I’m surprised more pro-Israel advocates haven’t made the argument I’m about to make. It’s not a particularly complicated one. But it requires conceding things that most pro-Israel advocates would rather not concede, which I suppose is why they haven’t.

Tucker Carlson, in his viral exchange with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, was asked whether he believed in Israel’s right to exist. Rather than answer, he questioned the premise. Where does that right come from? What does it even mean? His point was straightforward: if standards aren’t universally applied, they aren’t standards. They’re preferences. “I believe in human rights, not ethnic rights,” he said (which was an interesting admission from someone with Carlson’s pedigree).

On the narrow philosophical point, Tucker Carlson is correct. Individuals have rights. States do not, at least not in the same way. Individual human beings, because they are endowed by their creator, possess inalienable rights — rights that precede any government. States are instrumental. They are created by man to serve human ends.

The great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said dismissed the “right to exist” as “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law,” and he was right. The political theorist Andrew March, in a rigorous philosophical treatment, makes the case more precisely: states possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have derives from the rights of the people they serve. Czechoslovakia dissolved. The Soviet Union dissolved. Nobody speaks of their “right to exist” having been violated. No wrong was committed against them. They ceased to exist, and it wasn’t an injustice. In contrast, violating a human being’s right to exist is always a violation (although in limited cases of capital crimes, that right can be usurped by the state).

And there’s an even simpler observation. As John Patrick Leary notes in The New Republic, Israel is the only country in the world to which the phrase is applied. No one asks you to affirm France’s right to exist before you’re allowed to criticize French foreign policy.

So if the question is whether Israel has a “right to exist” in the way that individuals have rights — the answer is no. But that’s true of every state, not just Israel. But it’s not necessarily that simple, and this is where Israel’s defenders might find themselves on stronger ground if they could only realize it.

Israel was founded relatively recently, and its existence — and specifically its right to exist as a majority Jewish state — has been contested from the start, and rightly so. Israel was founded on a profound injustice — the dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. This isn’t controversial among serious historians. Benny Morris, one of Israeli “new historians” who documented the expulsions, doesn’t deny them. He just thinks they were necessary. I find this morally abhorrent, but the underlying facts aren’t in dispute.

Israel was born in sin. The question is whether that sin justifies dissolving the state.

I don’t think it does. One injustice — Israel’s creation through ethnic cleansing — does not justify another: undoing Israel against the democratic wishes of its citizens. This is where I diverge with parts of the pro-Palestinian left. draws a useful distinction between dissolving a country and transforming its political system. He doesn’t want to eliminate Israel any more than he wants to eliminate Myanmar or Cuba. He wants to dismantle the structures of Jewish supremacy. The question he asks is the right one: Does this state protect the rights of all individuals under its control? Obviously, in the case of Israel, the answer is a resounding no.

But conceding that doesn’t tell you what comes next. And more importantly, it doesn’t tell you how to get there without violating the very principle you’ve just invoked — namely, that rights belong to people.

It’s reasonable for Israeli Jews to want to retain a Jewish-majority state. That is what makes Israel Israel. It’s the only country most of them have ever known. The pro-Israel political theorist Michael Walzer would call this a “community of character“ — a political community forged through shared life that possesses a form of moral standing. As much as I dislike and disagree with Walzer’s claims of Gaza being a “just war,” his basic intuition — that collective self-determination means something real — isn’t so easily dismissed.

There is no justifiable way to undo Israel short of a majority of its residents freely voting, in a referendum, to fold the state into a broader binational arrangement incorporating both Jews and Palestinians. The genocide scholar has articulated something like this vision: seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians sharing the land from the river to the sea. It’s an aspiration I both respect and long for. But Israeli Jews will never vote for it. They would have to be compelled into it, and that would be undemocratic. Therefore, I don’t see it as a live option or, importantly, a moral one.

Allen Buchanan, probably the most important political philosopher working on questions of secession and state dissolution, limits the case for unilateral dissolution to the most extreme circumstances — genocide, sustained mass atrocities — and even then, the presumption favors territorial integrity. The alternatives, he notes, tend toward catastrophic violence.

Now, Israel has committed what most scholars on the topic — Bartov among them — characterize as genocide against the Palestinian people. So perhaps Israel has, in fact, forfeited its own legitimacy. Bartov himself has said as much, warning that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the state.

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But even if that’s true, it doesn’t resolve the problem of democracy. If Israel’s “right to exist” has been forfeited, how exactly do you dissolve it in a way that doesn’t override the democratic rights of Israeli individuals? You can’t, really. Not without compulsion. And if the whole point is that rights belong to people and not to states — which is where this argument started — then you can’t simply ignore the rights of seven million people because you’ve won a philosophical argument about the state they live in.

This is the paradox, and I don’t think there’s an obvious way out of it. The same principle that undermines Israel’s claim to a “right to exist” — that rights belong to persons, not to political arrangements — is also what protects the democratic agency of Israeli citizens. You can’t invoke the first half and discard the second.

So yes, I do think it’s worth asking whether Israel has a “right to exist” as a Jewish state, even if the rights language is a poor fit for states of any kind. Because even if Israel doesn’t have rights, Israeli voters do. Any transition to a different political arrangement — binational, confederal, whatever we want to call it — would have to be subject to some kind of democratic process to be legitimate. And there’s simply no way I can see in which this could conceivably happen.

Short of that, the only option is raw force. The political theorist David Polansky calls this a “power fantasy.” What body or party would force Israelis to dissolve their own state? No such body or party exists. And even if it did, forcing Israelis do to so would be unjust. And compounding one injustice (the founding of the Israeli state) with another (dissolving the Israeli state) is never a good path when it comes to the Middle East.

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Cultural institutions — including this one — are getting into event planning. It’s about more than just public readings. It’s a trend toward in-person gatherings instead of virtual meetups. People want to be around other people; they want to meet new people; they want an excuse to get out. We asked Wisdom of Crowds contributor whether he’s noticed the same thing. It turns out that Gasda, who spends most of his time putting on plays and organizing public readings, has a lot to say about the topic.

— Santiago Ramos

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The boom in literary readings, plays, happenings, branded parties, and debates — of which, for better or worse, I’ve participated in and organized — signals that communication deeply matters to us as a species and culture. But it’s also a sign that online communication has altered our ability to communicate, and therefore how we organize social experience. Having been closer to the center than the periphery of New York underground theater and literary culture during the last five years, I feel justified in making the following -style trend forecast for 2026: live events will gain popularity in direct proportion to the decline of functional literacy; writers will write less for the page and more for the ear; readers will become, functionally and spiritually, listeners, viewers, collective-absorbers, reliant on cues provided by crowds.

This is not a trivial trend. The shift away from the visual toward the oral and aural is both symptom and cause, a marker of cognitive transformation and a driver of further behavioral modification. The movement from text-based to televisual decoding has been underway for generations. wrote more than twenty years ago: “We are currently living in the midst of a massive cultural revolution. For the first time since the development of movable type in the late fifteenth century, print has lost its primacy in communication.” In 1984, Neil Postman correctly understood that the long, humanistic “habits of mind” that began with Erasmus — which required “considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning … to detect abuses of logic and common sense” — were rapidly eroding. Before Postman, Marshall McLuhan articulated a still-useful theory about the relationship between medium and message, between cognition and televisual stimulation.

The trend has now reached critical mass. Our generalized inability to maintain eye contact, pay attention, write letters, read books, sit through movies without checking our phones has produced guilt, anxiety and a reasonable fear that we have lost access to one of the great inheritances of liberal modernity: the headstrong, clearly articulated word which binds us together across space and time.

The age of the printed word was one in which written language made people feel closer together. I’ve been reading Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa, nearly 350 years old, and I am astounded at the eloquence, force, and lexical dexterity of every character who writes a letter. This was considered realistic! And Saul Bellow’s Herzog from the 1960s shows us this world at its zenith and the beginning of its decline — Herzog neurotically writing letters to himself and to the great humanists and philosophers. Even in the early 2010s, when I was in college, I could reasonably find half a dozen correspondents a year. I kept a diary by hand. Now it feels harder — feels harder internally, like my brain has changed, or been changed. It is harder to sustain a conversation in writing.

David Foster Wallace’s long digital letters from the nineties show that the internet hadn’t killed but had temporarily accelerated the power of the word, even as it gathered the force to kill it. Like a star exploding at the end of its life cycle, the internet produced more written words than ever by many orders of magnitude, even while their effectiveness declined. In the 2000s and 2010s, you can see how the visual layout of text on a Blogspot, a Tumblr, a webpage like Vice or Gawker influenced how people wrote, how people thought. That was the terminal stage of the Gutenberg galaxy.

The 2020s feel different. I know this both as a playwright and live reader of prose fiction. All the nonverbal cues, the biomechanical and chemical signals people share in a room — as well as the actors and director—help interpret and digest the text of a play and render it more communicative. In 1885, Ibsen published his plays before they were performed, because European Victorian culture — shy, ultra-bookish, ultra-literate, repressed — couldn’t handle the physical rendering until the text had been digested by reading first. I surmise we’re living through an inverted Victorian age, in which people — because of videos, pop psychology, the sheer amount of information they can internalize about the human face — are more socially literate, less verbally literate.

The brain changes, and social organization changes with it. The lust for the live event is not just a plea to end technologically enforced alienation; it reflects a structural desire for experiences that suit the dominant mode of cognition, which now requires multi-level visual and auditory stimulation to process text. Susan Sontag’s canonical description of the happenings of the 1960s sounds like a description of internet content: “The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation; this is the logic of dreams rather than the logic of most art.” The happening-like reading, the reading-centric happening, the happening-like play — readers known and unknown, musicians, coke fiends, it girls and boys; poems, autofiction, novel fragments, spoken word — are internet-like in their mode. Familiar, but less alienating than the internet itself. This points toward a telos for all this cognitive evolution: real spaces with an unreal, internet-derived aura.

A room full of people feels safer than a quiet night before a fire with a book. More comfortable. More interpretable. The rise of the reading series, the play, the debate, the live oracular event represents not just a meaningful reaction to post-Covid loneliness and social media fatigue, but a structural cognitive shift in which we hunger to understand what things mean, and to share those meanings with others. We want to feel the same way other people feel about something, to escape the extreme relativity of the internet, where for every opinion there’s some counter-voice inverting whatever knowledge is constructed.

The screen killed the book — not as an artifact, but as the ordering principle of the mind, of cognition. The TV weakened its hold. The computer and smartphone finished the job. But the smartphone’s cognitive dominance, like Macbeth’s reign over Scotland, is short-lived and productive of resentment. We would like to see it end as fast as it began. But we cannot fully return to the book because of the damage done to our brains. And so we are left with something more primitive than the book: the room, the campfire, and the story told around it.

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The late novelist David Foster Wallace is having a moment from beyond the grave. His thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest, seems to have predicted the techno-cultural moment we are entering: the age of AI-generated non-stop bespoke entertainment. In this week’s essay, makes the case for why we should all be reading Foster Wallace again — and not only Infinite Jest.

Hill is Co-Founder & President of the Office of American Possibilities — the “venture studio for civic moonshots” behind initiatives like Welcome.us, Frontline Justice, More Perfect, Bedrock, and the COVID Collaborative.

— Santiago Ramos

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To own a bookshelf circa 2015 was to invite criticism proportionate to the number of David Foster Wallace titles in plain view. Like the fedora or the unironic love of Nickelback, the striking blue cover of an Infy J paperback evoked a reaction similar to what an unprompted crypto pitch from a “sigma male” might elicit today.

Which is a bummer, because it turns out Wallace was a) prescient and b) correct about approximately everything.1

Take boredom.

My mind has drifted towards this topic because of this recent story about a pair of 13 year-old girls tracing a trail of carnage through their suburban New Jersey neighborhood on a 2:20AM joyride. The reason? They were “bored”.

What fascinates me about this story is not that kids cook up mischief for dumb reasons. ‘Shocking!’ Rather, it’s that — in an age of endless “screen addiction”, “overstimulation”, and “chatbot mania” takes — “boredom” is something they were able to encounter at all.

Of course, that’s the rub, isn’t it? As boredom has become an ever-more-prominent dragon to slay at all costs, an ur-enemy worth creating societal and technological imperatives towards obliterating, its hold on us has only grown more absolute. The smallest splotch of sauce still stains the shirt. Like a quiet drip of water barely audible from another corner of the house as we’re drifting off to sleep, boredom’s sanity-eroding power magnifies rather than diminishes the closer we are to warding it off entirely. The very act of suspecting it could be present draws our attention to it — and there it is.

There are three really important things to understand about how we relate to boredom.

The first involves how we deal with it. The weapon we use to fell our boredom we call entertainment,2 and our attention bears the same relationship to it as a jacket does to a coat-check. We hand it over, and later we get it back.

Or do we?

The hydra of entertainment has many heads: junk, slop, content, “trash,” porn — but those are just the ones we villainize. In fact there are many balms we use to send our attention rocketing off like a dog after a tennis ball. The words we use are revealing: “distraction,” “escape,” “turning our brains off.” But distracting us from what? Escaping from what? Turning our brains off for what reasons? Exceptional cases of e.g. trauma and critical stress paper over the fact that most often, the real answer is just: drip, drip, drip. We know not what we fear, or why we fear it — but neither are we curious to find out.

And that creates a situation where we’ve thrown the ball so much that we might not even notice that the dog hasn’t come back.

The second involves boredom’s socio-cultural role in a context where the marginal cost of an additive unit of entertainment trends to zero. Wallace prophetically referred to this as “Total Noise,” the “seething static of every particular thing and experience” that constitutes a “tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.” In such a context, one’s “total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect” crescendos to an almost unbearable anxiety — an active choice, after all, represents a values-laden moral claim: “this is the single best thing I can be doing.”

Well, that’s daunting.

So, instead, we outsource such decisions to “Deciders”: in Wallace’s day, curators, and today, algorithms. “It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood,” Wallace conjectures.

Acuity. Taste. Choosing. These are the qualities of people — not of the commodity that is their attention.

The third involves how boredom (and our avoidance of it) has taken primacy across every single aspect of our lives. Every parenting blog brims with takes about how kids ought to relate to screens, but virtually all of them presuppose that a parent has a role to play in alleviating a child’s boredom in the first place. Self-consciousness about materialism has harbingered an evolution away from things and towards experiences as the preferred superlative of choice to hoard — an object of status to be enjoyed and then consigned not to a garage, but to the dustbin of memory. The on-demand availability of rides and meals and hotels and couriers and video-chats with therapists means that each second spent waiting for something to happen feels like a failure, a design flaw, an opportunity for continuous quality improvement.

It’s not that any of these things are bad. It’s that they all postulate that something is wrong if attention has no helipad upon which to land, if the dripping attention-formlessness that is boredom dare be allowed to swell to a flow — much less a flood.

But what exactly is it that’s so wrong?

Wallace, to be clear, was long on the virtue of boredom. “Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” he says in a note accompanying the publication of his unfinished novel The Pale King.3 Within that novel a character concludes, with intentional superlativeness, “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

My own point, though, is something less transcendent.4 It’s that boredom indeed sucks. But that’s kind of the whole deal.

The reason boredom sucks is that the creaking imperial tediousness of inhabiting a stimulus-devoid consciousness and body replicates almost precisely the infinitude of being utterly alone in an uncaring universe.5 Your needs: agnostic of the whole. Your wants: illegible and irrelevant. Boredom forces us to face the fundamentally multiplayer nature of our environment intersected with the fundamentally single-player nature of how we experience it. It’s the Diet Coke version of oblivion itself: the sense, rather than the fact, of our own irrelevance in the face of the ineffable.

The flip side is sort of like how we were all wrong about babies and young kids not needing some kind of low-level exposure to peanuts lest the shit hit the metaphorical fan. What’s terrible/great about boredom is that it rears its head before you’ve read any magazine articles containing words like “infinitude” and “oblivion” and “ineffable.” It doses you early with a taste of the long bright dark, and lets you know the two of you will be hanging out together for a good chunk of the foreseeable.

Sitting with boredom, in other words, is the green-screen trailer version of the capital-A Abyss: you’ll watch the movie eventually, but it’s good to have a taste of what is coming. What we’ve done by inquisitionally purging boredom from our world like Taylor purged 1989 from Spotify is to chuck aside the training wheels, wrench open the safety caps, and yeet several entire generations of people straight into the deep end.

Acuity. Taste. Choosing. These are all synonyms for the fundamental act of directing attention. To appreciate its opportunity. To handle its responsibility. To hone the laser of our focus and guide it where it ought to go.

The alternative is to become so sundered by our first flirtations with existential dread — the climate! the decline of the West! the looming AI future! — that we retreat into distraction at the very first inkling of anything that might eventually evolve like Raichu into terror.

The great wisdom of Wallace is to instead lean into the Abyss, the boredom, the terror. To listen to the drip rather than merely hear it. And what we find as we sit with it is that it directs us to a different place, a human place, where attention is not a coat to be checked or a product to be consumed but rather the very stuff of life itself, the medium through which time unfolds into anticipation and experience and memory. Where we can be satisfied, not just distracted. Where we greet stillness not with the grasping anxiety of the starving, but with the calm and (one might say) boring repose of those who have just filled their bellies with a meal.

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Today it’s clear that migration has unsettled the politics of every developed nation. And yet, argues political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) , the most influential political theorists of the last few decades did not anticipate how migration would challenge their notions of liberalism, international law and the nation state. Is it time to update their theories?

In this week’s essay, David refers to the work of political theorist who, faithful readers know, is something like the patron saint of Wisdom of Crowds. Here is the recording of a conversation we had with Fukuyama this past summer. Here is a CrowdSource explaining his famous “end of history” thesis. And here is an essay grappling with that thesis.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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As if by a lit delay fuse finally reaching its explosive charge, the issue of mass immigration has exploded the political establishments of the developed world. Many commentators have sensibly asked why so many governments not only had difficulty marshaling arguments for restricting immigration, but actively pursued what turned out to be untenably high intake levels for so many years. But what I’ve wondered is: why so few political thinkers seem to have anticipated that this phenomenon would become so widespread, to the point that it now dominates political debates around the world.

It is particularly interesting to consider the significance of both the scale of these migrations and the associated political fallout for Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. For, despite its flaws, The End of History and the Last Man remains the fullest statement of the default assumptions held by the global governing class and its auxiliaries across media, academia and both the non-profit and business sectors. As such, its reticence on the topic is a sign of a larger blind spot in our worldview.

Now, it must be admitted that questions of immigration have often been sidelined throughout the tradition of liberal political thought from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, which tends to treat populations as relatively static quantities. And these normative assumptions are both reflected and reproduced by the formal institutions of the present international system — from basic guarantees of sovereignty to the Fourth Geneva Convention. This is all to say that, for all the concern we accord to refugees, migrants and displaced peoples, most observers basically presuppose that ours is a world of largely stable borders and populations, and this is the standard against which we measure geopolitical fluctuations.

It is not that political theorists have disregarded the topic as such. For example, Christopher Heath Wellman has defended the legitimate right of democratic states to define and enforce their preferred immigration policies; whereas Joseph Carens has argued that migrants have a strong claim to relocate as they see fit, and those who establish residency then have a strong claim to be treated as moral and political equals by existing citizens.

But even they have not really grappled with the possibility that, as a practical matter, substantial numbers of people might relocate in a manner that might cause rapid social and economic change. In other words, their conception remains one of basically stable majority populations accommodating minority rights and protections, as opposed to developments that would result in consequential impacts to those majority populations.

The rare work that has dealt with this theme at length is Jean Raspail’s novel, Camp of the Saints. The book is having a moment, having been brought back into print by Vauban Books, a self-described “dissident” press. The novel functions much like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in presenting a kind of right-wing version of a dystopian future, though its bête noire is third-world migration rather than socialist redistribution. It is also like Atlas Shrugged in being badly written and didactic; partly for this reason (though only partly), its influence has largely remained on the political fringe.

Interestingly, the one mainstream thinker of whom I’m aware to cite Raspail is Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order — a work originally conceived as a response to Fukuyama’s thesis. Even Huntington, however, limits his discussion of immigration to a short subsection. He recognizes its theoretical significance for his thesis, in other words, but seems unsure of its practical impact.

Meanwhile, it is not quite the case that Fukuyama simply ignores this question. At the end of the penultimate section of End of History, he discusses the tensions between what he calls the “historical” and the “post-historical” worlds (by which he basically means the developing and the developed worlds). The implication being that the former is at a different point along the same track as the latter (in a later work, he’ll refer to this same process as “getting to Denmark”).

In considering the points of contact between these two worlds, he makes the following points: for both political and economic reasons, there is a steady flow of people from countries that are poor and unstable to those that are rich and secure; this flow could easily be accelerated by further upheavals in the developing world; both the political conditions (in their places of origin) that produce migrants and the political conditions that they in turn produce (in their new destinations) will require management; and finally, developed countries will find it difficult to stem this migration, both because they have grown accustomed to the cheap labor it provides, and because the universalist principles to which they are otherwise committed make it difficult to exclude foreigners on racialist or nationalist grounds.

What is fascinating about this passage is how accurately it sketches the contours of the present, and yet how bland its tone and limited its consideration (just three paragraphs) in comparison with today’s political realities. It describes reasonably well the circumstances of the 2015 European migrant crisis but not the momentous impact it had on continental politics — not to mention Brexit.

Fukuyama also fails to mention the possibility that states might rapidly accelerate their intake of migrants in the absence of upheaval or pressing economic need, as Canada has done since that same time. On the other hand, he can hardly be blamed for not anticipating the case of the UK being compelled to admit thousands of Afghans into the country, after a data leak exposed them to the risk of reprisals from the Taliban — a scenario that owes more to Burn After Reading than normal political logic.

It should be clear that — for Fukuyama as for most others — one’s views on the immigration question are a reflection of one’s larger understanding of nationalism. Building on the modernist thesis that views nationalism as a historically-recent development rather than an age-old political phenomenon, Fukuyama argues that just as nationalism had a recognizable beginning, so too will it have an end, as states continue to converge on a single form of government and an integrated world market. It’s important to note that he doesn’t actually envision the withering away of the state, or of the national body it represents. What he seems to mean is that, having effectively done its work in establishing a world of nation-states, nationalism as an affective force (of the kind that can launch major world wars, for example) will gradually peter out.

So far, so conventional. What’s interesting is that he treats the matter of cultural recognition more seriously than your average neoliberal type:

National groups can retain their separate languages and senses of identity, but that identity would be expressed primarily in the realm of culture rather than politics. The French can continue to savor their wines and the Germans their sausages, but this will all be done within the sphere of private life alone. Such an evolution has been taking place in the most advanced liberal democracies of Europe over the past couple of generations.

Well. The problem here should be obvious. One of the central purposes of what we now think of as nationalism is to resolve and reinforce the bounds of protection for this same sphere of private life. If a representative government is the best option for safeguarding individual rights, then one has to determine just who that government will be representing. In this sense those same cultural signifiers that Fukuyama identifies (French wines, German sausages, etc.) are mutually reinforcing with basic liberal protections insofar as they help affirm the boundaries of the community within which a government is obliged to uphold liberal rights.

This is not to say that these communal ways of life exist solely for that purpose, but that their preservation is nonetheless bound up with certain liberal, democratic expectations: those who share a certain way of life are also fellow citizens who share a common, representative government. Fukuyama’s (and not only Fukuyama’s) expectation seems to be that democratic citizens will continue to enjoy that shared way of life and to derive ordinary pride from it, without feeling inclined to put others enjoying their way of life to fire and sword.

This is something like the distinction George Orwell makes between the defensive patriot and the offensive nationalist. The former naturally prefers his particular customs, whereas the latter cannot be satisfied without demonstrating their superiority over others — by conflict if necessary.

What all of this presupposes, however, is a certain measure of distance and separation between peoples. France and Germany no longer need to recreate the tensions that led to 1871 (and 1914, and 1939, etc.), and they can surely share commerce, tourism, and the like. But for French wines and German sausages to retain their essential character, as well as their representative significance for their respective countries, requires certain limits on economic and political union.

Of course, these days we aren’t really talking about distinctions between French and German folkways, but much more intense cultural frictions. The extreme case (thus far) is probably something like the terrible grooming gang cases in middle England, in which thousands of (mostly lower-class English) girls were raped, abused, and trafficked by organized groups of Pakistani immigrants, and (this part is the kicker), the full extent of the crimes was systematically downplayed by the legal system and the media for many years for fear of giving the appearance of prejudice. In other words, when a far stronger cultural clash than any involving cuisine and viticulture revealed itself, the UK political establishment was unable to uphold basic protections for fear of revealing contradictions at the heart of its multicultural commitments. This represented a profound societal failure to fulfill both the atavistic mandate to protect its women from foreign predation and the Hobbesian/Weberian mandate to deploy its monopoly of violence for the basic security of its citizens.

But even for milder cases, the point remains: the “sphere of private life” Fukuyama mentions — which he hopes is the sphere into which nationality and ethnic culture will make its retreat, and where it will stay — is not self-perpetuating, but sustains and is sustained by the public sphere of law, regulation, and enforcement. That sphere of national or cultural practices will inevitably shrink if the state that otherwise shelters them abrogates its role as a matter of policy. The tacit assumption that one finds in his discussions, and that has I suspect guided the decision-making of leaders across the developed world since the 1990s, is that the effects of public policies would not impinge upon that private sphere in such a way as to invite blowback.

This is where we stand today in much of the developed world, but it was never the case that a majority of public thinkers and policy makers anticipated profound demographic change taking place under utopian conditions. The real problem was far more banal: they simply never thought that so many people would come, and once they did, it became easier to deny the true volume of migratory flows and to downplay the intensity of the antagonisms arising therefrom.

The irony is that neither the influx of newcomers, drawn by economic and social opportunity, nor the increasingly tumultuous consequences of their arrival, lie outside the horizons of liberal democratic capitalism. And though many found their philosophies unable to accommodate these developments, this may be more an indication of the limits of our collective political imagination at the end of history, than a sign that the end of history itself might be ending.

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“Barbaric” is a word that’s appeared a lot in our pages. Last summer, wrote a whole essay about “our own barbarism only now coming more clearly into view.” Wisdom of Crowds contributor also sees barbarism in our midst. In today’s essay, Gasda pleads against the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, which is trending throughout the world. (For more on the debate concerning physician-assisted suicide, see this week’s CrowdSource.)

Matthew is an extremely prolific playwright and essayist. His last book came out a few weeks ago: Zoomers and Other Plays. His next book, Writer’s Diary, comes out next week. Check them out!

— Santiago Ramos

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When British historian Andrew Roberts told the British House of Lords last month that opponents of assisted suicide were “antediluvian monsters” defending “medieval and sadistic practice,” he revealed not only a philosophical schism within contemporary conservatism, but hinted at a larger directional question for the entire West: do supra-rational concerns like the Soul, the Good, duty, honor, love, tradition and community, have any place in the world to come? By framing Burkean and Christian resistance to technocratic fiat as hopelessly antiquated and barbaric, Lord Roberts opened up a line of hyper-rational utilitarian argumentation that equates all suffering with evil, and any policy that permits suffering with historical regression.

Lord Roberts is not only wrong, but the dismissive tone of his rhetoric — the shame he implies should be bound up in belief in these conceptual entities — opens up real, consequential paths for more material, embodied suffering. The ideas Roberts finds “medieval” are actually protective. They protect us from certain kinds of pain.

Assisted suicide isn’t wrong for theological reasons, or because there are no cases where euthanasia is just and merciful (there are). Assisted suicide is wrong because it makes us barbaric: the legalization of assisted suicide requires a collective deadening of our moral senses, de-individualizes us, and makes machine-like the highest and most difficult choice.

The humanness of death, the wrestling that comes with death, entails contact with death; when we are incentivized to die in pods, by appointment, unable to touch or be touched by loved ones, or even a doctor or nurse, then we are incentivized to give up a precious and cosmic form of knowledge; from the perspective of either Stoic humanism or Christian humanism, assisted suicide encourages spiritual suicide — both for the individual and society.

A clinical, government-run death apparatus is not analogous to pain killers or palliative care. A civilization where some have to face a profound choice about the lives of others, and can recognize the profundity of that choice, is healthy; where it happens as a matter of course, a matter of filling out paperwork handled by a death mechanic, it is fundamentally insane.

The assisted suicide regime, at scale, implies machinery (and premiums and liability and profit) rather than mercy. The rise of a professional class of euthanizers (doctors whose specialty becomes legally ending lives — Canada’s MAiD providers now number in the thousands, with some performing hundreds of procedures annually) is repugnant enough — but there’s also a not-unrealistic scenario in which the entire process is automated and AIs make decisions about and control the pods that liquidate the biomass (Switzerland’s Sarco pod, which fills with nitrogen gas at the push of a button, already exists; its inventor promotes it as eliminating the need for medical personnel).

At scale, assisted suicide implies either a death-caste or a euthanasia machine — or both; it implies the erasure of face-to-face contact with death, the witnessing of death, and human care for the dying (in the Netherlands, mobile euthanasia units arrive at homes like delivery services; in Canada, some facilities now have dedicated MAiD rooms, separate from palliative wards).

One does not have to defer to the slippery slope fallacy to organize an argument against assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is dangerous not because it implies an immediate cascade of consequence, but because it represents a changed premise in the social code which inevitably produces gradual coarsening of human bonds.

Assisted suicide is a moral bacillus that entails widespread desensitization, which is inherently contagious; a moral pathogen that slowly pulses into the water table — omnipresent, passive, yet potentially ruinous. Assisted suicide, legalized, will produce a gradual, non-linear maladaptation to an anti-human normal in which the taboo around ending the life of another person imperceptibly dissipates.

Assisted suicide is insidious because it’s naturally appealing to an emerging civilizational calculus: technocratic rationalism; the sci-fi systems update on utilitarianism. Assisted suicide is cheaper than long-term medical or psychiatric care. Under the assisted suicide regime, on a practical and symbolic level, one becomes biomass. We have to use our imaginations: imagine the death doctor, the pod that fills with gas, whatever certificate the state gives you. It says the doctor is permitted to end you.

For Silicon Valley narcissists obsessed with cleanliness, optimization, and control, assisted suicide squares with a larger program of eliminating inefficiency from the world. Moral arguments against assisted suicide are unlikely to move the techno-accelerationist who would like to replace everything natural with something artificial and sees nothing wrong with an artificial, sterilized death and removal from planet Earth; the rest of us must be persuaded instead.

In the world of universally-available assisted suicide, we should not imagine 97-year-olds who have been coupled for 65 years dying together with beatific looks on their faces, or noble Olympians who have lost the use of their limbs deciding to end their lives after noble deliberation. Instead, we should imagine isolated, lonely, depressed, anxious people desperately seeking relief from a faceless state-sanctioned doctor-bureaucrat.

True, ancient philosophers often prepared their own death, embracing death and taking agency over death. But we’re not talking about the death of the stoic or the samurai, who dies as an individual at the height of their strength and power and jouissance and honor. We’re talking about neighbors and friends, grandparents, professors, artists, who are simply excised from the social fabric.

Death is sorrowful, pain is sorrowful, and our condition is sorrowful. These facts cannot be undone, but the spirit can toughen its resistance. Whether from a Christian or pagan or Stoic perspective, passivity in the face of the death machine is a sin, as well as a psychological and social violation.

We must approach the philosophical problems posed by assisted suicide not from a utilitarian point of view, which is too comfortable for the contemporary technocratic and rationalist hive mind. Instead, we must use our literary imaginations and primal emotions. The erosion of taboo, the deadening of moral imagination, and the reduction of life to procedure and legalese forms a disturbing parallel with the darkest moments of the twentieth century while hinting at the darkest possibilities of the 21st.

A superficially admirable liberal-mindedness about pain reduction and situational mercy is not nearly robust enough to engage with the full metaphysical implications of mass global government-assisted AI-run auto-death. Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between zoe and bios is useful here (zoe = bare biological life; bios = qualified life in a political/moral context). There’s an anti-human will masquerading as rational compassion within the logic of assisted suicide: a techno-capitalist desire to sterilize and optimize; a totalitarian political desire to surveil and control human biomatter.

Bring death into a cost-benefit analysis, bring death into a technocratic project, and you drive God out of death, and you drive God out of life; you will no longer encounter the radiant face of the Other in the face of death.

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If you live in New York, you’ve already seen the provocative ads on the subway for “Friend,” an AI-powered pendant that is meant to provide artificial friendship for our lonely age. If you don’t live in New York, you’ve likely already heard about the controversy behind those ads. That means they worked.

Today we are proud to publish, for the first time, an essay by Ripley Stroud. Ripley is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she focuses on the ethics of belief. She is also a sharp writer, and a natural fit as one of the first research fellows at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. Ripley writes about the Friend ads and the Friend machine itself, and asks: will the machine work? Can it become a true friend?

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Simon and Garfunkel once sang that “the words of the prophets are written on subway walls.” I’m not so sure about words of the prophets, but it is undeniable that the words written on subway walls — whether advertisement, graffiti, or both — yield deep insight into the current pulse of American culture. That’s why Avi Schiffmann’s $1 million dollar subway campaign (which he claims to be the largest in history) is so striking. Schiffmann is the CEO of Friend, a startup hawking a $130 AI companion. You wear it (rather unsubtly) around your neck, and for the extent of its 12-hour battery life, it listens in on your conversations and texts you with snarky commentary on your life (and, as testers have noted, overly needy fussing).

The ad campaign has two different kinds of posters, both of which are aesthetically sparse: black serif text on a white background. The first kind are written in the voice of the necklace, vowing to do all the things that your woefully embodied friends will not: “I’ll binge the entire series with you”; “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink”; “I’ll never bail on our dinner plans.”

The second kind are a little bit more ontologically daring. Written in the style of a dictionary definition, they read: “Friend [frend], noun. Someone who listens, responds, and supports you.” Placing an image of the necklace to the right of the definition suggests that this necklace is a paradigm example of friendship, much like you might see an etching of Dickens’ Scrooge next to the definition of “miser”.

The campaign has not been met with anything resembling support or positive reception (and interestingly, Schiffman has identified this as precisely the point). The posters are covered in the scribbles of white-knuckled Sharpie; the most frequent mark by far is a giant “X” over “someone”, with “a person” or “a real person” written above it as replacement. Also common is the vitriolic imperative to “get real friends”.

What’s interesting about these responses is that they frame the primary offending feature of this device as pretending to be something it’s not: that it’s an artifice of friendship. The necklace is a fake friend because a necessary feature of a friend is that they are a person.

The discourse playing out on the walls of the MTA mirrors the standard debate about AI research. AI skeptics want to prove why it doesn’t think, why it’s not agential, why it can’t be your friend. AI enthusiasts want to prove the inverse of all those things. The trouble with either side of this coin, however, is that the answer to these questions is ultimately an empirical one, and at that, an empirical question that seems especially difficult to ever answer with certainty.

So let’s take another tack. I want to show you that it doesn’t really matter whether the necklace can be your friend or not. What matters is that the necklace would be an awfully bad friend.

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In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously distinguishes between the three different kinds of friendship, each of which is organized around a different good: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and friendships of virtue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he holds up friendships of virtue as the moral ideal, identifying friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure as deficient versions of friendship.

Crucially, this is not to say that friendships unified around pleasure and utility aren’t friendships: they’re just worse versions of the ideal. Friendships that are propped up by serving one another’s instrumental ends just aren’t as rewarding as friendships centered around pursuing the good together. In other words: the colleague you carpool with may very well qualify as your friend, but that friendship is deficient compared to the one you have with the neighbor who does charity work with you. Further, Aristotle is happy to grant that friendships of pleasure and utility can be unequal while still aptly being called “friendships”. This is particularly clear when he includes parent-child relationships — ones where the utility in question only goes in one direction — as friendships.

So, according to Aristotle, friendships can be friendships even if they’re centered primarily around acts of utility, and even if those acts of utility are unidirectional. That makes it seem like the Friend necklace could actually be your friend. It’s just arguably best understood as a friendship of utility, and as a friendship of utility where the necklace exclusively helps you, not you it.

Even if Aristotle’s view delivers the conclusion that the AI necklace could actually be your friend, that same view allows us to at once identify the necklace as a deficient friend — a friend that we certainly shouldn’t want around all the time. It could never replace a friendship of virtue.

And I wager that even if we suppose that the necklace could meet the criteria for being in a virtuous friendship with you (“respond to me as if you are the paragon of virtue!”) there are inexorable reasons why it would still be a bad friend. Perhaps most simply, the AI necklace would be a bad friend for the same reasons we’d take a human friend with the same qualities to be a bad friend. When I think about what I love most deeply about my friends, a substantial portion of what comes to mind are things that are fully distinct from me. I love that when I spend time with them, we watch inane procedural crime dramedies that I cannot myself see any value in. I love that we will go months without properly talking because I feel like that distance itself is a reflection of the soundness of the relationship; the faith that we can be two separate people while still existing in a purposeful parallel. Indeed, I find it exciting and rewarding that my friends have enough going on that they are not always available to me. Insofar as one can arguably look to their friends to learn something about themselves, I end up liking myself better knowing that there are people who see value in me that have such rich and important ground projects.

The Friend necklace cannot be any of those things. The Friend necklace would be ubiquitous, cloying, ever-present, demanding. It would be a bad friend. Bristle all you like at the idea of being friends with a hunk of plastic: what’s really objectionable is the idea of being friends with someone (or something) who cannot possibly be distinct from you.

This is a normative argument against AI friendship: it claims that the AI necklace would be a bad friend, and so we ought not be friends with it. This claim is orthogonal to the descriptive argument being made by the Friend billboard vandalizers, who instead assert that we can not be friends with the necklace. I think AI skeptics would do better to focus on building normative arguments. This is because descriptive arguments will ultimately be contingent on the actual facts about the technology’s prowess. If technology advances to the point where there’s no doubt that AI has the capacity to be your friend, the AI skeptic is left fresh out of arguments. Normativity, on the other hand, is evergreen. Conditions on a good friendship are a perennial matter.

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is a writer from New Zealand who previously appeared on Wisdom of Crowds with a powerful and unconventional personal essay about religious belief, superstition and love. Today, she is back with reflections on pacifism, justice and how American violence looks like from outside its borders.

— Santiago Ramos

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My husband looked at me this morning and said, “Welp, thank you very much for marrying me.” He meant, thank you for being the reason that I am here and not there. Spring is starting in New Zealand. Is the American fall beginning, in more ways than one?

My own distance from American shores feels less to me like a relief and more like a fact to be mindful of. I have lived in America, I am married to an American, and like much of the wider world I spend perhaps too much time staring at America’s political twists and turns. Still, it would be foolish of me not to acknowledge the distance.

I was talking to one of the old ladies at my Quaker meeting, a while back, about how political polarization seems so much stronger in the USA than it is here. She said, yes, she always used to remark about that with an American friend of hers.

It’s the internet, I suggested, and she laughed.

“Oh, no, dear,” she said. “This was in the 1970s!”

Well, I thought. That’s told me!

Her name is Linley, by the way. She believes that there is that of God in everyone, by which she really does mean traditional God. After Donald Trump was elected for a second time she told us all to stop moping and go out there and improve the world. Once I suggested, to an old man in Christchurch who spoke bluntly about his own death, that she was a welcome source of calm perspective. He looked at me like I had suggested that a tiger was a cozy pet to snuggle with.

Linley’s belief about “that of God in everyone” sounds similar to the idea of all people being made in the image of God, but it’s a very specific mindset with its own implications. The phrasing is from a famous exhortation by George Fox to “be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.”

Quakers believe, essentially, that everybody already hears moral truth in their heart. The voice may be small, and without being attended to and developed it may not amount to much, but it’s there. Your job is not to put the right feeling into people but to answer what they already have, and perhaps to learn from what they know that you have not yet considered. It’s a controversial proposition; it’s also a powerful way to behave. I don’t know if it’s true, but I find myself thinking that it is the sort of thing I could take on faith. As another Quaker friend once told me, it’s an idea that can feel worth holding on to because it is hard to believe sometimes.

I am, strictly speaking, an “attender” and not a “member” of my Quaker meeting. Most of the time this barely matters, but I think about it a lot. I worry that I am not enough of a pacifist to officially join. I have been inspired by pacifists in many ways, throughout my life, but I don’t see how it can ever really work, as a general rule. There are some situations where it seems like disarmament is just allowing yourself to be harmed with impunity. It’s easy to be for “peace” in the abstract. Peace in practice is more complicated. Calling myself a pacifist because I support the former would just be cheap.

Mary Dyer’s pacifism has been on my mind, lately, courtesy of an internet commenter who tried to convince me that women’s freedoms will always be dependent on the men who fight for them. Freedom was, in his view, the product of force and only force. I wonder.

Mary Dyer was born a Massachusetts Puritan in 1611. She was driven out of her community for heresy, went to England, and became a Quaker. When she returned to Massachusetts, she was imprisoned and then banished, on pain of death, for her religious views. She defied that banishment multiple times, and was eventually sentenced to death by hanging in 1660.

Mary Dyer went to the gallows with her head held high, hand in hand with the two men convicted alongside her. Dyer’s execution, and her defiance in the face of it, became a touchstone for persuasion, both of the Puritans who witnessed her death and the authorities back in England who made a succession of decrees ordering greater religious freedom over the subsequent decades.

If Mary Dyer, and others like her, had not been willing to die for the cause of living alongside other people with different beliefs, would there be a United States of America? Could a Puritan colony like Massachusetts and a Quaker colony like Pennsylvania and all their many different neighbors have come together into a single nation, if the citizens of one were subject to execution in another? Surely not.

Mary Dyer and her fellow martyrs helped make the United States, and part of why that happened is that they took persecution with defiance but without retaliation. It’s a complex move. The Quaker belief in religious freedom was not just about freedom for themselves but about freedom for everybody. They believed in persuasion. They were willing to persuade with their lives.

It all looks so clear, when you tell the story like that. But maybe some of that historical clarity is an illusion that is dependent on a specific narrative about violence and death. Mary Dyer could have just accepted her banishment. She believed in religious freedom, but at the time not everyone did. I’m sure there were people who thought that she got what she deserved.

Charlie Kirk died a martyr of sorts, shot in the throat while attempting to persuade. Unlike Mary Dyer, it may be that his martyrdom comes to stand, not for freedom and dialogue, but for the dark moral clarity of a movement that may now believe with all its heart that free speech is a lie, that persuasion and principles have been dead in America for a long time now, and all that is left is fighting over the remains. One way or another, violence has a narrative force that is hard to resist.

John Woolman would have liked to be a martyr like Mary Dyer. The Quaker history that he had been taught growing up had specific ideas about what heroism ought to consist of, and frequently it consisted of dying for your beliefs. But Woolman was born in 1720, and there were no longer any places nearby for him to prove his convictions by being executed for religious freedom.

Woolman had to content himself with other causes. Abolitionism was not yet an official Quaker position, and some of his neighbors still kept people in slavery. Woolman set out to persuade them. He wrote earnest pamphlets, examining the motives that might lead an otherwise good person to continue enslaving people. He thought carefully about the broader virtues that would be needed to make a society without exploitation. He refused, visibly, even to profit from slavery by proxy, wearing linen rather than cotton and eschewing dyes such as indigo, which were produced by slave labor. A modern boycott is an exercise of consumer power; Woolman’s search for purity was more like a willing sacrifice for the sake of principle.

Woolman also allowed his convictions to lead him into dialogue with people he disagreed with. Some of his most moving stories of persuasion are incredibly intimate and interpersonal, as when he was called to write the will of a neighbor who had been recently injured:

I considered the pain and distress he was in, and knew not how it would end; so I wrote his will, save only that part concerning his slave, and carrying it to his bedside, read it to him; and then told him, in a friendly way, that I could not write any instruments by which my fellow-creatures were made slaves, without bringing trouble on my own mind: I let him know that I charged nothing for what I had done; and desired to be excused from doing the other part in the way he proposed: We then had a serious conference on the subject; at length he agreeing to set her free, I finished his will.

Did Woolman win? Slavery was eventually abolished, though Woolman didn’t live to see that happen even amongst Quakers, let alone in the wider United States that didn’t yet exist when he died. And slavery was abolished in violence and war — a war in which Woolman himself would certainly never have fought, devout pacifist as he was.

Pacifism can offer false moral clarity if you don’t think hard enough about it. Eschewing violence does not just risk martyrdom. It risks passivity, even complicity. The standard Quaker response to this is to continue to seek other actions besides violence that are possible and meaningful.

Pacifism at its best turns away from the shiny narrative power of violence, its justifications and its allure, and looks for something better beyond the conflict. It is said that liberty is bought with the blood of patriots, and sometimes it is, but liberty is invented by the peacemakers, scrabbling techniques out of the dirt for ways to live together without killing each other.

One thing I keep realizing, as I watch Americans wrangling over the future of their country, is that there is a sense in which principled liberals are pacifists, in practice, even when they would never call themselves pacifists by conviction. Like pacifism, liberalism is committed to persuasion as an alternative to violence. Like pacifism, liberalism is difficult in practice, risking complicity at every turn. And this is not surprising, because liberalism was at least partly created by pacifists.

The part-time pacifists with dirt under their fingernails are worth a lot. As existing systems of liberalism fracture, can new ways of peace and liberty be invented? If it’s useless right now to kill for liberty, and you’re unlikely to die for liberty, then how do you live for liberty? By what acts of courage or generosity will you shape a future you’ll never see in a country that might be changed from the one you have? You can’t know in what ways this is a long defeat and in what ways your actions will create new hope as the years go by.

You cannot put the good into people, or societies, or countries, but you can try to grow whatever good may already be there. I know that there is a lot of good in America yet. I have faith that, no matter what, some good will remain.

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edits , a Substack which strives to be “a sort of court jester, attempting to bring some levity into a very self-serious culture.” His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of venues, from the New York Times to The Blaze. His eclectic tastes — for Camille Paglia, reggaeton, and Andy Warhol — along with his shameless, ironic style make him well-suited for the themes of today’s essay: narcissism and death.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Since I was six years old, I’ve had a bizarre habit of fantasizing about my own funeral. Fear not, this essay is not a death wish or suicide note. I don’t want my life to end … at least not literally. But I can’t deny being allured by the image of my funeral — of the liturgical arrangements, the flowers and commemorative photos, the little laminated cards with kitschy religious graphic on the front and a generic Bible verse and the dates of my sunrise and sunset on the back, and the people reminiscing about the good times with me, eulogizing my greatest virtues, and mourning the loss of my beloved presence in their lives, as they console themselves by reminding each other that I’m in a better place.

My fantasy started when a distant aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. As soon as the news broke, everyone in my family started talking about how worried they were about her. Calls were made about helping to take her to chemo appointments and cooking meals for her. This outpouring of sympathy and concern came to me as a surprise: for as long as I can remember, my aunt had been persona non grata in my family. Yet now, everyone was fawning over her and expressing their concern for her well-being. When we visited her, I saw a pile of gifts in one corner. “Those are my cancer gifts,” she explained to me.

A surge of envy rose up in my soul. Where were MY cancer gifts? My aunt’s rewards flew in the face of all the meritocratic messaging I received at home and at school about how you had to behave well and work hard in order to earn rewards. And now her diagnosis — which she did nothing to earn — somehow merited her receiving gifts, special treatment, and being showered with attention?

About nine months later, my aunt passed away at the age of 58. At the funeral, people sobbed about how much they were going to miss her. Her eulogizers conveniently forgot all of her worst attributes and focused on her good ones. I was amazed by how the simple act of dying could magically erase someone’s errors and incite people to amplify all of the good they’ve done. Why couldn’t this magic wand also be waved over my strengths and weaknesses? And more importantly, why couldn’t I also be the center of attention — the object of gushing praise and affection — the way she was?

As I grew up, I realized that being jealous of dead people and fantasizing about my own funeral was not exactly a normal thing to do. I don’t need to be told that there’s something deeply narcissistic and, quite frankly, creepy about this morbid habit. That being said, I’ve yet to fully shake off that green monster of envy whenever attending a funeral. Just as I’ll always take mental note of my attributes that people are most likely to miss most about me and of my achievements that they are likely to mention after my passing (I’ll often half-jokingly remark to myself that “that’ll def go into my funeral file”).

I’m sure you’re wondering at this point why I’d disclose such an embarrassing fact about myself. What good can it do to own up to our most outlandish fantasies? The reality is that as much as my narcissistic ideations may have taken shape in a rather particular (and absurd) form, we all are subject to such ideations — especially those of us who grew up in what Christopher Lasch calls a “culture of narcissism.” I’m thinking of my fellow millennials in particular, who grew up in the ravages of a society that not only permitted but enabled pathological narcissistic tendencies. And thanks to recent events in my own life, I’ve realized that the solution is not to keep hush about our worst tendencies out of respect for social conventions, but rather to work through them humbly, frankly, and with a bit of a self-deprecatory sense of humor.

Much of my ability to do that work is indebted to having read Lasch’s 1979 magnum opus, The Culture of Narcissism, which helped me in a way that no psychologist has been able to thus far. The book attempts to highlight the ways that the socioeconomic changes during the transition from early- to late-phase industrial capitalism have given rise to certain psychological and cultural phenomena. In particular, Lasch focuses on how the vices of “pride and acquisitiveness” eventually gave way to those of “vanity” and to pathological narcissism, which instead seeks respect from others on the basis of one’s “personal attributes” rather than from the substance and quality of one’s achievements. “The good opinion of friends and neighbors,” Lasch writes, “which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments.” But now, people “wish to be not so much esteemed as admired” and “to be envied rather than respected.”

The narcissist seeks the adoration of an audience, and is plagued by the feeling that his actions are meaningless in themselves, and, thus, that he will never fully gratify his need for attention and approval.

Without an objective measurement with which to judge the value of one’s actions — and thus, one’s character — the narcissist is a “performer” perpetually competing with others for the attention of the crowd, sometimes resorting to do so by any means necessary. The strongest strategy for beating out the competition and achieving the complete fulfillment of my need for attention is to pull the ultimate trump card: dying.

Lasch goes on to point to Freud’s “controversial hypothesis of a death instinct, better described as a longing for absolute equilibrium.” The unleashing of the pleasure principle eventually morphs into the “longing for the complete cessation of tension” that comes along with dying. The “Nirvana principle” is the “backward quest for absolute peace.” And “since narcissism does not acknowledge” the existence of “objects distinct from the self,” it “has no fear of death.”

I couldn’t help but recognize Lasch’s claims about the correlation between the cutthroat competition bred by the narcissistic attention economy and the Freudian death instinct within the workings of my own wayward psyche. The simple fact was that death was a guaranteed fast track toward being absolved of all moral responsibility and garnering everyone’s attention and admiration. Rationally speaking, I know I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the spectacle of my own funeral while lying dead in my coffin. But still, the very act of fantasizing about the moment continued to fascinate and excite me.

But all this irrational fantasizing was turned upside down after two very close friends — both of whom happened to be just a year younger than me — died within the span of eight months from each other.

Ian and John’s funeral festivities — the eulogies, the Facebook memories and Instagram photos shared, the memorial scholarships — triggered my typical death-envy complex. But it also opened the door to a new, rather different sensation. There was something about the fact that their deaths were so untimely, and that the memories shared were not the typical “play up the good, downplay the bad” style fare. These two friends were good — dare I say, holy — people through and through. Though not devoid of faults, they were selflessly committed to their relationships with others and had their eyes — and hearts — set on higher, eternal ideals.

As much as I was jealous of the attention they were getting and longed for the day that people would be forced to absolve me of my shortcomings and laud my most wondrous attributes, I started to find myself more attracted to the prospect of emulating their actions which garnered them so much praise and affection — perhaps more so than the prospect of garnering praise and affection. Sure, I still wanted the attention. But I also wanted to dedicate myself to an ideal that would last beyond my stint on earth and that would be of genuine value to others — in the same way my friends did — even more.

When the 16th century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila prayed that God release her already from the “iron prison” that is life and hasten her death — whose “sweetness” she longed for — it was less a narcissistic plea to be absolved from her earthly responsibilities than it was a recognition that the pleasures of her time on earth were nothing compared to the eternal bliss awaiting her in the afterlife. On my least virtuous (that is, my most snowflake-y millennial) days, I continue to fantasize about the day when I’ll be relieved of the toil of everyday life and be the object of numerous people’s adoration. But on my best days, my death wish takes the shape of Teresa of Ávila’s prayer — which on one hand recognizes the emptiness of everyday life on earth (including attention from others), but on the other accepts the fact that it is precisely through our fidelity to everyday responsibilities and relationships — the same kind that my two friends exemplified — that we enter into communion with the Eternal and, thus, inch our way closer to true, lasting happiness.

And so, I remain trapped in this tension between my base and nobler selves; between being an insufferable millennial with severely narcissistic tendencies, and intuiting that there’s Something greater and more beautiful that beckons me toward It. I’m sure I’ll continue to fantasize about my funeral until the day it finally arrives — but for varying reasons, depending on which way the wind blows, and which of my proclivities dominates my conscience on any given day. Hopefully God’s sense of humor will be kindled by my own.

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Today we share some late-summer reflections on tattoos as souvenirs and body art — a practice that, as author notes, has unexpectedly become a political act. (Kristina, by the way, is also a fiction writer, and you can keep up to date with her work here.) Enjoy!

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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With my eight tattoos, a common question — from friends and strangers — is: “Why did you get that?” I end up in conversation with people who wax dreamily about how they’ve always wanted to get inked but haven’t. “It doesn’t feel right,” is the general sentiment, driven perhaps by preemptive social criticism. This soft self-censure has hardened in recent months as the administration deported migrants with prominent tattoos. A Palestinian friend, casually discussing potential ink, recently said to me, “Getting a tattoo these days is practically a ticket to arrest.” I think about this often, even as I write this, while the poppies on my outstretched forearm move in concert with my typing hands. The three flowers and two buds symbolize remembrance and remind me of those I’ve loved and lost: my mother, my grandparents, a best friend. As prominently as their red blooms on my exposed skin, I say tattoos are virtuous.

I didn’t always think this way. Like many of us, my parents trained me well in their morals and self-righteousness. My mother reserved a special tone whenever she mentioned “pierced and tattooed” people, her response a reflection of a common taboo among the Boomers: tattoos signaled a lower class, a lesser being, or a vice. Instead I found other ways to rebel in my youth without crossing that line of inking my skin. I dabbled in other vices: cigarettes, rowdy rock shows, alcohol. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that my mother approved of any of these things, but she tolerated them in a way that tattooing would have crossed a line.

These fears are not without precedent. Tattoos, over time, have suffered from a reputation of vice rather than virtue. Looking at ancient history, in Greco-Roman culture, tattoos were a disgrace, seen as something reserved as a mark for the enslaved. More recently, tattoos have represented subversion, the punk scene and dismissiveness of conventionality.

I fast forward to age 30, when my grandmother’s death left something of a hole in my sense of meaning. She was my mother’s mother, the matriarch of our family, the one who made a home in Harrow, England, with the tallest of trees in the backyard. Summers growing up, I remember lying there on short-cut grass, watching the clouds float adjacent to the oak’s arms. The tree was a mainstay, seemingly invulnerable, and a symbol of my family line.

I decided to get it tattooed on my back. This would be the first time I’d cross the line that my mother set so many years previous. But it was an act that seemed virtuous: a memorial to my grandparents, now both gone, and to our family’s legacy. It didn’t matter how good or right this tattoo felt to me. My mother cried upon first seeing it, not tears of sentiment but instead shocked that I dropped so much ink into my clean, white skin.

They say that once you get inked, you’re addicted. I agree with the concept that one tattoo begets more tattoos, but not because it’s an addiction. The more I’ve inked my skin, the clearer it is virtuous and good. This was obvious with my second tattoo. Also in my thirties, after trying to get pregnant, for thirteen weeks I thought I was having a baby. Then, I learned the pregnancy wasn’t viable. The baby I envisioned, one that didn’t exist yet except in my mind, wouldn’t be a part of our lives; this is the grief of miscarriage. I commissioned a print artist I loved for a memorial design. The picture depicts a moon with a bird’s silhouette flying out from the crescent. The moon, a symbol of motherhood, and the bird, a symbol of my lost child.

It’s easy to call something virtuous when it’s meaningful. These initial tattoos warranted a permanent place on my body because of the memories and experiences that they represented. I admit that, at the time, I also hoped that my disapproving family might make an exception for a thoughtful graphic dedicated to a mutual love or loss. All the while, though, I was telling my life story through pictures on my body.

My third tattoo came from a deep desire for place, a story that’s forever rooted in my being. After fifteen years living in Colorado, I’d moved back east to be near my mother and, I hoped, to benefit from built-in childcare for my then three-year-old. DC wasn’t all I imagined, though, when my mother fell ill with dementia, and I became her caregiver. These early years back in DC were hard. Romantically, I missed the ubiquitous mountain vistas, craving Colorado like a lover. Visiting Denver on a work trip one week, I walked into a tattoo studio on a snowy night and asked for a single line silhouette of the mountains that I so desired.

When I speak of my tattoos being virtuous, up until this point, I think “virtue” means – using Plato-speak – a wise solution to memorializing love lost. What they weren’t: particularly courageous. My first three tattoos were easily hidden by clothing. I could choose to show them – or not. And if someone asked me why I got them, I had a tidy story ready about memorials and grief and love – all things that are easily translatable as good to the average person.

It’s my subsequent tattoos that further define ink’s virtuosity. They not only tell a story but also show the courage of displaying it to the world. Except in the depths of winter, these pictures are ones that anyone can see. They are subjected to both unsolicited questions as well as compliments from strangers.

TSA agents, without a doubt, are among the most likely to laud my ink. This started with my first sleeve, which I got in a post-pandemic belated celebration of my 40th birthday. Coming back from Las Vegas, wrapped in saniderm, I got an enthusiastic “New ink? Love it” from the agent. The Lady Gaga-inspired anime character on my right arm doesn’t make a lot of sense to people. It doesn’t easily memorialize anything, or really look like Lady Gaga, when it comes down to it. But it permanently represents a moment in time, when I both wisely and courageously decided to literally wear my virtue on my sleeve.

That was the first of four, large pieces of art on my body, none of them easily hidden or explained away. These are my courageous tattoos: The Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland wraps my left arm. The March Hare holds a teacup while the Dormouse nods off in the teapot, nestled in large, red roses. Alice sips her tea at the front of the scene, and it’s all a literary symbol of the world’s chaos. On my right thigh, a heron in black and grey linework, which I got in my home state of Maryland. On my left thigh, a 1920’s inspired portrait encircled with more roses, a tattoo that’s also from Las Vegas and by the masterful artist and Ink Master Joey Hamilton.

I wear these proudly and virtuously, despite the current threats of authoritarianism that, in part, present as a backlash against tattoos. And, I hope my son, nieces, nephews, and others will see them, that coming generations will kill the bias against well inked bodies. But will I get more tattoos anytime soon? I think I’ll wait until I’m ready to turn another page on my story – or until courage strikes me strongly enough to etch something further into my skin.

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A few months ago, I asked philosopher why anti-Trump humor always seemed to fail. She came up with a brilliant essay, “The Jester’s Power,” which is still current and worth reading. But now that South Park has decided to point its comedic arsenal at the president, I thought it would be the perfect time for her to revisit the topic of political satire.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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During Trump’s first term, there was a designated White House staffer whose job it was to sing: specifically, to play the sorts of songs known to calm and soothe the losses of temper that Trump often, it seems, experienced. Any small or large sort of thing, being crossed, double-crossed, insulted apparently or insulted for real, even just being bored or out of sorts and of course, screaming through various sorts of rages, all these could be an occasion to hit play on various showtunes of choice — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s barn-burner from Cats, you know the one, Barbra Streisand covers it (it’s the one about memory). On occasion, Trump would ask for the guy himself. “Go get the music man,” the staffer reports that he would say.

Aside from his fear of falling down stairs, a fear I share, it is this detail about the designated man for music that I find most sympathetic about Trump. His soul is in a sad condition, and happy the man who can be at least temporarily soothed by song. As Plato describes it in the Republic, the tyrannical soul cannot sleep; the man who has fed, taunted and grown his native desire for people and things to the point of madness — the better, as he thinks, to triumph over the rest of everything up to and including the gods themselves — he can’t rest. It is the very condition of tyranny to be the most dissatisfied of men, and unfortunately, the condition is terminal.

Two weeks ago, in an attempt to poke just this sort of the savage beast, the folks at South Park offered up the first episode in the latest installment of their comedic and satirical show, featuring in extended and scurrilous fashion Trump himself. It was well received by many, record-breakingly so, if not by the current White House spokesman, who gasped out something about “uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.” Well perhaps, although again, on the whole it seems to have been enjoyed, with the president of the non-profit FIRE writing in praise of it and of the “special role of comedy in a free society.”

But to me, the episode seemed aimed less at me, one viewer among many within the teetering rule of law, than the television-watcher-in-chief, up late at night en suite in DC, flipping the channels and illuminated by passing lights, treated to seeing an image of himself likewise in bed, on the screen; only this time, with Satan, attempting to talk Satan into just a little bit more sex. What did he, Trump, think? The episode was most violent about what it seemed to hope were his weakest points, size of his genitalia and so on, presumably in the attempt to operate as an inverse sort of music-man, to raise rather than soothe the temper, to double-dare cancellation for themselves, just for the sheer hell of it. It felt courageous, partly at least, and probably was. Did it get the goat it was written for? Well, perhaps.

In May, I wrote for Wisdom of Crowds about my love of a seventeenth-century French playwright (thanks, guys) and his approach to the kind of satire and humor that, slow-burning, say a century or two later, is the kind of thing that leads to the toppling of kings. One problem is that not every kind of humor is actually funny enough to do this. And unfortunately, the American world is saturated in just the kind of humor that is definitively not — the way you can tell is that people routinely describe it as “hilarious,” but without actually feeling moved to laugh. What they mean is something more like “so right,” to them at least. As one WoC commenter put it, American humor is balm for the already-converted, and certainly most things, the Comedy Central shows, Stewart old and new, are exactly that, though if they function as balm I can’t say that it seems to last that long.

In 2005, 2006 or so, I was young and hanging out with people who worked for Democrats in Congress, and while they wanted the kind of relief from losing, from the Iraq war and the Patriot Act that the Daily Show seemed to provide, and something more like truth-telling I suppose, what it resulted in was a static sense of self-superiority, marked by a kind of guttural hunching of the shoulders, the same kind of laughter that the South Park characters are best known for; and not in any kind of practical political action at all. Was Colbert’s late-night version cancelled because it was funny, or because it was not funny enough? I can’t say for sure, but the thing is, to me it seems that while Colbert himself remains an interesting human being, the schtick and the humor his current show engendered wasn’t funny enough to merit cancellation. The problem is that it was flattery, really not much more, and unfortunately it seems to have flattered the audience it didn’t have. Predictably, its cancellation engendered a flurry of humorless tweets, insisting that, in a democracy, comedy is so important.

What the South Park episode was supposed to be about was shaming Trump. But unfortunately, I think it probably may have simply flattered him instead. Things like this feed the importance of the satirized one, the guy you are trying to make fun of, by clothing him even while naked with the force of your attention. As a character in Plato also remarks, what’s more pleasant than an image of yourself? And so I think Parker and Stone failed just where they most wished to succeed: angry themselves, devil-may-care in the court of the king, their jokes create that very court, calling into existence the glamor of the president-king. Congrats guys, you’ve reinvented the levée.

The best part of the episode, by contrast, was the subplot of the character Cartman, who was bummed when woke-NPR was cancelled, to the point of self-murder, because he couldn’t get to feel gruntingly contemptuous enough anymore. Woke is Dead, read his new Nietzschean t-shirt; admitting that in a way, woke had been the best god he had ever had. Within such a joke, one may see oneself if one wishes; Colbert too is dead, and long live Colbert.

So here is the genre-problem we have: How on earth do we break out of the humor of self-satisfaction, and grant ourselves the relief of the soul-shaking laughter that contains within it the possibility of better things? Part of the issue is, formally speaking, the form: South Park often manages better and more sustained jokes because it has narrative form, one that depends on characters you know, and with a real formal plot. Real plots develop and bring out more and more memorable humor, even over the course of twenty minutes, than just the evening’s best one-liners, or another stupid and forgettable sketch. The Cartman plot ends when despite his best efforts to kill his friend and himself with exhaust fumes, he’s gone and forgotten again that his parents are in receipt of an electric car. That’s stomach-twistingly funny, and so is the guidance-counselor-turned-ICE-agent from episode no. 2; both are more memorable in the long view than (forgive me) a petite talking penis; genitalia are funny but only for a brief moment.

And formally speaking, this next point is yet more important still: humor that makes fun of the other guy, but not you as well, is formally insufficient, aesthetically and psychologically. A good joke cuts both ways, and includes the teller’s faults within it; like Chris Rock’s joke about the difference between having money and being wealthy (the trick is to avoid diamonds, and on occasion, rims), you can’t make fun of aspirationally-oligarchical waste without admitting your own temptations and failures. South Park’s conceit, where the kids are the ones who have it right, likewise requires that we the adult viewers are forever in the wrong; and so no one is ever seriously at dramatic risk of being either. But when you leave yourself out, you, rational and political actor, fully grown, citizen in this time and place, maybe partly right and definitely partly wrong, the joke is over before it begins. Perhaps this is why, as in the second episode, the only hero possible to imagine is a canine, shot on his way to the rescue; the narrative omniscience made possible by cash and libertarianism remains untroubled. Truth be told, while doing the voices yourself adds much, there’s still something to the practical aspect of acting the joke out yourself, face to face, rather than have cartoons do it for you. Molière died less than an hour after making it through a performance of The Hypochondriac, truly nearly dead on his feet. He also wrote a joke about his favorite ribbons into the plot and hero of his best-known show, The Misanthrope, where he had to walk on stage as that guy, ribbon-adorned, each night; it’s also what comedians risk onstage at Kill Tony.

Real humor, the engendering kind, implicates you in the joke. There’s always something funny about us in what annoys us, and the same goes for what irritates us about tyrants as well. Unless we and our comedians figure out how to do this, rather than keeping on trying to, impossibly, shame the shameless, we too are goners. If I had to hire a music man, a new late show guy, or a story-teller for the demos, that’s the kind I’d pick. Much more than we want, politics depends on who we pick next.

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I haven’t been able to forget Children of Men since I saw it in theaters in 2006. A quick search reveals that the movie lives on in other peoples’ minds as well. As WoC contributor explains in his essay below, the film is memorable because, with every passing year, it looks more and more prophetic.

And yet, Polansky argues, the movie has a fatal flaw: it does not believe its own prophecy. Unlike the novel it is based on, the movie ultimately fails to stick the landing.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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This month, The New York Times released one of those “best films of the century so far”-type lists that periodicals love so much, sourced from 500-plus Hollywood insiders, along with an (actually pretty fun) interactive portal allowing the rest of us to post our own “Top Ten” lists.

One particular film landed at #13 on the main list and made a strong showing among the vox populi as well: 2006’s Children of Men. I was both surprised and unsurprised at this outcome. Unsurprised, because it received a good deal of acclaim upon its release, and it retains a good deal of staying power nearly two decades on. Moreover, its central premise — a childless world facing irreversible demographic decline — has only proven ever more prescient with time, which is rarely the case with dystopian or apocalyptic fiction. Not incidentally, the film is actually set two years from now, and while we are not yet hunting down replicants, nor battling cyborgs, nor eating each other, we are indeed facing plunging fertility worldwide along with the expansion of government-assisted suicide in developed countries.

And yet I remain surprised by both its popular and critical reception, given the fact that the movie doesn’t actually, you know, work.

The reason it doesn’t work is because those who made it crafted a technically impressive film, the meaning of which they didn’t entirely understand. And while its prescience has been noted, much of that prescience is better attributed to the source material — P. D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men — and one can map the flaws of this adaptation by considering the gap between them.

The film takes place in the year 2027, during a mysterious fertility crisis, in which Great Britain is slowly dying. No one has successfully given birth in two decades; the UK has become a totalitarian police state and appears to be undergoing a kind of low-level civil war between government and anti-government forces, much of it centered on an ongoing refugee crisis. Theo Faron, a former activist who has lost all purpose since the death of his son, is contacted by a revolutionary group called “the Fishes” and led by his estranged wife. They need him to use his official contacts to help a young refugee woman pass through the transit checkpoints that have been established around the country. As he discovers, the young woman, named Kee, is pregnant — the only such woman left in their world. Beset by a fascist government that controls all movement on one side and the increasingly sinister revolutionaries on the other, Faron must escort his heavily pregnant charge to a meeting place with a secretive group of scientists dedicated to discovering a cure for human infertility.

Alongside this dramatic backdrop, Children of Men has much to admire. The cast is uniformly excellent: Clive Owen plays the Humphrey Bogart role of world-weary-protagonist-who-discovers-his-conscience about as well as anyone has done it since Bogart himself, and Chiwetel Ejiofor embodies the charismatic-but-also-wild-eyed-and-dangerous-fanatic role that he has pretty much locked down (e.g., Serenity, Doctor Strange). Technically, it is superb. Alfonso Cuarón reveals a flair for directing sequences of graphic action that his previous films (including the charming Y tu mamá también) barely hinted at. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has had a truly elite run this century, does astonishing work, shifting from naturalistic scenes of pastoral beauty to the staggering continuous action shots for which the film has become justly famous.

Credit must also be given to the film’s refusal to turn its protagonist into an action hero. Theo Faron’s ordinariness only heightens the intensity around the film’s major set pieces and, frankly, more movies should do this. There are some moments that are almost unbearably suspenseful, and the viewer is denied the emotional reprieve of knowing the protagonist is some kind of superhero who will invariably win out.

But the film’s problems are ultimately thematic in ways that no amount of technique can fix. For there is a hole in the film, and the hole is faith. Please don’t think I’m trying to proselytize; I am the wrong guy to do it. But the film dances around it throughout. It’s not that it’s anti-religious, exactly. Ejiofor’s villain, while a fanatic, is a fanatic of the radical, secular variety, familiar to anyone with some knowledge of Cold War-era global politics. And while he recognizes the significance of the new birth, his hope is to use it as a symbol for his (again) revolutionary ends.

Rather, religion and G-d are simply … absent. All of this would be fine in a different film, with a different framing narrative, but the film they elected to make centers on what is unavoidably miraculous. One can see in the film the impression left by its source material (whose author called it “a Christian fable”), like archaeological deposits of a past civilization. What, after all, is the failure to reproduce but a lack of faith in the present and future?

In the film’s version of Theo, he is presented as a former political activist (for what, it’s unclear) who evidently became a bureaucrat following the tragic death of his son. He has in a sense lost his faith, but faith in political projects, not true faith. Even the Christian symbolism of a radical group calling itself “The Fishes” is lost here.

The failure to understand the film they made also undermines the film’s narrative and setting, in which scenes of political violence and downtrodden refugees feature heavily. The primary reason that refugees and other migrants move from one country to another, however is to seek a better life for themselves and their children. By contrast, the primary concern of immigration restrictionists is that such migrants will reduce the quality of life for their children. But without any children, what possible motivation could there be for the dramatic clash of these radical and reactionary energies? By the same token, who would bother going through the trouble of maintaining a totalitarian government?

While the novel does feature violence, as well, it is nihilistic in character rather than a reflection of contemporary right or left ideological movements. Similarly, in the book’s savvier treatment, Britain has abandoned democracy but mostly because it is content to allow a soft authoritarian government to shepherd its people to an orderly and comfortable end. The novel is a truer projection of our own situation for how it more accurately gauges the spiritual health of a society at the cusp of the End of History (a book that was, incidentally, published in the same year as James’ novel). For the society that the novel depicts is much more clearly our own: people who increasingly refuse to reproduce, elderly who go quietly to their government-assisted demise, democracies giving way to managerial authoritarianism. Our general loss of purpose is much the same, even in the absence of any biological catastrophe.

Ironically, in striving for contemporary relevance by incorporating recognizable images of our world (Third World refugees, masked paramilitary forces, etc.), the film ends up indulging too much in post-apocalyptic fantasies. In doing so, it ends up getting lapped by its true subject. And to the extent that the film retains such popular and critical acclaim, I am inclined to think that the audience too has been lapped. One sympathizes with the filmmakers here, as decadence and meaninglessness and anomie are simply less exciting from a cinematic standpoint than violent conflict, but only one of these is a coherent representation of a literally dying world.

In the film’s climactic moment (spoiler alert!), Kee successfully gives birth, and Theo escorts her and her newborn infant through the war zone as the soldiers and revolutionaries cease fighting and gaze on in awe. It is a profoundly moving scene, and I have seen it bring more than one viewer to tears (me, I’m talking about myself here). But the scene’s power relies upon an implicit meaning that it otherwise denies: both the reproduction of one of the foundational images of Christian civilization, and its portrayal of a miracle that it cannot acknowledge as such.

In the film’s final scene, salvation is provided by the arrival of the looked-for research ship out of the Azores — not deus ex machina but doctus ex machina. This, however, reduces the crisis to a kind of technical problem. Human infertility is a material disease requiring a scientific cure. It is an unfortunate predicament, no doubt, but it is not a morally meaningful one in what it represents, and its metaphorical significance is greatly diminished. This society, which is our society, has not lost its meaning; it is just unlucky.

As the critic Alan Jacobs notes in his review of the novel, “when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable.” But the hope the film holds out proves in the end to be one of more and better meliorism. The secret scientific research group will succeed where others failed. The appalling ideological violence portrayed in the film thus represents not so much a perversion of theological hopes but a lack of faith in progress. This rather banal conclusion, however, is concealed by the film’s visual excitement. Which paradoxically draws upon the same spiritual symbolism and meaning that it putatively rejects. This is then a bait-and-switch, enticing us with a spiritual and moral promise upon which it is unwilling (and ultimately unable) to deliver. Children of Men is, in other words, a prophetic film that doesn’t believe its own prophecy.

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Are you living in a simulation?

Nick Bostrom, a famous British philosopher, thinks it is highly probable that we are all living in a simulation created by an alien species. Here he explains why. Many people, including Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, find Bostrom’s argument compelling.

In today’s essay, playwright, novelist and WoC correspondent argues that Bostrom’s simulation argument has evolved into a simulation religion — the stilted worldview of a culture without a taste for beauty.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom presented what he carefully termed the “simulation argument” (SA) — a probabilistic thought experiment that posits that, if there are advanced civilizations with Godlike computing power anywhere in base physical reality, then we are overwhelmingly likely to be living in a simulation ourselves. Bostrom reasons that, if posthuman civilizations ever develop the computing power to run detailed simulations of conscious beings then the total number of simulated beings will easily exceed those in base reality.

Think of it this way: a single human gamer playing World of Warcraft can simulate thousands of non-player characters in a single session; posthuman civilizations with godlike computing power could simulate entire histories populated with billions of human minds. If civilizations can reach a sufficient level of advancement without destroying themselves, then we are part of their simulations. If we are not simulations, that means that reaching that level of civilization is likely impossible. Either we are part of any number of Godlike computers’ simulations, or no such computer can be built for whatever reasons.

This thought experiment, however, has since metastasized into a folk belief and a meme — simulation theory (ST) — which asserts that we are living in a simulation because those advanced civilizations must exist somewhere. ST leans into the scope of what we don’t know, the feeling that there must be something more: the universe is so large, and perhaps multiple, than one or more of those Godlike simulators must be out there somewhere; we just gotta be a simulation, probabilistically. In the last few years, with increasing frequency and amplitude, thanks in no small part to Elon’s tweets, ST has become a part of our lexicon — “We’re living in a simulation; The simulation is breaking; The simulation is fucking crazy bro.” Simulation theory has seeped into both our lexicon and our phenomenology; many suddenly have the feeling that the simulation is fraying. ST, as a folk belief, is changing human experience.

And this — this pragmatic cash value, this ability to change our relationship to ourselves and the world around us — rather than the epistemic status of either the SA or ST — is what interests me. I suspect ST, traveling through our cultural bloodstream in meme form, is malignant: it justifies psychological disengagement from reality because it downgrades reality to the status of video game, an advanced civilization’s home movie. With startling casualness, mass culture has internalized, and normalized, an idea of creation, and an ontology, that is compatible with the most extreme forms of nihilism and solipsism. If life doesn’t feel real to people, then ST explains why; no fuss, no stress: it’s all fake.

But this is where I think critical engagement with ST really gets interesting. I hypothesize that SA has been disseminated as ST because we can no longer imagine a God in our own image, and have instead reworked the idea of God into a computer. Ontologically, Bostrom’s depiction of Godlike simulators (and Godlike simulators simulating Godlike simulators ... simulators nested inside of simulators) bears so much resemblance to religion that it’s functionally indistinguishable from religion. It is basically an ultra-reductionist, ultra-scientistic vision of how God or Gods or higher or lower levels of reality could exist (like in Buddhism). In pragmatic terms, I’m not really sure what the point of thinking about SA is. The only point in engaging with either SA or ST is that you want to: the theory allows you to experience less experiential friction; you don’t have to worry so much; you don’t have to try to puzzle out why you’re on earth anymore, or what it’s all for. You aren’t really here.

Stated thusly, simulation theory and God ultimately are versions of the same thesis with different names and points of emphasis; simulation theory is a blend of monotheism and Buddhism without any duties, demands, or standard practices. Moreover, the trope of simulation theory better fits our current understanding of ourselves, and the direction of our technological civilization; it projects an astonishingly anthropomorphic idea of the divine: simulational theory is a narcissistic new projection of a God who resembles what we’ve become. We live more and more on and through screens; so God must too.

I don’t expect this epistemic trend to reverse. As our own brains become more enmeshed and embedded within computer technology, or as in the age of Neuralink, computer technology is sewn directly onto our brains — vas we become less embodied, less emotional, more synthetic, not just through an engagement with screen technology but with psychopharmaceutical drugs, as we spend more time indoors, less time socializing, have less real sex, more simulated sex, love, friendship — the more we are going to be prone to imagine that the divinity, the nature of reality, is like that: simulated.

An atheist might argue: “So what? Divinities are always invented in the mirror.” Freud, deeply atheistic, suggested, for instance, that the Jews got the idea of a single God from wandering in a desert haunted by a single relentless sun, and that polytheistic religions were religions of the forest and jungle, where life forms were myriad and polyphonic. So we think of God as a computer, a simulating machine, because that’s what we spend all day looking at, experiencing, interacting with — what difference does it make? The image of the divine will evolve as we evolve, or devolve. ST’s popularity is anthropologically inevitable.

Maybe. I would respond simply by saying, even if you don’t think any God or Godlike simulator exists, ST is an aesthetically ugly idea. In a pragmatic sense, it justifies turning off, turning away, and living indoors, away from contact with corporeality. It’s a blank check to accept an incorporeal framework for our lives. And it’s an idea — a tropological structure — that lacks lyrical resonance. Maybe Freud was right and the Jews got the idea of monotheism from the sun, but the sun is a rich and suggestive trope; as is the rainforest; as is nature in general. Ideas of God derived from nature have a similar richness because they’re developed on earth, inspired by nature — by the experience of coming into contact with something that in itself is alive and real, semi-visible but also sublime. The sun, the jungle, the moon, the forest, the desert, the stars ...

So, even if you think life contains no metaphysical twists or surprises, even if you’re a strict atheist, you still might see the spread of ST as a folk belief as a bad thing; it is a sign our civilization is becoming scientific, sterile, and boring — crass science fiction. Fervent Christian belief stimulated the construction of Gothic cathedrals; Islamic civilization stimulated the Alhambra; Hindu devotion stimulated the temples of Khajuraho; Buddhist faith stimulated Angkor Wat; ancient astrological cults stimulated the Parthenon and Stonehenge. What does fervent belief in ST stimulate? Sober raves?

And what higher plane does ST conjure? Glimpsing the base reality for a split second? Unplugging like Neo from the Matrix? Simulation theory betrays an unwillingness to find God interesting, deep, or beautiful anymore; it betrays an unwillingness to find any mystery inside the human soul or the human body. Ironically, as software for civilization, ST sucks: it lacks the greatness, the complexity and depth, of world religions.

And what if you aren’t an atheist? What if you are agnostic? A wavering believer? What if you are God-haunted — uncertain ... fearful and trembling? Is it possible that aesthetic differences might reflect truth and that Freud’s sociological observation about how civilizations tend to form God in the image of their immediate environments isn’t proof that God doesn’t exist — only that He might not exist in exactly the form we project for him? Then you really ought to guard against ST, because at best, it is a lazy, narcissistic trope for the possibility of revelation that inhibits and disincentives spiritual emotion or disciplining practices; it is not proper fuel for the soul.

With all this in mind, I will end with the following warning: simulation theory will become popular, widespread, and accepted in proportion to the degree to which our lives are automated, pointless, numb, and locked onto screens. The more it becomes reflexive, folk wisdom, the less older, richer, more aesthetic forms of wisdom will be able to move us closer to the truth. We will walk through Chartres and when the light streaming through the stained glass hits our eyes, we will only see the fraying Matrix code, and not a sign of something that transcends reason, and metaphor itself.

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Several people have argued that — consciously or not — Trump and Vance are following the thought of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist and legal philosopher who developed influential ideas about executive power, popular sovereignty, the reduction of politics to the conflict between friends and enemies, and the so-called “state of exception.”

In the last decades, legal theorists like Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule have applied Schmitt’s ideas to the American context, while political commentators like and are critical of those ideas.

Today we have an essay by , a political theorist and writer who writes the Substack, , and thoughtful comments have appeared several times on CrowdSource. Looking for an explanation in Trump’s behavior in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt is a red herring, Mace argues. Trump is actually more unpredictable than the Schmittian Sovereign.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

— Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, Feb. 15, 2025

The words above are ominous. They speak of a man who does not believe in law but in action. This is arguably something unique in American history, although as the theorist Giorgio Agamben points out, American Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush have not been shy of abrogating the constitution to save the Union. Yet, Trump feels different not only from the obvious case of Lincoln but also from the Texan who set up Guantanamo. It appears as if the US has entered a new era.

The above has led some, such as , to explain away Trump as a modern-day representative of the fascist past. To do so, these writers tend to point to the jurist Carl Schmitt. There are good reasons why, on the surface, this makes sense. Trump’s rhetoric of migrants moved from xenophobic to overtly threatening in the last election cycle, and his actions on January 6 should make us doubt his respect for the law. These things can be interpreted via Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy and the notion of sovereign decisionism acting as direct attacks on the liberal values which underpin modern ethics and law.

Yet, Schmitt’s notions of politics and constitutionalism have been widely misinterpreted. The friend-enemy dichotomy is not about disagreement, no matter how strong. Rather, the dichotomy refers to the fight to the death to secure the body politic. When George Bush said that “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he was evoking the Schmittian notion of the dichotomy. For Bush, there was no possibility of a third position in the War on Terror. There was no possibility of compromise, because compromise would put lives at risk. Instead, when Trump talks about his enemies, he is talking in terms of personal vendetta, not the security of the body politic.

Neither is the sovereign decision merely about the sovereign doing as they please. Often people misinterpret Schmitt’s famous line from his book, Political Theology — “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception” — to mean just that. But this interpretation of Schmitt does not explain by what right the sovereign proclaims himself the sovereign in the first place. Yes, the sovereign can declare an emergency, and in that moment, he can act outside the law to defend the “people.” But this interpretation misses what constitutes a “people” in Schmitt’s work, thereby not only misinterpreting Schmitt’s ideas but also how to analyze modern formations of politics. Moreover, this leads to the misapplication of Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign, and of the “people,” to Trump and the MAGA base, respectively.

In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt locates the constitution as distinct from other forms of law. It is the constitution which forms the boundary of the polity. As Jeffrey Seitzer and Christopher Thornhill have argued, “[Schmitt] sees the constitution as united with the state, representing a uniform political will that cannot be reduced to formal or autonomous legal principles.” The constitution, therefore, for Schmitt, is not merely any other law but the practical representation of the people, which the defined people give to its purpose. Such a people must be united as a homogenous block, which he identifies in Constitutional Theory as either via race, tradition, a common destiny or a shared purpose within the confines of the friend-enemy distinction. There is, after all, a reason why Schmitt frequently returns to Revolutionary France and Communist Russia in his writings. It is not simply to show historical and analytical skill, but to emphasize the complex relationship between unity and political formation outside of legal mechanisms.

Therefore, if the sovereign is to be a legitimate representative in a Schmittian world, they must embody the people. Despite what the earlier quote in Political Theology states, the sovereign can only act as they do once they have garnered legitimacy. But even that comes under contestation when you peek past the short pamphlet. In his earlier work, Dictatorship, Schmitt recognized the act of defending a political state, but was trepidatious about handing ultimate power to any singular figure beyond a specific time frame and threat level. Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism is not the blank cheque Richard the Second demanded of the English Parliament, as is regularly imagined, but more constrained, dependent upon prior legitimacy being found from the body of the people.

The people, the nation, remains the origin of all political action, the source of all power, which expresses itself in continually new forms, producing from itself these ever renewing forms and organizations.

— Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory

The question, therefore, must be whether America is reconstituting itself as a new form of body politic and, if so, is that new form Trumpism? And does Trumpism and/or Trump believe it is doing the will of the people as so defined? Given the close margins of the last three electoral races, it would be difficult to argue that America as a people wishes to reconstitute itself via a Trumpian Presidency. Because America is viscerally divided to the point of physical threat it is not in any real sense homogenous. America is no longer “a people” as Schmitt would define it, and we may question more deeply if it ever could be seen as such given the arguments from the Founding Fathers over the morality and legality of slavery. The strength of negative polarization, fears of secession, and long held racialized politics make America difficult to imagine today as the collective, unified force required by Schmittian standards.

Trumpism is no different. It is a movement which is simultaneously less substantial than a Schmittian proposition and altogether more horrifying. Elected on a narrow mandate, Trumpism has not brought the country together but left citizens feeling even further apart from one another. It is destructive in its nature, but unlike Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, there is nothing to replace it. Disrespect for legal norms can be located in Schmitt, but abrogating sovereign responsibility is nowhere to be found. Trump’s use of law to detain, deport, and persecute non-enemies of the American people represents not the apotheosis of sovereignty but its ultimate demise.

MAGA does not act to defend “the people,” but rather only a minority who give the project its unbounded support. MAGA is not only a movement devoid of respect for law but a movement whose moral edifice is crumbling, if it was ever there to begin with. Acting in defense and subservience to a singular person is no representative sovereign, but the act of a cult defending a petty tyrant. For that reason, we should not treat it as a Schmittian alternative to liberal democracy but a dangerous attack on the people by an angry, vengeful minority. In my book, Trump is no Schmittian sovereign.

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“Artists can’t shock people today,” said Marcel Duchamp in 1961. He should know: by 1961, Duchamp had become famous for painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and displaying an upturned urinal in an art gallery, titling it “Fountain.”

But the artists didn’t listen. They went on trying to shock the public. They dropped crucifixes into tubs filled with urine and sharks into tanks of formaldehyde. They sang “I hate myself and I want to die” and “WAP.” And now Kanye West has crossed another line.

What’s the point of all this? Why does transgression matter so much to artists? tries to figure it out.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

Transgression trends:

• The artist formerly known as Kanye West is singing “Heil Hitler” onstage, and launching a “Heil Symphony,” and telling his haters to suck it;

• The artistic Right is reviving Italian fascist art, launching its own version of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Regency of Carnaro. Last week in Chelsea, New York, these would-be provocateurs hosted a launch party for the new Fiume Gallery (devoted both to the “avant-garde and forbidden” and a “new rising class of artists for the regime ahead”). The event included a “strut of the Valkyries” (burlesque) and a “Theatre of Cruelty”;

• In the post-Woke era, in both its mildly masculinist and more full-throated MAGA form, transgression seems an easy shorthand for self-identification: sexy, dangerous artists defining themselves against the sclerotic scolds of liberal bureaucracy.

There are plenty of trite things I could say about this. For example: Woke is dead; fascism is sexy; sexy fascism is passé; people who still write explainers for Yahoo News call “Heil Hitler” problematic; singing “Heil Hitler” onstage is many things, and problematic seems a nebulous but not inaccurate term to describe some of them; it is rare if not impossible to be dedicated both to the “avant-garde” and to a “regime”; even the Regency of Carnaro only lasted eighteen months, and everybody got syphilis.

But these days I find myself more interested than I once was in transgression. Not the transgression of the New Right, or the Alt-Right, or the Art-Right. Nor in its equally obsolescent, if more obviously-dated queer-progressive equivalent: think Lil Nas X selling 666 pairs of Nikes, each decorated with a drop of human blood. I’m interested, rather, in the teleology of transgression: what, if anything, is transgression for? Can transgression ever be a virtue, at least when it comes to art? Is there something that transgressive art, by transgressing, can do for us as people — or, even, for society? Or is transgression — at least in an era where little is truly transgressive — destined to be the purview of teenage boys and shock jocks: something, like pornography, that exists only to produce a limited hit of an effect?

I started thinking about this earlier this year, on one of my long afternoon walks through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I started my ramble with the paintings featured in the salons of the Academie de Beaux-Arts — quintessential specimens of classical art. Going by the informational plaques alone, they’re the kind of paintings I — with my moral absolutes and high-church sympathies — ought to like, or at least defend: affirmations (the plaques tell me) of the True and the Beautiful and the Good. Every figure is a Platonic ideal. Children are cherubic. Peasant mothers are tender and gentle.

The problem is: I don’t like those paintings. I prefer the paintings a gallery or two away — the avant-garde, the Salon de Refusés and the fin de siècle. These paintings do not, or at least do not seem to, represent an ideal. Franz von Stuck’s Inferno neither geometrically reproduces nor sentimentally improves upon reality, but it captures, in blazing eyes and textured brushstrokes, emotional reality: what it feels like, from our ever-contingent place, to be in despair. When it comes to late nineteenth-century art, at least, I worry I am not on the side of the angels.

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I kept thinking about transgression, too, as I taught a class at the Catholic University of America on the philosophy and theology of fiction-writing. My students — bright, thoughtful, committed, and steeped as they are in the Catholic intellectual tradition — were less inclined to take, even for a class period, even for the sake of argument, the side of Bataille, Wilde, Nietzsche or Marinetti. I often played devil’s advocate — because someone had to. I assigned works by French writer Georges Bataille, who wrote books with titles like The Solar Anus. He wrote a whole novel — The Story of the Eye — about fetishistic and murderous and sacrilegious sex. And yet his “Preface” to his 1957 essay collection, Literature and Evil, contains one of the most beautiful and moving (and, intuitively-to me-as-a-novelist, true) passages about the writing of fiction I have ever read.

“Literature is communication,” Bataille writes. “Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.”

But evil, for Bataille, is understood narrowly. He defines it as what society does not want, and cannot allow. It is not amoral or anti-moral; Bataille tells us it demands hypermorality. But evil is an acknowledgment of the competing demnds of social life against individual reality. Social life requires a degree of harmony and order, and so society places collectively necessary (though not always right or justified) restrictions on who we are as individuals. For Bataille, evil — the anti-social realities of what we repress — is also part of who we are.

Some of what society represses it does so by necessity or expedience. Some of what is repressed is doubtless evil in a broader, theological sense, rather than Bataille’s antinomian one. But some of what is repressed, maybe even most of it, are not brute or demonic urges but rather the painfully human ones: loves we cannot or should not consummate; lives we ought not to live, but maybe could have lived; could have lived, if we had chosen differently, or if other people did not need us, or if our brothers had not died in civil war over Thebes and need burying that morning. That it is right or just or moral or even socially and pragmatically necessary not to live those lives does not mean that they are not a part of us. They are not merely authentic — a word I dislike because I think it too often equates desire with reality — but they represent one of the holiest things about us: our individuality. The desires I cannot fulfill, and do not fulfill, are a part of what makes me me.

Good literature — I think Bataille is saying this — addresses this part of ourselves. It acknowledges the existence of that part of ourselves. At times it acknowledges one of life’s inherent tragedies — that that part of ourselves cannot, ethically, exist alongside our promises and commitments and the other goods that come from a life that is never private. At other times, though, this acknowledgment of the individual — Bataille’s “evil” — goes further. It calls attention to the contingent nature of the social order — man-made and makeshift and flawed. Literature, especially transgressive literature, does poke fun at, maybe even destabilizes, the social order. It calls attention to the social order as play-acting. And that’s a good thing.

Society’s laws, even in some hypothetical theocracy, are not, after all, God’s laws. We may do our best to organize a right or just or equal society; we may draw up requisite social contracts as necessary. But we are human beings, whether as individuals or collectives, and so our institutions are as rife with complication and complicity (Christians might call it sin) as individuals are. To place society as merely some kind of bulwark against the individual is to forget that all parts of society, from laws to language, come from the imagination of human individuals.

And the part of us that dreams — the part that desires the wrong thing or invents the right thing or wonders how else might it be, whether in fantasy or imagination or political possibility — is the part of us that holds society accountable, and the part of us society in turn ought to protect. It is, I think, the best of us. And this, I think, is what makes Ye, or the Fiume project, or any other self-consciously transgressive art-pop project, not just moral failures but artistic ones. They fail to take into account that transgression — like any other form of literary or artistic genre — has its own structure and maybe even its own rules.

After all, it’s rules — followed, bent or broken — that make all art, not just self-consciously transgressive art, interesting. The expectations of genre, followed or subverted, are what makes new art intelligible to the audience. And if we think of “transgression,” as a kind of genre — the way we might tragedy, or science fiction — this helps us think more clearly about how transgression works, and what it in fact does.

Transgressive art is about the limitations of our assumptions. It is about our hypocrisy, about our prejudices, about self-protection disguised as morality and control disguised as order. It takes seriously the idea that there is something irrepressible about the individual human being, that no human being can ever fully and only be a member of society, that humanity both stains and sanctifies whatever it is we create. Historically, of course, that’s meant that transgression gets equated with either desire (most violently, in the work of the Marquis de Sade), or digestion (the shit and farting and piss-jokes we get in Rabelais). Desire and digestion are stand-ins for emotions. More recently, transgressive art has taken the form of the banally blasphemous (Piss Christ, Satan Sneakers), or else the “racism for racism’s sake” of most anti-Woke comedy, which, sure, throws Molotov cocktails at the foundations of the liberal cathedral, but which lacks the humanistic joy of the most interesting transgressors.

It’s probably a Christian cop-out here to say that I think we can, and should, distinguish between transgression as something with a purpose, from the kind of nihilistic transgression that seeks to destroy the idea of purpose altogether. There are plenty of people who might fairly take issue with the idea that there can be “good” and “bad” transgression. But there are, I think, two kinds of transgression: the humanistic and the nihilistic, represented, in the literary canon, by the aforementioned Renaissance satirist Rabelais and the Enlightenment-era pornographer Sade.

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Francois Rabelais is lusty; he is smutty; he is gross. He writes, in novels like Gargantua and Pantagruel, about sex and shit and passion plays gone wrong. But he does so from a fundamentally humanistic perspective: a recognition that to be human is to be chaotic, and to desire wrongly, and to try to legislate and moralize ourselves out of cognitions and urges we cannot understand, let alone control. The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on Rabelais and His World, characterizes Rabelais’s transgressions as the “carnivalesque”: a fundamentally comic place where hierarchies and status get overturned, where taboos are inverted — a necessary space to restructure an old order in order to dream of the new. Rabelais’s carnivalesque transgression opens us up to, in Bakhtin’s words, “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order”; it is “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.” It’s a celebration of our humanity; and an acknowledgement that we are always fallen, imperfect, corporeal, and — as long as we are alive — in an unfinished state of becoming.

Then there’s the Marquis de Sade, who is whatever the opposite of a humanist is. A sexual predator in real life (despite what the movie Quills would have you believe, most of his several imprisonments were for rape, not literary infamy), Sade wrote thousands of pages of scopophilia, necrophilia, child pornography and torture porn. His erotic works are celebrations of the power of human beings to use their imaginative and erotic capacities to turn other human beings into furniture, fuck-toys, meat or machines. They are, perhaps, celebrations of the individual — at least, the imaginative individual who can use his imagination to separate himself from the collective crowd he mutilates and rapes — but they are celebrations of an individual entirely outside of society, one who exists alone.

Sade’s rapists are the only real human beings in his texts. To read Justine is to imagine oneself at the end of that Twilight Zone episode where there’s only one sentient person left in the whole world. It’s telling, I think, that Sade has become, both on the Left and the Right, the poster child for exciting transgression (as one Sade expert puts it in a Smithsonian interview, describing his experience of the French student riots of 1968: “look[ing] at all the placards, reading ‘It is Forbidden to Forbid,’ and ‘Do Whatever You Desire.’ I suddenly understood that our revolutionary phrases were actually from Sade”).

And yet. For all of my fondness for Rabelais and Bataille (if not Sade) I joke, sometimes, of being in support of a new Index of Forbidden Books, modeled on the old one once used by the Catholic Church. More seriously, I believe that there are immoral books that ought to be recognized as such. But I think the greatest and most humanistic challenge to Sade, maybe even the Rabelaisian answer to Sade, is not to ban Sade, but to read (before eating, through one’s fingers, slowly a couple of passages at a time) Sade the way Bataille might, as nothing more nor less than the communication of one messed up, brain-rotted human being to another. The intimacy we encounter, when we read any transgressive text (at least, any one written by a human being) is that of opening ourselves up, at the level of that imagination orthogonal to our social lives, to the imagination of another. It is the intimacy of an erotic encounter — it is an erotic encounter, as the best writers and the more zealous censors both know — between individual human people, mediated through language, and yet, at both ends of the encounter, something other than language.

Which is to say, maybe we think about transgressive art the way we think about sex. We may well, and rightly, recognize its dangers; we may well, and rightly, have guidelines of ethics but also prudence but also safety but also purpose; we may believe, that in a fallen or broken or just plain perverted world, that every encounter between two people falls short of the immediacy, vulnerability, self-abnegating presence and perfect love. But that doesn’t mean we lie to ourselves that what draws us to transgression is the messiness of disclosure, of intimacy outside of norms we both need and recognize as incomplete.

Which is all to say, I am not particularly interested in whether Ye wants to say “Heil Hitler” onstage or not, or whether or not some art gallery in Chelsea wants to perform a new version of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” with some guy named Skinless Frank or DJ Octopussy. If art is communication, then I suppose one day, when the culture wars have died down, and I have run out of Rabelais to read, I will be curious about what anguish is being communicated, intentionally or not, by individual human beings for whom transgression seems, like Sade’s, to be a rejection of humanity in the guise of celebrating its freedom. Future historians, with less skin in the game than I have, might well wonder what regime-approved transgression tells us about the people who tried to make it. And it may well be that we are so ideologically kaleidoscopic these days, that true culture-striding “transgression” itself is now a nonsense term — if we have no shared cathedral, in fact, no cathedral at all, how can anyone tear it down?

Lil Nas X can go on selling Satan sneakers to rich Bushwick witches, and the Art-Right can fund their galleries by displaying racial epithets, and everybody will make money and get decent reviews from the publications that cater to their specific micro-demographic. But insofar as we are human beings, we will always be caught between being us, and being part of something that is not us. We will always have to give up some of that us in order to make the not-us work. If the best that we can hope for from a novel is an encounter between us and someone else, even if that someone else is dead, or a pervert — an encounter that reveals that both parties are not identical but are still, somehow legible to one another — that is a moment of carnival, allowable once a year.

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— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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