These events might appear only loosely related. Some — like Trump’s X-Files-style memes or Johnson’s obsession with scientifically optimizing his girlfriend’s reproductive health — elicit uncomfortable laughter. Others, especially Anthropic’s claims, have an undeniably disquieting aspect. But all are expressions of a much deeper shift, one that most of us aren’t acknowledging, much less discussing (even if we all feel it): we’re living through a series of stochastic ontological shocks that amount to a Second Copernican Revolution. And we’re far less prepared to meet its demands than the earlier generations who met the first.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life, the expansion of human habitation into outer space, the prospect of enhancing the body and expanding its life span, and the stupendous achievements of artificial intelligence call into question our privileged sense of mastery and belonging in the world. 

Our age, in other words, is witnessing the dramatic second phase of the scientific, technological, and philosophical shift that launched modernity beginning roughly half a millennium ago with the discovery that the Earth isn’t at the center of an orderly “chain of being.”

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Asset-hoarding Boomers rob the young  

By Matthew Gasda

The First Copernican Revolution suggested that, far from being orderly, the cosmos is constitutively antagonistic: roiled by blind, competing forces indifferent to human ends. In doing so, the revolutionaries radically de-centered humanity, dislodging man from his former place of honor in the cosmos.

The ontological picture did not improve with time. Darwin showed that the Homo sapiens is just another species, sharing origins with all others in the relentless struggle to survive and reproduce. Marx suggested that the beliefs we hold dear form the ideological superstructure upholding modes and relations of production that are historically determined; history, in other words, conditions belief. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud, who famously called his discovery of the unconscious a new Copernican revolution, revealed the irrational appetites and unconscious drives churning just beneath our polite conventions. Psychoanalysis purported to reveal a picture of the soul that was not unified, rational, or fully conscious — but instead propelled by a hydraulic system of psychic energies formed by the libidinal dynamics of the family; Freud’s theories demolished the Victorian understanding of what it meant to be human. 

Freud’s theories of the mind were novel in that they not only stripped away another layer of dignity from the philosophical account of man, but also in registering and taking account of ontological shocks that preceded his thinking: widespread industrialization, globalized capital, the disintegration of the large multinational empires.

Yet the First Copernican Revolution was incomplete, and not nearly as radical as some of its protagonists claimed. Psychoanalysis, for example, rested upon a surprisingly old-fashioned, moralistic account of human personality, leading the later analytic thinker Erich Fromm to conclude that for Freud, “health and virtue are really the same.” Then, too, the First Copernican Revolution coincided with the age of mass literacy, which made it possible for culture to reflect on itself and for individuals to nurture a sense of interiority — “the birth of the subject” was one of the great and few consolations that accompanied the great dislocations of modernity. 

In the high-modernist works of Joyce and Proust, to cite canonical examples, the individual psyche is represented variously as polymorphously perverse, anxious, and existential; Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Proust’s narrator, for instance, are each obsessional, with a fractured sense of time and anthropological belonging; by 1922, the year Ulysses was published, to map the human meant to map the troubling disruptions, distortions, and dislocations that attended human experience and cognition. Modernism, which includes psychoanalysis, is, by these lights, a formal attempt to symbolically bridge the ultra-new with a longer humanistic tradition in which the brain was a soul, and man had a central place in the story of the cosmos. It was perhaps the last secular attempt to do so (though perhaps Carl Sagan would like a word).

“Copernican” revolutions are moments when civilizations acquire new knowledge and new means of mastery, which simultaneously empower what Freud would call the “illusions” that uphold those civilizations. They are naturally fraught. 

The shocks that are upon us, in other words, are displacing the human even further from the cosmological story. If there is no singular event like the Napoleonic Wars or World War I which reorients our inner lives, there are and have been a series of fractured crises: the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, coupled with the sci-fi horizon of aliens, artificial general intelligence, robots. Esoteric or fringe ideas are now normal for social media scrollers or Tucker Carlson viewers; part of being alive in 2026 means wondering seriously if our species is the result of an alien genetics experiment; if AGI will rule the world; or whether biotech will enable lives as long as Methuselah. The normality, even the banality, of these discourses, is a sign that we’ve moved beyond the retrenchments of the literary modernists or the midcentury existentialists, who tried to provide intellectual structures for human beings to make sense of themselves in the wake of centuries of rapid scientific and intellectual revolution. If one or any of the possibilities on the horizon of 2026 are true, or come true, then everything is different forever.

The ontological shocks of the present are the most extreme to date because they threaten to alter the species itself; previous ontological shocks changed the explanatory framework around man, in this decade, and especially this year, narratives are changing, but so is the material of mind and body, and the aspirational trajectory of mankind. ‘Ontological influencers’ like Bryan Johnson urge followers to pursue immortal life. In the old humanistic framework of the West, it was sensible for Odysseus to reject immortality with the demi-goddess Calypso and return home to his aged wife, dog, and son; this wisdom does not seem like it will prevail into the next decade.

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Humanistic intellectuals, or anyone who ascribes dignity to the human condition, can’t assume they will prevail unless they take seriously how weird things have become, and will continue to become. Writers, artists, philosophers, undergraduates at coffeeshops, whoever is interested in building a new kind of bridge (like modernism) between the future and the past must be audacious relative to the scale of the manifold transformations at hand.

So, where are the new vocabularies, new concepts, new art forms to help humanity process Year Zero, an ontological revolution that may usher in Biblical lifespans, UFO disclosure, cyborgs, Butlerian jihads et al.? Where are the prophets? For the first time, humanism seems to have failed to catch up to changes in the human. The imminent transformation of the foundations of mind and body, and potentially of our understanding of history (if it turns out we are not the only intelligent life form in the galaxy), has not produced great art or thought, only slop and deferral. 

A culture that is preoccupied with dating mores and the manosphere, with the political trends and the lives of pop stars and reality stars and streamers, is derelict both of ambition and duty; rather than acknowledging ontological shock, we are numbing ourselves to it. As a civilization, as a species, and as a global population, we are destitute of secular palliatives, of modes of care and of thought to handle the onslaught of the future. Rather than diluted therapy-speak, we need a new Freud, or new Freuds (or new Marshall McLuhans): new thinker-prophets, to build intellectual bridges to a future that has already commenced.

The comfortable center risks letting the future be defined by technologists with platforms who are invested, literally, in a certain version of the future coming to pass, and by government bureaucrats who may be more interested in controlling unrest than in ameliorating its causes.

And this is a shame. Heightened awareness, new forms of interiority and self-articulation, new means of self-making are traditionally the beneficent byproduct of sudden breaks in the linear unfolding of history. (When we say Shakespeare was early modern, for instance, what we really mean is that the Bard was drawing on intensely new energy that was flowing through London in the wake of intense religious warfare and technological and philosophical change. Ditto Cervantes, ditto Montaigne.)

New ways of life should give rise to new thoughts and new expressions of meaning. Ontological shock can be more than an unpleasant sensation. It can be a provocation, an imperative to reform the ranks and battle a science-fiction future into a dignified truce.

At the bottom of the window is a simple dedication:

R. A. Fisher
Fellow 1920-26 1943-62
President 1956-59

What Ronald Aylmer Fisher was fellow and president of was Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (in whose dining hall the window was installed). He was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He more or less invented the modern discipline of statistics. As if that wasn’t enough, he also made a vital contribution to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ — which rescued Darwinism from the doldrums and turned biology into a fully-fledged science. Richard Dawkins named him the “greatest biologist since Darwin”: Fisher “provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology’s central theorem.”

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R. A. Fisher was, in other words, a foundational figure. Unfortunately, one of the things he founded was the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society. He was also a racist, telling a UNESCO enquiry that “available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” (the opposite of what the enquiry concluded).

Last month, the college announced that Fisher’s window would be removed — following a campaign by Cambridge students.

Political correctness gone mad? Well, how would you like to eat below a memorial to a man who considered you racially inferior? As for concerns about erasing history, the window was only installed in 1989.

The real problem here is that Fisher was not some isolated crank. He was part of the much wider eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can’t be edited out of our intellectual history, because for many decades, and to a shocking extent, it is our intellectual history. 

*

For obvious reasons, we view eugenic ideology through the lens of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yet there’s another story that must be told — of how eugenics in Britain and America exerted an influence over the intellectual mainstream that outright fascism never did. Eugenic ideas were deeply embedded within almost every facet of modernity — shaping the thinking of movements, organisations and individuals that are still venerated today as icons of science and progress.

Taking Fisher as a starting point, one can, in the manner of a crazed conspiracy theorist, trace the links between many of the biggest names in science, literature, politics and social reform. Except that there’s no conspiracy — it’s all on record: a dense web of professional and personal relations that define the intellectual life of the era.

For instance, Fisher had an important mentor and supporter in Leonard Darwin — the son of Charles and the President of the Eugenics Education Society from 1911 to 1929. The EES was the focal point of the eugenics movement — almost every eugenicist that I mention in this article was a member of it.

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By Tom Chivers

The father of eugenics was Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who coined the word and laid down its pseudoscientific principles. He was instrumental in founding the EES in 1907 with the 21-year-old Sybil Gotto. The EES became the (British) Eugenics Society in 1924 and then, much later in 1989, the Galton Institute. 

It should be said that the Institute has long repudiated its eugenic past. For instance this is what it’s website says in reference to Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius:

“Galton devotes an entire chapter to an overtly racist view of intelligence, which uses a completely fallacious group of criteria to argue that Africans were of less ‘worth’ than Europeans. These views are shocking now, but were pretty representative of many at that time.”

It was indeed another time, but even so Galton’s prejudices were grotesque. This is clear from a letter to The Times, in which he advocated a scheme of racial replacement in Africa:

“My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a par of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages living under the nominal sovereignty of the Zanzibar, or Portugal, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese…”

University College London, where Galton was based, is now in the process of renaming its Galton Lecture Theatre.

However, that’s not all they’re having to do. UCL also has (or rather had) a Pearson Lecture Theatre and a Pearson Hall named after Karl Pearson. He was a protege of Galton’s, a fierce rival of Fisher’s and, you guessed it, yet another raving eugenicist. His very real achievements in statistics and biology were horribly marred by his revolting opinions on “inferior races” and “degenerate and feeble stock”. That didn’t stop him from being offered an OBE and a knighthood — both of which he turned down because he was also a ‘principled’ socialist.

It may seem incredible to see such a combination of views, but before the Second World War it was unexceptional. Eugenic ideas were common among both Marxists and Fabians. The Left-wing eugenicists of the time included Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane. They didn’t just hold these beliefs in awkward juxtaposition, but saw eugenics as an essential part of socialist project. In Shaw’s infamous words, “the only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man.”

It wasn’t just socialists though. In 1899, Winston Churchill declared that his aim in life was the “improvement of the British breed.” He saw “the “feeble-minded” as a threat and in a 1910 letter to the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith advocated compulsory sterilisation as an alternative to confinement — a “simple surgical operation so the inferior could be permitted freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.”

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Churchill was a Liberal at the time he wrote that — albeit one who had come from, and would return to, the Tory ranks. However, many life-long Liberals — including those intellectual titans John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge — were also convinced eugenicists. Keynes was a co-founder of the Cambridge Eugenics Society with Fisher — and continued to support eugenic ideas even after the Second World War. 

Beveridge was no better. In 1906, he stated that “the unemployable” should be supported by state, but at the cost of losing their rights including “the franchise… civil freedom and fatherhood”. In the 1940s, at the height of his influence, he argued that child benefits should be paid at a higher rate to middle class than working class families to boost the birth rate of the former.

Again and again we see the co-mingling of eugenic and progressive ideologies. Early feminism was no exception. That’s especially true of the first advocates of birth control — women like Alice Vickery, Sybil Gotto, Marie Stopes and, in America, Margaret Sanger. They were all active in what was euphemistically known as the ‘social hygiene movement‘ — a mixture of charitable action, social reform, finger-wagging moralism, class snobbery and, in many cases, outright bigotry.

Some of the worst offenders are still revered as feminist pioneers and forerunners of the sexual revolution. Marie Stopes has a reproductive health non-profit named after her, and yet she was a eugenicist through-and-through. In her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood, she looked forward to legislation that would “ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased”. Meanwhile, Sanger — the founder of Planned Parenthood — set out her ideology in a 1923 op-ed for the New York Times:

“Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtless practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilisation.”

And there it is, the whole of the eugenic mentality distilled down to just two words: “human weeds”.

*

Confronted by the poverty and squalor of the fast-growing industrial cities, there is ample evidence that the intelligentsia felt not compassion, but deep revulsion, for those less fortunate than they were. Take this 1915 diary entry from Virginia Woolf:

“we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”

The more progressive intellectuals may have subscribed to various schemes for the improvement of society, but that did not preclude the most dehumanising attitudes to individuals that they saw as beyond help. Even the self-declared socialists, who supposedly had the best interests of the working class at heart, perceived much of it as an obstacle to progress. As H. G. Wells complained:

“We cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny …and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

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Socialism and eugenicism went together because the latter was a tool for getting rid of the people that supposedly couldn’t benefit from, and might overwhelm, the former. Or to quote Karl Pearson’s chilling words:

“No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings.”

This was also the Bureaucratic Age — a time in which technocracy had yet to understand its limits. Everything, not just the economy, was to be managed from the top-down by an expert class: “No consistent eugenicist can be a Laisser Faire individualist”, exhorted Sydney Webb, “he must interfere, interfere, interfere!”

Eugenics stood at the intersection of so many powerful intellectual currents — so why didn’t it triumph completely?

In part, it was because modernism, though untamed by later doubts, had to contend with what was still a Christian society. The Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic currents in the great Victorian torrent of social reform took a long time to lose their full force. And thus in the twentieth century, the eugenicists were opposed head-on by Christian campaigners like G. K. Chesterton and Halliday Sutherland.

And yet, as we know, the twentieth century also saw traditional Christian morality lose ground to progressive forces across a whole range of issues — from abortion to the divorce law to Sunday trading. So why did the explicitly eugenic agenda — once part of the progressive mainstream — not advance? What happened to it? 

The short answer is that the Second World War did. But that’s not the only reason it lost its respectability. Even if the Nazis had never come to power, the ‘progressive’ eugenicists would have been exposed as the cranks that they were. Their demographic paranoia would have been shown to be baseless. The growth of prosperity and the extension of the welfare state demonstrated that no section of society was beyond help. Over the decades we greatly improved the material condition of our nation without recourse to the eugenic methods that a generation of intellectuals once told us were indispensable.

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Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

Clearly, there’s no fad so dangerous as one that spreads through the academic and cultural elites — especially one that categorises the rest of the population by things like race and class, and then makes sweeping generalisation on that basis alone. 

In 2020, we could look for more windows to remove and lecture halls to rename. We could stop putting on the plays George Bernard Shaw and stop reading the books of H. G. Wells. We could erase any tribute to Marie Stopes or William Beveridge. We could even get economists to stop calling themselves Keynesians. 

But all of that would be missing the point. After all, it’s not the madness of the dead we need to watch out for.