In the summer of 1942 Robert Oppenheimer reportedly initiated a conversation with his superior—Arthur Compton—about the possibility that the atomic bomb might in fact ignite both the oceans and atmosphere … globally. According to Compton: “Hydrogen nuclei are unstable and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy…might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode the hydrogen. And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen in the sea water.”

The preferred language over the past years from AI safetyists—which tends to include everyone from the apocalyptic voices like Eliezer Yudkowsky over to the fairly measured co-founders of Anthropic—is “alignment.”

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Roughly: AI should be consistent with human values, goals, intentions and interests. The worry in this camp tends to be guarding against technological independence. Either that tech will just start creating these extremely volatile and unpredicted scenarios (most famously involving office supplies) or that as AI becomes more intelligent it will engage in agentic forms of deception to the perhaps extreme detriment—or destruction—of humanity.

I tend to take a moderate position on these debates—they are essential empirical questions. Is it the case that AI might end up in a “take-off” scenario in which both capacity and malign intent super-scale—well sure, maybe. Or that we will end up with all kinds of unintended consequences simply as a function of the power of the technology? Well, yes that is happening already. But the scale or speed or consequence of these harms sits I think in the same category as planetary hydrogen ignition—entirely an empirical question, is the world going to turn out this way? It is possible to be scrupulous about the actual empirical trajectory, and we probably should given the potential severity of the harms.

All of this, however, I think is still in the realm of the easy problems of technology.

The Harder One

Over holidays I ended up falling back into reading Frankenstein. The central passages—the creation of the monster, it’s innocence and gradual betrayal, the culminating murders—are as incrementally dread-inducing as I remembered.

What I hadn’t quite remembered is how gravitational the first third of the novel feels. In so many of the best tragedies the experience is one of catastrophic decision followed by absolute inescapable inevitability. So the Lear rebuffs Cordelia and everything else tumbles down the slope in predictable cataclysm.

The inevitability of Frankenstein doesn’t really start the moment the monster opens his eyes however, but rather from the first pages of the novel with the sense that Dr. Frankenstein himself is somehow already possessed by his own utterly inescapable self-obsession. Even if he had been shown perfectly the outcomes of his decisions he seems entirely helpless to stop himself as he gradually puts the steps in place to create the monster.

The inevitability of Frankenstein’s creation of the agent of his own destruction seems to me to confront us with a question that I think nearly everyone has been avoiding regarding how our species relationship to technology as a whole (not just LLMs) seems very frequently to work. Setting out the premises:

1. Humanity seems only to be able to realize its potential by technological development.

   • At a basic level this has universally undergirded how our species has survived with as much physical fragility as we have—from basic shelter to food preparation to self-defense.

   • But technology also seems entirely intertwined with our relentless pursuit of our higher potentialities—from books, to city planning, to military capacities.

3. As these technological trajectories grow, they not only expand human ability, but also amplify the stakes of competitive dynamics within our species making it so that the stakes of not creating grow.

4. The benefits of escalating technological stacks grow (art, expanding life spans) but so too, the possibilities for catastrophic risk.

5. Hence Frankenstein and his monster.

To put the problem simply then: Is humanity’s relationship to technology both inevitable and intrinsically tragic?

There have of course been a significant number of people who have been pressing at these themes well before the age of AI. To take one example, MLK decided to his 1964 Nobel lecture not principally to talk about poverty or racial division, but specifically to warn that something about humanity’s relationship to technology seems to be “the most pressing problem confronting mankind today.” As he frames the issue:

There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance… So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

In King’s telling he seems to think at a basic level that we do actually have agency here. That our attraction to technological development contrasts with an alternative trajectory we could be taking, namely pursuing a science of ends not just of means in Thoreau’s sense.

The ends/means distinction seems helpful and I’ll return to it—but I think the problem is more difficult than King gives credit. The sense of humans as technological beings is somehow electrifying—What if we could just eliminate cancer? What if unhappiness or boredom or depression are just matters of developing more modes of stimulation or pharmacology? Why not envision terraforming other worlds? Or gamifying the whole business of romance?

And furthermore, the question of technology is also social. If we don’t develop means then it implies some other company will outcompete us for capital. The markets will be punishing. Or at a grander scale—our geo-political rivals will gain significant advantage and capacity to rain down wrath from the sky.

In other words, there is both a pulling and pushing mechanism—we are both intrinsically drawn in fascination by the quasi-infinity of creating (τέχνη in Greek means not just “art” or “skill” but “cunning of the hand”) and also punished severely by falling behind.

None of this is to take a sharply negative stance on technology itself. It may well be that 95 percent of what we make is actually beneficial to have in existence vis a vis humanity. The question has to do rather with agency. Do we actually have capacity relative to various possibilities—negative or positive to decide at all—or are we driven by some strange determinism, social or individual?

Hence, however, the increasing inevitability of the Frankenstein situation—growing knowledge that we should not make what we can’t not make.

On my assessment, the problem I’m mapping is genuinely, not superficially hard.

• On the one hand it is hard contingently—because we live in a trajectory of history that has filtered very much for highly competitive global dynamics both at the level of economy and national security. Once you are embedded in the logic of that system, so many decisions are actually made for you (as, for example, OpenAI’s recent announcement that they will sell ads).

• But it’s also hard at a more intrinsic level—human nature seems both essentially vulnerable (hence technology) and essentially filled with highly expansive desires (hence technology again).

I also am fairly convinced that once we start probing at this problem it will probably come to seem harder initially, not easier. There has been a fair amount of discussion of the frustrating reality of having to make technology simply out of the logic of competition.

But there is much less discussion of how much our notion of progress also seems to be in a strange relationship with agency. On the one hand, developing a new technology expands agency (I can now sit in my house and communicate with thousands and thousands of people). But it also at a different level contracts agency—we now live in a world of social media suicides and viral politicians. Or at a more fundamental level, even if all the top AI frontier labs decided simultaneously to halt their research, the basic technological paradigm of LLMs is now in the wild with all that that implies.

Ends

I don’t think this issue is going to be resolved easily, but I also think that it is helpful to specify that at a fundamental level the most difficult problem of technology is actually a very familiar problem of humanity—what is it that we are or want?

Here I think King is actually very prescient. The activity of deferring primary questions of ends—whether out of fear of conflict or the sense of that we simply prefer more pragmatic activity—has left us, predictably with an era of means in every sense of that word. It’s an era of massive and growing wealth disparity. An era in which we end up developing technologies only to realize their effects later. An era in which we have expanding capacity to realize our desires without really understanding why we should want any specific thing in particular. When the creature finally opens its eyes a third of the way into the novel, Dr. Frankenstein already knows he is looking directly in the mirror:

It was already one in the morning … and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Here, however, my suspicion is that we will never get out of this trajectory by diminishing our longings. If the problem of technology is actually a problem of humanity—our way out is always and only to go further in.

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I had hoped that 2026 would prove calmer than 2025, a hope that was quickly disabused. We’re bombing Venezuela! Shooting women in the streets! Using AI as a novel mode of sexual harassment! Eating enormous amounts of red meat??

Yet oddly, considering my general interests, the thing that has stuck in my mind the most so far is the latest business with the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s response — a video.

Brief context: It was announced over the weekend that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — specifically, whether he had misled the Congress about the scope and costs of the renovation of the Fed headquarters in DC, which is definitely America’s #1 most pressing concern at this moment in time.

No, obviously, the renovation is a pretext — President Donald Trump has been furious at Powell for not agreeing to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy, and is weaponizing the Justice Department to pressure him to do, even though the central bank is meant to operate independently of the government.

On Sunday evening, in response, the Fed released a two-minute video message starring Powell:

Said Powell:

[…] this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.

This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role […] Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.

The contents of the video are alarming, with Powell directly accusing the administration of using “political pressure [and] intimidation” to coerce the bank into giving into the president’s demands. More weaponizing of the Justice Department — obviously bad. And it’s troubling to think that the Fed, after presumably serious discussion, felt that the best course of action was to attempt to intimidate the president back in as public a way possible; that it seemed not even worth bothering to settle the issue by normal, restrained means.

But what makes it feel worse, somehow, is that Jerome Powell, 16th chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a sober, sedate man in his 70s, was compelled to make a video for the purposes of keeping the country (and presumably the president) abreast.

Yes, yes, presidents have always made speeches, special broadcasts, spoken on the radio, etcetera. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing out sneering propaganda tapes that look like something from a made-for-Tubi movie about totalitarian dystopias1. But the Federal Reserve? It’s a public institution, but I had hoped that we had at least a few serious ones left. Jerome H. Powell didn’t sign up to be an influencer or content creator, churning out direct-to-camera reels for Instagram and TikTok. I don’t want a GRWM from the Fed, I just want my bank not to fail. And yet, here we are.

The debate around America as a post-literate society began some months ago, with the attendant worries about loss of nuance, lessened attention spans, a citizenry that lives for spectacle and takes nothing seriously. Maybe I’m just a luddite, but this latest episode feels like more confirmation: We never should have pivoted to video.

Who would have thought? Venezuela is becoming more authoritarian and repressive after the U.S. intervention, rather than less. Of course, I’m being sarcastic here, since Donald Trump has long made clear that he has no interest in supporting democracy abroad.

The Venezuelan regime — which is still in place, populated by Maduro-aligned hardliners, including the interior minister and top military officials — has announced a state of emergency and directed authorities to “immediately undertake the search for and arrest . . . of any person involved in the promotion of or support for the armed attack by the US against the territory of the republic.” Journalists have been arrested and paramilitary gangs, known as colectivos, have spread throughout the capital, erecting checkpoints.

The early retort, in defense of Trump’s capture of Nicholas Maduro, was that Venezuelans were thrilled. And they may have been, for a moment. But now they are barred from expressing any support or enthusiasm for what the Trump administration did. And the Trump administration doesn’t care. In an excellent and somewhat chilling piece titled “Trump now has his very own oil empire,” Javier Blas lays out in detail what most of us already suspected: it’s about the oil. And it’s about dominating a country that has a lot of it.

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly poured water on the notion that the opposition, which won Venezuela’s last presidential election and then was denied its rightful role, would have any role in governing Venezuela. Holding free and fair elections within a reasonable timeframe was not mentioned. What about a bit of power-sharing? None of that, either, even as a merely rhetorical aspiration.

My own view is that if you're going to depose an authoritarian leader, the least you can do is try to facilitate a more democratic outcome. I was and am against what the United States did. But it happened. It’s done. And it can’t be undone. The task of progressives — who care about values and morality in foreign policy more than Trump does — should now be to call on the United States to support a democratic transition. That doesn’t mean Venezuela becomes democratic overnight, but it can mean that Venezuela gradually becomes somewhat more democratic than it was before, and that can only be done by holding new elections, rather than handing over permanent power to Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez.

I have my doubts that progressives will rise to the occasion, although I’d love to be proven wrong. It’s not enough to condemn. You actually have to have a vision for what the alternative to Trump’s “nakedly predatory” power grab might actually look like.

But I’d like to return to what this tells us about Trump’s foreign policy vision, because it is a vision, however chilling it may be to the rest of us. As one administration official put it: “[There’s] something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’” There’s no hypocrisy here. There’s no pretense of higher aspirations, of the United States being interested in anything more than its own self-interest, very narrowly defined.

As I argue in The Case For American Power, to accept hypocrisy as an inevitable fact of living imperfectly is to hold on to our sense of morality in the breach. Hypocrisy does something that anti-hypocrisy cannot — it, in the words of the writer William Raspberry, “accepts the sanctity of societal standards, even while violating them. It says: What I’m doing is wrong; therefore I must not be found out.” Without hypocrisy, there is no such sense of self-awareness, that what one is doing is actually wrong.

I believe it is a good thing that the charge of hypocrisy can be leveraged against U.S. officials. Because it at least reminds us of the kind of country we should — and still can — become. We can no longer level such a charge against the Trump administration, and that should frighten us.

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With the Old Year coming to a close, I’m finding it difficult to draw conclusions. What just happened? What did we all just go through?

It’s hard to say. I’m not wired for memories, I struggle with time. The upside of being present-oriented is I have few regrets. But looking back, it’s always through filthy glass.

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Though I’ve tried doing it several times, keeping a journal never sticks for me. The whole idea behind a “Tuesday Note” was partly self-serving: to create a public obligation for me to regularly scribble down some passing observations. And lo, I guess I have a set of scribbles from the past year to look back on. So… what did we all just go through?

Trump was clearly top of my mind this year. Two things about him and his reign stand out.

One has to do with time. In January of last year, I was glorying in what his ascent signaled. I didn’t vote for him, I wouldn’t vote for him, and I won’t in the future. But his victory represented a real break.

All of us writing in these pages have long felt in our guts how hollow and self-serving everything was getting. In 2016, Trump and Bernie felt it too, and both lunged for the throne. The Dem leadership outright aborted Bernie’s candidacy, while the Republicans tried to strangle newborn Trump in the crib, surrounding him with all sorts of nannies —“adults in the room”. The adults largely thwarted Trump’s program, but they failed to stop Trump himself. After four years in the wilderness, he came roaring back, and this time he flattened whatever political piety was still standing.

It felt like a true passing of an epoch. I wrote at the time that there was some perverse relief in that. I still feel it.

And the excitement. I went to an early Doge party and you could smell it in the air. For them, it wasn’t so much a perverse relief as a sense of triumph. Not in the normal sense — that their side had defeated the opponents, the enemies. More like that transgression had triumphed over manners. I get that too, if I’m honest: perversion is electric. But the charge didn’t energize me in the same way it clearly energized the young Trumpists. That jolt bred in them the second thing I kept coming back to in my writing this past year, something I could only describe as a barbaric frenzy.

The frenzy was everywhere. On policy, there was the “move fast and break things” Doge effort — except unlike in Silicon Valley, there was little pretense that the breaking was a regrettably necessary consequence of building something better. It felt more like transgression for its own sake. Nihilism.

It was all being done very quickly — partly as a tactic, because the system simply can’t keep up. But also because that nihilistic energy, unopposed, was feeding into itself. All across government, the very limits of existing law were being pushed — on firing federal workers, on deporting people, on tariff authority. There’s a positive ideological agenda you can pick out if you squint: the unitary executive, immigration restrictionism, industrial policy. But there was clearly gleeful energy to be gained from just transgressing.

“I’ll break it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I imagine Stephen Miller taunting. “I dare you to try.”

Over a week ago, I went on what may have been the only vacation I took this year. (Is that true? I don’t remember.) I traveled (to Sils Maria in Switzerland, where Nietzsche summered and eventually went mad) and spent some time with my folks. I think I mostly unplugged. More important, I started reading again. The Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism, by Philip Benedict have long been tempting me. I’m about knee-deep in both right now.

My parched, addled brain is soaking it up. The sixteenth century also contained a profound inflection point. The Church (like “the Cathedral”) had gotten flabby and cynical. Its pieties were hollow and self-serving. Many people had felt it in their gut ahead of time. As MacCulloch reminds us, proto-Protestant critiques had been bubbling up for at least a century before it all properly boiled over. Luther and Zwingli and Bullinger and Calvin also clearly felt it — and similarly lunged, if not for the throne then for the throat of the existing order.

It was violent, even frenzied at times. After a municipal vote in Bern banned the mass and ordered all images removed from churches, things got frothy, as Benedict tells us:

Two days of iconoclasm followed during which children sang triumphantly, “We have been freed from a baked God”—a mocking reference to the host—while Zwingli exhorted the iconoclasts from the pulpit of the ransacked Minster, “Let us clear out this filth and rubbish! Henceforth, let us devote to other men, the living images of God, all the unimaginable wealth which was once spent on these foolish idols.”

But Zwingli is no Stephen Miller. Luther, Bullinger, Calvin, and even the iconoclasts in Bern were not intoxicated by transgression itself. Even when they destroyed, they were destroying toward something true and binding, something with a horizon beyond the present moment. Salvation, after all, transcends time itself.

Trumpism is not iconoclastic in the Reformation sense. It is ultimately powered by the pleasure of violation and the tactical advantages of speed. Its truth claims about the monarchical executive, immigration, and nationalist economic policy are just simple inversions of parliamentary deliberation, open borders, and globalization — all pieties of the previous order. That is why it feels so electric but at the same time so very thin. And its horizon is only getting thinner. As its frenzy builds in speed, it shrinks the experience of time itself into an increasingly suffocating present. Even with my own temperamental presentism I’m finding it hard to cope.

I was talking to a friend today about the Trumpies. She was complaining that not only are they bigoted, but they are also ignorant and self-satisfied. I said that for all the education and erudition of our previous elites, they were no less self-satisfied than this bunch — and that I still can’t bring myself to really mourn their exit. The perverse relief I felt in January was real. But rupture is not the same thing as reformation, and relief is not the same thing as renewal. After a year, it’s clear that Trumpism is a white-hot fire that can’t go on forever. It already feels like it might be in the process of consuming itself.

The real danger, I think, is not that it will have destroyed too much of what came before. All that had to go because it was legitimately hollow. What I worry about is that we have lost our ability to even know what truth is. That’s not Trump’s fault either; liberalism tends to discourage all ultimate truth claims. But without ultimate truth, Trumpism might be just the first of many violent pendulum swings.

The Reformation endured precisely because it yoked reform to an account of eternity. That’s something we’ll have to eventually aspire to ourselves. But maybe as a first step, let’s pull ourselves out of the shrinking present and pray for a better year ahead — if only because nothing else we have tried can supply the kind of truth reform actually requires.

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Happy holidays, Crowd! We’re pleased to be publishing an essay by our brilliant friend Ian Tuttle, who also happens to be a research fellow at Aspen’s Philosophy & Society program, as the Tuesday Note on the culmination of Advent. We hope you have a wonderful and restful holiday break with your loved ones.

— The Editors.

One of the disorienting parts of living in the twenty-first century is that the twentieth has yet to end.

In his 2010 book, The Burnout Society (published in English in 2015), the philosopher Byung-Chul Han attempts to diagnose the distinction between our present and what came before. “Every age has its signature afflictions,” and ours, he contends, are “depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome.” We live in a “neuronal” age.

At the source of these pathologies is what Han calls an “excess of positivity.” We encounter very little in the way of alterity, or genuine Otherness, he suggests. Instead, we find that very little challenges our sense of identity; it is readily assimilable, easily absorbed into the Same. We face very little in the way of exterior constraints. We are “free” — so free that, having nothing to constrain it except itself, “the ego overheats.” This is what we diagnose as “burnout.” Depression, similarly, is a function of finding nothing that is distinct from myself, nothing that draws me out of myself.

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Writes Han, putting a fine point on it:

Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. . . . [The depressive subject] is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.

The opposite of depression is, perhaps, what the Greeks called thaumazein, “wonder”: astonishment at what is not, finally, me.

But that becomes harder and harder to come by, especially as the mirror of digital technology reflects us back to ourselves more perfectly. No wonder that more than 18 percent of American adults, or some 47 million, are currently undergoing treatment for depression — up from just over 10 percent in 2015.

Han draws a contrast between our excessively positive age and the previous, Cold War-era world, which he characterizes as an “immunological age.” “The immunologically organized world,” he writes, “is marked by borders, transitions, thresholds, fences, ditches, and walls that prevent universal change and exchange.” The immunological age is characterized by attack and defense. The “disciplinary society” theorized by figures such as Michel Foucault was concomitant with the immunological age. Where there is negativity — that is, threatening Otherness from which we must protect ourselves — we are likely to find vigorous defensive measures: border guards, aggressive public-health bureaucracies, nuclear weapons.

One way to think of the postwar world is as a program dedicated to overturning the immunological age. The reduction of barriers to the flow of goods, in the form of unrestricted trade; capital, in the form of international investment; people, in the form of mass migration; and ideas, in the form of digital communications technologies, was an effort to eliminate genuine, and therefore potentially threatening, alterity, by reducing all to the same. (Think of homogeneous non-places such as the shopping mall, the airport, the McDonald’s.)

Yet when Han writes that “today, even the so-called immigrant is not an immunological Other, not a foreigner in the strong sense, who poses a real danger or of whom one is afraid,” something seems to have gone awry.

The immunological paradigm surely persists. Certain forms of nationalism, populism, and post-liberal thought have strong immunological elements, as does the behavior of certain governments. The current administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is one example. So is its decision to strike boats allegedly ferrying drugs to American shores.

The immunological paradigm has legs abroad, too. Hungary and Poland have reintroduced border checks, pushing back on the European Union’s migration policies. Ukraine has been forced to repulse a Russian assault. Covid was a literal, worldwide immunological event, which had the additional effect of shifting relations between major powers (the U.S. and China, especially) toward greater antagonism.

So, compare Roberto Esposito and the opening of his 2002 book, Immunitas:

The news headlines on any given day in recent years, perhaps even on the same page, are likely to report a series of apparently unrelated events. What do phenomena such as the battle against a new resurgence of an epidemic, opposition to an extradition request for a foreign head of state accused of violating human rights, the strengthening of barriers in the fight against illegal immigration, and strategies for neutralizing the latest computer virus have in common? Nothing, as long as they are interpreted within their separate domains of medicine, law, social politics, and information technology. Things change, though, when news stories of this kind are read using the same interpretive category, one that is distinguished specifically by its capacity to cut across these distinct discourses, ushering them onto the same horizon of meaning. This category . . . is immunization. . . . [I]n spite of their lexical diversity, all these events call on a protective response in the face of a risk.

The extraordinary confusion of our time might be characterized this way: we have pathological symptoms in abundance, but they point in different, even competing, directions. Are we suffering from an excess of positivity — cf. the relentlessly solicitous reply of the LLM: “That’s a smart question!” — or an excess of negativity — cf. rising antisemitism? Are we struggling with too little Otherness — cf. “deaths of despair” — or too much of it — cf. crimes or acts of terrorism committed by migrants? Which is it?

Our discontent yields bizarre spectacles. Negativity and positivity each generate specific forms of violence. Oversensitive immunological responses perpetrate outward-directed violence: militarism, sectarianism, racial and ethnic hatred. Oversensitive neuronal responses generate inward-directed violence: hyperactivity, exhaustion, self-harm. Like crossing waves, these phenomena are creating strange patterns of interference: the televised ICE raid that doubles as entertainment; the mass shooting that is also an elaborate form of suicide. This much, at least, is clear: the patient is critical, divided body, mind, and soul.

Is any therapy available to us? Han seems to offer a suggestion that he does not explore. The world of too much positivity he refers to as “a terror of immanence,” a terror “immanent in the system itself.” The world of too much negativity, by contrast, is best figured by Medusa, who “stands for radical difference that one cannot behold without perishing in the process.” That is, on one hand, violent immanence; on the other, violent otherness.

Yet Han’s logic — and his invocation — suggests the possibility of an Other who is, also, not other; something outside ourselves that also restores us to ourselves; something that transcends us and yet embraces us. Neither Other nor Same, neither negative nor positive, is enough, but only their reconciliation — an impossible union of spheres.

We might consider the possibility that the extraordinary confusions of our time will not — cannot — be solved from within our time. We might consider the possibility that the remedy for our broken world will require a different kind of physician.

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I suppose I have a tendency towards masochism. At a difficult time in our history, when so many are losing faith, I took it upon myself to lay out the case for American power — for an America that proudly shoulders global responsibilities and takes it distinct moral mission seriously not just at home but abroad. It is an unpopular case to make, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if I have a knack for finding myself on the losing side of big, ideological battles.

The tide has turned against a more expansive morally-infused definition of American self-interest. Normally, I’d say something like “it’s in America’s self-interest to be moral and to exude some semblance of that morality in its conduct of foreign policy.” Reasonable, I think. And, of course, reasonable people can disagree on what exactly that means in practice. But the Trump administration’s new 2025 National Security Strategy is something else entirely. It’s, well — I don’t know else to put it — a must-read, because it very clearly and unapologetically lays out the case for a smaller America that defines its national self-interest in exceedingly narrow terms.

It makes for a chilling read, in part because it does away with any pretense of a distinct moral mission. (For instance, there is basically nothing about promoting democracy abroad, except for a call to support “genuine democracy” in Europe, the one region of the world where almost every country is already democratic. Genuine democracy, in this context, seems to imply a Europe dominated by right-wing populist governments on the premise that this would be a more accurate reflection of the will of the people).

But the Trump-ified National Security Strategy is unsettling for another reason: I found myself sympathizing with parts of it, somewhat to my surprise. It’s a no-nonsense approach that can be straightforwardly communicated to American audiences who are skeptical, rightly, of foreign entanglements. It correctly calls out elites of both parties for making a mess of things post-September 11th, including through “forever wars” that gave interventionism a bad name. Interventionism is not intrinsically bad — like anything else in life, there are good interventions and there are bad ones. But it’s hard to make that case when you have to go back to the 1990s to cite positive ones: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the first Gulf war. (I’d cite the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya as a more recent “positive” case, but I’m pretty much the only one left who seems willing to make that argument. If you’re interested, see my full-throated defense of the Libya intervention here. I stand by every word).

In a fascinating and thoughtfully critical review of my book The Case for American Power, the political theorist poses a fundamental challenge to my argument — wondering “[whether] the America Hamid admires and idealizes still exists or even if it ever existed.” He goes on: “We may believe it is now a historical footnote — something that attempted to build a legal world order grounded in enlightenment principles is now not only under significant threat but is arguably crumbling into dust.”

Of course, contra Trump, that world order wasn’t all bad. It was quite good, at least some of the time. But now we are quite willingly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is something admirably honest about this. We will no longer even pretend to be better than we actually are. There is no real moral aspiration or sense of moral responsibility in Trump’s National Security Strategy. Maybe that’s a good thing: to do away with the pretending, the hope, the ambition, the aspiration. But as I’ve argued, hypocrisy — which arises when we try to be better than we actually are — can be a good, necessary thing. Morality can’t exist without hypocrisy, for better or worse. In doing away with hypocrisy altogether, be careful what you wish for.

And in doing away with any pretense of moral aspiration, Trump — with the apparent support of a big chunk of the country — is cutting us down to size. In 2017, Trump famously defended Vladimir Putin’s brutality by pointing the finger towards towards: “You think our own country’s so innocent?” He was partly right: we’re not so innocent, as any dutiful reader of Noam Chomsky will easily recognize. But that’s different than saying we’re basically the same as Putin’s Russia. We’re not, and we never were.

In another perceptive review of my book cheekily observes that I might be the last true neocon. I don’t love this, in part because I hated the Iraq war and cut my political teeth opposing it, but bear with me. Polansky writes:

In an ironic sense—particularly given his sharp criticisms of U.S. policy toward Israel—Shadi may be one of the last true neoconservatives. Though one still hears the term tossed around as an epithet, nearly all of the fin de siècle neocons have either died, retired, turned their attention primarily to anti-Trumpism, or weren’t really neocons to begin with.

Mostly, Polansky notes, this is because I have an abiding faith in democracy and democracy promotion abroad, which was a core precept of neoconservatives that most of the neoconservatives themselves couldn’t be bothered to live up to, which raises the question of whether they ever really believed in it. They turned half-hearted on democracy in short order, when free elections in the Middle East started producing Islamist governments. I get it. It’s hard to be a small-d democrat.

But I lost that battle during the Arab Spring, and now democracy promotion in the Middle East is rarely discussed. Worse, it’s seen as self-evident folly. I wish it were otherwise.

I also know, however, that the pendulum tends to shift. The impossible, somehow, becomes possible. Now, “America First” is all the rage, but that might not last, in part because of its close association with a president who is loathed by so many Americans. Yes, perhaps, the America I believe in is ceasing to exist, but that doesn’t mean the movement can’t be reversed. It will be an uphill battle, and it might take a generation. At the same time, I have to acknowledge the possibility that the battle will be lost. That, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting.

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“Just don’t be an idiot,” she said.

My friend and colleague Chloe, one of the Washington Post’s talented photo editors, was giving me advice about going to Ukraine.

“I’ve worked with a ton of photographers, and some of them are just addicted. The worse it is, the more they are drawn to it,” she said. “My husband has been in these situations, and he always says that if something feels bad, just trust your gut. Stay safe, dude.”

I was sitting in the office with my bags packed. I was headed over as part of a junket organized by the Ukrainian NGO, Razom. The flight to Warsaw was that evening. For whatever reason, I wasn’t worried.

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I had a sense that being in wartime Ukraine would be different than what the news stories might have you believe. Friends had gone. A year or two ago, even though Kyiv would regularly get hit with drones and missiles, they said it was a party town. Western politicians would come to get photographed somberly paying their respects at Bucha. Though you stood the chance of seeing haunted veterans on the streets, you also stood the chance of running into José Andres in a bar.

The atmosphere was more somber now, I was told. The attacks were more frequent and more intense. The power grid, the primary target of Russian strikes, had finally started to buckle. Blackouts were more common. But it wasn’t exactly Dresden.

“We are very, very tired,” Viktoria told me.

You could see it in her face. You could see it in all of their faces. I was sharing a sleeper car with three Ukrainian women, one in her early thirties, one in her forties, one probably in her early sixties. They were consultants of some sort, coming back from Warsaw — from a conference planning the country’s reconstruction. We were stopped at the border while first Polish and then Ukrainian guards checked our papers. It was the middle of the night.

“It’s all the time. When the alerts come, you have to wake up and move your children,” said Elena.

The conventional wisdom is that if the alert is warning about Shahed suicide drones, you should go into an interior bathroom or the hallway. The drones are armed with explosives, but if you put two walls between yourself and it, you should be OK. If the alert is for missiles, however, you go hide in the basement.

All three of the women lived in Kyiv. Not in the well-defended center where all the government buildings were — where I’d be staying in a hotel which advertised its well-appointed bunker. They lived in the periphery.

Elena, the middle one, had a basement, and she told me she had put a bed down there, even though it wasn’t a comfortable place to spend time, especially in winter. Viktoria, the younger one, didn’t have that luxury.

“Honestly, sometimes I don’t even wake up any more with the alerts,” Viktoria said. “You take your chances.”

Tatyana, the oldest one, didn’t speak much. She said she understood English, but wasn’t comfortable speaking it. She finally asked why I was going to Ukraine. I told her I was on a trip with some journalists.

“Thank you for coming.”

Kyiv had gotten hit the night before we arrived — in Warsaw, my air raid alert app informed me it was both missiles and drones — but in the morning light it looked as if nothing had happened. It’s a big, sprawling city of 3 million, and even a big attack doesn’t target the whole. It took us some time to get to the hotel due to the bad traffic.

There’s a curfew in place for most parts of Ukraine: you have to be off the streets by midnight. Most bars stop serving at ten, but a few are open right up until the deadline. The mood is not exactly exuberant, but the bars are packed. Indeed, even though the country is plagued by longer and longer rolling blackouts, in downtown you would be forgiven for thinking it’s not that big of a deal. That’s because basic infrastructure — street lamps, stop lights, the metro — are prioritized. And all the stores and bars and restaurants have long ago put in generators and battery banks. In our hotel, the lights flicker off for only a few seconds when the blackout hits before the backup power kicks in.

It’s a different story in the suburbs. We visited the rubble that once was the home of Mark Sergeev, one of Ukraine’s most popular evangelical youth pastors. His whole family was in the building when the missile hit in September, Mark tells us. His son was on the top floor. But miraculously no one was killed. Like Viktoria, they had no basement. The nearest shelter is a metro station, but that’s 20 minutes away on foot. You’re not going to haul your family out of your house every single night there’s an alert. Especially at the current pace at which the Russians are attacking, it’s not sustainable. You take your chances. Mark, too, looked tired.

During my time in Kyiv, the attacks were mostly drones. You quickly adapt to those. One night Russia mustered a serious missile barrage which the alert system thought could be headed for Kyiv, so I went down to the comfortable basement and slept. The missiles, it turned out, were headed for western Ukraine. One hit a residential building in Ternopyl, killing dozens. The others further damaged the grid. The rolling blackout schedules published the next day were extensive.

Though we were mostly in Kyiv, we visited Dnipro for one day. Unlike Kyiv, Dnipro is closer to the front, some 60 - 90 miles away. That front is not as active as elsewhere, but given how stretched Ukrainian defenders are, Russia has made quiet gains there in recent weeks. Security people warned us against spending the night in Dnipro, as it’s getting hit quite regularly. And given its proximity to the fighting, the warning time for incoming is much shorter.

Rather than doing a ten-hour round-trip drive, we stayed in a colorful roadside motel outside Poltava. It was self-consciously Ukrainian kitsch. Think “biggest ball of twine” for a U.S. equivalent. We got there just ahead of curfew, too late to eat at the restaurant, which is supposed to be terrific. As we arrived, our apps lit up. Dnipro was getting pummeled.

The next day, we went and saw a fresh smoldering ruin. A drone had hit Dnipro’s public broadcaster’s TV station. Alex, a young local journalist covering the attack, was surprised to see so many foreign journalists milling around. He wanted to talk. Why were we here? I just wanted to find out what it was like living here under fire, I said, pestering him for details. The attacks were a regular occurrence, he shrugged, bleary-eyed. What can you do?

I thought of Alex a couple of hours later.

The attacks usually come late at night. Russia launches its drone swarms then, presumably because they’re trickier to shoot down in the dark. But missiles can come whenever. We had finished our last meeting and were heading back to Kyiv. It was 5:30pm. Traffic in downtown Dnipro was completely snarled.

Suddenly, the apps on all of our phones lit up simultaneously. “Air raid alert, seek shelter.” Then, shortly thereafter, “Missile attack, seek shelter immediately.” We were in two vehicles. “Advice?” I typed into Signal to our group. “The advice is to exit the city as quickly as possible,” one of our guides typed back. I didn’t want to laugh. It felt inappropriate.

Helplessness is a profound feeling. I had quickly gotten used to the drill in Kyiv. It all felt abstract in my tight and comfortable little security bubble. This was different. I suppose we could have abandoned the car and gone looking for a metro station. But with missiles incoming, GPS was being jammed and Google Maps was useless. Nothing to be done. What can you do?

“It’s not in my hands,” I said to myself. And immediately a calm washed over me.

We were all still glued to our phones, trying to find updates from various Telegram channels that publish up-to-the-second reports about incoming attacks, when we heard what sounded like a somewhat muted explosion somewhere off in the distance. It felt like maybe it was accompanied by a slight change in pressure, though maybe I imagined that. Maybe the missile hit, maybe it was intercepted. But between the alert and the explosion, only a few minutes had passed.

The sound pulled me away from my phone. I looked at our surroundings. No one had abandoned their car. And on the sidewalks, people went about their business. It was a relatively warm if somewhat rainy night. A couple on a date were standing outside a coffee shop holding hands. An old lady was walking home, pushing a cart overflowing with groceries. The alert hadn’t lifted, we didn’t know if more missiles were incoming. But no one flinched. No one was trying to hide.

I still think about that scene, now weeks later. It filled me with a profound sadness then, and still does. These poor people. Brave? Yes, but that’s not the word, exactly. These poor people, just living their lives every night as if it’s normal. It’s not normal. None of it is normal. But what can you do?

A few days later, back in Kyiv, I found myself at a party thrown by one of my Post colleagues. Lots of foreign correspondents were there. I found myself talking to exactly the kind of TV journalist that Chloe had warned me about. He was telling me about being on the front near Kharkiv a year or so ago. The shelling. How he and his team had gone in to examine the damage right after a salvo, and had seen a leaking gas main near one of the craters. As they were leaving, another salvo came in and ignited the gas. Big explosion behind them. His eyes were gleaming.

The story that shaped my trip was the announcement of Trump’s peace plan. I spent most of my time in Kyiv trying to figure out the politics after that bombshell. Big things are afoot. A corruption scandal is loosening Zelensky’s grip on power. Some are seriously talking about land concessions to Russia, even as they admit that any stop in the war would be temporary. As I write this, that drama is still unfolding. I left Kyiv amazed at the timing of my trip. So much had happened while I was there.

But that night in Dnipro is still with me. It still defines the trip.

When I got back to Warsaw, the alert app lit up. Kyiv was under attack — a much bigger one than I had experienced while I was there. Missiles, drones. It lasted for hours. A friend was texting me that she was hearing explosions.

I’m not going to lie, I felt a sinking feeling. I wanted to be there. I was missing out.

On what, exactly? I slapped myself. “Don’t be an idiot,” Chloe said. There’s nothing glamorous about any of this.

I’m more than a little ashamed. It’s sick. But that trip made me feel alive. I still don’t know what to do with that feeling.

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For the past several months, the consensus here in Washington, DC has been that “the vibes are bad.” Something about the 2024 election and its aftermath seemed totalizing: the chainsaw of DOGE, the brash triumphalism of the MAGA “cool kids,” the unexpected efficiency with which Trump 2.0 began to run its policy playbook, and the obvious exhaustion of the Democratic “resistance” in the face of it all.

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Recently, though, it feels like the winds have changed. I think I’m sensing a vibe shift. I know, I know, the term is very 2022. But I’m not sure how else to describe this not-quite fact-based feeling that Trump and the MAGA movement are maybe losing just a bit of their grip on the nation.

A few examples:

• DOGE is officially dead eight months ahead of schedule, and no one seems particularly proud of what it did. Even the Silicon Valley superstars who once worked for DOGE are being reassigned to what frankly seems like menial work (much-lauded AirBnB founder Joe Gebbia is now on website beautification duty). The grip of fear DOGE had on much of the capital seems to be slowly loosening.

• The Epstein files haven’t faded, and seem capable of causing real rifts in the MAGA movement, even among previous diehards (witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s very public feud with Trump and her subsequent resignation). Congressional Republicans are becoming restive, where their fealty to Trump (or fear of being primaried) once kept them entirely in line.

• Speaking of staying in line: The Heritage Institute, responsible just months ago for the well-oiled execution of the Trump agenda, is tearing itself apart. Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Groyperism and anti-Semitism have thrown the MAGA power establishment (itself only recently solidified) into disarray.

• And speaking of disarray, Democrats seem to finally be… pulling it together? At least a few of them? Liberal senators are mutinying against an ineffective Chuck Schumer. Zohran Mamdani is outflanking the establishment in New York and defanging the White House. He and the wide slate of recent Democratic midterm successes are gaining ground by focusing on economic issues instead of culture war, a long-overdue correction that will yield dividends as…

• Inequality and economic stagnation have become undeniable — even among Trump supporters and especially among those moderates who tipped the election to him in hopes of economic gain. The tariffs were roundly disliked, even Laura Ingraham thinks the 50-year mortgage sounds dumb, and financial analysts are eying the stock market with newfound skepticism as the “AI bubble” continues to trip alarms.

The MAGA coalition never totally made sense; after the post-election honeymoon period, the cracks were bound to show. And Trump is entering his lame duck era — despite Steve Bannon’s continued insinuations, a third term is extremely unlikely for both legal and actuarial reasons. And so, Trump’s grip on the Republican party must loosen, and the party — a motely crew held together by the ultimate personality hire, who will soon retire— will begin to disintegrate. Perhaps it already has.

It’s possible that I’m overoptimistic. Maybe I’m clutching at glimmers as we enter a season of hope. Still, it’s a welcome change — a good vibe, at least for now.

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I have found myself with almost infinite appetite for poetry recently. The specific poets and genres seem to be varying wildly.

I’m moving from Western love poems:

You are near enough to be a far horizon.
Your body breathing is a silver edge
Of a long black mountain rising and falling slowly
Against the morning and the morning star…
Or I can say to myself as if I were
A wanderer being asked where he had been
Among the hills: “There was a range of mountains
Once I loved until I could not breathe.”

To Homer on violence:

As Dawn rose up in her golden robe from Ocean’s tides,
bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men,
Thetis sped Hephaestus’ gifts to the ships.
She found her Beloved son lying facedown,
embracing Patroclus’ body, sobbing, wailing

To an astonishing new poet that I recently discovered in Baltimore:

She’s holding the joint
while he lights it, and then they take
a deep breath together
and she says, Let’s not go
just yet, oh my love, not now
when I’ve found you, please,
let’s circle slow

I worry that the theme word for 2025 might be: sludge.

In a long Substack post last week, Rod Dreher detailed his experiences whilst in DC for a trip designed around meetings between Victor Orban and JD Vance. His account compiles countless conversations in which the usually NatCon-sympathetic Dreher gets stretched further and further beyond his boundaries by young conservatives who tell him not only about what they see as growing antagonism against Jews among Gen-Z, but the desire for pure bloodlines, and openness to actual fascism.

The account tracks the broader events that we are seeing as the Right begins to rip at itself over Nick Fuentes and Jeffrey Epstein. It also echoes countless conversations I have also had — particularly with female friends — about how DC dating culture is recalibrating under the Trump administration. What started as curiosity about somewhat more traditional relationship structures is morphing quickly into increasingly strident rejection of the equality of the sexes. Many of these stories — from demands for female submission to questions about racial heritage — have made me more incandescently angry than anything I can remember.

But I’m also the perfect age — old enough to remember a world before Trump, young enough to have very little sentimentality for it — to recognize that the roots of this crisis began well before 2024 or even 2016.

After I started writing this essay, the news broke that Larry Summers has decided to step back from his public commitments because of the release of documents related to his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, including asking Epstein for advice about how to “pursue” (prowl after) a mentee of his, and emphasizing that women have lower IQs than men.

In Summers’ statement he states “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused … I take full responsibility for my misguided decision … ” Summers’ silky prose lingers for just long enough to remember that the reason for this apology is not because he has found himself so troubled by his actions that he can’t keep them hidden any longer, but because other people can now see the truth because the House decided to release a trove of illicit emails. The files are filled with sludge — just an ongoing stream of putrescence by many figures who were or still are in the public eye — and have now spent decades obfuscating, sidestepping and lying.

The word “vulnerable” in English has both negative and positive connotations. Negatively it’s the condition of “exposure” which traces back to its origin from vulnus “wound” — the susceptibility to be violated. Given this etymology, it is strange that we consider it such an aspirational word — something that is actually close to the culmination of life. The ability to be open, exposed, revealed to other people. In some sense intimacy just is, I think, the capacity to take the boundaries one would ordinarily reserve only in one’s own hands — “here is where I protect myself” — and place them externally in the hands of another person.

Violence, in other words, is a real and constant possibility in human life. Even in moments of full self-protection, the possibility of being overwhelmed by external force is real. And definitionally to be vulnerable is to make oneself intentionally susceptible to wounding.

But the paradox that I’ve been wrestling with is a prior one — assume pain, assume violence — what is lost in self-protection?

Our generation is not unique in being born into a violent or mendacious time. But such times do provoke their own questions. If the world around begins to bubble with lies or hostility, the immediate intuition is to respond with equivalent force. To draw up one’s guard and to develop mechanisms for counter-attack.

But at that moment, one has already lost. That decision is a decision also to be ripped away from the possibility of trust. An act of violence then reproduces itself in one’s own actions. The first iteration then creates counter-actions and counter-counter-actions — overt revenge or a quiet hardening — and that road can never lead back home again.

Hence, I think, the need for asymmetric combat. The actual fight is not about which combatant wins, but what of human life is lost in resigning oneself to a world of violence or lies. To stooping one’s head.

The world that Summers represented was something that — for those who lived in it — already felt duplicitous, sordid. And in many ways, New Washington is a direct reaction, repudiation of it. But neither are innocent and both in their own ways have diminished their hopes of what life should be.

The Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan made what seems like a fairly conscious decision to write the bulk of his poetry in German. In his acceptance speech for a literary prize late in life he reflects on the degree to which language itself became the great problem: “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Language in general, and German in particular had been used to lie, coerce, manipulate, condemn. German, it turns out, was porous, taking in the filth of the entire regime, soaking it deep into its sinews.

But that was all the more reason to live in that language. As he says “In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems … to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality … the poem does not stand outside time. True it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time — but across, not above.”

Every time I read this speech — especially that last line “across, not above” — it’s like air rushing back into my lungs. It’s the directness of the poet. The honesty about violence, and the full fragility which we mortals carry. It’s the sense — even in Homeric war poetry — that the world is large and the stakes are real. But somehow poetry is also the place that begins to heal the paradox.

How to get out of the paradox of strength v. weakness — the triumph of will. I have a friend who after a recent romantic shock took herself to a week of operas — soaking in beauty to remember a different world. If another world, a world defined not by lies or the conceit of coercion is real, we should live in it. This is the whole point. The vision of life that involves vulnerability is itself a picture of strength — of far greater strength. It is precisely a demand that life is high, and that respect — dignity one deserves — is genuine. But it is a version of strength that can never be symmetric to violence. The cost of violence is high, but the cost of invulnerability far higher — far too high.

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another depicts the desperate soul-searching of aging revolutionaries: Should we abandon the Cause and lead a normal life? Should we raise our children to become radicals? Should we regret the violence of our youth? As such, it was always destined to grab the attention of Slovenian film critic-cum-psychoanalyst, , an aging radical himself.

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Žižek’s review in UnHerd is interesting for its paternal approach: he’s clearly disappointed with the movie, but he pulls his punches. Like a patient father, he wants to correct but not discourage. But Žižek clearly believes One Battle After Another’s radicalism is a radicalism of means — the means being political violence — but not of ends. Instead, the ends championed by the movie’s radicals dovetail with those of standard-issue bourgeois liberalism. The radicals in One Battle After Another are not fighting to replace the system, nor even to blow it up. Instead, they want to make the system more fair. On this point, Žižek compares the film’s revolutionaries with those from a 2012 movie about aging radicals, The Company You Keep:

… in The Company You Keep, [radicals] fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another, the contemporary descendants focus on helping the illegal Latino immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US homeland. In other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system.

This harsh verdict is basically correct, but Žižek misses a couple of things. First, in depicting the harsh conditions that migrants endure inside border detention centers (the local vernacular for such places is “kennel” and “icebox”), Anderson himself, as director of the film, is in fact doing something radical. It’s true that there’s no shortage of videos on X documenting the excesses of ICE, that reports abound about the inhumane conditions at the border, and that South Park skewered Trump’s child separation policy back in 2019, in an episode partly set in a border detention center. Nevertheless, in displaying those cages in a mainstream film, Anderson does something in and of itself political and radical, and should get credit for it.

It would only have added to the pathos of the film had Anderson let the camera dwell a little longer on these cages and detention centers. But the camera doesn’t dwell on anything for very long in this three-hour movie: Anderson chose not to resist the TikTokification of cinema. His artistic radicalism is one of content, not form. Still, for all that, Anderson sees in the detainees a “Revolutionary Subject,” a people whose very presence is a testimony to injustice and a force for change. He seizes upon them to lend his film a moral seriousness that his leads — those aging, hapless radicals, who half the time play comic relief — fail to provide.

Which brings me to the second thing that Žižek misses: not another element of radicalism in the film, but traditionalism. For the Latinos that emerge in One Battle After Another do not only lend the film a modicum of seriousness by providing a link to real-world injustice. They also provide a conservative, religious, even paternal ballast for the film, which the radical protagonists count for support.

This becomes most clear in the character played by Benicio del Toro: a sage named Sergio St. Carlos. Sergio spends a lot of time trying to outsmart the police: he hides migrants and leads a network of lookouts for ICE raids. He is certainly a radical, of a kind. Sergio’s day job — a martial arts teacher for local youths — suggests that he knows something about the disciplined use of power. “Discipline” is a good word for what he provides for his community, where he plays a paternal role. Sergio eventually becomes a father figure to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the washed up revolutionary “Rocketman” Pat Calhoun, himself a father, though not always a very good one.

A father-son relationship at the center of One Battle After Another is not something we should have seen coming. It’s a conservative trope in a movie about revolutionaries. Consider that the radicalism of the 1960s and 70s is often explained in Freudian terms, as a sort of society-wide rebellion against the father. As one of the central figures of that era, the German Marxist Herbert Marcuse, wrote, the radicals of the 1960s “have learned not to identify themselves with the false fathers who have built and tolerated and forgotten the Auschwitzs and Vietnams of history, the torture chambers of all the secular and ecclesiastical inquisitions and interrogations, the ghettos and the monumental temples of the corporations, and who have worshiped the higher culture of this reality.” By destroying their paternal bonds, these revolutionaries “will not have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but they will have become free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement.” If you give even a little credence to Marcuse’s theory, then the appearance of a relatively wholesome father figure midway through a film based on the life of the Weather Underground should surprise you.

Then again, maybe not. That the human need for a father is ultimately ineradicable is not surprising. We should not expect politics to be able to replace it, even revolutionary politics. And we should not be surprised when the father figure pops up in a sweeping, epic film. Moreover, Marcuse himself seemed ambivalent about whether this rebellion against the father would truly create a better world. Other Leftist thinkers of the time were even more skeptical. But I am curious about why it’s the proverbial “wise Latinos” who provide the father figure, and the moral seriousness, to the burned-out American radicals.

It’s a kind of orientalism for the South (a friend suggests we call it estereotyping): Latin America as a sort of nature preserve, where the Developed World can find the family, the father, and religion (the migrants in Anderson’s movie are constantly praying in Spanish, and use a church as a hiding place). One Battle After Another depicts a world controlled by powerful cabals of mysterious men, coldhearted security forces, and money. The Hispanic migrants provide not only an example of life which defies these powers and principalities. They also provide a glimpse of cultural institutions that no longer exist in the world of the film. It sounds like something Žižek would come up with: an America that literally imports its revolutionary subjects as well as its little platoons.

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Two weeks ago, the economist joined us for a live taping of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast to discuss the future of American liberalism. Cowen being Cowen — a writer interested in the sources of progress and technological dynamism — the event quickly turned into a more general conversation about the future of America and finally, to artificial intelligence.

During the Q and A after his talk, Cowen said that LLMs are already “kicking our butt” at many things, including poetry. In fact, Cowen insisted, LLMs already write poems that are as good as the median poem by Chilean Nobel Prize-winner, Pablo Neruda. “Now, ex post, you can read one, read the other, and say, oh, only the real Neruda poem is meaningful to me because he’s a flesh and blood human, or was one. Like, fine. But … we need to wake up and realize there’s going to be a generation that has just grown up with this and won’t have the same sentimental attachment to the real Pablo Neruda.”

Hearing this bummed me out for the rest of the evening. I suppose Cowen would say that my sad reaction to his words was a sign that I grasped the magnitude of what he was saying. As he posted last year: “I’ve grown not to entirely trust people who are not at least slightly demoralized by some of the more recent AI achievements.” Well, consider me demoralized.

Why do I feel demoralized? Because Cowen is partly right. ChatGPT can already generate a Neruda pastiche that might fool a reader who is not an expert in Neruda’s work. And I don’t say this only because Neruda often wrote in free verse — LLMs are adept at writing in meter as well. ( wrote about someone who trained their LLM to write a convincing John Milton pastiche.) It’s demoralizing to think that something Neruda worked and suffered and sacrificed for — the development of his voice and his craft — might be captured in a computer subroutine. Not that I think an LLM can really do that. You can’t write a set of symbols that reproduce the experiences of suffering and love which fueled the alchemy in Neruda’s mind that produced his poems. But you can imagine a world in which everyone is satisfied with, and even fooled by, a pastiche over the genuine article.

Further demoralizing is the fact that — as Cowen suggests — I am a middle aged man who still has a “sentimental attachment to the real Pablo Neruda.” I cannot imagine myself giving up on that stubborn attachment.

I don’t know exactly why I love Neruda.

I get bored if I think too much about how art does what it does to a human life. But these lines from his poem “Absence of Joaquin” move me, even though I don’t really know what they mean. Here’s my attempt at a translation:

His habit of dreams and measureless nights
His disobedient soul, his ready pallor
Sleep with him finally, and he sleeps
 Because his passion dissolves into the sea of the dead
Violently sinking into it, coldly becoming one with it.

I’ve enjoyed reading “Walking Around” aloud while drinking whiskey with friends. I comforted myself with “There’s No Forgetting” after the death of my grandmother. Regrettably, I have also used Neruda’s lines to troll my aunt.

The lines in question are drawn from Neruda’s poem about his dead dog. (As it happens, this poem just the type of poem that Cowen says an LLM could emulate quite well.) The poem begins:

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.

A decade or so ago, I posted this poem in a family chat, after my aunt announced that her pet dog had died. I grinned as I pasted the poem into my text, thinking that, yes, it would irritate her, but also that it would shock her out of what I thought of as her complacent Boomer agnosticism. (I was an annoying and insensitive Catholic provocateur. I repent.)

Today, my most generous read of what I was trying to do was to get my aunt to care about death. (Of course, I thought of myself as a highly sensitive and intelligent person who had a very serious attitude toward death already — no need for anyone to send a Neruda poem to me.) To care about death is to care about life, to care that we use the time we have as best we can — but it is also to dare to look beyond death, to ask ourselves whether there is anything beyond death, something to look forward to. Neruda cared about death, and that’s why he wrote his poem. We care about death, and that’s why we read Neruda.

This is what I find most demoralizing: the steady erosion of this type of care. When Cowen says that future readers won’t have a sentimental attachment to the flesh-and-blood Neruda, he is describing a world in which readers will care less about the flesh-and-blood suffering that Neruda’s poetry evokes and attempts to explain. Instead, these future readers will see poetry as a consumer product. Do you ever wonder who designed your favorite hat or came up with the recipe to your favorite energy drink? You might have brand loyalty, but you probably don’t think too much about the flesh-and-blood mastermind behind these products. And the same will be true for Neruda’s poetry, once we are able to recreate his poetry through a digital process.

Another way to put it is that in the future that Cowen describes, the existence of the poet is irrelevant: only the effects that the word have on the reader matter, no matter where they come from. Right now, we encounter works of art and feel a tug toward a question: “Who wrote this?” This question will be irrelevant in the future: it simply won’t matter if there is no “who” behind the words. The identity and experience of the author is not the only thing that Cowen suggests is, to a certain extent, irrelevant. We can’t confirm with 100% that God exists, Cowen argues, so his existence is irrelevant. All that matters is that believing in God makes people happier. As Cowen put it on our podcast: “there are studies that say that, you know, having a strong faith correlates with happiness and fulfillment. Shouldn’t one believe in God if those studies are true? … So in this sense, I’m Straussian. I want other people to believe.”

The existence of the self, too, is somewhat irrelevant. As he told on his own podcast: “I think most of my decisions are made without my awareness. What I feel is my consciousness is some kind of blip or epiphenomenon. … Most of it happens beneath the surface, and I’m not aware of the decisions I’m making. There’s an ex post reconstruction of it that makes me feel like I’m in control, but I don’t think I am very much, if at all.” Of course we should act as if we do have a self. Of course we should act as if we are responsible and moral decision makers. But the philosophical question of whether the “self” exists — just like the philosophical question of whether God exists — is ultimately undecidable and irrelevant.

When I ask questions about a poet, about myself or about God, I am asking questions about topics that define my existence: time, love, death, hope, joy, etc. I respond to Neruda’s lines because there is real meaning there — in the flesh-and-blood experience that prompted him to write the lines, in the beauty of the lines themselves, and in the resonance I — so many years and miles away — experience. If the existence of God and the self and the other do not matter to me, then what does actually matter? What’s left?

The future Cowen expects seems implausible to me for many reasons, not least because it’s a future where people still enjoy poetry while finding the embodied experience and existential questions that drive the creation of poetry irrelevant.

I asked ChatGPT what literature might look like in that future. Here’s what it told me:

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Living through two thirds of a year of Donald Trump’s second term has felt both like an eternity and like no time at all. “Time feels like it has collapsed in on itself,” my colleagues at the Post and I inaudibly gasp at each other as we struggle to keep up.

I asked ChatGPT: the author of this strategy is Steve Bannon. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he told Michael Lewis in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The zone is indeed flooded, much more so this term. If Bannon is the Steve Jobs visionary, Stephen Miller is Tim Cook: a ruthless optimizer of the supply chain of shit. We journalists are drowning. I imagine it to be “runny, decaying shit,” like in Steve Albini’s famous essay. It makes our eyes water, we can barely see straight. But we keep trying to swim, our chins trembling, held desperately high.

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The Trumpies are radically compressing time. As a day is compressed into an instant, it runs into all the other bewildering instants that are accumulating everywhere at a dizzying clip. If you try to count snowflakes in a snowstorm, your mind gives up. You just conceptualize the whole thing as an infinite blizzard. To do anything else courts madness.

I was in Vienna last week at this wonderful annual gathering of interesting people. Someone suggested that the left has ceded the future to the tech bros. The left used to have heroic stories to tell about a better future it was fighting to bring about, this person lamented. But visions of the future now belonged to the likes of space-obsessed Elon Musk.

Too easy. Too pat.

By 1989, the left’s egalitarian visions for the future were widely understood to be murderous. And as Ivan Krastev reminds us, during the Cold War, liberalism was conservative. It was popular insofar as it opposed the glaring horrors of communism. It said it was about balancing plural visions of the good, but its main promise was to keep the idealist butchers from power. JFK could rhapsodize about outer space and progress, but everyone knew the space program had military uses. And while both FDR and LBJ engineered sprawling social programs, they did so to blunt the appeal of communism among the poor.

It’s true that tech bros are obsessed with the future. And there’s an awful lot of unsavory eugenicism flavoring their enthusiasm. But in that sense they’re no different than any other millenarian cult. Futurists and communists both tried to immanentize the eschaton. That’s always a bad idea. Blasphemous, even. Science fiction nerds should be banned from running anything.

Trump’s not that kind of nerd. He’s not a nerd at all. Christopher Clark had him pegged in 2019:

Trump, whose trademarked campaign slogan was ‘Make America Great Again’, brought to the most powerful elected office in the world a political vision founded on a trenchant disavowal both of the neoliberal future of globalization and of the scientific anticipation of climate change.

Clark continues:

At the same time, his febrile communicative style has opened up a rift between the hyper-accelerated present of Twitter and the slow deliberative processes that are the daily fare of traditional democracies and administrations attuned to constitutional norms.

Maybe it’s not Bannon or Miller after all. Trump is the authentic author of the accelerating flood, the Steve Wozniak to their Jobs and Cook — the intuitive, funny, semi-autistic inventor of our moment. The demiurge of time compression, he outright rejects the future. But he’s not exactly a conservative either. He gestures to returning to some better past, yes. But it’s just a theatrical gesture.

With Trump, there is no vision. Just spectacle. You can’t look away, even if you wish you could. Behold it in all its glory. It’s coming at you all too fast, freezing you in the infinite present.

A few weeks ago, reposted his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future.” I read it then for the first time; below is my attempt at a response.

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After his friend Albert Camus died in a car crash, aged 46, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Every life that is cut off — even the life of so young a man — is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is shattered and a complete life.” Three years earlier, Camus had won the Nobel Prize. As an author and philosopher, he was at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of writing a trilogy about love — the culmination of his earlier trilogies about “the absurd” and “revolt.” It might have been a lasting work of philosophy. But it was not to be. “For all those who loved him,” Sartre continued, “there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”

We shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work. Sartre isn’t referring only to Camus’ writings — his incomplete philosophical and literary works. He means Camus’ complete work as a man of action, as a political figure, as a husband and a father. Camus was a human being who still had a lot to do. But this isn’t only true about a brilliant philosopher. Anyone who dies young is a mutilated work.

Noah Smith begins his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future,” reflecting on another unfinished work: the artist Keith Haring. A year before he died from AIDS at age 31, Haring completed Unfinished Painting: a quarter of the canvas is decorated with Haring’s typical mosaic-like composition of dancing figures; most of the canvas is empty, plain white and streaked with dripped paint. It is a statement about his own interrupted work, his life that, Haring knew, would be cut short by illness. “Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough,” he said. “I mean, I’ve barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.”

Noah reflects on this work: “… without AIDS, Haring very well might never produced anything as haunting or evocative as Unfinished Painting. … without the pressure of a life cut short, Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was.” Instead, Haring’s work, especially what he completed when he knew he was dying, has a certain pathos and depth to it. We are forced to see Haring’s mutilated work as the total work. It’s moving, and lasting.

But imagine a world where we discovered a cure before Haring died. Haring survived to ripe old age and developed, over the long arc of his career, a merely mediocre body of work. His style never matured or evolved. “That would have been a good trade,” Noah says. It is better to live a long happy life than a brief one that is full of suffering, even if the latter yields great works of art. “Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in their right mind wishes for tragedies to continue just so that human life can continue to be filled with pathos.”

In general, Noah says, we should strive to eliminate suffering, rather than treat it like an end in itself. “The nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism,” argues Noah. “Happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth.”

The problem with Noah’s view is this: there is no such thing as a happy life that is free of suffering. Happiness when it comes is always bound up with suffering. Even a long lived life with a happy ending has some suffering in it. Even a complete life is a shattered record. A full life is a mutilated life. An old man can look back at his life and examine all the ways in which he failed himself and others — all the paths he didn’t take, the mistakes he made, the limits of his love. Most of us hope to reach old age in good moral and spiritual shape. Even if we manage to do so, there will still be forms of incompleteness all around us: projects that we’ll have to abandon; relatives we will not see grow up; wayward friends whose moment of redemption we will miss; historical events we won’t get to see; hopes that will emerge only after we’re gone. There is no way around it: even a complete life is in many ways incomplete.

Think about the artists who, unlike Haring and Camus, enjoyed a long and fruitful life, and worked to the very end. Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Picasso, Saul Bellow — they never saw completion in their work. There was always more to say and to explore. They continued to work because they continued to have questions, to feel the incompleteness of life — in short, they continued to suffer. The deep wisdom that they acquired in their creative engagement with their own suffering didn’t merely make them interesting. It helped them survive. It didn’t always ennoble them — Picasso, in particular, was a real jerk. But it permitted them to dwell successfully in a world rife with darkness and fear.

We will always need the wisdom that comes from suffering because we will always be incomplete. In fact, the more the world approaches the frictionless utopia that many people are hoping for, the more a strange void will emerge inside ourselves: a question of why this utopia is not enough. It’s then that we will go back to the work of poets and artists whose suffering was crucial to their creativity. A soul that feeds only on slop and reels won’t be able to cope even in utopia; it will flee from itself, and as it grows older it will long for the type of relief that comes only from gazing at something like Haring’s Unfinished Painting.

Consider the daily life of an upper middle class American professional, living in a comfortable suburb, in the shallow future that Noah foresees, which I believe is already here. This American professional is relatively happy, with a few challenges here and there. But every day there is news of horrors — in Gaza and in Utah. His only way of coping is to escape into entertainment, or reposting videos of the horrors as an act of moral protest against them. Distraction or outrage, but not real spiritual processing. For that, you need an education in tragedy and philosophy; you need to read the works of someone like Camus.

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I don’t tend to write that frequently here about Christianity. I think it’s because, the more ideological our age has become, the more I have found myself wanting to emphasize ideas that don’t fit — picking at how intractably untidy existence is. I’ve grown obsessed with pressing into contradictions rather than writing about answers. Writing about longing, and difficulty, and pain, and ambiguity in the world. And in digging obsessively into the places of contradiction and unresolvability in myself.

But faith has always been weightier than anything else in my life. I can’t remember a time before it. It was there in my happiest childhood memories, and it was there amidst the more abusive years of my upbringing as well. It’s there in my intellectual life, in what I think the world might be. It is also there in my philosophical drive — I am not sure I would be asking these questions so insistently without some covert hope for coherence. And it’s there in my habits — in my impulse always to confront pain directly which I’m sure I learned from the Psalms first. And it’s there in key assumptions I have about the possibilities for politics. I think perhaps I dislike writing explicitly about faith in part because it feels too important to me — too heavy for news cycle arguments.

Religion has of course always had a notably loud voice in America. But we seem to be flirting with a line in which it is not just trying to speak to the state. Religious rhetoric — strike that — Christian rhetoric is increasingly becoming language of the State.

On Charlie Kirk’s podcast last week, the Vice President quoted both the Nicene Creed and the 133rd Psalm in his discussion of the new policies the White House will be developing in response to Kirk’s death. Similarly the 90,000 person Kirk funeral in which the Secretary of State, White House Chief of Staff, Vice President, and President all spoke began with a full lineup of evangelical style praise and worship music. And this week, Pete Hegseth tweeted a promotional video for the newly named “Department of War” in which the Lord’s prayer is interlaced with images of stealth bombers and aircraft carriers.

In the Rawlsian age, the idea was that religious language should be valued, but contained. Public discourse was a realm that had to sit aloof from particular metaphysical commitments. Perhaps there is a final truth to the world, but claims at this level had to restrain themselves. They could play out their full arguments in niche “communities of faith” (to use the liberal euphemism), but when it came to entering into public they had to translate and temper this language so as to deliberate with people from wildly different backgrounds and commitments. That era appears thoroughly over, at least for now.

It is not merely that we are finding religious claims being made more openly as arguments about how the country should be structured, but also being used as explicit justifications for policy decisions.

This phenomenon — collapsing court and cult — is one of the least unique things in the history of politics. Until our incredibly idiosyncratic era, in fact, the idea of claiming divine mandate for state action was almost the norm. In one of our earliest records of a strong state, the Mesopotamian king Naram-Sin set himself up as the divine protector of Akkad which happened to coincide with rapid expansion of imperial territory. We see similar patterns in Assyria, Persia, Greece. To take two more familiar names — Alexander the Great claimed lineage from Zeus, and Julius Caesar from Venus. The cult-court collapse was not just a political tool — demanding full subservience — but a far simpler way of seeing the world. There is one hierarchy instantiated in heaven and earth and it requires submission.

Nor has Christianity refrained from getting in on the game. If pre-Constantine Rome prohibited Christians from becoming soldiers, post-Constantine Rome had Christian armies. If early Christianity had a rule to “render unto Caesar,” Renaissance popes came to look rather uncannily like the Persian “God-Kings” in their bids for authority.

But if the task is ratifying authority by divine mandate, Christianity always ends up being the most duplicitous ally. Perhaps the most consistent theme in the gospels is the full unrelenting inversion of hierarchy. “Woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation”; “whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave”; “blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

These are also not trivial aspects of the religion, but tie directly to the structural logic of the faith — “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” If the God that made the world decides not to slaughter but die for his enemies, what does that do to good old human blood feuds? “If you love those who love you, what credit is that?”; “I say to you — love your enemies; do good to those who hate you.”

And alongside the Borgias and crusades this idea of power inversion also developed centuries of culture around it. In emperors who literally bowed at higher authority. In charities and hospitals for the poor otherwise completely unknown in antiquity. In monastic movements explicitly antagonistic to class hierarchy and socialist Catholic Worker houses.

As many commentators have pointed out, the contrast between Erika Kirk’s speech at Charlie’s funeral and the other more political figures was jarring. After recollecting key memories of Charlie, she concluded her speech with an emphatic statement of forgiveness: “That man. That young man. I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did. What Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love.”

Like many millennials, I feel visceral revulsion at the pallid, emaciated versions of politics that we inherited. Bland talk about economic prosperity, or even-handed equality never gets anywhere near the blood.

In part for that reason, I’ve always found something wildly strange — intoxicating — about any of the philosophical and religious views that really do involve power inversion. One sees it at times in Buddhism, and in Platonism. One can glimpse it in the pagan tragedies and the Jewish prophets. And it’s clearly the one thing without which Christianity wouldn’t be anything at all. And I want this. I still have my breath drawn short whenever I encounter a politics that genuinely seems able to invert the rule that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

But all of this makes the rise of state-bound muscular Christianity all the more stomach-turning to me. We have already had a liberal establishment that tried something like this pick-and-choose approach. Liberals I think genuinely do believe in power inversion — caring for the poor and the weak. And on most plausible histories — that too is a centuries old inheritance of Christianity. But one of the main stories of the late 20th century is that liberals found themselves less and less able to find larger philosophical or religious resources that could motivate that vision of care in a sustainable way. And so they resorted to repeating the parts they liked ever more loudly, never quite noticing how much the whole vision was dying in their hands.

For this reason, it is all the more disturbing to see political figures in our new right playing at similar games. In their case they seem perfectly happy to keep the eccentric language of divine sacrifice, to keep the praise and worship music, to keep the idea of protecting a Christian culture, even as they seem far too thrilled at the idea of a society that believes first of all in human muscle.

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It’s been nearly a week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I’m still processing. Here are a few things I’ve read that resonated — you might find them interesting, too.

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To start: In the Wall Street Journal last week, Peggy Noonan wrote a piece titled “Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point.” In explanation, she writes: “It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad.” I can’t say I agreed with the entirety of her column (which, honestly, is the mark of a good column), but several observations stood out. Here’s one:

For those of us who remember the 1960s and the killing of Medgar Evers, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, it feels like we’re going through another terrible round of political violence. It’s tempting to think, “That was terrible but we got through it.” But the assassinations of the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more and was, for all its troubles, more at ease with itself. It had give. Part of why this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like something we do, which is a painful thought. [emphasis my own]

What do we give up if that’s the case? What comes next?

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One thing that seems at very high risk is free speech. Attorney General Pam Bondi, aka America’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, announced in an interview that the government would “absolutely target” protestors engaging in “hate speech” — which she defined as making light of Kirk’s assassination. She also suggested that the government had the power to investigate businesses who declined to print posters for his memorial vigil.

Even conservatives pilloried her comments as a gross misinterpretation of the First Amendment (which does not have a “hate speech” exception), but importantly, President Donald Trump did not. In fact, he took them even further. When an ABC reporter asked him how he felt about Bondi’s statements, he replied: “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate.”

There is no hate speech exception anywhere within the First Amendment, and being mean to the president has never been a prosecutable offense. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, the Constitution seems to be becoming more and more optional. And while I’ve never been a speech absolutist, this particular incidence of horseshoe theory — a wholehearted adoption of cancellation (and possibly political targeting?) by the Right, after years spent bemoaning it from the Left— bodes ill for a functional democracy dependent on the exchange of ideas … not to mention personal freedoms.

And as always, I feel compelled to figure out how this event is tied to societal trends, not just political ones. And here is where ’s Quillette piece, “Brainrot, Not Ideology” gave me much to unhappily ponder.

Whether Robinson’s online milieu tilted left may end up being beside the point. What matters is the profile: a socially adrift 22-year-old dropout searching for meaning online […]

This is not just a mental-health story; it is a spiritual one. Kids with brainrot are not just chasing dopamine hits. They are searching for belonging, intimacy, initiation, and a status hierarchy. In-jokes supply a counterfeit community; algorithmic highs offer counterfeit meaning. Superstimuli hijack attention until the physical world feels flat and boring, and the digital one — an infinite scroll of references to references — starts to offer its own metaphysics. When the real is displaced by the virtual, what follows is not flourishing but a slow demise — a purgatory of endless posting in which the self thins out.

Implicated here are twin crises of loneliness and meaning, but also the way that the technology we have become dependent on is killing us, and others.

So where do we go from here? Hoping someone in the Crowd has an optimistic answer, because — much like Shadi — I am feeling sorely tested.

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I’ve been fairly consistent on this point for a few years now: America is worth believing in and fighting for, not just despite its faults but also because of them. But there are limits. My beliefs are being tested, which I suppose is a useful thing. Have I been overly optimistic in my faith in the American project, perhaps even naive?

This week’s Supreme Court ruling is yet another challenge to my core position. ICE agents can now discriminate based on race and language and target Hispanics just based on who they are. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said:

The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.

What happens when a country’s top constitutional court decides to make something patently unconstitutional constitutional? Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time. Think Plessy v. Ferguson or the infamous Korematsu v. United States decision which legalized internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II (a decision which Trump has spoken positively of).

The other day, I was talking to a Canadian friend of mine who works in progressive politics here in Washington, DC but lives in Virginia. She says she is trying to avoid coming into the city after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and takeover of the DC police. She is brown and could pass for Hispanic, and she’s not wrong to think that she could be detained without cause.

I also spoke recently to a Tunisian friend who works in international development, and he said that where he once saw Washington, DC as his home, he is now considering leaving the United States. He doesn’t see a future for himself in this country.

The mood is dark. It takes a lot of effort to tell people to hang in there and not lose faith, when I myself am losing faith.

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Part of the problem — although it’s ultimately a good thing — is that we are no longer tolerant of frontal attacks on our constitutional order. After various civil rights struggles over the past century, we had come to believe that the fundamental questions over liberalism and democracy had been resolved.

In my latest Washington Post column, I wrote the following:

Racial and economic progress — America, for all its faults, is considerably more equal and richer on a per capita basis than it was in the 1950s — raised our expectations and led us rightly to expect and want more from our lives. The more equal we become, the more glaring the remaining racial and gender gaps seemed to be.

Because we expect more, the gap between our ideal of what America should be and what the reality actually is grows, even as the United States remains more free and equal on race and gender than it was in the 1950s and 60s. The backsliding feels like an affront against progress, which it is. But, of course, progress isn’t guaranteed.

I suspect we may have to acclimate ourselves to a new order, one in which “progress” is no longer an upward if uneven curve but more like a pendulum. If Democrats win in 2028, we almost certainly won’t return to where we were (it could take years, if not decades, to undo Trump’s damage). But we will at least be able to stop the bleeding temporarily. And I worry that this — far from progress, more like a rearguard action against what calls “barbarism” — will be all we can manage for the time being. Perhaps that will be enough, if only we can adjust our expectations of what is possible, and not, in politics. But it’s not enough, and it shouldn’t be enough. But we’re no longer living in a world of “shoulds.”

In this way, where once Republicans were the party that stood athwart progress and said no, Democrats may have little choice but to become the party that stands athwart barbarism and says no.

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Part of my project this summer, I realized half way through the season, was to try to drill down on just what the Trump moment means. I don’t mean along traditional partisan lines (or partisan moral lenses) necessarily. Just... what is it?

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A few weeks ago I tried my hand at sketching out a prevalent mood — “barbarism,” I called it, a kind of truculent narcissism that seems to have turned particularly rancid lately. A lawyer famously described it (decades ago and in different circumstances) as “a gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values” — a search, I argued, that resulted from liberalism-as-organizing-principle coming up short for a lot of people. Trump’s politics are perfectly attuned to this mood. He repeatedly demonstrates the hollowness of it all, which paradoxically makes his supporters even more heady and drunk and beastly.

But I’ve also been thinking about the other side of the ledger. What are the illusions Trump shatters that may in fact need shattering? The way we talk about alliances ranks highly for me this week.

Last Wednesday, an additional 25 percent tariff went into effect with India, notionally as punishment for it buying and reselling Russian oil. The backstory is more complex (and more quixotically Trumpy). Negotiations had been picking up pace ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington in February, and the Indians apparently felt good about locking in a deal by this summer. They were hoping to keep various agricultural sectors shielded from American competition for domestic political reasons, but had reportedly offered other concessions.

But Trump dug in his heels and started making a fuss. After a short conflict between India and Pakistan burned itself out earlier this year, he became pissy with Modi for not thanking him publicly for helping mediate an end to hostilities. And he started slagging off the Indians more broadly, calling theirs “a dead economy.” He even publicly courted the Pakistanis, talking up the potential of their “massive” oil reserves — the existence of which was apparently news to the Pakistanis themselves.

It’s been a while since I leafed through The Art of the Deal, but I suspect one could find justifications for all of these moves in that text. And talking to India watchers last week, I got the sense that both Modi’s advisors and Trump’s advisors were treating all of this as regrettably necessary theater. Modi’s own rhetoric remained defiant thought not particularly antagonistic. Both sides were signaling they could walk away should they so choose.

These spectacular displays of staged defiance unfortunately peaked just ahead of a long-scheduled visit by Modi to China for a summit meeting that would also include Russia. This prompted a seemingly endless stream of breathless news analysis and commentary excoriating Trump for pushing Modi into Xi Jinping’s (and Vladimir Putin’s) waiting arms.

Here’s a representative snippet from a recent Wall Street Journal story:

The cordiality of the Tianjin confab will sound alarm bells in Western capitals, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute think tank in Australia. “President Trump’s gentle treatment of Vladimir Putin has done nothing to pull Russia away from China,” he said. “His rough treatment of Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is pushing India closer to Russia and warming up its relations with China.”

There’s a kind of tic among Westerners to see alliance building and maintenance through the lens of friendship, as if states — especially democratic states — were people, or families led by a parent. If due respect is not accorded, feelings get bruised. But why would it be that Putin is so impervious to charm while Modi is so vulnerable to abuse? I doubt any analyst thinks Narendra is a soft and sensitive man. No one who has dominated his country’s politics for so long can be particularly sentimental.

It’s certainly possible that these bumpy negotiations could fail, that both sides have concluded that they can live with this failure, and that with trade stymied more distance will creep into the relationship between India and the United States. But it’s also true that India has always clung to its self-conception as an independent and non-aligned actor, so we should be careful about setting the baseline against which to judge any drift.

At the end of the day, transactionalists like Trump might say, it’s all about interests, and any bruises given or received in bilateral negotiations won’t change broader geopolitical balancing. “I do not believe that Trump approaches these trade issues as part of a broader Indo-Pacific strategy, or as inconsistent with U.S. and Indian joint strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific region,” Trump’s first ambassador to India Kenneth I. Juster recently observed.

And indeed, Modi might agree. He stopped over in Japan on his way to China, and in an interview seemed to try to contextualize the spat with Trump by praising the Quad — an alliance between Japan, the United States, Australia and India. “As vibrant democracies, open economies and pluralistic societies, we are committed to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific,” he said. Of all countries, India is keenly aware that China is committed to none of these things.

On things like these, I see Trump’s approach to dealmaking as a healthy tonic for the public. The truth is that diplomacy has always involved all sorts of bullying and browbeating behind closed doors. It just seems like publics — and, worse, journalists who should know better — have come to believe that diplomacy really is a form of friendship.

Keeping the rough stuff out of public view may have been a vestige of the fact that diplomats used to be outwardly-genteel nobles. And we should admit that the kind of coarsening that Trump brings to everything certainly plays apart in furthering the barbarism I wrote about earlier. But on balance, I’m not sure we’re worse off remembering that a lot of the drama we see in foreign affairs is in fact transactionalism and a weighing of interests above all else. It helps us better assess where we stand.

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Hope you’re enjoying the dog days of summer, members of the Crowd. As for me, I’ve been thinking about death.

In the Atlantic’s September issue, there is a long and disquieting piece, written by Elaina Plott Calabro, on the runaway success of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), which now accounts for around 1 in 20 deaths in Canada.

While it began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients at the end of life, by 2027 it will be available to those suffering only from mental illness. The Canadian Parliament has also recommended granting access to “mature” minors.

“At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy,” Calabro notes. Though the piece is moderate in tone, her disapproval is evident.

In contrast, there was the New York Times’ profile of Joseph Awuah Darko, an artist whose bipolar disorder had “crushed his will to live.” He moved to the Netherlands to pursue legal, medically assisted death there — but not before embarking on a series of “Last Suppers” with over a hundred of his social media followers. The writer David Segal covers this project with a credulousness that borders on ridiculous, though he does note that “Mental health experts, by contrast, are appalled.”

Actual euthanasia still retains its power to shock.1 But what about milder forms? There are other, non-absolute versions of this detachment from life that seem to have slipped into our day-to-day with much less controversy. Call them, perhaps, our modern anesthatizations.

I’m still working this concept out, so bear with me. When I think about this idea, I have in my mind the category of tools, amusements, pursuits and eventually obsessions that lead people into non-engagement with the real world: real life, real relationships, real struggle. These anesthatizations are simulacra of experience that may not be perfect, but are engaging enough to substitute for living in full.

I talked about “male anesthatization” in the last WoC podcast — engagement with porn and OnlyFans as opposed to the frustrating work of pursuing real relationships, and as a semi-satiating solution to the loneliness of being alone.

Add to that the quick dopamine hits of gaming, sports betting and crypto as a substitute for the plodding (and increasingly hard-to-find) work of a real-life job.2

Not to be misandrist, there are female-coded anesthatizations too. Every major publication has covered the rise of “romantasy” — novels blending romance and fantasy, where heroines mind-meld with sexy elves or hot dragon lords (“Women today have abandoned earthly plausibility altogether,” journalist Anna Louie Sussman writes.) The attractiveness, sensitivity, and charm on offer in novels provide an enduring escape — and in many cases, far more appeal than the troubled communicators and flawed mates on offer in real life. Romance now accounts for 21% of adult fiction sold.

And of course there is the equal-opportunity anesthatization nadir: the AI bf/gf/best friend/therapist. Why struggle to build something with an actual, troublesome, has-their-own-preoccupations-and-desires human being? Who wouldn’t rather escape the conflicts of the world and live in a bubble with a companion who always responds, always supports, never challenges, and never leaves?

(Until they do, GarbageDay covered the insane fallout from the latest update of ChatGPT from 4o to 5, which is apparently less sycophantic: the moderators of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI “had to put up an emergency post helping users through the update.” )

Escapism has always existed, but the internet and its associated novel delivery mechanisms (smartphones, AI, food delivery(?)) have made it easier to completely subsume oneself. It’s more possible than ever before to exist in a world of one’s own making, one that is almost completely detached from the world as it exists. (It’s notable that other forms of escapism — cults, fandoms, etc. — still often involved some elements of community with others; also, outcomes often still existed outside of one’s solitary control — who knows what BTS will decide next?)

And the surrounding environment: decayed institutions, a looming AI apocalypse, shocking barbarism, a lack of romantic prospects, or prospects more generally … makes opting out seem, perhaps, more appealing than ever before — especially, as with assisted suicide, it becomes more normal to do so.

This, to me, seems obviously bad. Not so to others!

My last — and scariest — association with the growing prevalence of popular anesthatization is not those bemoaning it, but its champions. I think often of the rich, powerful, and highly influential investor Marc Andreessen and his idea of “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions […] Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

In other words, fill the syringes.

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“Barbarism” is a word that keeps coming to my lips lately. It’s not just that everything feels more coarse under Trump. That’s too easy. That’s pointing the finger at the Big Ugly Orange Man. That’s saying that he’s pulling us down. That’s saying that we’re better — or were better — until he showed up and made everything shittier.

But it’s not that we’re complicit, either. Not like the Europeans were.

The Casual Barbarism of the Nazis

I picked up Curzio Malaparte’s novel-memoir, Kaputt, to try to nail down a parallel. Kaputt is not unlike a far more demented and bleak Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Malaparte is hallucinating his way across Nazi Europe, palling around with the masterminds of the atrocities, as well as the foot-soldiers doing the wet work.

As an Italian journalist, he tours the Warsaw ghetto accompanied by a young SS Black Guard minder, witnesses and documents the widespread misery and starvation — and then helplessly jokes about it with Hitler’s viceroy in Poland, Hans Frank, and the governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, over a meal of goose and venison.

“You should deal with them as with rats,” I said. “Give them rat poison. It would be simpler.”

“It's not worth the trouble to poison them,” said Fischer. “They die at an incredible rate. Last month forty-two thousand died in the Warsaw ghetto.”

“It's rather a high rate," I said. "If they go on like this in a couple of years the ghetto will be empty.”

“It's impossible to foretell as far as Jews are concerned,” said Frank. “All the estimates of our experts have proved wrong. The faster they die, the faster their number increases.”

“The Jews persist in having children,” I said. “It is all the fault of the children.”

“Ach, die kinder! — Ah, the children!” said Frau Brigitte Frank.

“Ja, so schmutzig — Yes, so dirty,” said Frau Fischer.

“Ah, did you notice the children in the ghetto?" asked Frank. "They are horrible! They are dirty and diseased; they are covered with scabs and prey for vermin; they would be pitiful if they were not so loathsome. They look like skeletons. The child death rate is very high in the ghettos. What’s the children’s death rate in the Warsaw ghetto?” he asked turning to Governor Fischer.

“Fifty-four per cent,” replied Fischer.

“The Jews are a diseased race, in full decay,” said Frank. “They are all degenerates. They do not know how to rear children or how to care for them, as we do in Germany.”

“Germany is a country with a high Kultur,” I said.

“Ja, natürlich, in child hygiene Germany leads the world,” said Frank.

Then, flashing back to when he was an Italian officer, he recalls the Jews of Jassy in Romania pleading with him to use whatever meager clout he has to avert a pogrom they all know is coming. He tells them it’s pointless to try, that the German commander will ignore his pleas, that the Romanian authorities are themselves planning the massacre. And the very next evening, he witnesses1 the slaughter. The Italian consulate manages to shelter some one hundred wretches, but the streets of Jassy run slick with the blood of thousands of others.

Back in Warsaw, his Nazi hosts try to commiserate after he recounts what he saw.

“Though my heart is not as soft as yours,” said Frank, “I share and I understand your horror at the Jassy massacres. As a man, a German, and as Governor-General of Poland I disapprove of pogroms.”

“Very kind of you,” I answered with a bow.

“Germany is a country that has a higher civilization and abominates barbaric methods,” said Frank gazing around him with an expression of sincere indignation.

“Natürlich,” the others chorused.

“Germany,” said Wächter, “is called upon to carry out a great civilizing mission in the East.”

“The term ‘pogrom’ is not a German word,” said Frank.

“Naturally, it is a Jewish word,” and I smiled.

“I don’t know whether it is a Jewish word,” said Frank, “but I know that it never has been and never will be a part of the German vocabulary.”

Malaparte, a charming and witty man of letters, tries his best to needle his hosts, but he knows he’s just playing along. And his Nazi interlocutors are superficially no “barbarians” either. Their Kultur is real. Frank has refined tastes in music (he rhapsodizes over Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven) and literature (he freely cites Apuleius and Apollinaris). Socially and culturally, they’re reading from the same hymnal.

Malaparte’s main trick is to show how the high culture of Europe is the thinnest veneer over an almost incomprehensible capacity for violence and cold cruelty. The educated use culture to aestheticize the violence. But the less-educated are no more innocent. Indeed, they openly thrill in their murders. Romanian soldiers lob grenades into basements in Jassy packed tightly with terrified Jews — and some drop to their knees “to look at the results of the explosions within the cellars and turn laughing faces to their companions.”2

Modern Democracy and Narcissism

Perhaps needless to say, we’re nowhere near what Europe got up to in the early 1940s. We’re certainly moving away from our status quo ante, but we shouldn’t overstate our prior innocence. Trump didn’t invent detention camps for illegal aliens, for example, but he did come up with “Alligator Alcatraz.” Its purpose is different and its scale is vanishingly minuscule compared to Europe’s former camps. And it’s arguably been set up more for theater than outcomes. But that we now have a theater of cruelty is notable. Our capacity for inhumanity was always there, but we hide it from ourselves better.

Maybe the way we hide it is different. We Americans famously scorn Europeans for their refined airs. Kultur is aristocratic, undemocratic. We reverse-snob our sophisticate cousins across the pond. We pay visits to their majestic castles (which they’ve kindly converted into parks for our amusement), both attracted by their opulence and smug in our knowledge that our democratic age somehow represents progress.

But is it progress? Or do we just flatter ourselves? I suspect it’s the latter. Or something worse. I suspect it’s the source of our own barbarism only now coming more clearly into view. And no, again, it’s not The Orange One. It’s much broader than that — a kind of vanity and vapidity rolled tightly into one.

The democratic spirit wasn’t always quite so narcissistic. Americans have always thrilled at derring-do and the frontier spirit of figures like Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett. But mythic heroes were specifically not everyman, but rather types. All Americans could aspire to their virtues, but no one saw them as blueprints for self-improvement. One could always “make it” in America, but one’s goal was not to “become” something, as one does today.

This distinction points to something incredibly self-centered, if not outright selfish. As I suggested to and on the podcast last week, if dating is more miserable today than it was before, it’s probably because people have redefined relationships in terms of personal growth and personal satisfaction, rather than as anything higher than themselves.

Where did this narcissism come from? My rough guess is that it probably tracks with growing secularization.

Killing God

Secularization afflicted Europeans much earlier than it did Americans. Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God in 1882. For Americans of the same period, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was still within living memory, its copious invocations of the Almighty drowning out whatever Nietzsche’s madman was on about.

Nietzsche’s Europeans killed God through the Enlightenment. You could already see it in Rousseau’s thought, which started to bear its bloody fruits in the French Revolution. As Carl Schmitt aptly put it in his book Political Theology, the core conceit is of this line of thinking is that “the will of the people is always good.”

“The people are always virtuous,” said Emmanuel Sieyès. “In whatever manner a nation expresses its wishes, it is enough that it wishes; all forms are good but its will is always the supreme law.”

And what if the will of the people diverges from progressive goals? The benighted publics must be educated. Rousseau’s revolutionary descendants in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and North Korea took this idea of education (often termed “re-education”) to its logical end. And left-liberals today echo all this in their obsession with “misinformation,” which claims that if only people knew all the facts, they would converge on a broadly leftist political program.

After the Revolution petered out, monarchy remained allied with the Church, solidifying the remaining radicals’ commitment to atheism. They concluded that faith was fundamentally inimical to social progress and emancipation, and believed that only the extirpation of religion could lead to full liberation. As Schmitt tells us, “The battle against God was taken up by Proudhon under the clear influence of Auguste Comte. Bakunin continued it with Scythian fury.” For Bakunin in particular, all that is fundamentally good comes from man.

[And] there is nothing negative and evil except the theological doctrine of God and sin, which stamps man as a villain in order to provide a pretext for domination and the hunger for power. All moral valuations lead to theology and to an authority that artificially imposes an alien or extrinsic “ought” on the natural and intrinsic truth and beauty of human life.

The idea that God is inextricably tied to monarchy is not necessarily true at all. The radicals’ conclusion is due to a historical accident in Europe. In the United States, Schmitt points out, God and democracy were not at all in tension.

In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God — a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson's victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns.

And yet Americans, too, killed God eventually, if only gradually, with the strangulation picking up pace in the 20th century. To tell that story accurately would probably take several books and decades more of research. I suspect it has something to do with 20th century liberalism becoming a “fighting faith” for Cold War America, and in doing so helping bleed away the more difficult commitments that traditional faith traditions demand. Part of it had to do with the blasphemous elevation of the individual, which comfortably mated with the idea of a personal Jesus of American folk Protestantism.

Over time, American Christianity turned to telling people what God wants with and for them, rather than encouraging them to abase themselves as fallen wretches before His unknowable plan. And over time, they lost even more ground to the secular priests of psychotherapy, who encouraged people to put self-actualization above everything else. The “alien and extrinsic ‘ought’” that Bakunin fought against is the same oppressive force that much of psychotherapy hopes to liberate us from.

The Roots of our Barbarism?

Thérèse Delpech, a tragically under-appreciated French political theorist, had a thesis on how and why the untold depravities of the European soul came to the surface. In her book Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, she links exactly what Nietzsche was warning about to what Malaparte brings to grisly life.

Franz Kafka meticulously described it in his work: a view of the world suddenly deserted by the idea of the divine, revealing unsuspected depths in man. The end of religion and the death of the Father for the majority of Europeans left an enormous void in Western civilization, of which all thinkers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aware.

She cites François de Menthon, French chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunal:

“While inner spiritual life grew weaker, cruel uncertainty afflicted men’s minds, an uncertainty admirably defined by the term Ratslosigkeit, an untranslatable word meaning roughly not knowing which way to turn, a cruel state of mind of the nineteenth century that many Germans have described with tragic eloquence. A gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values.”

Delpech again:

The intellectual and spiritual chaos visible everywhere spring from the feverishness of societies that have lost their way, in the resulting boredom, in the destruction of hope for the future, but above all in the decline of confidence in the human spirit. That is a worldwide phenomenon, which affects former communist societies, where nationalism is attempting to take the place of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism, as much as Western societies, where hedonism is beginning to come up against its limitations.

Both emphases are mine.

Matthew Rose has picked up on similarities between Weimar German youth and the Vance brigade — angry young men “disturbed by a culture that seemed to celebrate transgression” and motivated to defend an “endangered morality,” but without the vocabulary to express either the threat or the delicate thing they tried to defend. “Unable to understand or express themselves in any other way . . . they gave voice to savage forms of group identity,” Rose writes. “The mark of barbarism . . . was the belief that truth and justice should be defined in terms of ethnic or racial membership.”

But it’s worth sitting with just what these young barbarians were rebelling against: an empty, selfish culture based on the limits of hedonism, devoid of ultimate meaning, with all “oughts” not just absent but banished and scorned, a culture whose ultimate truth is grounded only in the satisfaction of needs and the completion of the self. In short, they rose up against the empty onanism of modern existence.

Faith used to provide a salve for this, Delpech says, if only by quieting the passions:

Religions, at least, had been restrained by the idea of a superior power, by belief in the corruption of mankind, and by the need for close monitoring of one’s actions and impulses. With the end of those beliefs, which constituted so many barriers to action, there appeared tyrannies without limits, capable of any crime.

But is it possible to roll the clock back? In Germany and the rest of Europe, the evil energies spent themselves and left the continent teetering. It has rebuilt itself, largely under America’s security umbrella and with copious American aid. But a hard-charging belief in anything never returned. The war in Ukraine seems to have proven that a faith in universal liberal values is not a fighting faith after all. And the magnificent churches that dot the continent remain “the tombs and sepulchers of God,” as Nietzsche predicted.

Here in the United States, however, every so often there’s anecdotal evidence that the rising generation is rediscovering organized religion. Maybe it’ll develop into a bona fide trend. The Christian faith is, after all, predicated on a resurrection.

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How important is the freedom not to care — not to have to care — about being overheard? If you’re a parent (or even if you’re not one), when children are around, you should watch what you say. When you speak, you are modeling proper behavior for them, whether you like it or not. It’s just a fact of life. But if only adults are around, we allow ourselves to be frank, or blunt, or to kick back and say whatever. Loose talk. But now the stakes of overhearing are higher. AI is always listening, writes , and we have to be mindful of that fact: “The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night.”

After taking its cues from what must have been millions of anti-Semitic posts and revisionist World War II videos on X, Grok AI started generating pro-Hitler outputs. The first to be blamed were X’s engineers: they did not train Grok well enough, the story went, and a conjunction of bad — or devious — prompts, combined with the scores of racist detritus posted on X, led to the AI praising Hitler. But Cowen argues that all of us are partially responsible for what happened with Grok. We should all always watch what we say:

[The AIs] read the internet, they read millions of books we have scanned and uploaded to the internet, and they listen to our podcasts. To some unknown extent they may be reading our emails and listening to our Zoom calls—if not now, possibly in the future. They are also very attentive audiences, if I may use an anthropomorphic analogy. … Whether or not you work in the AI sector, if you put any kind of content on the internet, or perhaps in a book, you are likely helping to train, educate, and yes, morally instruct the next generation of what will be this planet’s smartest entities. You are making them more like you—for better or worse.

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Again, part of this is simply a matter of growing up: adults should watch what they say (and write, and publish). Adults should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and speaking is an action. But at what point does this responsibility become oppressive? At what point does it keep you from experimenting with your thoughts in conversation — with saying things for the sake of argument, or to provoke, or to get a rise out of someone, or merely to joke around? At what point does this responsibility become so great that the ability to speak freely is rendered moot?

Playfulness, role-playing, debating, gossiping, fabulating, yelling, shouting, taking things back, adopting positions for the sake of argument, etc., all belong not only to college dorm bull sessions but also to adults outside of working hours — at least in those parts of the country where people are less obsessed with the online surveillance of their every thought and utterance. If we lose this free space for conversational experimentation, then we’ve lost a part of our autonomy as human beings.

Five years ago, one of the arguments against so-called wokeness was that freedom of speech requires the freedom to experiment with ideas, crack jokes and risk offense. The anti-woke argument was that universities and corporations should not act like the parents of students and employees. But consider what Cowen is suggesting: instead of universities and corporations acting as parents, all of us are now the parents to ever-present AI children. The effect is the same: we have to watch what we say at all times: “It is less likely that you will hear out-of-control AI models spontaneously praising some obscure successor to Genghis Khan, however evil that person might have been. If humans talk a lot about Hitler, and indeed they do, their AIs may be inclined to follow in their footsteps.” So stop talking about him!

Cowen isn’t making a moral or political judgment. He’s simply describing reality as he sees it. It’s just a fact, he says, that we now share a space with other intelligent entities that are trained on our words, that we are in a “complex symbiosis” with LLMs. But that, by itself, is nothing new to most human beings. Most human beings believe in a god who hears what they say and what they think. Most believe in the existence of supernatural entities like angels, and in the surviving presence (in one form or another) of their deceased loved ones. What is new, however, is that now we have to take responsibility for the moral instruction of a nonhuman, artificial intelligences. Unlike AI, neither gods nor angels look to human beings for training inputs.

If we take Cowen seriously, then, everything we say and write is either an AI input or will generate a future AI output. We have always been answerable to God on the last day, but we are now also answerable for what Grok does in six months. I don’t mean to make an anti-AI argument here. (I used ChatGPT to help with research for this article!) Cowen is correct to say that we should act responsibly given the new technological reality we live under. But I think we should also take responsibility for the culture we are creating, and for the fate of language — for the scope of its use and its meanings. If we don’t do this, I worry that we might reduce human expression to refined inputs for desired outputs.

A world where all language consists of inputs and outputs is one where we probably won’t speak freely and idly and wildly, for fear of misdirecting Grok once again. We won’t tell crazy stories — for fear of miseducating another AI. It’s a culture where we won’t talk with ambiguity — the essence of artistic expression. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” wrote Emily Dickinson; unfortunately, slanted meanings don’t easily compute. This coming culture already has its online advocates: “Fiction is a poor guide to action, because it’s made up,” said one popular intellectual influencer on X. Another major thought leader calls for consumer protection from literature: “Mixed fiction and non-fiction with no warning label on where the transition occurs is the sort of thing that can end with false information stuck in somebody’s head and propagating. Spoilers or not, I’d put a warning sign on it.” Do we really want a culture where these are the rules? Because if Cowen is right, we might be on our way to creating one.

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