I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t. But you have to admit: the man is just so easy to parody. In 1934, F. Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to the same temptation as I did in the pages of Esquire: “There was an old biscuit in my dish and if there’s anything gloomier than one dead biscuit on a windy morning I don’t know about it.” By 1977, a whole “International Imitation Hemingway Competition” had been set up in the United States, yielding over the next 30 years such instant classics as “Big Too-Hardened Liver” and “The Old Man and the Flea”.

Sometimes, it seems, a writer’s style and sensibility can seep into the public consciousness so thoroughly that it washes away all particular facts about the works themselves. Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the paradigm case. Everyone agrees that he is gruff and terse and manly and emotionless; his main interests are bullfighting and big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing and overusing the word “and”. Most importantly, the things that tend to preoccupy other great novelists — interpersonal relationships, the delicate gradations of human thought and feeling — tend not to get much of a look in.

It is for this reason that readers who open up The Sun Also Rises, which celebrates its centenary today, might be in for a surprise. Hemingway’s first major novel follows the American military veteran Jake Barnes as he drifts drunkenly around war-scarred European cities: first Paris, then Pamplona in northern Spain. There is, admittedly, a fair amount of gruffness and taciturnity on show in Jake, but it is quickly made to point in a rather deeper, more obviously psychological direction. In the novel, Hemingway leaves the precise nature of Jake’s torment to the reader’s imagination: “Of all the ways to be wounded,” Jake says cryptically at one point while staring into a full-length mirror. “I suppose it was funny.” Later in his life, however, faced with pesky journalists insinuating Jake was just a stand-in for himself, Hemingway gave the game away: “Do you think that I had my prick shot off?”

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Once you realize what is, or isn’t, going on in Jake’s trousers, The Sun Also Rises reveals itself as a remarkably psychological novel. All the famous Hemingway rough-and-tumble — the bullfights and fistfights, the endless macho posturing to win the hand of the beautiful, promiscuous aristocrat Lady Brett Ashley — become explicable in basically compensatory, Freudian terms. Jake gazes longingly at bullfights — he is, the pamploneses all agree, a true “aficionado” — then befriends the toreador, deliberately leaving him alone at the bar with Brett in the hope they will go home together. The Sun Also Rises is, in fact, a study in all the ways in which human beings displace their simmering frustrations and resentments into other zones of their lives, and a blueprint for many of the other, classic Hemingway scenarios from the Twenties and Thirties: the fishing trip that serves as a refuge from war trauma in “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925); the moment of mad, rash courage on a hunting expedition that compensates for romantic humiliation in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936). It is hard not to read these works and be reminded of the fact that Hemingway was writing during one of the great golden ages of Freudianism in North America — a time when Eugene O’Neill was selling out Broadway theaters with plays about the Oedipus Complex, and Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays was dredging up his uncle’s theories to persuade American women to smoke. Meanwhile in Paris, where Hemingway lived, the Freud-obsessed surrealists were putting themselves in trances and speaking in tongues in order to try to get some of their respective unconsciouses to leak out onto the page.

Yet for anyone familiar with Hemingway’s later trajectory, these early affinities with psychoanalysis might seem rather surprising. By the time Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he was regularly exploding in print at any journalist or biographer who dared mention the word “psychology” and “Hemingway” in the same sentence: “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was done because of some trauma?” he complained in Time magazine. “To tell a writer he has a neurosis,” he grumbled in a letter to one of his most eminent critics a few years later, “is as bad as telling him he has cancer.” By the time Hemingway took his own life in 1961, the battle lines were drawn: Papa Hemingway on one side, psychoanalytic critics on the other. Over the next few decades, Leslie Fiedler argued that all the hunting and fishing was simply a way to flee the terrifying responsibilities of adult heterosexuality; Kenneth Lynn noted Grace Hall Hemingway’s peculiar penchant for dressing up her young son as a girl; and Mark Spilka made an immense fuss out of the fact that a lot of Hemingway’s female love-interest characters seem to have short hair. In the academy, Hemingway became a kind of anti-Freudian bogeyman, a monster of male repression, and the task of his critics was to do what he, in his own life, never could: understand himself.

How do we explain this rift? Did Hemingway simply become old and crotchety, disavowing the things that made his early work so great? I suspect there might be another explanation. Hemingway may have come of age in America’s first great golden age of Freudianism, but he lived long enough to realize that the fashionable new language could be deployed in two very different ways. On the one hand, there was the vague conviction of depth psychology that informed Hemingway’s own “iceberg” theory: the idea that within a work could be discerned all kinds of repressed desires and unacknowledged drives, such that the writer didn’t always need to spell out what a character was thinking in order for their motivations to make sense. On the other hand, there was the idea that this procedure should be performed on the writer — that understanding a work of literature was simply a matter of putting its originator on the couch. As he grew older and crankier, more famous and misunderstood, Hemingway sensed that the latter conception was beginning to crowd out the former. Put simply, he was one of the first American writers to discern, and inveigh against, the rise of what today we call “therapy culture”.

Contrary to popular belief, if you look carefully in Hemingway’s work, you find it absolutely full of characters who talk a lot about their feelings — it’s just that these characters are inevitably the frauds and phonies and self-deceivers, men who could use a hunting expedition or two to clear their heads. In The Sun Also Rises, the role is performed by Robert Cohn, champion boxer at university and reader of far-fetched romances set in South America, who spends most of the novel punching people, then tearfully seeking amends by explaining how lovesick he is for Brett. You can hear an adumbration of 2026: Oh, I’m sorry I ignored your messages, but that’s how my trauma response manifests. Won’t you forgive me? In perhaps the greatest Hemingway short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), the structure is even clearer. For three or four pages, the male protagonist inveigles his girlfriend into having an abortion by going on and on about how it is her choice and he will support her no matter what. He is communicative, attentive, and articulates his own preferences in a spirit of what seems to be openness and honesty: “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” It is, I think, one of the saddest scenes in 20th-century fiction.

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If characters in Hemingway resist saying things, it is because they know, just like Papa himself, that the more you try to articulate your psychic life in an open and honest way, the more you end up either falsifying it, or else cynically deploying it in some new scheme. Curiously, given the generations of American feminist critics who turned Hemingway into a model of male repression after his death, one of the people who seemed to grasp this most intuitively was Simone de Beauvoir. In The Prime of Life, she recalled the shattering impact Hemingway had on her and a young Jean-Paul Sartre: “A great many of the rules we imposed on ourselves in our novels were inspired by Hemingway,” she wrote; in some ways, in fact, Hemingway was the great precursor to the mid-century French existentialist hero, for whom “there was no separation between the head, the heart, and the body”.

It is an example worth taking seriously today, too. The therapy culture whose first stirrings Hemingway detected in the Fifties has come to dominate art, literature and entertainment to a staggering degree: Marvel superheroes are given arduous psychological backstories; pop stars opine publicly about their attachment styles; the real villain of the last Disney film I watched seemed to be something like “intergenerational trauma”. Contemporary literature is often even worse: these days, the surest way to literary stardom is gently to imply that your book is the thinly veiled fictionalization of your own  traumatic experiences with drugs or family or money or sex. Everywhere, in fact, the assumption seems to be that the role of culture is to drag the various ordeals that motivate human action out into the open. Read Hemingway, however, and you will soon begin to know better. You will know that men are often at their most revealing precisely when they cannot explain themselves, and at their most dishonest precisely when they can. You will know that if the truth of the human soul is to be found anywhere, it will be in the golden haunches of a lion, or the white pebbles at the bottom of a river, or the scales of a Gulf Stream fish, or the horns of a bull.

“The Rest is Fest” is a three-day live podcasting event organized by Goalhanger, the media company co-founded by Gary Lineker in 2014 that is currently the largest producer of podcasts in the UK. Its most popular podcast — The Rest is History, in which co-hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland chattily extemporize their way through some genuinely fascinating material, from the Costa Rican Civil War, to the truth behind the lost city of Atlantis, to history’s “Top Ten Eunuchs” — boasts nearly 20 million downloads per month. Close behind is The Rest is Politics, hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, with over 10 million; and even the least popular shows in the Goalhanger stable have listener-counts comfortably in the millions. Last year, Goalhanger turned over nearly £38 million, making it the UK’s fastest-growing private company. All in all, its podcasts were listened to three quarters of a billion times.

Who, exactly, are these listeners? Before attending, I had naïvely assumed that most of the patrons of The Rest is Fest would be people with a huge, insatiable interest in one specific thing, for whom Goalhanger was simply catering to a pre-existing need: men in anoraks for The Rest is History; culture vultures for The Rest is Entertainment; super fans for The Rest is Football. But in fact, most of my fellow audience members seemed to view Goalhanger as something more akin to the heir to mainstream mass entertainment, navigating instinctively to any podcast with “The Rest is…” in its title in the same, thoughtless way people once flicked on BBC One. One woman I spoke to claimed to listen to all the Goalhanger offerings: “I barely listen to music at all these days,” she said proudly. Several others admitted that they barely even bothered with non-fiction books any more — which one suspects might have something to do with the fact that last year, non-fiction sales reached their lowest levels since 2014. 

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How concerned should we be about this transition? Most of the listeners I spoke to were pretty confident in the mind-sharpening power of their podcasts. One gentleman explained to me that his days used to be filled with “dead time”, whereas now he could spend every minute of every day learning — most recently via a five-part The Rest is History special about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. When I asked him what he had learned from his eight or nine hours’ immersion, he gave me a panicked look. He couldn’t remember too much, he admitted. But Dominic Sandbrook did do a very funny impression of Ian Paisley. 

I suspect this episode might be more revealing than the attendees of the Rest is Fest would like to admit. Podcasts are, as a form, curiously Lethean: you can sit through hour after hour of some “deep-dive” on the battles between the Scythians and the Persians, and still end up with no idea where the Scythians were from, or when the Persians lived, and what they were even fighting about anyway. Walter Ong, the great theorist of the differences between oral and literate cultures, gave a useful description of what might be happening: in oral forms, certain prominent features of written narrative — detailed chronologies, scientific facts, complex causal relationships — are difficult to transmit. What the listener tends to take away from oral forms, instead, are intangible convictions of character and vibe. Modern historiography becomes great-man history; political science gives way to slogans and formulas. In the land of the podcast, simplicity reigns. 

Massive simplification and sloganeering was certainly the order of the day at the Rest is Fest. In the case of the live recording of The Rest is Politics: US, hosted by the US-based journalist Katty Kay and Donald Trump’s notoriously short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci, this made for rather good fun. Scaramucci was on fine form, flitting between CNN-style Trump-bashing and winning self-deprecation (“my hair is what they refer to as ‘Latin-American-dictator-brown’”). Kay, meanwhile, gamely fielded the questions the audience had submitted via the massive QR code that loomed above the stage — “Kiss, marry, kill: Vance, Rubio, Trump?” — to all kinds of happy braying from the audience. But by the time I got to the live recording of Empire: World History, a kind of orientalist spinoff of The Rest is History hosted by Anita Anand and the kurta-clad William Dalrymple, things were more fractious. At one point, when the discussion turned to the Iranian Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, a woman near the front got up and started screaming: “He’s our only hope! Our only hope!” Soon, the word “Israel” had been mentioned, and the whole room had descended into boos and hisses, and any hope of “disagreeing agreeably”, as The Rest is Politics’s own self-congratulatory slogan has it, was lost. 

In fact, the more time I spent at the Rest is Fest, the more I began to wonder whether there might not be something slightly paradoxical about the whole Goalhanger project. On the one hand, the podcast as a form obviously favors a certain, simplified, vibes-based conception of the world, that turns all manner of technical disputes into highly personal confrontations. The Rest is Politics interview format, for instance, encourages its listeners to ascribe every policy proposal to a nice, relatable human face. This has some value: political discourse in the UK can tend towards the bloodless and the pedantic, and if the ultimate consequence of companies like Goalhanger is to bring a bit of antagonism back into the political and intellectual discourse of this country, to induce more people to stand up and shout at the mandarins in front of them, to remind people that the rules and procedures by which they are governed might depend on acts of human will, then they can be considered, at least in some ways, a success. 

Except, of course, antagonism and truculence are the very things that the Goalhanger project claims to be trying to expunge from the discourse. After all, if there is one feature that unites the Goalhanger brand, it is a stated commitment to politeness and civility — a conviction that however strenuously people might disagree with each other, they can always adhere to the rules of bourgeois etiquette while doing so. Lineker has actually singled out this dogged commitment to good manners as the reason for the company’s success on several occasions: “There is so much tribalism and division,” he said in a 2023 interview, “it feels as if those who shout loudest get the attention.” His co-founder, Tony Pastor, agreed: “We don’t have people shouting at each other from different positions. We always try to maintain a civility of tone: our phrase is, ‘We disagree agreeably.’” Which, of course, begs a question: if the podcast as a form favors one mode of expression, and the founders of Goalhanger favor another mode of expression, then which of them will win the eventual tussle?

By the time I settled in my seat for my final stop of the day — the live performance of The Rest is Politics in the Royal Festival Hall that was to cap off the Rest is Fest weekend — it had begun to dawn on me that the real reason why the “Rest is…” brand seems to work so well is because what its partisans tend to refer to as “agreeable disagreement” is actually something else entirely. Up on the stage, the hosts chattered on predictably for a while: Rory Stewart apparently angling for some kind of Nick-Clegg-style Silicon Valley sinecure; Alastair Campbell unable to resist a little barb at the media about their hounding of Jason Arday, apparently forgetting some of the media-hounding he had partaken of himself. But it soon became clear that the real excitement was to be supplied by two very special guests: one Israeli and one Palestinian, who had, despite their bereavements, collaborated together to form an NGO. 

Together, the guests mounted the stage and embraced Campbell and Stewart warmly, to a smattering of cheers up in the circle. Then they embraced each other: there were howls of approbation now, filling the hall, from the orchestra pit to the concrete rafters. One of them was passed a microphone; he said something about “working together”, I think, though I could barely hear through the tsunami of applause. The microphone went to the other speaker: he said something about “building bridges”, but it was drowned out by a hoot behind me. The atmosphere was far from “agreeable” now, the audience climbing to their feet, whooping and hollering like they were at a pantomime. But this wasn’t exactly “disagreeable disagreement” either. How could it be, when everyone in that hall, everyone at the festival, everyone listening remotely over the airwaves, everyone in the entire Goalhanger family, agreed with each other already?

Entrepreneurial types have started to get wise to this national obsession, too. Britain’s “leadership” industry has become vast and lucrative: podcasters and influencers throughout the land churn out self-help manuals and Diary-of-a-CEO-type podcasts, selling their listeners the dream that they might one day be as irresistibly charismatic as Steven Bartlett or Jake Humphrey; exclusive private networks promise to put aspiring board members in touch with real-life “NEDs”; historic stately homes are shuttered so that self-important middle-managers can take them over for residential leadership getaways. Any serious author who can get recognized as some kind of thought-leader in the theory of leadership can count on a flurry of sales — both to wonkish political commentators desperate to work out what makes someone fit to rule, and to ambitious young tech and business types, keen for someone to teach them how to sell their SAAS products with the might of Marcus Aurelius and Genghis Khan.

This, at any rate, seems to have been the main consideration behind the decision to publish Jared Diamond’s Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?, which is released by Allen Lane this September. Diamond shifts books: his 1997 inquiry into why the West became so powerful, Guns, Germs and Steel, sold over two million copies, and became the prototype for the other middlebrow blockbusters, like Sapiens and Prisoners of Geography, that dominated the bookshelves of the corporate-boardroom autodidacts in the pre-podcast era. His foray into the science of “leadership” promises to prise this old audience back into Waterstones with one weird trick: a nifty thought experiment that he calls “The Hamlet Test”. By posing the question of whether anyone else would have written Hamlet if Shakespeare had died of smallpox at the age of 10, argues Diamond, “we can make a strong argument that Shakespeare was uniquely talented”; in the same way, we can make a strong argument that a leader was effective by asking not whether he or she effectively represented a particular group, or achieved something noble, but whether he or she managed to make a difference in the world.

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Once we define effective leadership this way, Diamond seems to think, then the perennial question of “what makes a good leader?” can be reduced to “under what conditions do leaders make a difference?”. Conveniently, this gives Diamond the chance to conduct lots of nice, big, multivariate analyses of the kind that social scientists love. Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings contains several mad charts “ranking” different leaders according to how much they could be said to have “made a difference” to their countries’ economies: good leaders in this regard include Lee Kuan Yew and the military dictators Chun Doo Hwan and Georgios Papadopoulos; bad leaders, meanwhile, include Idi Amin and Harold Wilson. Occasionally, he goes into more depth — most convincingly his chapter on Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president after independence, who almost, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, managed to steward a relatively peaceful handover of power, keep a lid on ethnic conflicts, and integrate the Botswanan economy reasonably effectively into the global system of trade. 

Whenever Diamond does try to go into depth, however, some pretty serious problems start to emerge. In the Khama chapter, for instance, he diligently lists a few obvious factors that helped Khama’s success — his chieftaincy of Botswana’s largest ethnic group, the discovery of diamonds shortly after independence — but totally neglects some of the most important factors of all. There were, in fact, plenty of other similarly promising leaders across sub-Saharan Africa in the Sixties, whether Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso — it’s just that they were all killed or overthrown in coups that Western powers were rumored to have sponsored. This, needless to say, seems important for anyone claiming to be conducting an empirical study of the factors that led to Khama’s success. Arguably, what really set Khama apart from his pan-African counterparts was his willingness to renounce leadership on a global level — distancing himself from the non-aligned movement, refusing to intervene against apartheid South Africa, and generally toeing the line drawn by the world’s greatest, pushiest power. Yet Diamond barely grapples with this possibility. Instead, he simply reproduces the hagiographies that liberal NGO-workers and development economists have been churning out for years.

There is, I suspect, something paradigmatic about this failing. All attempts to analyze “leadership” in terms of the different factors that contribute to it end up sounding rather nonsensical: after all, if a leader’s capacity to “make a difference” is reducible to certain structural conditions, or obedience to certain rules, then “making a difference” doesn’t really count as making a difference at all. Can you really be a leader by virtue of having been in the right place at the right time? Are you really a leader if you have got to where you are by following a simple five-step plan laid out for you by some podcast? No sooner does the literal-minded investigator start to ask questions about leadership than he or she starts to run up against an ancient antinomy: to make a difference, they must be free from the forces that determine events; but if they are free from those forces, there can be no science capable of explaining why they succeed. In Diamond’s case, this leads to some genuinely embarrassing formulations: Hitler was an effective leader because of “four qualities: anti- Semitism, speaking ability, tactical cleverness, and risk-taking”. 

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If you are really interested in the phenomenon of leadership, you will have to look elsewhere this autumn. Crowds and Power, the 1960 masterwork of the German theorist Elias Canetti that has just been republished by Fitzcarraldo, will probably not attract too many ambitious young politicos or corporate middle managers. It is a strange, unclassifiable document: a mixture of Victorian comparative anthropology, Jungian psychoanalysis and the just-so stories of modern-day evo-psych. It isn’t hard to see why it has been so thoroughly overlooked by mainstream social scientists: its main champions were literary and philosophical figures, including Susan Sontag and Iris Murdoch, and its first part is basically just one, vast typology of all the different types of “crowd” which human beings can amass themselves into — “closed crowds”, “open crowds”, the wolf-like “packs” that dominated human social organization in the days of prehistoric game hunts — interspersed with pieces of mad speculation about how certain deeply ingrained mythic symbols inform and determine real-world mass events. To give one gloriously unfalsifiable example, Canetti explains the Third Reich via the fact that Germany is a forested country, whose inhabitants have as their essential “crowd symbol” lots of tall, upright things standing to attention like coniferous trees. Thus, he concludes, Germans were particularly susceptible to militarism in the 19th century, and felt the disbanding of the German army by the Treaty of Versailles as a vast, existential humiliation that demanded redress.  

What would the contemporary consumer of leadership-content make of this kind of explanation? Clearly, Canetti’s account is massively unsatisfactory to the empirically minded reader — how exactly does one measure a “crowd symbol”? — and could certainly not be condensed into any kind of how-to guide for would-be Elon Musks or Seretse Khamas or Hitlers. But it does, I think, have one distinct advantage over almost every other invocation of leadership one might encounter in today’s media. By layering hundreds of apparently mutually exclusive explanations like the Hitler story — many of them seemingly self-sufficient in their own right — Canetti hints at the fact that psychic causation doesn’t work quite like physical causation. Human actions are, as Freud might have put it, overdetermined: the same act can be simultaneously caused by a dozen different motives, memories, fantasies and psychic mechanisms, none of which can straightforwardly be isolated as the variable which “made the difference”. In this sense, in fact, Canetti’s lunatic profusion of explanations is more realistic than Diamond’s sober attempt to rank them: the closer we look at why anybody does anything, the more their psychic life seems exempt from the laws of causation entirely.

Once we start to see human action in this light, questions like “what makes a good leader?” start to look very different indeed. Perhaps the most striking effect of Crowds and Power is the way it induces the reader to think of the great men of history as mere conduits for impersonal psychological and social mechanisms — as mere vessels, in whom vast, unpredictable “crowd energies” temporarily reside. It is a truth that we all notice from time to time: one only has to look at the last few parliaments to see the range of animal instincts and bizarre psychosexual neuroses that send people careening towards power. It is also, in a sense, the project that more mainstream leadership-theorists, Diamond among them, seem to be wanting to ask — even if the demands of reader-flattering liberal good manners never quite allow them to do so. 

The genius of Canetti’s account, by contrast, is to assign priority to the deepest, strangest mechanisms of all, and totally ignore what leaders say their interests might be, almost as a matter of methodological principle. The true common factor among leaders, he argues, is a kind of primal, evolutionary obsession with being the sole survivor of an atrocity, standing over a pile of dead — a terrified, animal desire to claw one’s way to a position where one can send others to die in one’s place. The archetypical political leader, in fact, is the Jewish historian Josephus, who, trapped with 40 fellow rebels during a siege, deceitfully engineered their suicide pact so that he emerged one of its only two survivors, then surrendered to the Romans, prospered, and wrote the history of his own lies. Josephus’s deception, writes Canetti, “is the deception of all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in reality, they send their people to death, so that they themselves may stay alive longer. The trick is always the same.” 

Of course, this kind of thinking will not be acceptable to today’s leadership-fetishists. One suspects Diamond’s book will outsell Canetti’s, and however much I would like to switch on Newsnight and see Andy Burnham locate the reason for his recent leadership campaign in his despotic compulsion to stand over a heap of corpses, I have to admit this will probably not come to pass. And yet, if there is one lesson of Canetti’s that is worth retaining, it is that people’s interests and fixations are never quite what they seem to be — especially when leadership is involved. 

The irony of Britain’s current fascination with “leaders” and “leadership” is that in many ways, it is born of a dissatisfaction with the way in which most people think about the role of human freedom in political and commercial affairs. Why else would you single out leadership as the thing that needs to change, if you were not hungry for some streak of pure, overdetermined madness to shock those in power out of their unimaginative ways? Perhaps, in their bottomless appetite for leadership manuals and corporate podcasts, the British public are channeling something deeper and more dangerous than we realize. Consider it, next time you are cornered by one of them at a party: look into your smarmy interlocutor’s eyes, and tell me you can’t see the piles of dead, smell the pine forests, hear the packs of howling wolves. 

The Odyssey does not come from the same world as the other pinnacles of Greek culture we all know and love and tweet about. For one thing, it is much older: the events it recounts take place during the late Bronze Age, around 1200 years before the golden age of Attic culture that spawned Socrates and Plato. The poem itself was set down in writing only after centuries of oral transmission — but even the written document is older than not just Plato and Sophocles, but the Persian War, the Olympic Games, and even the Archaic poets like Sappho and Alcaeus. In fact, Homer barely ever uses words that mean “Greek” or “Hellenic” at all: The Iliad and Odyssey are really about a mess of tiny, disunited Mycenaean kingdoms whose subjects wear boar’s tusk helmets and fight with bronze weapons and write, on the rare occasions that they write at all, in a complicated ideographical script called Linear B that was only deciphered in the Fifties. 

No heroic figure better illustrates just how different these two worlds — the Homeric and the Attic — were than Odysseus. It is true that he was often admired by the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age: the intelligence evinced by his ruses was impossible to ignore for such a self-consciously brainy civilization. But just as frequently, Odysseus was deplored for his lack of scruple, his amorality, his low cunning. Pindar suspected that “the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through the sweet lays that Homer sang”. Sophocles had his main character, Philoctetes, berate Odysseus for being a “shameless wretch! from whom nor truth nor justice, / Naught that becomes the generous mind, can flow”. Even Socrates, who was generally rather keen on intelligence as a virtue, stopped short of straightforwardly defending the man from Ithaca in the Lesser Hippias, preferring instead to show how his interlocutor is just as bad as Odysseus, because he is a deceiver, not of others, but of himself.  

What was it about Odysseus’s intelligence that proved so unsettling to these vast, rational, civilization-founding minds? In a series of essays and books published in the Sixties and Seventies, the French classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne offer one interesting interpretation. In the Homeric epic, they point out, the words used to evoke Odysseus’s particular kind of intelligence are very different from the words that denote intelligence in later Greek. In Plato and Aristotle, for example, the usual abstractions of choice are nous, logos and episteme — all of which suggest the faculties and forms of knowledge concerned with grasping a stable, intelligible order. Homer, by contrast, tends to use the word metis, which denotes a more practical kind of intelligence. Something flexible, unrepresentable, as variegated as the flecks of light that glint off bronze armor: the uncanny knack some people have for getting things done. 

All through the Odyssey, Homer lingers over Odysseus’s feats of knowhow and craft every bit as lovingly as he does the feats of martial strength performed by Achilles, Hector, and Ajax in the Iliad. In Book 5, we watch him fell trees, bore joints and build with his own hands the raft that carries him from Calypso’s island; he steers himself across the open sea armed only with his knowledge of the stars. In Book 21, we see him string his great bow “like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song” in order to best the outrageous suitors who have colonized his house. In Book 23, we learn of his skills at carpentry, and the fact that he fashioned his marriage bed by carving it from the living trunk of an olive tree. Even the famous scar by which the servant Eurycleia eventually recognizes him is testament to his knowhow — specifically, in the distinctly non-Mycenaean art of hunting for boar. 

What distinguishes these skills from the kind of airy, abstract knowledge we find in, say, Plato? Vernant and Detienne list several divergences, but perhaps the most important is the peculiar relationship metis has with its own formal representation. For Plato and Socrates, a written or spoken representation of the truth is the truth; indeed, words like episteme actually imply some kind of representation of the world. Metis, by contrast, cannot be grasped abstractly; the moment you try to write it down, or codify it, you lose it. Odysseus may be best remembered as a creator of elaborate plans, but these plans are rarely laid out before him as a nice, clear set of steps; they are always provisional, prone to being revised whenever a cyclops bars the doors to the cave you are hiding in, or the sea-god who has taken against you tears apart your raft — when, in short, reality proves to be stranger and more variable than your own ordered representation of it. In Book 13, the goddess Athena explicitly admires this quality in her champion. When she meets him in disguise on the shores of Ithaca — and begins, for what it’s worth, one of the greatest, most under-appreciated flirtation scenes in all literature — she adores the fact that he begins to lie to her without yet knowing why he is lying. He has a blind conviction that pretense might yet prove useful in future improvisations: “Here among mortal men you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles [metis] too.” 

The choice of words is no accident. In ancient Greek theogony, “metis” had another important meaning. Specifically, it was the name given to Athena’s mother — the Oceanid nymph who marries Zeus in the primordial age of the Titans, before the Greek pantheon has settled into its familiar form. As Hesiod records it, after the wedding, the couple receive a prophecy. Metis will bear two children: a daughter, who will match her father in wisdom and strength; and a son, who will one day overthrow him. In response, Zeus swallows Metis whole — “put[s] her away inside his own belly … so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil”. The message is clear enough: power and strength are all very well; so too are patriarchal authority and abstract Apolline knowledge. But if you want to be King of the Gods, you gulp down metis, the most mysterious, unrepresentable form of intelligence of all. 

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It is striking, too, how many of Odysseus’s 20th-century admirers seem to single out something like metis as unusually appropriate to the modern age. Joyce, who reimagined Odysseus as an unassuming Jewish advertising agent named Leopold Bloom, always stressed that what he admired most in Homer’s protagonist was his completeness and wholeness, his ability to adapt to any task. He was, according to Joyce, “son to Laertes … father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca” — all of which combine to render him the “most human” character in world literature. Over the course of Ulysses, Odysseus, in his wiliness, his adaptability, his endless capacity for reinventing himself, becomes a kind of antidote to modern alienation: by being identified with him, Bloom somehow transcends his boring bourgeois job and predictable bourgeois relationships, and becomes whole. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt went so far as to suggest the Homeric ethic as an anti-capitalist strategy: “In the world of Homer, Paris and Odysseus help in the building of their houses, Nausicaa herself washes the linen of her brothers, etc. All this belongs to the self-sufficiency of the Homeric hero, to his independence and the autonomic supremacy of his person.”

Nevertheless, there is something slightly unfamiliar about reading the accounts of Joyce and Arendt — or, for that matter, other modern Odysseus-fanciers like T.E. Lawrence and Derek Walcott — in the 21st century. The jury’s decision is in, and it has been decided that the Greek ideal means top-down planning, rational bureaucracy, vast sovereign efforts to make the world conform as neatly to abstract standards as possible. For Le Corbusier, Greek ideals justified razing half of Paris and replacing the curlicued old buildings with Parthenon-esque cuboids; for contemporary politicians, the grand old Greek word “democracy” is used to justify an increasingly inane and arbitrary form of abstract proceduralism. These days, the rational, modern institutions that claim to be the heirs to the Greek tradition — the halls of democratic government, the geometrical housing estates, the immaculate American universities with Greek letters on their porticoes — seem less capable than ever of producing a single individual as well-rounded, as universally capable, as polymetis, as Odysseus.

If there’s one hope I have for the wave of Odyssey-mania that is set to crest this week, it is that it might remind us that the intellectual legacy of Ancient Greece is far more mysterious than our culture likes to remember. The importance of un-representable knowledge is hard to discern in the philosophers of Golden-Age Athens — though even Plato, it must be said, put rationality in its place, giving over a good chunk of the Phaedrus is to the discussion of the revelatory power of the mania induced by poetry and sex and alcohol. But the further back you go, the clearer the mystery gets: the Pythagorean geometers guarded the secret of irrational numbers, and drowned Hippasus for revealing them to the world; the Orphic cults refused to disclose their secret wisdom to anyone who had not undergone elaborate purification rituals. But for my money, it was the earliest Greek writer of all who did it best. No-one since — in any language — has better captured the essential wildness of the human intellect, its storminess, its amplitude, that is matched only by the wine-dark sea. 

The conspiracy-theorizing wing of the US media has offered plenty of possible explanations about what this shadowy entity might be over the years: Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, the Council for National Policy — or perhaps even “Dialog”, the secret club founded by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that was recently exposed by a Swiss hacker. But those who have really done their research, who have brushed shoulders with high-ranking government officials and walked in the corridors of power, know that if there is a secret guild steering the American Right, then it is almost certainly made up of the students and acolytes of a dead German-Jewish political scientist named Leo Strauss. 

If all you know about Leo Strauss are the bare facts of his life, it is hard to work out why anyone would consider him all that influential, let alone the originator of a cult. After fleeing the Nazis in 1937, Strauss spent most of his life locked away in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, scribbling out heavy, prolix books with titles like On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero and Philosophy and Law: Essays Toward the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors. Yet for some reason, in the years since his death in 1973, he has managed to send wave after wave of conspiratorial panic crashing through the political establishment. In the Eighties, Myles Burnyeat argued that most of the American Right had been colonized by the disciples of this “Sphinx without a secret”; in the 2000s, noting the influence of Strauss among Republican neocons, Seymour Hersh went so far as to allege that “We’ve been taken over basically by a cult”. These days, everyone on the American Right gets linked to Strauss: Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Bill Kristol, Curtis Yarvin. The Strauss-panics even come freighted with strange sexual rumors: there are whispers of a homoerotic initiation rituals, intercrural orgies, a long lineage of Greek-style pedagogical techniques linking Right-wing figures as diverse as Allan Bloom and Bronze Age Pervert. 

What do Straussians actually believe? If you ask a certain kind of respectable, tenured academic, the answer you tend to receive is pretty banal. In the words of Steven Smith (who actually advised Bronze Age Pervert, aka. Costin Alamariu, for his thesis at Yale), “Straussianism is characterized above all by what its practitioners often call the art of ‘careful reading’.” A Straussian education, in other words, basically just means spending hours and hours trawling through an idiosyncratic canon of “greats” comprising Plato, Xenophon, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; this, all the Straussians seem to agree, is the single best career-preparation a would-be statesman, or professor, or world-shaping businessman, could hope for. It is certainly in the spirit of the master himself — who, when asked by colleagues what he taught, liked to reply “old books”. 

Why, then, are Straussians so widely mistrusted? The clearest indication comes in Strauss’s 1952 book Persecution and the Art of Writing, which looks, at first glance, to be just another vast tome of commentaries on several Straussian favorites: Plato, Maimonides, Judah Halevi, Spinoza. Over the course of Strauss’s analysis, however, some curious claims are made about the way in which philosophers ought to write. Specifically, Strauss argues that ever since the leaders of Athens put Socrates to death, Western thinkers have needed to temper the destructive potential of philosophy on “the city” — which is Strauss’s favored synecdoche for all types of public and civic life. As a result, the only proper way for the philosopher to write is esoterically; he must hide his true opinions from the rank and file, only signaling his true intentions to his brightest, most alert readers. Secret codes, odd turns of phrase, weird lacunae in the index: these are methods by which the great philosophers’ works reveal their true meaning to the elect, without upsetting everyone else. Read this way, even a text as great as Plato’s Republic will start to yield. Far from agreeing with Socrates, in fact, Plato reveals his sympathies to lie with Sophists like Thrasymachus; deep down, he knows that all the lofty talk of “justice” is just a “noble lie” told by the powerful to keep the rabble in check.

There were, of course, many other facets to Strauss’s teaching, a number of which soften the rather brutal message of Persecution and the Art of Writing. There was Strauss’s critique of modern technocracy for instance, in which he argued that the politicians of today ought to rediscover ancient, holistic notions of “the good life” rather than blindly pursuing what “works”; and his work on Natural Right, in which he defended a trans-historical standard of right and wrong grounded in human needs. But for some reason, the Straussians who reach the highest echelons of US government always seem to place Persecution and the Art of Writing at the front and center of their thinking, and wave away everything else. 

This was certainly the case in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when, under George W. Bush, a crop of explicit admirers of Strauss set about expanding the United States government’s secretive, constitution-spurning underbelly. In 2001, Paul Wolfowitz, one of Strauss’s protégés at Chicago, was promoted to Under Secretary of Defense, and quickly set about urging his fellow members of the National Security Council to “take proper advantage” of the 9/11 attacks with little regard for federal and international law. Wolfowitz never publicly endorsed Straussianism while in office, but there were plenty of winks and nods: as his friend Christopher Hitchens put it, “Since Paul Wolfowitz is from the intellectual school of Leo Strauss … one may even suppose that he enjoys [the] arcane and occluded aspect of the debate.” Abram Shulsky, who headed the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that eventually produced the notorious “intelligence” about Iraqi WMDs, went one better, co-writing an essay called “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”, in which he explicitly argued that Strauss’s ideas endorse the modern security state. The core of Strauss’s teaching, wrote Shulsky, was the insight “that political life may be closely linked to deception”; every exoteric system of laws, rights, constitutions was invariably underpinned by its illiberal counterpart: “enhanced interrogation”, Guantánamo, the NSA.

It was in response to the Straussian fervor of the Bush era that Peter Thiel — at that point best known for his relatively apolitical involvement in PayPal and Facebook — wrote perhaps the single most influential treatment of Strauss this century: “A Straussian Moment.” At first glance, this 2007 essay seems to be a gentle critique of the administration’s neoconservative excesses. If you read it carefully, however, it is hard not to interpret it as a kind of covert endorsement of the Straussian project — particularly in Thiel’s approving citations of the fact that “The most just society cannot survive without intelligence, i.e., espionage” — even in cases where “[e]spionage is impossible without a suspension of certain rules of natural right”. Given the trajectory of some of Thiel’s companies since — particularly the steady takeover of international intelligence-gathering capabilities by Palantir — it doesn’t seem too outlandish to read “A Straussian Moment” as an important development within the Straussian tradition. It is perhaps the first major Straussian consideration of the fact that the custodians of the “noble lie” might come from outside government, too. 

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The most energetic Straussians of the last two decades have been those who took this idea seriously. Most of them seem to have been concentrated on America’s free-wheeling West Coast — specifically, the Claremont Institute, where one of Strauss’s most distinguished students, Harry Jaffa, set about rearing a new brood of Straussians who would completely change the legacy of the great man in the new millennium. The “Claremonsters”, as their detractors in the US political establishment liked to call them, took Thiel’s reasoning to its most extreme conclusions: the traditional political classes had quite obviously fallen short of their forebears, they argued; they had begun to believe the “noble lie”, and as a result had spent the last 50 years getting bogged down in law and procedure. A new kind of leader was needed, to restore the ideals of classical statesmanship once and for all.

In 2016, a Claremont Straussian named Michael Anton published “The Flight 93 Election”, in which he argued that the perfect man to perform this salvific miracle was Donald Trump. Within five years, John Eastman, another Claremont senior fellow and a former student of Jaffa’s, was urging Mike Pence to reject the electoral college count on January 6 on the grounds that the true, esoteric constitutional order superseded the Electoral Count Act of 1887. At a time when most of the American Right was scandalized by Trump’s disdain for law and custom and procedure, the Claremont Institute was tirelessly propagating the idea that this unscrupulousness was a strength. Nowadays, everyone involved in MAGA professes their disdain for the old myths and noble lies in favor of “just doing things”: domestically, the administration seems serenely comfortable with flouting Supreme Court orders to prevent the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia or the mass-firing of civil servants; internationally, its saber-rattling about Greenland and Canada shows what it thinks about defense treaties and international law. 

What would Leo Strauss have made of all of this? I can’t help but suspect he would have seen the past 10 years of Straussianism as a monstrous vulgarization of his project. The core of his thought, after all, was a commitment to minoritarianism and secrecy — and though MAGA officials like to talk about their willingness to do shadowy, disreputable things with little regard for public opinion, they tend to do so in the most public, forthright, non-secretive way imaginable. In 2018, Steve Bannon spoke openly about the Trump campaign’s Machiavellian electoral strategy of “flood[ing] the zone with shit”; in 2024, JD Vance defended the administration’s propagation of stories about cat-roasting Haitian migrants with the line, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Esotericism, in other words, seems to have become a remarkably exoteric doctrine. Which begs the question: if everyone is a Straussian, convinced of his own unique ability to glimpse the eternal esoteric truths of philosophy beneath the tangle of contingent lies we call politics, then is anyone really a Straussian at all?

In the end, I suspect, there is something slightly self-defeating about Straussianism. It is the paradox of all esoteric doctrines: the more successful and influential they are, the more people read and understand and propagate them, the less esoteric they become. In the good old days of broad public faith in American institutions, Straussians could still derive a secretive frisson by imagining themselves to be the custodians of the kind of nihilistic wisdom they found in Thrasymachus, or Machiavelli, or Hobbes. But political nihilism is mainstream now; if Straussians have any hope of inducting a new generation into their fraternity, they will need to find a new secret to guard. Indeed, if the conspiracy-theory-baiting mode of discourse that has begun to predominate on the American Right is anything to go by, they might have found it already. It is the secret that has animated the greatest secret societies and mystery cults in history, from the Rosicrucians to the Freemasons to the purple-robed hierophants of Eleusis: the knowledge that, beneath all the candlelit rituals and grandiose mutterings about esoteric wisdom, there is absolutely no secret at all. 

You will be familiar, of course, with this style of political discourse. It is hard to avoid these days — particularly in the United States, where for at least the past five years, whole news channels have given themselves over to an endless barrage of Epstein speculations, vaccine panics, Russian collusion allegations, and UFO babble. It is characterized by a kind of hyperactive manufacture of hidden plots to explain what is going on in the world, coupled with an almost hermetic fascination with the deeper meaning behind coincidences and symbols: the logo of a D.C. pizza shop, for instance, is evidence of the pederastic blood rituals that go on in the upstairs room; or Donald Trump’s bizarre grammar on Twitter and Truth Social, which actually contains hidden kabbalistic messages about his ongoing war with the Deep State. It is invariably met with noisy disapproval in other, more respectable media corners, where academics and experts rally like the counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée, “debunking” the feverish allegations, “calling out” the online rabble, and usually agitating for a return to good, old-fashioned virtues like “trust in government” and “standards in public life”.

Perhaps the greatest debunker of them all was Richard Hofstadter. As a young historian in the Thirties, Hofstadter had flirted with Marxism-Leninism, but by the time he gained tenure at Columbia during the most feverish years of the Cold War, he had traded in his class-based conception of history for a more institution-friendly liberalism. His magnum opus — The Paranoid Style in American Politics, recently reissued — was first published in 1964, when conspiracy theorizing in America was at a high point. The US government was still reeling from McCarthyism; rumors were swirling around concerning the death of JFK, and the Republican Party was in the process of being hijacked by arch-paranoiac “pseudo-conservative” Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter believed that liberal America needed new, diagnostic terms if it had any hope of weathering the storm.

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In the end, it was a term from psychiatry, “paranoia”, that seemed the best fit. This was partly because it was non-partisan (paranoia, Hofstadter generously points out, is “not necessarily right wing”) but mainly because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. After all, Hofstadter explains, paranoia isn’t simply a kind of madness. In fact, the paranoid mind is in many ways “far more coherent than the real world”. The greatest paranoiacs are sticklers for careful scholarship (“McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism,” observes Hofstadter, “contains no less than 313 footnote references”). They display the kind of maniacal interpretative zeal that is also found among rationalist philosophers: everything must fit into their schema, and nothing — no verbal similarity, no coincidence, no pizzeria logo — is permitted to go unexplained.

As a history of conspiracy panics in US political life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics does an excellent job. Hofstadter manages to amass an extraordinary amount of detail in just a few pages: beginning with the immediate post-revolutionary period, when John Robison’s treatise on “the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies” captured the imaginations of New England puritans, who worried that secular secret societies might undermine the congregations and institutions they had worked so hard to set up. Even more winningly outlandish is Hofstadter’s account of the forgotten American tradition of anti-Jesuitism, with its profusion of salacious, tell-all memoirs from ex-nuns — one of which, Awful Disclosures, written by Maria Monk in 1836, was probably the bestselling book in American history until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the time we reach the 20th century, it is hard not to agree with Hofstadter’s well-known contention that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds”.

But what about explaining the American propensity for paranoia? Like all good academics, Hofstadter is very clear about the explanatory claims he is not making: “In using the expression ‘paranoid style’”, he assures his readers, “I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” But if this essay is not an attempt at psychological classification, what is it? Hofstadter’s final interpretation is curiously toothless: “a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population,” he speculates; “certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies.” The essay ends soon after. In fact, it is hard not to finish The Paranoid Style in American Politics without beginning to wonder whether Hofstadter might actually have something to learn from the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist, at least, has the temerity to ask the big sociological questions: What is behind all this? What does it all mean?

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the “debunking” mentality which Hofstadter and his fellow Cold-War liberals forged, and still characterizes much of the American establishment today. For the debunker, the salient fact about the conspiracy theorist is his departure from the truth: conspiracy theorists are disordered, delusional, and need to be corrected by a stern, patrician voice telling them how things actually are. But when you talk to conspiracy theorists, you tend to find that their operative notion of the truth is rather different. There is often a humorousness to people’s adoption of conspiracy theories — or, at least, a kind of perverse pleasure or comfort. In conspiracy theory, in fact, the relationship between “truth” and “belief” seems to land rather closer to what one might find in Pascal, or Nietzsche: a sense that the conspiracy theory is true in an artistic sense, the way a metaphor, or allegory, might be true. They are ways for people to parse or understand complex situations without the conceptual vocabulary to do so in a more literal way. Even if you don’t quite have the time or resources to articulate a full account of all the different ways in which the DNC is corrupt or austerity is misguided, you can still say “Hillary Clinton eats babies” or “David Cameron had sex with a pig”, and everyone, on some level, will understand what you mean.

What dark truths might Hofstadter’s American paranoiacs be articulating? I suspect it might have something to do with the United States’ political system: after all, even Hofstadter notes the fetishistic preoccupation the purveyors of the Paranoid Style have with subverting political institutions — freemasons walking among the Founding Fathers, Jesuits infiltrating the government, Communists taking control of the Senate. And curiously, conspiratorial fantasies of subversion do seem to crop up in post-revolutionary liberal societies like the United States with remarkable frequency. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that something like Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style can be observed in France, Germany, and Italy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries — often using a lot of the same “secret society” imagery. No sooner does a country declare a liberal constitution that guarantees power to the people, than those same people declare it to be the product of freemasons, or Illuminists, or Jews, or Jesuits — any group, really, so long as it isn’t them.

For Koselleck, in fact, conspiracy panics are simply what you get when you combine liberal societies’ endless rhetoric about “openness” and “transparency” and “mass participation” with the rather more exclusionary and secretive reality of the modern liberal state, with its faceless bureaucracies and standing armies and legions of spies. They are a way of explaining away dissonance, wriggling out of the double bind that comes with being a modern citizen. The applicability to 18th and 19th-century American history is obvious: “I know that America ought to mean liberty and prosperity and a bright future for myself and my family,” thinks the American paranoiac, “and yet all around me I see a decaying oligarchy that seems to hold my abstract freedoms in pretty low esteem. Ergo: America must have fallen victim to a plot, an infiltration.”

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Nor is it particularly hard to see why conspiracy theories might be so popular in America today. Liberal institutions are creaking more loudly than ever before: since the Patriot Act of 2001, the very bodies that are supposed to safeguard abstract freedoms have voted to support mass state surveillance; and all across Congress, the custodians of the “transparent” lawmaking process seem to be writing policy with the sole intention of making money from some mixture of insider trading and Polymarket gambling. Under such conditions, paranoia works as a way out, a psychic salve for the citizen who all his life has believed the state to consist of a bright and noble set of ideas, only to discover that it is in fact run by flawed, greedy people. Its true function, therefore, might well be a good deal less radical than its sufferers would like to admit: the more time you spend looking for government subverters in the local Jesuit mission or masonic lodge, the less time you spend looking in the lobbying industry, or big business, or the institutions of government themselves.

Anthropologists have been making this kind of argument for decades. When an ethnographer glosses, say, vampire panics in Malawi as an example of a culture reckoning with its colonial past, or South African zombie scares as a response to globalization, scarcely anyone raises an eyebrow. But for some reason, the lavishly funded debunking institutions in contemporary media — BBC Verify, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab — seem incapable of applying the same logic to Western societies. They just keep on checking isolated fact after isolated fact, maintaining the steady burble about “fostering transparency” and “countering disinformation” that is expected of them. They are, in short, just like Hofstadter, spending so much time crowing about the conspiracy theorist’s total lack of epistemic reasons for his beliefs that they fail to mention his abundance of causal ones.

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that the best political and sociological thinking always has a whiff of conspiracy theory to it. After all, to understand the world, you have to subject it to an immense simplification; you have, like the paranoiac, to come up with totalizing metaphors that you believe capture vast, sprawling processes — whether “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “modernity” or “globalization”. Indeed, you don’t have to be a sociologist to suspect that part of the reason why a lot of stolid, dependable media institutions are suffering a collapse in trust — despite the millions they have poured into their in-house debunking commissions — is that they have failed to make such leaps of interpretative simplification. There really are deep structural explanations for the latest inner-city stabbing, the latest riot, the latest bomb detonated in a distant, sun-baked part of the world, but you would be hard pressed to find them grappled with satisfactorily on the BBC. And if there is one thing The Paranoid Style in American Politics really does prove beyond all reasonable doubt, it is that the public’s conspiratorial imagination cannot be switched off by complacent talk of “fact-checking” and “debunking”. When an entire media class neglects the biggest issues of its day, some people cannot help but posit something vast and shadowy behind it, nudging the tiller, pulling the strings.

Safavid Iran is hardly the best known of the great Eurasian empires, but for nearly a quarter of a millennium, from 1501 to 1736, it boasted the kind of splendor that makes even the most cautious court eunuch feel almost immortal. At its peak under Shah Abbas the Great, it stretched from Baghdad and the Caspian Sea in the west to Kandahar and Bactria in the east; when the traveling jewel merchant Jean Chardin stumbled upon its capital, Isfahan, he marveled at its geometrical architecture, its vast reflecting pools, its hundreds of bathhouses, its main plaza, the lushly landscaped Naqsh-e Jahan, which was larger than St Peter’s Square in Rome. This, despite the fact that the empire had little in the way of productive industry, no precious metals to speak of, and Isfahan itself was surrounded by a barren, rocky plateau on one side and mountains on the other. How, he wondered, had the Safavids managed it?

The Safavid Empire did have one major advantage: it was perched at the crossroads of just about every significant silk trade route in the world. Raw silk streamed down from the humid provinces near the Caspian Sea and into Isfahan, then branched off, to Europe and the Ottoman lands in the west, Mughal India and China in the east. Anyone who dared bypass the Safavid routes found themselves subject to an irresistible campaign of bribes and blandishments until they came round: Shah Abbas, sensing that Armenian merchants might try to cut through Arabia instead, built a lavish new Armenian quarter on the outskirts of Isfahan, replete with three new Christian churches, and invited his challengers to take up residence there.

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So lucrative was the silk trade monopoly that by the time Abbas died in 1629, charging customs on it had become the default solution to just about every symptom of imperial decline. Isfahan needed a new dome, or bathhouse, or water garden? A new tax could be levied to finance it. The Afghan tribes were threatening the border? No need to conscript the native population: the silk duties would pay for endless battalions of mercenaries or slave-soldiers, fresh from the savage peoples of the Caucasus. The endless tariffs created bottomless demand for the Safavid currency: the imperial treasury in Isfahan could mint coin after coin without fear of debasement, since merchants would always hoover up the surplus to pay the new taxes. The Safavid empire, in other words, had discovered the heady delights of what in modern political economy is called seigniorage — the benefits that accrue when you have enough garrisons and slave-soldiers to be able to tell everyone what does and doesn’t constitute money. This magic mechanism gave them total fiscal invincibility. War after war, palace after palace: everything was possible for the Shah, the King of Kings, the Shadow of God on Earth.

I don’t know if the great minds in Washington and Langley that engineered the US’s recent foray into Iran ever opened a book on the Safavids before launching their campaign, but if they did, they might have noticed some similarities between the vanished empire of silk and their own. For one thing, both are empires built on remarkably similar systems of international seigniorage. Ever since 1974, when Richard Nixon agreed to supply Saudi Arabia with American weapons in return for the world’s largest oil producer denominating its oil trades in dollars, the US has had the privilege of a national currency that it is almost impossible to crash. Lawmakers in Washington can get away with all kinds of mad and reckless policies — running huge deficits, hollowing out domestic manufacturing, invading any nation it likes — safe in the knowledge that there will always be structural demand for what has become, thanks to the cooperation of a few lavishly bribed allies, the world’s reserve currency. Like the Safavid courtiers of the 17th century, American officials believe themselves to be somehow exempt from the normal requirement for productive national investment. Every week heralds a new, unwanted extravagance: a trade war, an actual war, a ballroom, with enough marble and gold leaf to rival anything in Isfahan. 

Unfortunately for the Trump administration, however, the other important thing worth remembering about the Safavid empire is that it no longer exists. Four years before the empire was founded by Shah Ismail I, a Portuguese explorer named Vasco da Gama had managed to bypass the silk roads altogether by navigating his caravel through the ferocious waters around the Cape of Good Hope; over the next century and a half, explorers and merchants set about making this route safer — establishing waystations in South Africa where ships could dock, replacing their caravels with more nimble and capacious Dutch fluyts, and discovering ingenious routes through the Indian Ocean to evade the vicious westerly winds that had scuppered so many of their predecessors. By the late 1600s, most merchants, if faced with a Safavid customs official demanding some new, swingeing tariff, could simply shrug and choose to take the long way round. Customs revenues plummeted; the silver coins Shah Abbas had stamped with his own face were unable to withstand their progressive debasement. By the time the Afghan warlord Mahmud Hotak thundered into Isfahan on horseback in 1722, the Safavid army was so understaffed and underequipped that it could barely put up a fight. 

The irony of America’s own march into Safavid lands is that it signals, perhaps more clearly than any other geopolitical development of the last 50 years, that the decline of the US is set to occur according to the Safavid model. Of course, the oil that props up the American dollar is not traded by Portuguese and Dutch merchants in caravels and fluyts. It is, however, subject to a powerful invisible infrastructure, of which the US government slowly seems to be relinquishing control. The dollar was already losing ground to the Chinese yuan before the US launched its invasion; now, up to 90% of Iran’s oil trade is conducted, in yuan, with China, and the dollar now makes up only 57% of foreign currency reserves internationally — a 25-year low. Moreover, the most exciting new applications of the Trump administration’s beloved blockchain technology all seem to revolve around cutting the US out of the oil-trading loop: the mBridge platform, for instance, has already processed RMB 387.2 billion worth of payments between China, Hong Kong, the UAE, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia, with 95% of transactions denominated in digital yuan. One by one, the significant non-aligned powers — Iran, the BRICS, ASEAN, Argentina — have begun to meet to discuss the possibility of denominating transactions in other currencies, while those countries that have toed the line seem to be demanding more from the US for the privilege. The UAE, for instance, has managed to exact a lucrative dollar-swap line after making a few threatening noises about adopting the yuan for their oil trades. In other words, the entire financial edifice on which America’s postwar hegemony was built has begun to wobble. What seemed just a few years ago like a permanent feature of the global system is starting to look very contingent indeed. 

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that there is a certain predictability to decadence. Empires sprout out from little quirks in the structure of the world: a bunch of sheep farmers find themselves sitting on top of an oil field, a trade route, or a piece of technology that renders them powerful enough to subdue all their neighbors. And then, gradually, the beneficiaries of this quirk manage to convince themselves that the real reason their empire has exploded into being rather than anyone else’s is their own inner greatness. 

For the Safavids, the beginning of the end came when Abbas’s great grandson, Shah Soltan Hoseyn, began to take the pomp and ritual he had inherited a little too seriously — throwing himself into the state religion with a puritanical zeal, forcing the Zoroastrians to convert, fighting all his neighbors. If you listen carefully to the most recent dispatches of the US State Department, you can notice the same, slightly crazed air. There is talk of being chosen by God, of razing civilizations to the ground in a single evening. The wiser courtiers are muttering seditiously. And there is another sound, too. It is quite faint, but it is unmistakable. You can hear it in the dead of night, when everyone is tucked up in bed, scrolling through X, dreaming of the next glorious invasion. Drifting through the trees on Capitol Hill, down to the black waters of the Potomac: the sound of hooves. 

In February, however, a pair of archaeologists published a paper that suggests we might have got the story of human literacy rather wrong. Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz are researchers at the University of Saarland, who for the last few years have been finding strange artifacts across the Jura mountains in Southern Germany. All of them date from between 43,000 and 34,000 years ago — an era known as the Aurignacian; the final throb of Europe’s last ice age, when mankind subsisted in small, itinerant, mammoth-hunting bands. The type of object varies greatly: archaeologists have unearthed flutes, carvings of animals, humanoid figurines, even strange monsters with the limbs of men and the heads of lions. All of them, however, have one thing in common. Their surfaces are engraved in strange, looping patterns with the same set of 22 symbols.

Feeding the patterns into a piece of software that measured different symbols’ statistical frequency, Bentz and Dutkiewicz realized that, whether they were unearthed in the lowlands of one end of the Jura region or the mountainous Swiss border at the other, the patterns tended to proceed in a remarkably regular way. The most common symbol was a V-shaped notch, followed by various lines, crosses and dots, plus a few complicated symbols, such as Y- and star-shaped signs, that are used only very occasionally. Clearly, the symbols were not merely decorative. They seemed, in fact, to be encoding something — recording information, just like the clay tablets of Uruk, except older by about 40,000 years.

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There was, however, one problem. Though the symbols clearly meant something, they clearly could not be a transcription of any kind of spoken language. The patterns are simply too repetitive, with the most common characters — the V-shaped notch in particular — often recurring 10 or 20 times in a row. If the symbols were simply letters corresponding to phonemes like in English, then the words they expressed could not be uttered like a human — there would be too many words like “ggggggggggahlllllllo” and “bbbbbbrpfff”. If they were ideograms like in Chinese, then they would amount to a single concept repeated over and over again — there would be lots of sentences like “cat dog cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat”. Neither of these seemed particularly likely. What, then, did the symbols mean?

Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s solution is to suggest that the phenomenon of “writing” might not be so unitary as we once believed. For the first 40,000 years of its existence, it was simply an abstract symbolic system to process complex data; only in the last 3,000 years did mankind acquire the strange notion that these sign-systems might correspond to the grunts and gurgles they used for everyday communication. Writing, in other words, is two separate inventions: “protowriting”, which bears no resemblance to the spoken language, and “modern day writing”, which does.

How did protowriting work in practice? The anthropological record gives us a clue: the of Peru, for instance, had their quipu, a set of colored strings with complicated patterns of knots that were used to record tax revenues and grain yields; the Iroquois of the American plains, meanwhile, have their wampum belt, upon which are threaded different types of shell and bead that record treaties and alliances between tribes. But perhaps the most intuitive way to understand protowriting, is to realize that we use it all the time. We are protowriting whenever we tally something up on a sheet of paper, or whenever we mark a date with a cross on a calendar — whenever, in short, we write something down that we can’t actually say. Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s best guess about the meaning of the Jura carvings is that they were used to record the yields from past hunts in years gone by — in other words, a cross between a tally and a calendar.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s insight, though, is the way in which it forces us to reconsider some of the fashionable prognostications about the future of reading and writing that are currently doing the rounds in the media. The “decline of literacy” is much invoked these days: perhaps most influentially by James Marriott, whose blockbuster essay “The dawn of the post-literate society” predicts a rapid “draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence” as societies lose the ability to read; but also by the rank-and-file of educational policymaking, who are discerning, in the words of the National Literacy Trust, “the lowest levels of reading enjoyment and daily reading in a generation”.

If literacy is two separate technologies, however, then this raises the question of which type of literacy is really declining. And it doesn’t require too much sociological insight to realize that the crude, record-keeping, tabulating function of protowriting is still very much intact. The average citizen spends more time than ever clicking through inane online forms, reading returns policies, sifting through gas bills to work out whether they have been overcharged. At work, people are surrounded by written information: it flashes up on their office Slack channels, whooshes into their email inboxes, chimes up at them from their phones. What has disappeared is the expectation that the little symbols we encounter should bear some relation to the way we speak — and the corollary that we should aim to deal with written texts via a kind of sustained, immersive attention, like we afford our interlocutor when we are having a conversation. We are, in other words, all Aurignacians now.

In a sense, then, LLMs have only accelerated this reversion to the stone age. After all, what are ChatGPT and Claude if not ways of avoiding the hard graft of making one’s prose conform to the norms and rhythms of the spoken language? The hardcore LLM user treats language as basically ideographic or hieroglyphic; he does not bother typing out sentences; he simply pulls up the interface, taps something like “ePic Giglamsh plot smmry bullet pts simple revisn” into the search bar, and waits for the machine to extrude its nice, chatty précis: “Certainly! Here’s a clear bullet-point plot summary of the Epic of Gilgamesh to help you with your essay or upcoming exam.”

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Does this mean, then, that the prophets of literacy’s demise are right? Perhaps not. After all, the written word has been trying to scuttle back in the direction of the Aurignacian carvings for as long as it has existed; even the most literate societies in history have required a dedicated squadron of artists and poets to yank the language continually back towards the vernacular. Dry, scholastic medieval Latin had to be rescued by Dante and Petrarch; frilly late Sanskrit, with its page-long compound words, needed to be put out of its misery by Tulsidas and Kabir. Even the “reading revolution” — the late 18th-century and early 19th-century efflorescence of poetry and novels beloved by those most concerned about the trajectory of human literacy — was built on similar agonisms. Despite all the Romantic poems, and realist novels, the fact remains that most of the writing undertaken during this period was decidedly non-literary: constitutions and penal codes drawn up by lawyers to fill the holes where absolute monarchs had once been; political pamphlets and propagandistic feuilletons cobbled together by journalists from barely comprehensible new abstractions; and modern bureaucracies that carried out levels of tabulation and record-keeping of which the Aurignacians could only dream. The literature of the period was an attempt to rescue the writing from this sorry condition — to reacquaint the written word, as Wordsworth, with “the language really used by men”.

Clearly, the new crisis of literacy isn’t quite the same as the one Wordsworth discerned at the beginning of the 19th century. There are certainly new phenomena to contend with: twitchy, under-socialized children who scream if denied access to the family iPad, and college literature students who can’t comprehend a page of Dickens. But still, those concerned about the “literacy crisis” would do well to remember the essential inevitability of “crisis” in the history of writing. Literacy always involves a tussle between the demand that writing be like speech, and the temptation to treat it like a simple Aurignacian sequence of chips and notches, a kind of autonomous code. And if the history of writing tells us one thing, it is that whenever writing looks most lost — whenever it seems to have lost all relevance to human lives, and decayed to pure, sterile manipulation of symbols — a new form might just be about to explode into being.

This article is about the second way of understanding the Jeffrey Epstein case.

In 1886, a young German anthropologist named Franz Boas landed in British Columbia, with the intention of studying the indigenous peoples as they began their ritual preparations for winter. He had seen similar preparations before, on Baffin Island in the frozen north, but the scale of these preparations was different: almost nightly, the Kwakiutl gathered in their long, rectangular houses to dance into the small hours of the morning, until the sun showed itself again. They prepared special masks for these ceremonies, and wore complicated insignia made of cedar bark; at many gatherings, there were complicated stage magic techniques, even rudimentary pyrotechnics. The longer Boas spent among the Kwakiutl, though, the more he became convinced that the strangest and most shocking rituals were held behind closed doors, only accessible to those with considerable wealth and long periods of purificatory seclusion behind them. He asked a few villagers about the rumors though: no one seemed to want to talk. They did have a name, though, for the select group of men in the village who were allowed to attend them: the “Hamatsa” — meaning, the “cannibals”.

Boas spent the next decade exploring the Pacific Northwest region. The more indigenous peoples he visited, the more he became convinced that all of them had equivalent, secret brotherhoods. There were “Cannibal Societies” among Kwakiutl, the Bella Coola, and the Tsimshian peoples, not to mention “Grizzly Bear Societies” and “Wolf Societies” who were rumored to eat human flesh, too. What was more, studying the cedar bark insignia of the different brotherhoods, Boas began to suspect that they were all connected: what other anthropologists had believed were multiple different peoples were perhaps better thought of as just two different groups: a scared, confused rank and file, and a secretive, cannibalistic elite.

For several decades, Boas’s discovery languished in the pages of relatively obscure ethnographies. Those anthropologists who encountered it tended to treat secret, cannibalistic cults as a quirk of the Pacific Northwest: a strange outgrowth of the totem religions of the region, and certainly not something with any wider sociological significance. Boas himself was an advocate of what he called “historical particularism” — the notion that societies should be treated on their own terms, according to their own internal logic, and certainly not extrapolated into any kind of grand, sweeping theory of human nature. Then, in 1902, a colonial administrator named P.A. Talbot began to notice some strikingly similar patterns in the region he had been tasked with governing in British Nigeria.

Talbot was first alerted to the fact that there might be a strange, second power system operating in his fiefdom by the road closures. Masked figures kept appearing on public highways and demanding they be shut for unspecified, ritual purposes. Soon they began to commandeer other public spaces: markets, town squares. Attending one of them, Talbot witnessed a masked man kill and eat a baby, only to “resurrect” it for the crowds of cooing onlookers (Talbot himself suspected the real explanation was that there were two different babies). Over time, he uncovered the truth: the masked men belonged to a shadowy group known as the “Ekkpo,” or “Leopard Society”, which had “usurped practically all the functions of government”, regulating trade, adjudicating disputes, imposing fines, and executing people they found guilty of non-observance of public rites, or having witnessed private ones. They had established a virtual monopoly on palm oil nuts, the main agricultural staple of the region.

Talbot published his findings in 1923, in a rather sensational book titled Life in Southern Nigeria. The Leopard Society was a kind of state-within-a-state, their power maintained by a vast network of secretive rituals: mock beheadings, staged resurrections, feats of bodily invulnerability — not to mention, of course, cannibalistic sacrifices. Within a few years, colonial officials across West and Central Africa had begun to notice similar features in their own territories: in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the secretive Poro society wormed its way into just about every important political position with initiates sacrificing their own first-born sons to reach the highest ranks; in Rwanda, the Kubwanda Society maintained secret lodges outside villages where they plotted techniques for taking over political power. By 1950, anthropologists were discovering secret societies on every continent on the planet: the Suque in Melanesia, with their mass sacrifices of pigs; the clown-fraternities of the American Southwest, with their black-and-white body paint; the “bear cults” among the Ainu of Japan, with their hidden feasts of ursine flesh. What Boas had thought was a relatively isolated phenomenon confined to a few fishing peoples in British Columbia was starting to look like a human universal.

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What did this all mean? For a while, the discipline of anthropology could not agree. Certain esoteric interpreters liked to think that the sheer preponderance was evidence of some hidden, perennial truth, accessible only to a select few in each society — that the Hamatsa and Ekkpo and Poro and Suque were privy to the same, occult wisdom as the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But, as other anthropologists quickly pointed out, it seems that the “wisdom” guarded by the secret societies was pretty variable — and in many cases, initiates didn’t even really seem to know what the secret they were guarding actually was. In fact, what all human societies seemed to require was not a particular kind of secret ritual or rite, but an excuse for secrecy itself.

The next breakthrough came in the Nineties, when archaeologists in France and Italy began to notice some strange patterns in the Paleolithic cave dwellings that littered the Northern Mediterranean. With surprising regularity, they noticed, there would be smaller caves, positioned a little way away from the main dwellings with hidden apertures, with unusual concentrations of cultic artifacts, and — entirely unheard of in other dwellings from the period — evidence of cannibalistic human sacrifice. What was more, such dwellings tended to belong to very specific types of peoples. The cannibal cults invariably seemed to emerge in “transegalitarian” societies — that is, societies who were caught somewhere between flat, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and stratified, feudal societies with established hereditary classes. In such societies, the archaeologist Brian Hayden explains, everything was up for grabs: greedy “aggrandizers” needed to recruit deputies and cronies, and quickly; but in the absence of standing armies and sophisticated ruling-class ideologies about the importance of giving tithes to the local baron or paying back one’s student loan, they needed to get creative. Perhaps, the archaeologists began to suspect, all the machinery of terror was simply a way of solving a technical problem of government: how to cleave apart a group of people who formerly believed themselves to be bound together in structures of reciprocal obligation. Masked ceremonies and mock-beheadings to terrify those excluded. Cannibalistic ceremonies to lock in the initiates. After all, were you really going to go crawling back to your family for forgiveness when you had just sacrificed your first-born son?

It is a surprise, then, that despite the question of the origins of social inequality having bedeviled political, social and legal thinkers since Rousseau, the ubiquity of such grisly, occult rituals isn’t better known. Secret societies are not just a vestige of older, quirkier times; they remain one of the most empirically sound explanations we have for why groups that have hitherto been bound together by bonds of community and family suddenly explode into hierarchy. Indeed, they are perhaps best thought of as social technologies for creating hierarchies. As such, they are also tell-tale signs that a group of people, however much they claim to be acting in the name of the common good — however many reputable chieftains they sponsor, however much of the local Congolese rubber industry they own — plan on sowing division.

In an important sense, the Epstein revelations are simply the latest chapter in the ancient history of secret societies designed to enforce boundaries between a cozy elite and a terrified rank and file. The evidence — the testimonies of all those underage girls trafficked for sex, the trapdoor into the ocean, the torture video, the suspicious order of 300 gallons of sulfuric acid the day after Epstein’s indictment — certainly seems grisly enough to guarantee a similar kind of bond of secrecy among those involved. What is more, Epstein really does seem to have had a coterie of powerful people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt against all evidence: not just among the celebrities who flocked to him long after his conviction, but also, perhaps, in institutions like the FBI, which gave him peculiarly lenient plea deal back in 2007, not to mention the virtually unprecedented guarantee of “immunity for all co-conspirators”. But in a sense, it is the more feverish rumors, like the cannibalistic orgies in the upstairs rooms of pizza restaurants posited by QAnon, that are most telling of Epstein’s sociological significance. Suddenly, spontaneously, people with no familiarity with the Hamatsa, the Ekkpo or the Poro, are devising imagery straight out of the ethnographies of Boas and Talbot. It is as if ordinary people know, instinctively, that the greater the inequality, the stranger and more occult the rituals that reinforce it need to be.

Of course, this view of Epstein does give the lie to a certain, complacent view of our own society — one that sees it as founded in a set of liberal institutions whose principles include “transparency” and “democratic accountability” and “not killing babies in cannibalistic orgies”. But perhaps this correction is overdue. After all, mainstream historians such as Margaret Jacob and Frances Yates have been arguing for decades that secret societies were right at the heart of the political foment of the Enlightenment, with groups such as the Carbonari in Italy, the Comuneros in Spain, and the Decembrists in Russia incubating pretty much all the most important democratic institutions of the 19th century. Even today, it is hard to spend too much time among politicians and barristers in London without noticing, say, the preponderance of freemasons in the livery companies of the City of London, or the tendency of entire political dynasties to be drawn from the alumni of Oxford drinking societies with humiliatingly macabre initiation ceremonies involving dead pigs. As hard as it might be to imagine some horsehair-wigged judge staging the mock-execution of an infant, Ekkpo-style, our most venerable institutions do seem very good at devising ways of getting their members ensnared in a web of each other’s humiliating secrets, even without an Epstein to orchestrate it all.

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But perhaps this conspiratorial reading misses the most important way in which our liberal institutions have begun to function like secret societies. After all, far more potent than the way these institutions operate behind closed doors is the way they operate out in the open — specifically, the way they strike fear into those who do not belong to the elite guild. Take the law, for instance. Reading over the Epstein files, one of the most shocking things one discovers is that for Epstein and his affiliates the whole function of the legal system seemed to be to frighten and bully those who did not really understand it. Epstein appears to have been serenely comfortable using his lawyers to hound and pester people who fell afoul of him: for him, with the best lawyers in the world on retainer, a few dozen lawsuits were easily navigable; for his victims, with normal jobs and families and no savings to pay for counsel, just one lawsuit could quite plausibly ruin their lives. This technique – using what are supposed to be neutral procedures for administering justice as a punishment in their own right – is so widely acknowledged today that it even has a nickname in America: the SLAPP, or “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”. But we should not be seduced by the jargon into thinking this is anything new. The underlying logic is exactly the same as the Hamatsa and the Ekkpo: the law is a secret guild, that works in the service of initiates, and terrifies everyone else.

This logic seems to be increasingly popular among politicians, too. In the UK, our political class seems to be gleefully shedding the Enlightenment commitment to accessibility and transparency in legislative affairs and embracing the occult techniques of the Ekkpo. The last five years have seen pieces of legislation creep into force that are unprecedented in their sheer vagueness: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022, with its decade-long sentences for those who cause “serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity”, whatever that means, or the Public Order Act of 2023, which renders illegal all protest that might cause “serious disruption to the life of the community”. Now ask yourself: what are these bills meant to achieve? What any of these legal widgets really means is a secret, known only to initiates who have sifted through reams of case law and sat in on the relevant closed discussion groups at Chatham House. It doesn’t matter. You are not supposed to obey rules like these. You are meant to cower before them in holy terror.

This is why the anthropological record is such a useful corrective. If we in the UK suffer from one national defect above all others, it is a kind of deference to bourgeois authority: a nice, public-school accent, the flutter of a gown, a well-timed “hear ye”, and we all become as obedient as lambs. The British public has become very accustomed to asking whether things are legal or illegal, harmful or not harmful, sanctioned by the bureaucracy or not sanctioned, but tends to forget to ask what the function of these designations actually is, how strange they look from the outside — to a visitor from the black fjords of the Pacific Northwest, perhaps, or an anthropologist fresh off the boat armed only with a notebook. If there is some small good that comes from the Epstein case, it will be that it has helped us to recapture some of that strangeness. For the first time in decades, people seem to be viscerally, instinctively aware that when it comes down to it, power is never actually about laws and regulations and procedures. It is about what goes on in hidden caves and smoky rooms. It is about the infinite terror of what we do not understand, and the suspicion, even if we cannot prove it, that the person ordering us around might just have a taste for human flesh.

For a while, it looked as if Philip Roth was going to adhere to this protocol rather neatly. When he died in 2018, his memorial event at the New York Public Library was attended by Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Mia Farrow; in the weeks that followed, even the most politically hostile obituarists were forced to admit that Roth had been the most important American writer of his generation. Blake Bailey’s 900-page Philip Roth: The Biography was published in 2021, to gushing acclaim from reviewers as distinguished as Cynthia Ozick and David Remnick, and, more importantly, a place on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a big, brash, bawdy celebration of the writer, who, if turbulent love affairs and glamorous friends are considered a reliable metric, had done more living than most.

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Then, in April 2021, disaster struck. At what was just about the height of the MeToo movement, worrying rumors began to circulate about Roth’s biographer. Bailey, it was alleged, groomed female students at a high school where he taught, and later allegedly raped two women (Bailey denied the allegations, and no formal charges were made. He later published his account of the scandal in a book called Canceled Lives). Soon, the story had reached national newspapers; Norton, Bailey’s publisher, withdrew his book. Within a few weeks, however, the discourse had taken an unusual turn. Much of the criticism left Bailey behind entirely and instead turned its attention on Roth himself. “A best-selling biography of a misogynist, written by an alleged abuser, is almost too apt a metaphor,” wrote one journalist. “Philip Roth and His Defensive Fans Are Their Own Worst Enemies,” read a headline in The Nation. It was no wonder, so the allegation went, that Roth had chosen a predator as his biographer. Had they not read him? His novels were littered with wife-beatings, underage seductions, extramarital affairs. He was, everyone suddenly seemed to agree, the misogynist’s laureate.

Roth Studies are yet to recover from this commotion. If you want to get a Roth biography published these days, you have to strike a rather coy, apologetic tone. This, at any rate, is the tactic pursued by Stephen J. Zipperstein in Philip Roth: Stung By Life, published by Yale University Press this week. Yes, Zipperstein argues, Roth did have a lot of sex, but he was first and foremost a writer; the biographer, therefore, must put aside his prurience and focus on the work itself. Accordingly, Stung By Life passes over much of the juiciest gossip that surrounded Roth in dignified silence, and instead offers long, slightly staid summaries of the novels. The success of the biography — and, indeed, the future of Roth’s reputation — appears to be staked on a very old question: to what extent, when all is said and done, is it possible to separate the art from the artist?

Once the problem is framed in this way, it is hard not to be pessimistic about the prospects for both the Roth biography and the Roth brand. Roth was, after all, a compulsive literary self-examiner and self-mythologizer: at least three of his novels contain a character called “Philip Roth”, and a full nine involve Nathan Zuckerman, whose Jewish upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, relationship with his father, succès de scandale with a ribald early novel called Carnovsky, and litany of physical and mental afflictions are clearly modeled on Roth himself. His first real blockbuster, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), took the form of one long psychoanalytic confession, full of ungenerous family sketches that most readers took as barbs against Roth’s own parents, and a memorable defilement of a piece of liver that led one writer to muse on The Tonight Show — clearly showing where she came down on the issue of separating art from artists — that “Mr Roth is a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand”.

Poring over early interviews with Roth, it is impossible to ignore the sheer frequency with which the question of biography comes up. Following the publication of his first truly great novel, The Ghost Writer (1979) — which sees a fictionalized Roth (Nathan Zuckerman) undertake literary pilgrimage to a fictionalized Bernard Malamud via a fictionalized Saul Bellow — almost every interviewer feels the need to open with the same salvo of inquiries: “Are you Zuckerman?” “On which one of your stunning girlfriends is this woman modeled?” “How do your parents feel, knowing they have been so mercilessly stitched up?” Roth, of course, always rebuffs the questions: life is life, and art is art, and any conflation of the two is just readerly laziness. Still, it is hard, reading over Roth’s back catalog, not to conclude that these conflations and confusions were not at least part of his aesthetic master-plan. Roth was particularly fond of quoting Czesław Miłosz’s aphorism that: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” When Roth picks up his pen, reads the hidden admonition, no-one in his life is safe.

There is a case to be made that Roth’s early novels tend to be successful in strict proportion to how much they cannibalize his life and relationships. To my mind, The Counterlife (1986) is the best of the bunch — yet it is difficult to imagine reading this book without some sense of what kind of creature Roth was. After all, in many ways, it is a novel about how mad, neurotic, possessive and irresponsible writers can often be with the other people in their lives. The general conceit is straight out of Pirandello: one by one, the characters in Zuckerman’s work — his brother, Henry, and Maria, the young woman upstairs with whom he has been having an affair — start rebelling against the author who controls them.

In the final section of The Counterlife, Zuckerman moves to England, and begins to dream of a peaceful, domestic existence with Maria, holed up in her flat in Chiswick with a baby on the way. But he can never permit himself this pleasure; he is too insistent on injecting conflict, neurosis, plot, into everything he touches. “You are forty-five years old, and something of a success,” says the exasperated Maria: “it’s high time you imagined life working out.” She does not get her way. Of course she doesn’t: she has fallen in love with a writer, and to the writer, people are just raw material, pawns to be pushed around on a board. “At the point where ‘Maria’ appears to be most her own woman, most resisting you, most saying I cannot live the life you have imposed upon me,” she exclaims in her final letter to Zuckerman, “she is least real, which is to say least her own woman, because she has become again your “character,” just one of a series of fictive propositions. This is diabolical of you.”

A few years after The Counterlife was published and showered with awards, one of the characters in Roth’s real life began to rebel, too. Claire Bloom, Roth’s English ex-wife, who had suffered through The Counterlife’s composition alongside him, released her own account of their marriage. Her ex-husband, she wrote in her wildly successful memoir Leaving A Doll’s House, was not just a neurotic and a valetudinarian, but a gleeful saboteur of every good thing in his life — cruel to Bloom’s daughter, downright libelous to her family, and all for the simple reason, as she saw it, that “too much harmony had become an obstacle to his creativity”. Almost no-one believed Roth’s side of the story — after all, he had just won the National Critics’ Circle Award by casting himself in much the same light.

What is the partisan of “separating the art from the artist” to make of all this? Clearly, Roth’s work cannot really be fenced off from the unsavoriness of his life; it is effective, in large part, because it appears to be a product of that unsavoriness, the spontaneous emanation of a deeply flawed soul. Does that mean, then, that projects like Zipperstein’s are futile? Or is there another way to advance biographical criticism without just resolving into a moralizing whine?

Perhaps we should look to Roth’s own work for guidance. When I read the novels Roth produced in the aftermath of his marriage to Bloom, I am struck by the influence of one writer in particular — not the well-known ur-Roths like Saul Bellow, Kafka, and Henry James — but Louis Ferdinand Céline, a frothing antisemite, Nazi collaborator, pervert, misogynist, and plausible candidate for the most evil writer of the last century. Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995) sometimes reads almost like a pastiche of Céline: a debauched Jewish puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath rages, mourns, copulates, blasphemes, desecrates with a relentlessness that rivals even great Célinian protagonists like Bardamu and Ferdinand. Even Martin Amis — himself not exactly shy about putting the odd male monster in his fiction — admitted he found the character “rebarbative”.

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In a sense, though, Céline rescued Roth. Smarting from Bloom’s revelations, wary of his growing number of feminist critics, the most indignant man in American letters could have easily retreated into a kind of prickly vanity, a defensive management of reputation. Céline, however, showed him that redemption could be sought in a kind of anti-vanity — that great things could be achieved by an artist who was prepared to cultivate a bad reputation, to deform his own personality into horrific shapes, just to make his work seem all the more stirringly grotesque. In an interview with The Paris Review, Roth explained the method. There were saving graces in Céline’s life: his diligence as a doctor, his work with the League of Nations. “But that wasn’t interesting,” said Roth. “His writing drew its vigor from the demotic voice and the dramatization of his outlaw side (which was considerable), and so he created the Céline of the great novels.”

This, I suspect, is what both Roth’s moralizing detractors and formalist defenders miss. Whenever we feel tempted to moralize about Roth’s life, we have to ask ourselves: is this not, on some level, part of the trap he has laid for us? Does he not, deep down, want to be abhorred? Perhaps this is the true value of the newer, “boring” Roth biographies: they remind us that in many ways, Roth the monster was just as much a creation as Roth the distinguished man of letters. Reading Zipperstein’s book, it is hard not to conclude that though Roth left lots of disgruntled women in his wake, the overwhelming majority accused him not of philandering, or deceiving them, but of being selfish — completely unwilling to compromise on his literary efforts, unwilling to surrender even an hour that could be whiled away in his study to anyone. If you wanted to spend time with Roth, it seems, this was something you just had to accept. Your life would be raided and bowdlerized, your family slandered, your most intimate moments submitted by his publisher to the National Book Award committee.

Perhaps we should condemn Roth for this. There is something genuinely deranged about someone who is prepared to deform themselves for the sake of a novel or two, and who treats everyone who crosses their path as raw material for their act. Still, it is stirring, especially in an era when reputation-management rules, when books are pulped for their author’s alleged impropriety and publishing becomes ever more indistinguishable from public relations, to witness one writer be so willingly scandalous, viewing his reputation as an addendum to his art, and not the other way around. If Philip Roth really was a control-freak, obsessed with maneuvering everyone in his life into the narratives he had ordained, then this was not out of vanity, but out of artistic single-mindedness. Any behavior was permissible, so long as it made the Philip Roth Show appear even more dazzling. In this respect, he had a streak not just of Céline, but of the greatest Jewish writers, of Moses and Jeremiah and Maimonides: he knew, deep down, that the flesh is nothing, compared to the word.

Liberal commentators in the US and UK have already resurrected familiar narratives about a global “populist wave” composed of rabble-rousers with unsound economic policies and questionable hair. But anyone who has spent even a little time in Argentina will know that things are rather more complicated. “Populism” is a slippery designation in Argentine politics: Milei’s main ally in parliament is the former president Mauricio Macri — the kind of cautious, sensible, establishment politician who tends to appeal rather more to the IMF and the World Bank than the baying mass of “the people”; his main opponents, meanwhile, are the Unión por la Patria — a vast, heterogeneous bloc of self-described “populists” descended from the brash, Perón-affiliated Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. However the Anglosphere chooses to parse the political ructions of a country like Argentina, it seems incapable of capturing the facts on the ground.

The reason for this incomprehension is not so much the singular weirdness of Argentine politics as the crudeness of our own theoretical terms. In the UK and the US, we stubbornly continue to denigrate populists as “demagogues” and sowers of “division”: people who threaten to undermine our nice, efficient liberal institutions. In Argentina, by contrast, the sheer preponderance and variety of “populists” in government have forced intellectuals to come up with a far more sophisticated understanding of their techniques. The Argentine Left, in particular, is far more willing to tread on the toes of liberals and concede that there might be something about populism that is worth retaining, even as the worst excesses of individual populists are to be condemned. The names associated with this tradition of “anti-anti-populism” are not exactly familiar: no one reads David Viñas or León Rozitchner in the UK today, and only a few theory-addled postgraduate students have heard of Ernesto Laclau. But perhaps we should take this remarkable body of work more seriously. After all, what happens in Argentine politics has a habit of happening everywhere else a few years later; understand Argentina, and you understand the world.

At the center of the debate over populism in Argentina is the controversial, and often misunderstood, figure of Juan Domingo Perón. When Perón came to power in 1946, it soon became clear that he represented almost everything the political Left despised: he commanded a deranged cult of personality, he shut down pretty much any university department or magazine that criticized him, and there was certainly a reason why so many Nazis ended up fleeing to Argentina. The well-to-do liberals of the nicer districts of Buenos Aires were terrified; the grande dame of Argentine culture, Victoria Ocampo, described Perón’s government as a “monstrous dictatorship” and was promptly thrown in prison.

Yet among the working classes — including hundreds of thousands of factory workers who should have been the Left’s natural constituency — Perón was something like a god. His first presidency saw vast rallies in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, where thousands of shirtless industrial laborers pledged their allegiance to the leader. To Leftists of the period, the rallies were a sick parody of the revolution they had been yearning for all their lives; here was the industrial proletariat, rising up, chanting for justice outside the presidential residence, but doing so in the service of someone whom they had always considered a fascist. The parallels with the populists of today are not hard to detect.

In 1953, a few Left-leaning writers set up a magazine to try and shock the masses out of their allegiance. It was called Contorno — a word that means something like “margins”, but also suggests some kind of side dish, the kind of thing you might get with a big lump of Argentine steak. The early articles laid the blame for Perón’s ascendency squarely on Argentina’s complacent, liberal intellectual class. The first issue contained an article by the historian David Viñas called “The Betrayal of Honest Men”, in which he outlined what today is often called the “professional managerial class” — a busy hive of intellectuals, managers, establishment politicians, media personalities, all toiling away to reproduce the conventional wisdom. When the “masses” seized on politicians who carved up the world into about an “us” and a “them”, Viñas argued, they were not simply being “divisive”; they were drawing attention to this invisible class and its role in prolonging the status quo. Populism, in other words, was not a sickness in its own right, but a symptom of a political culture that refused to call the establishment by its proper name.

By the Sixties, Contorno’s affiliates had turned these insights into the kind of full-blooded critique of liberal democracy that was rarely uttered in the West during the Cold War period. Writers like León Rozitchner and Oscar Masotta made Viñas’s ideas systematic: now, it was not just Argentine intellectuals that were to blame for the emergence of Perón, but the whole political system. Parliamentary democracy, argued Rozitchner in “Proletarian and Bourgeois Experience”, accustoms its citizens to a kind of magical thinking. They no longer advocate for their own interests; instead, they cast around for someone who “represents” them — usually, a political party, or leader, or member of parliament. But once this metaphysics of “representation” is accepted, it is very hard to keep in check. If parliamentary candidates do a lackluster job at representing the people, then what is to stop the people from casting around for someone who might offer them a better deal? Why should it be that the beneficiaries of a rickety electoral system are given the sacred task of representation? Why not a strongman? Why not a king?

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Argentina’s tradition of Left-wing “anti-anti-populism” has also produced at least one of the most important contributions to the theory of populism in recent times. Ernesto Laclau was loosely affiliated with Contorno members in his youth, but did most of his academic work in the UK between 2000 and his death in 2014. At the University of Essex, he published works like Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and On Populist Reason that were, for a time, very popular among earnest postgraduate students. For Laclau, “populism” was just about the most misunderstood term in the political scientist’s lexicon. Populism, he argued, was simply the recognition that institutions that claim to be universal are, in fact, anything but. The “government” is nothing more than a clutch of careerists trying to enrich themselves. The “civil service” is just a pretext for self-aggrandizing bureaucrats and greedy NGOs to siphon off public money. The “rule of law” is simply a feeding-frenzy for a few venal lawyers. Populism, he argued, wasn’t a type of politics; it was the essential procedure of all politics — which involves the building of coalitions against some established order in a bid to change the world. It’s the name we give to the moment when all the lofty abstractions that justify the status quo are suddenly revealed as crude exercises of power.

This is all very attractive in the abstract, but how useful are these ideas in real life? In Argentina, at least, the Left’s willingness to take populist energies seriously has, at various points in history, made it unusually potent in the face of international injustices. In the late Nineties and early 2000s, Argentina emerged as the epicenter of the worldwide rebellion against privatization and IMF-driven austerity known as the Global Justice Movement. The same constituencies of industrial workers who had once turned out for Perón blocked roads, banged pots and pans in the street, and chanted their famous slogan, “¡Que se vayan todos!”: “Out with all of them”. At a time when the North American Left was still in the thrall of “political correctness”, fawning over the unctuous Bill Clinton and meekly accepting the damage to the working class wrought by Nafta, the Argentine Left had rediscovered the joys of truculence and vulgarity, and resolved to take to the streets until the technocrats listened.

It is worth remembering this forgotten tradition — not of populism, exactly, so much as of “anti-anti-populism” — as the world acquires more and more leaders who seem to deserve the “populist” label. Commentators in the US and UK have already begun to speak of a “Latin Americanization” of their countries’ politics; perhaps they ought to “Latin Americanize” their countries’ political discourse, too. Indeed, if they did find a wider readership in the Anglosphere, writers like Viñas, Rozitchner and Laclau could be immensely useful to the political Left. At a time when the working classes have all but absconded from progressive causes, and are instead flocking into the streets in support of reactionary ones, it is up to a few all-but-forgotten Argentines to remind us that not everyone who wants to make the world a fairer, gentler place wants to do so with a sneer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In reality, Oxbridge interviews are nothing like this. Last year, I was hired to work as an interviewer for undergraduate admissions at one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. What an honor: only a decade ago, I had sat in the opposite chair, and tried not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of power that the erudite stranger in front of me was able to exert over my future. Now, I had ascended to the role of interviewer; the sacred task of spotting academic potential had been entrusted to me.

A few weeks before the interviews, I was informed by an administrator that I would have to sit through a short online preparation suite. It was to take about two hours, and would instill in me, she promised, some of the Solomonic fair-mindedness that is required of the Oxford interviewer. Much of the suite’s content was reasonable, or at least harmless: a template to help us structure the interview, the usual salvo of unconscious bias tests, the helpful suggestion that we avoid mentioning the interviewee’s sexuality or ethnicity in our pre-interview chitchat.

To my surprise, however, the longest chunk of my “training” was devoted to various kinds of admonition. There was, I was reminded, a lot that could go wrong in interview settings. Increasingly, I was informed, students and parents were known to get litigious if they failed to secure a place in the long run.

The primary job of the interviewer, therefore, was to make sure that all his or her decisions were backed up by a paper trail of clear, transparent decision-making that proved that the selection procedure was fair. To this end, a handy list of “evaluation criteria” had been provided for each subject by the administrators: for every candidate, we ought to be prepared to provide a nice, clear list of boxes they had ticked upon subpoena or Freedom of Information request. Obediently, I began to click through screen after screen of standards, targets, benchmarks; vague reifications like “demonstration of analytic ability” vied with numerical scores denoting socioeconomic disadvantage.

I suspect that the rationale for this new regime of rubrics and targets can be found in the old stories of institutional hazing. After all, however well such outlandish interview techniques serve as anecdotes years later, they are hardly fair — at least if “fairness” is defined as the imposition of a nice, clear, non-arbitrary standard which all candidates have the same opportunity to prepare for, and to which all candidates are subjected equally.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel it was slightly absurd to take something as deliberately supple and formless as an interview — a scenario that is still prized by employers precisely because it allows them to see past the drab uniformity of the CV — and subject it to such rigid trammels. If we were simply going to ask candidates to tick pre-drawn boxes, then why not cut out the middleman and do away with interviews altogether? Nor, I began to suspect, was the new system even particularly fair: under the old regime, interviewers could seize upon whatever it was that the candidate seemed to be especially good at, or interested in, and follow the thread wherever it led them; now, they were constantly being yanked back by the rubric towards lines of questioning that would, inevitably, favor a certain kind of student over others. Viewed in this light, what we were calling “fairness” actually turned out to be something very different: protocol, paperwork, procedure.

Oxford may sit near the top of the great pyramid of British institutional prestige, but it is not alone in displaying this tendency to conflate “fairness” with pointless bureaucratization. I have a distinct memory of working as a secondary-school teacher, and handing back a wonderful, insightful essay on Hamlet, which I had been forced to award a C because it addressed the wrong “Assessment Objectives” as stipulated by the exam board. Nor is the trend even confined to education: Justin Welby’s Church of England, with its Synod-mandated “talent pipelines”, functions in much the same way, as does the Civil Service, with its ornate systems for ensuring regional equilibrium between fast-streamers. The result is that, increasingly, academics, teachers, priests, and countless other professionals end up interacting with their charges, parishioners or public in a spirit of bureaucratic guilt: “If it were up to me, I’d do it differently,” we sigh as we watch the face before us crumple into disappointment, “but I don’t make the rules.”

In education, at least, the adoption of fairness as an organizing principle is surprisingly recent. You certainly won’t find much mention of it in the great humanist educationalists like Humboldt, or Cicero — nor even the great egalitarian firebrands of the Sixties, like Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière, who tended to avoid metaphors that implied they were simply doling out some education-commodity.

In the UK, in fact, the fairness fetish only really took off in the Eighties, when a series of Thatcherite reforms standardized education across the country. The most dramatic intervention came in 1988, when the Education Reform Act homogenized national curricula, broke up schooling into a uniform sequence of national “Key Stages”, and laid the groundwork for Ofsted, with its byzantine edifice of fairness-promoting rules and stipulations. The other watchword during these years, propagated by Keith Joseph, the education secretary, was “accountability”. Education, it was argued, was to be transparent to society as a whole, its structures and values fully codified and immediately accessible to any would-be auditor — just like the best companies in the private sector, fresh from restructurings by McKinsey and Deloitte. Accountable schools were fair because they ensured children and parents alike always knew where the goalposts were; if they ended up undereducated, or unemployed, the only people they could blame were themselves.

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With this in mind, it suddenly becomes much easier to discern what is going on in institutions like Oxford: less an egalitarian revolution than a kind of managerial coup, carried out by an elite administrative class. Thatcher (and just about every politician since) was bound to support the shift to fairness through “accountability”: after all, such measures take away the power to decide what is good from teachers — who are hardly the natural allies of the Right, what with their penchant for labor organization and teaching the young to think for themselves — and give it instead to white-collar workers, neoliberalism’s natural constituency.

The “fairness”, in other words, is essentially rhetorical. What makes the rubrics and marks schemes and assessment objectives seem fair is not that their stipulations avoid favoring some candidates over others (clearly, they do), nor that they are systematic and holistic (they are just as arbitrary as any other system), not even that they are meaningfully “transparent” (after all, what does “demonstrates consistent analytic and evaluative ability” actually mean?). Rather, it is the fact that the people ultimately responsible for selection see themselves as impartial, capable of rising above the fray with a kind of serene bureaucratic neutrality. A commitment to “fairness”, we might say, is just a way for the administrative class to vest itself with the power of the judge.

As a result, administrators in places like Oxford like to propagate an entirely misguided sense of the way in which snobbery and elitism actually work today. Many people, it seems, are content to spout what is basically a recycled version of Pierre Bourdieu — the idea that wealthy people have “cultural capital” in the form of a sophisticated-sounding accent, decent Latin, a working knowledge of opera, etc., that makes them stand out in selection procedures despite not really deserving to do so. The rubrics, by this logic, are egalitarian because they prevent academics from falling head-over-heels for the first rich kid who name-drops Hegel in his interview.

But anyone who has spent time in an “elite” secondary school in the last 10 years knows that “cultural capital” is not the primary gift these institutions bestow. Wealthy parents don’t pay for their children to go to private schools so that they can learn more about Hegel or Humboldt or even Hamlet; they do it so that they can learn how to get good exam results and construct tight personal statements, which they hope, somewhere down the line, will be transubstantiated into a well-paying white-collar job. These days, in fact, the real marker of elevated social class is a kind of bureaucratic efficiency — the ability to navigate the rubrics and procedures that apportion success in the modern world, without losing the will to live. Even the kids who do slip through the net from difficult backgrounds tend to be the strivers, with their clean sweeps of exam results, rather than the dreamy, thoughtful kids who tend not to read the mark schemes in the first place.

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Thankfully Oxford, at least, has not done away with the role of the interviewer entirely (the same cannot be said of most US universities, where admission tends to depend entirely on personal statements and exam results). There still remains, despite the best efforts of some, a crucial unaccountability to the interview scenario: ultimately, what the interviewers are really looking for is a certain spark of insight or teachability, and most of them have enough rhetorical dexterity to find an analogue for this spark in whatever the administrators give them. The worry is that, by the time academics are able to exercise this discretion, it is too late: all students have been systematically undereducated, and have grown so adept at pandering to the structures designed to promote fairness and accountability in primary and secondary school that they have quite forgotten how to think. Already, vast numbers of students turn up at university unable to read or write properly — they simply flit, free-associatively, from mark-worthy buzzword to mark-worthy buzzword, just as the “assessment objectives” model teaches them. Vanishingly few of them are prepared to undertake the voyage into the unknown and ineffable that ends up producing the best prose.

Some kind of rediscovery of the virtues of “unaccountability” would benefit just about every institution in the US. It would encourage their members to take risks, think freely and flexibly, rather than simply regurgitating rubrics; it would, in other words, promote the kind of behavior which the US’s institutions, with their widely lamented slide towards unproductivity and managerial bloat, sorely needs. Plenty of plodders and pencil pushers would feel hard-done-by; the strivers, no doubt, would have to be stripped of their birthright. But if such reforms were carried out correctly, our institutions just might be able to reobtain a sense that what they do is valuable for its own sake. And what, really, could be fairer than that?

In the past few years, such tests have become unavoidable for any aspiring professional. As of 2017, 75 of The Times’s Top 100 UK companies used psychometric assessments as part of their recruitment strategies, and the year before last, the global industry that designs, administers and coaches these tests was valued at over nine billion dollars. No one can escape, if they want to get on in the white-collar world. University students regularly shell out sums greater than the average termly maintenance loan on slick preparatory courses, and adult career-switchers often have to take multiple days off work to participate in whatever “assessment suite” has been dreamed up by their prospective new employer.

The purveyors of these tests certainly seem sure of their efficacy. Pearson, the multi-billion-pound market-leader, informs prospective buyers that such tests are “seen as a successful tool for predicting job success”, and that “research shows that organizations can predict over 70% of performance [sic] by using the right tools”. Those professionals who have done well by them are equally optimistic: “It’s basically all about being logical,” a corporate lawyer tells me. “It suits me, because I have a very logical brain.”

Yet despite such convincing testimonies, it remains remarkably difficult to extract from these tests any kind of philosophically robust procedure. One study of one of the most popular “critical thinking” formats found that candidates with formal training in logic and the philosophy of language might actually be at a disadvantage compared to their more ignorant counterparts. What, we might reasonably ask, is going on?

Though there are, these days, nearly as many test formats as there are HR departments, a few clear market-leaders have emerged. The most widely assessed capacity seems to be “critical thinking” — a largely undefined term that seems to have something to do with reading chunks of text and sorting valid inferences from invalid ones. In the UK, at least, the most popular rubric is the notorious “Watson-Glaser” format, which forms the major criterion for entry into professions like law, but also underpins many of the verbal reasoning tests used in the educational system, such as TSA tests employed by Oxford and Cambridge and the UKCAT test that guards the gates of medical school. It is also comparatively ancient, originating in America’s Progressive Era, the high point of race realism, eugenics, degeneracy theory, and a host of other now-unfashionable beliefs in man’s capacity to measure and taxonomize his fellow man.

Here is a paradigmatic Watson-Glaser test question, which I have adapted from Pearson’s own website:

Statement: Two hundred school students in their early teens voluntarily attended a recent weekend student conference in Leeds. At this conference, the topics of race relations and means of achieving lasting world peace were discussed, since these were problems that the students selected as being most vital in today’s world.

Based on the statement above, evaluate the following inference: “As a group, the students who attended this conference showed a keener interest in broad social problems than do most other people in their early teens.”

A) True
B) Probably true
C) Insufficient data
D) Probably false
E) False

According to Pearson’s own marks scheme, this statement is “probably true” — “because, as is common knowledge, most people in their early teens do not show so much serious concern with broad social problems.”

But is this common knowledge? Having worked in a school myself, I am struck by the fact that, if anything, young people in this country are more attentive to broad social problems than their jaded elders, often saturated in online political talking-points to the point of downright unteachability. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the best answer is C) Insufficient data, on the basis that there is nothing about students’ interest in the prompt.

Such issues may seem trivial, but they stem from a deep philosophical incoherency in all the major critical thinking formats. Tests claim to be assessing analytic ability — that is, the ability to draw conclusions from logical premises, according to the ancient form of the syllogism: A is B; All Bs are C; therefore, A is C. But there is no “probably” in a syllogism. What ends up happening, then, is that applicants are invited to bring outside judgments about semantics and the probabilistic relations of natural facts on their answer.

This raises the question of what criteria the test-takers are meant to use to make such judgments. The preparatory course-providers set up complicated rubrics that they claim will help their students sort everything out: “Understanding the difference, between common knowledge (allowed in the inference section)” reads one handy guide on a popular site called JobTestPrep, “and other types of knowledge (not allowed) is what ultimately allows you to find the correct answers to questions”. Thus, from the fact “Dan is standing at the bus stop” we can make the “common knowledge” inference that “he is probably waiting for the bus” (other possibilities, such as “he is sheltering from the rain” are here deemed to be wild and unreasonable). We cannot infer, however, from the fact that “She is driving a BMW” that “she is probably rich”. This is not “common knowledge”, but “general knowledge” — which, apparently, is a totally different thing. Even if we wrap our heads around these distinctions, not one marks scheme I have consulted acknowledges that the word “probably” could just as easily denote a semantic uncertainty as an epistemological one. Candidates with a background in philosophy of language, for example, would likely perceive that words like “rich” are relative and depend on context; they would thus be more likely to include hedging words like “probably”, and thus fall afoul of the marks scheme in a different way.

In other critical thinking formats, this blindness to the way in which logic is underpinned by semantics yields even sillier results. Consider this question, from the “evaluation of arguments” section of the JobTestPrep website:

Evaluate the answer to the following question as STRONG or WEAK:

Q: Should a company grant its employees some free time to spend in any manner they choose?

A: No — employees are likely to use the free time to clean their homes, run errands, and meet with friends, and thus bring no benefit to the company whatsoever.

According to JobTestPrep, this is a strong argument. “It is important, as it refers to the benefit the company might (or might not) get from this policy.” Here, the “common knowledge” required is nothing less than a total and unquestioning identification, on the part of the test-taker, with the mercenary ethos of the shareholder corporation. The idea the word “should” might denote any other type of obligation — moral, perhaps — is totally impermissible.

The procedures underpinning the test-setters’ categorizations are not just difficult to divine: they are completely arbitrary. The poor test-takers end up desperately trying to channel the spirit of the test, spending vast amounts of time (and, conveniently, money) on test-prep programs in the hope of acquiring an instinctive sense of what the test-setting mandarins do and don’t think is self-evident. Needless to say, such arbitrariness encodes into the tests an immense cultural bias. If you come from a background similar to that of the test-setters, then you’ll likely do well. If you were raised in a different environment where, say, people are taught to believe themselves to have moral duties that extend into the limited-liability corporation, you will likely fail.

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Even more tellingly, the shiniest, newest professional aptitude tests increasingly do away with logical deduction altogether, and instead simply measure the test-taker’s spontaneous identification with official rubrics. This procedure is the core of the “Situational Judgment Test”, or “SJT”, that dominates hiring in healthcare and human resources, and even forms a major part of the UK Civil Service’s Fast Stream exam. In the SJT, it is the candidate’s “character” that is assessed, via an online widget that dreams up hypothetical workplace conflicts and asks candidates how they would respond. Test-takers are exhorted to “research company values” in advance — and, essentially, parrot the company’s own HR policies back at it.

Clearly, what this really amounts to is a perfect recipe for workplace conservatism: the company hires graduates who do exactly the kind of thing the procedures tell them to do, always. This would be one thing if the Civil Service was a paragon of leanness, efficiency and innovation. But does anyone in the UK really think this is the case? Incidentally, several civil servants inform me that almost no one in the Civil Service believes in the Fast Stream exam: most of these hiring practices were dreamed up by private outside consultancy firms with an obvious financial interest in the Civil Service’s stultification.

This institutionalized skull-measuring has the potential to wreak catastrophic effects. It is no secret that the UK is facing a slump in productivity, its vast firms with their swollen internal bureaucracies rapidly being overtaken by competition abroad. Thomas Piketty and Katharina Pistor have argued convincingly that most of what counts for growth these days is really sterile manipulation by the administrative class: changing the legal rules surrounding one’s assets to increase their value, lobbying for new schemes to siphon public money into one’s latest quixotic startup. Brett Christophers, meanwhile, has shown how the biggest, most profitable companies these days are more interested in extracting rents than making profits, precisely because no one is doing or making anything new or exciting enough to sell. Few, however, have noted that these are exactly the pathologies we would expect to find downstream of a selection procedure that prizes ploddingly interchangeable candidates and systematically overlooks those who think differently. How many of the UK’s sclerotic institutions could be rescued by taking in people who are able to think critically, rather than people who are good at “critical thinking”?

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When I put these objections to defenders of such tests, the response is uniform. Even if their methodologies aren’t fully understood, the Pearson website assures its doubters, the fact remains that such tests predict success; they are highly correlated to something called “outcomes”. Yet, when I look, there don’t seem to be robust studies proving anything of the sort — not least because the supplest and most interesting thinkers probably don’t score well enough to be given jobs in the first place. In any case, this fêted correlation could be attributed to the simple fact that “critical thinking” tests reliably weed out a few illiterate candidates. The results of a spelling test would correlate to professional success, too.

Arguably, given the well documented racial and social disparities in the UK’s professional services sector, so too would outright prejudice. One of the most astonishing facts about the literature defending the Watson-Glaser test is that it actually acknowledges that this is the case: different cultural and ethnic groups tend to achieve vastly different results. Of course, this is entirely to be expected if most of what is being measured is the test taker’s cultural proximity to the test-setter; the high priests of psychometry, however, remain determined to find a way to make their discipline seem compatible with the egalitarian ethos of the average HR department. One report by Imperial College London admits that “Pearson Vue’s own literature on the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Assessment reports… ethnicity ha[s] been previously associated with differential group performance on the test,” only to observe that “there was no difference between groups when predicting [career] progression”. Thus, the report concludes, the playing field can be leveled via various baroque DEI initiatives. In other words: yes, the tests seem to be racially biased, but you needn’t worry because the tests don’t actually work, so you can impose whatever quotas you like in the name of compliance without feeling too guilty. Conveniently, most of the companies that sell professional assessment suites seem to be hawking “equality and diversity” services too.

Ultimately, professional assessors are guilty of making not one, but two of the great philosophical errors of our time. First, they mistake the fact that tests give quantifiable results for the idea that such results are somehow objective. Second, they assume that facts about the world can be derived from pure logic, without any theory of semantics intervening. These assumptions run rampant in the culture these days, animating everyone from online IQ fetishists to drab technocrats who think that everything can be solved with a nice, healing dose of economics. Anyone with a shred of philosophical training knows enough to question them — indeed, if one traces back the genealogy of “critical” thought far enough, one arrives at the work of Immanuel Kant, whose entire philosophical project aimed to show how “pure” or “logical” reasoning is always infected by a priori structures that it cannot itself justify.

Sadly, however, academic humanities like philosophy seem to be the one type of discipline that employers are determined not to take into consideration in their hiring procedures. This is a shame: to an unparalleled extent among branches of human knowledge, the humanities involve a questioning of abstract categories and measurement systems by which we parse and understand the world, and a consideration of whether the questions we are asking in our more mundane, technical pursuits are even the right questions. They are thus the perfect antidote to the inane proceduralism, the waterlogged bureaucracy, the creeping sense of stagnation, that haunt the contemporary workplace. If people really want to galvanize an organization, they should start trying to rediscover some of this critical, humanistic spirit, and do away with whatever crude new solution the latest smarmy consultant has sold them. Ditch Watson and Glaser; hire a few Kant scholars instead. Maybe then, one day, the students in college cafés like mine will be able to close their test-prep software and get back in the libraries where they belong.