We are thrilled to publish this essay, adapted from Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk’s new book Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life. This excerpt originally appeared in Comment magazine, and they have been kind enough to allow us to reprint the piece. If it piques your curiosity, we encourage you to check out the book. As a special offer, we’re offering a free 1-year paid subscription to Wisdom of Crowds for anyone who orders a copy. This is a $50 value so don’t miss out. You can order the book here. It is also available on Kindle and audiobook. If you’re already a paid subscriber, we will extend your subscription by a year. Please message us below with your proof of purchase.

Although we differ on the specifics, both of us believe in hell. This makes us part of a shrinking majority. Only 59 percent of Americans today believe in hell. That’s down from 71 percent in 2001. But these figures, while striking, fail to capture the remarkable shift currently underway in the United States. No one talks about hell much anymore, at least not publicly—not even religious people. We’ve both attended weekly religious services for most of our adult lives, and there’s just no other way to put it: Hell comes up less.

Hannah Arendt was one of the few modern philosophers who grasped the political consequences of losing belief in hell, writing, “The most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell.” The contemporary retreat from hell has any number of causes, many of them understandable. As pastor Robert Golding notes, modern people find the concept of hell “illogical, unnecessary, and cruel.” Innovations in criminal justice now emphasize rehabilitation over mere punishment and bristle at the thought that anyone—even hardened criminals—deserves endless punishment or, worse, death.

Many readers will, no doubt, scoff at this idea. They might protest, “I could never believe in hell!” That’s okay. We’re not going to try to convince you to believe in it. One need not believe in hell to grasp its importance or its utility.

For the good of our democracy, you should want your religious neighbours to take their belief in hell more seriously—not less. And even if you don’t believe in hell, you should take some time to ponder its political utility and ask yourself how you intend to make up for its absence in your own life.

Hell Hasn’t Gone Away

There are dangers with the doctrine of hell. Both of us have been put off by pastors or imams who turned our rich faith traditions into simplistic morality plays of heaven and hell with their fire-and-brimstone preaching. We take modern criticisms of hell seriously. Neither religion nor politics is healthy when it is driven by fear.

In addition, hell can easily be used for religious and political manipulation. If leaders claim to hold the keys to heaven and hell, their judgment of who is damned and who is not can quickly stifle dialogue and debate. After all, what is the purpose of consultation or compromise if one person wields the powers of damnation and salvation?

Despite these religious and political dangers, hell’s retreat from the public square hasn’t fixed modern politics. In fact, political life appears to have become even more hellish in the absence of hell. This might not be an accident.

We spend a lot of time in hell—or what feels like it. Politics is hell. Social media is hell. The modern workplace is hell. Dating apps are hell. Climate change is hell (sometimes literally, if we take hell to be a place of fire). In an America without God, we haven’t destroyed damnation; we’ve secularized it. We don’t believe in hell, and yet it feels like it’s everywhere.

The new, secular forms of hell seem to differ, however, from their religious counterparts in one important way: There’s no clear path out. Religious people believe they can avoid eternal hell by living righteously or receiving divine mercy; secular hell, on the other hand, feels inescapable. We don’t so much fear going to hell someday. We wake up to find ourselves already there.

The rise of secular hell reveals something fundamental about human nature: As a species, human beings need to make sense of the persistence of human evil and suffering. We need a story to tell, a villain to blame, a jail cell to slam shut. It turns out that the ancient belief in hell serves as more than just a deterrent to sin. It is also an explanation for why the world feels so hopelessly wrong. Today, people still have this haunting sense that something is deeply wrong with the world. This is because we haven’t abolished hell; we’ve just relocated it. And this relocation has profound implications for how we understand politics, democracy, and one another. To understand how this happened, we need to go back to one of the architects of modern statecraft, Thomas Hobbes. The famed seventeenth-century philosopher saw Christian belief in demons, evil spirits, and hellfire as a dangerous political problem—one that he was committed to solving.

The Modern Reinvention of Hell

England was being torn apart, and Hobbes wanted peace—at any cost. If you think polarization in the United States is bad, you’ve clearly not studied the civil war in England. Hobbes struggled with a question that sounds too familiar in a culture of constant religious and political quarreling: How can a nation hold together?

Hobbes believed that the natural condition of human beings was violence and domination—a war of all against all. In this natural state of lawlessness and fear, the only way citizens could end religious and political strife was to empower a single sovereign, whom Hobbes called “Leviathan.”

With a monopoly on power and violence, Leviathan could put a forceful end to all the fighting. Leviathan would not make peace; he would enforce it. In order for Leviathan to enforce a lasting peace, he would need to wield the most potent political weapon of all: fear.

While having a monopoly on material violence is rather straightforward—simply control all the soldiers, weapons, and police—a monopoly on a nation’s fear is something else entirely. Leviathan had a formidable competitor when it came to scaring the English people—the church. While Leviathan could condemn English subjects to prison, the church could condemn them to hell. Leviathan could make them suffer and even die, but, unfortunately, it could kill them only once. By damning them to hell, the church could make them suffer for eternity. In a contest between the fear of prison and the fear of eternal damnation, hell tends to win out.

This was precisely Hobbes’s discovery. Hell is not simply a religious belief; it’s a political power.

Ultimately, Hobbes concluded that if the state was going to establish peace, it needed to undermine the citizens’ belief in hell: “The maintenance of civil society depending on justice, and justice on the power of life and death (and other less rewards and punishments) residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth, it is impossible a commonwealth should stand where any other than the sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life, and of inflicting greater punishments than death.”

Hobbes began a pattern that has been repeated throughout the modern, post-religious West. First, modern citizens reject hell—a distant place of wrath, judgment, and alienation—in the hopes of creating peace. Second, they discover that contemporary society has become a place where citizens visit wrath, judgment, and alienation on one another.

Once again, the modern world does not abolish hell; it reimagines it.

The Spectacle of Secular Hell

An American college student is on her first trip to Paris. She decides to visit the Louvre. She walks amid the grand and majestic works of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance. She is satisfied and serene. But then she turns the corner and finds herself in the medieval wing. Here, to her horror, she finds outsized and gruesome paintings of the punishments of hell. Demons and devils bounce about with great delight, finding all sorts of creative ways to torture their human subjects. As the student leaves the Louvre, the images of suffering haunt her. She wonders how a society could make punishment such a spectacle.

Returning to her hotel room, she opens her laptop and scrolls through social media. She watches a viral video of a black man being chased down by police officers and dragged off to prison. She reads detailed stories about male celebrities being sued for sexual harassment. She watches as her favourite commentators give these men their due justice. She watches a video of ICE agents raiding a factory and deporting a group of immigrants. Finally, in an effort to wind down before bed, she catches up on her favourite courtroom television show, in which a man who might be innocent (but also might not be) is given a long jail sentence. Closing her laptop, she lays her head on the pillow and wonders to herself again how those strange medieval artists could turn punishment into such a spectacle.

Human beings not only thirst for justice; they want to see it happen. There is something in us that wants to take in the spectacle of bad guys “getting theirs.” Our television sets are filled with true-crime shows, celebrity scandals, and legal dramas. We scroll through social media with a sort of delighted horror as bad guys are caught and punishment is served. We want armies to send a message. We want more than victory; we want shock and awe. It is not enough to bring force. We have to make a show of force. This is what it means to secularize the spectacle of hell. We no longer believe that evildoers go to hell, so we’re forced to bring it to them.

But Hobbes had a problem, and so do we. Fear and spectacle work, but only to an extent. No matter how spectacular the disciplinary action, modern forms of punishment fail to bring unity and peace. Despite the incredible power of the modern world to surveil and cancel, incarcerate and bomb, the whole system is still ultimately fragile and fallible.

Hell: Medieval Versus Modern

As we’ve seen, the modern citizen demands a form of public punishment and wrath that is both spectacular and swift. Justice delayed is justice denied. What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! Lock her up! Drain the swamp!

As we scan the current political discourse on the right and the left, it is clear that our patience for political dialogue, negotiation, and due process is waning. There is a spirit growing within the West that demands a solution to human evil that is immediate and final. A distant deity does not hold the keys to hell; we do.

Medieval hell is different. It might be gruesome, but it’s both delayed and distant. Medieval hell affords both the offender and the offended a measure of time and space—a critical opportunity for confession, transformation, and reconciliation. As long as the offender has breath, they still have a chance to be transformed and redeemed. The door to hell is left open a crack. Hell is not here. It is not now. There is still time for persuasion.

But there’s an even more profound difference at work here—something that emerges when we look closely at the ancient words that Jesus uses when he talks about hell. Jesus never uses hell as a weapon to judge outsiders. He never says, “Here is why those people—the ones you don’t like—are going to hell.” Instead, Jesus uses hell as a mirror. When he talks about hell, he’s talking about you. Where might you go when you die? What eternal destiny do you deserve? What path are you on? Jesus wants his audience to think primarily about their own sin, not the sins of others. If we actually read the words of Jesus, they do not inspire us to hope for hell for other people. They cause us to look for the signs of hell within ourselves.

This approach to hell creates an entirely different political dynamic.

A college student may be scrolling through social media looking for hell in the lives of criminals, broken politicians, scandalous celebrities, and sexual harassers. She never pauses to look for the power of hell within herself.

An Invitation to Hell

Hell in both Islam and Christianity is profoundly egalitarian. Simply said, anybody can go there. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all people will receive a judgment. There is no way to buy, manipulate, or threaten your way out. All stand before the throne vulnerable. In this way, the doctrine of hell creates a level playing field based on an individual’s character rather than their wealth or power.

Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of consequences; the powerful can shield themselves from justice. When powerful figures escape justice—whether dictators dying peacefully in exile or corporate criminals receiving minor fines for major crimes—it corrodes public faith in democratic institutions. The apparent lack of just deserts for the powerful has political consequences. It feeds populist rage and democratic cynicism. In this context, the concept of ultimate justice, of a future hell, serves as a crucial safety valve.

But hell’s democratic function goes beyond mere deterrence or consolation. Traditional religious conceptions of hell actually embody principles that modern democracies strive to implement: proportional punishment, equal treatment for equal crimes, consideration of both actions and intentions. The Islamic tradition, in particular, emphasizes that divine justice operates with perfect fairness, treating similar actions alike while accounting for individual circumstances and intentions.

Heaven on Earth?

If a political movement promises heaven on earth, most of us know, instinctually, that it’s time to run for the hills. Historically speaking, such movements are willing to crush the things of earth for the sake of their heavenly vision. Communists sought to create a heavenly state of sharing and the perfect distribution of goods. They made the lives of millions a living hell as a result. This wasn’t exactly surprising.

There are other, less obvious turns of phrase that we take for granted, like the notion that we can “overcome evil” through politics. Have we ever really taken a moment to think of the implications of such a phrase? It’s messianic. It is a way of superimposing the vastness of God onto the smallness of politics. In reality, the domain of temporal politics is simply not equipped for a goal as ultimate and transcendent as ending evil. Perfection—at least in this life—isn’t possible.

The late Jesuit priest and philosopher James Schall had a wonderful, albeit frightening, way of capturing the paradox of secularism’s desire to overcome evil: “The belief that evil can be removed by political action, thus, turns out to be the cause for the secularization of hell as a political instrument to justify the good life.” This is why hell is so important. If you take hell seriously, it can lift a critical burden from your politics. Suddenly, the next election does not need to fulfill all your hopes and dreams. It does not need to make your country great again. It does not need to bring all evildoers to account. It does not need to dispense perfect justice, because that justice is coming from elsewhere. It is not yours, and it is not today. But it will come soon enough.

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This article is adapted from Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith — Not Less — Can Heal Our Public Life, by Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid ©2026. Used with permission from Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

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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 …

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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, …

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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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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 …

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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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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.

—…

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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: i…

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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 Bos…

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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 decade…

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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

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This essay began as a conversation I had with WoC contributor about what makes a historical figure “great.” Specifically, we were talking about Winston Churchill, lionized by the Right and by liberals but increasingly vilified by Left and by the … further Right. I myself struggle with Churchill: undoubtedly a powerful leader and orator, but also the ma…

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A hundred days into the second Trump term, the #Resistance movement, which was born during the first Trump administration, seems dead and buried. Its moralistic rhetoric and cringe aesthetics — brilliantly lampooned by the Onion’s “ResistanceHole” — are largely to blame for its demise.

Today, proposes a better way to resist tyranny: by making fun of it…

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Eighty years ago today, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis. His heroic resistance to the Nazi regime, as well as his compelling prison writings, have been a source for inspiration for generations of political activists, especially in the 1960s. Recent developments have convinced WoC contributor that Bonhoeffer is distur…

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Millionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson recently announced that he had founded a new religion. This religion would involve using the latest technology to “hack” our biology and allow human beings to live forever. This sounds like cutting edge stuff. It’s not, says …

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Already before the Casper David Friedrich exhibition at the Met, many people have been predicting a revival of Romanticism in our time. The novelist and culture critic have both written memorably about it. Recently, we published an edition of CrowdSource with roundup of pro- and anti-Romanticism takes. Today, questions all this Romanticism-talk, asking whether we really would want to live like a Romantic artist.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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My first real directing gig, the first time I directed a play other than my own, was Bloody Poetry, a work from the 1980s by Howard Brenton, an English playwright. It’s about Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, her sister Claire, and the obscure John Polidori (the doctor and writer who traveled with them and penned The Vampyre). Together, they traipse across Europe and the Alps — outlaws, lovers, renegades, poets.

I’ve been thinking about Bloody Poetry more now that the discourse has once again turned its attention to Romanticism and the Romantics. I’ve been reflecting on my own academic training: studying as an undergraduate with a scholar of German Romanticism, Fred Beiser, and my lifelong engagement with the Romantics. At certain times in my own life — inspired by my reading — especially when I first moved to New York — I found myself trying on the persona of a Romantic, attempting to embody the spiritual, erotic, and creative adventurousness that such an identity entails. Because of my own mixed experience as a reader and practitioner, I wonder: can those of living today really ever access the radical freedom the Romantics pursued?

Certainly, on my own Substack, my writer’s diary, I’ve dabbled in answering in the affirmative; I have very often made claims that could be pronounced in the school of Romantic theology. I feel the pulse of Romantic thinking in my own brain — about God, nature, love, and the relationship of politics and industry, and other Leviathan-like things to the individual, the neighborhood, the farm, etc. But somehow, as invocations of Romanticism become more popular on Substack and beyond, I feel a little sheepish about my own Romanticism (my own Substack is named after Novalis, the great German Romantic), and want to interrogate my own critical claims.

I feel compelled to say that it’s important, and more honest, to distinguish between Romantic rhetoric, Romantic influence, and Romanticism itself. I believe a critical distinction must be made between the Romantic style of rhetorical claims (Romanticism as a meme) on platforms like Substack and Twitter and a demonstrably material and spiritual return (or even an aesthetic return) to Romanticism (Romanticism as a way of life). I worry that as soon as Romanticism transforms from a feeling mediated by contact with art, literature, music, and direct experience, and becomes discourse, a talking point, it loses something. I feel that Romanticism is a bit like Zen: to reduce it verbalisms defeats it.

So while several writers have argued that American culture — marked by the threat of AI, the omnipresence of phones and surveillance, and the demoralizing badness of mass entertainment — is entering “a new age of Romanticism,” I’m dubious that that claim is more than a broad gesture. Certain domains of American culture are influenced by the same ideas that inspired the Romantics, or ideas invented by the Romantics, but I think that’s something different than a great Romantic awakening. Admiring the best of Romantic thought, and nesting it inside of one’s own contemporary thinking, while productive, is all letter, and no spirit; Romanticism is aiding our discourse, but it’s still discourse.

Romanticism, as it turns out, historically was and remains quite hard; Romantic literature is a variation on the suicide note. A true neo-Romanticism cannot be declared; and in practice, our sensibilities may be completely unprepared for what it is or feels like (I do not find Luigi Mangione inspiring or interesting, but he is the strongest example to everything I’m saying here). Romanticism is tied to the sublime; at its worst (like with Saint Luigi) Romanticism falls into bathos and Promethean performance art. A new age of Romanticism would not take much interest in Substacks about Romanticism or take part panels about AI; it would be off in the woods, or on the highway, on a motorcycle on the run; it would be reading by the fire, taking marginal notes; Romanticism would be having more sex, too. The 1960s were much closer to the Romantics in spirit than we are — and we are no 1960s, even.

A new Romanticism would not just question compulsive post-Covid safetyism, it would reject, laugh at, the entire civilizational premise of statistics-based reasoning and the securitization of the human body. The Romantics, in no particular order, practiced or dabbled in incest, sorcery, murder and suicide. (Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther arguably incited a wave of suicides, and Gérard de Nerval walked his pet lobster on a leash before hanging himself.) They were afflicted with insane diseases like syphilis, something like a combination of mad cow disease and AIDS, risking biological dissolution every time they had sex. In some cases, like Shelley’s and Byron’s, they were watched by the state. In Shelley’s case, he was cut off from his inheritance. (Chateaubriand, another Romantic exile, had a tumultuous relationship with political authority, as did Mickiewicz, the Polish Romantic poet who was forced to leave his homeland.)

Many of them were aristocratic, rebellious, savage and tender. They didn’t live long. Keats, the most gentle and lovable of all the Romantics, was killed by tuberculosis at 25. Kleist and his lover took their own lives on November 21, 1811. Schubert, the greatest Romantic composer along with Beethoven (and alongside Chopin and Liszt, who embodied different strains of Romanticism), died of syphilis at 31. Wagner, the most baroque and supreme of the late Romantics, has been, probably rightly, accused of inciting all sorts of political and moral evil with his music and philosophy. Balzac wrote, slept around, and accrued unmanageable debts until he died young. (Pushkin, too, was fatally entangled in the aristocratic decadence of his time, dying in a duel.) Rimbaud likely sought extreme adventure after extreme adventure at the margins of civilization until he finally met the death he had been looking for. Baudelaire, when he wasn’t able to get more money out of his mother, would wander the streets of Paris in a state of total abjection. We all know how La Bohème ends.

The Romantics were not cultural commentators. They were not at their laptops in a coffee shop writing about the damning effects of technology, as I myself often am. They are haunting figures who have grown steadily more tragic with historical hindsight, more sinned against than sinning — and sometimes more sinning than sinned against. They are villain-victims, both protagonists and authors, historically situated in the passing darkness of feudalism and the oncoming darkness of capitalism, illuminated by brief rays of hope that allowed them to form messianic and utopian visions of the future in which nature and science could coexist. (This can be seen in the works of Novalis, who imagined a magical, spiritualized world, or Fourier, whose Romantic socialism posited utopian communities of erotic and economic harmony.)

Their poetic prophecies, while moving and influential — staples of literature classrooms for two centuries — have, with the exception of the 1960s, failed to have any meaningful impact on politics and political economy. (Even the Surrealists, who considered themselves heirs to Romanticism, struggled to turn aesthetic rebellion into political transformation.) The most permanent influence of the Romantics is on the modern understanding of imagination, existentialism, and other forms of 20th-century individualism. But it’s fair to say that, as far as I can tell, there are no ultra-sexual, super-genius aristocrats riddled with venereal disease running around New York, London, L.A., or Miami. Of course, there are people who embody aspects of a Romantic personality, who possess certain component parts, but I don’t think the material and social conditions exist to truly recreate the love, violence, and massive energy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries — the conditions under which a few dozen artist-thinkers could warp their entire civilization through their convictions about freedom.

Stated frankly, Romanticism is genius plus criminality in an attempt to make the outer world resemble the inner world — beautiful, wild, insane, primitive and unconscious, and yet highly refined at the same time. Maybe for good reason, Romanticism has not proven to be sound or adaptive. It’s been weeded out of civilization. We rational, armchair, laptop Romantics are lapdogs to their wolves.

(Another way to put this is that we shouldn’t really want a Romantic age. A Romantic age is one of destructive revolution and, in a sense, absolute ruin. Goethe, the greatest of all the Romantics, saw this very quickly. So did Wordsworth, who ended his life as a kind of conservative.)

I think it’s important for us to consider whether we really desire to embody chaos, rebellion, insanity, and whether the belief or intuition that an art requires that dose of poison to achieve greatness is a productive one. And whether, in final calculation, our comfortable, safe, and predictable technocentric lives have rendered it fundamentally impossible for us to follow the path of Byron, Shelley, Rimbaud, Wagner — to cast our bodies and spirits into the volcano of modern civilization.

I’m going to attach a postscript, or what you might call a Romantic fragment. What I’ve meant to say is that Romanticism isn’t easily detachable from the experimental, dangerous, and cosmologically rebellious historical behaviors of the people who incepted the tradition. But I don’t actually think that neo-Romanticism would mean dressing like a 19th-century aristocrat or riding about on horseback.

The broader point is that we are so deep into internet-mediated experiences — I mean, I’m writing this on the internet for you, internet readers — that most neo-Romantic behavior necessarily becomes inauthentic. So, we shouldn’t worry about whether the age we’re living in is Romantic. The best of Romanticism is highly private. It’s not on the internet. It’s not discourse. It’s not a vibe. It’s in the mind, in the body; it’s a frequency of the soul — at its best and purest. The Romantics were willing to die for love. Yes, they were willing to die for revolution, but they were also willing to die for poetry. What is best in the Romantics is the intensity with which they sought private experience — an experience they actively sought to create. If there’s one stable, useful truth we can extract from them, it is that what matters is experience, and that love is the highest experience.

Why should someone be a Romantic today? Why would someone be a Romantic today? Because being a Romantic means, perhaps, that you’ve felt a transformative love — a love worth dying for. Or a love worth just … changing for. It doesn’t have to be grand or public. Romanticism exalts feeling; feeling deepens life.

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