Or maybe not. Perhaps capitalism will continue to act antisocially if it’s profitable for it to do so. A respect for humanity doesn’t seem to have restrained it much so far. It’s not a question of changing the minds of its leaders, as our deluded monarch seems to imagine. A few moral platitudes from Charles won’t prove enough to avert Doomsday. The economic system we have is as geared to promote profit over people as a tiger is geared to sink its teeth into your neck. If we’re all going to perish together, a plausible answer to why it might happen is organized greed. It’s unlikely that such unseemly words passed the monarch’s lips.

The word “Doomsday” suggests a punctual event, whereas one of the problems with alerting the public to the urgency of climate change is that it’s a gradual process. And we don’t tend to think of catastrophes as gradual. AI, however, is a different affair. There may come a world-shaking moment when a squad of terrifyingly brainy robots actually takes over, swarming our garden paths and emitting lethal rays, just as there may come a point in time when weapons of mass destruction are unleashed. Well, actually slightly more than a moment. It’s been estimated that such warfare could wipe out humanity in 17 minutes, time enough to try on a number of tweed suits, take the dog for a disappointingly brief walk or tell the boss what a contemptible little creep he is. The Apocalypse has traditionally been thought of as a dramatic event, an irruption of the timeless into time; in fact, some years ago, an American evangelical TV station drew up plans to broadcast Christ’s Second Coming, with cameras placed strategically at the poles and the Equator. It’s hard to know who would have taken out ads.

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What the literature of Apocalypse never really took account of, however, was that we ourselves might be responsible for winding up our own history — that the disaster might constitute mass suicide rather than an outrage inflicted upon us by the Antichrist, an exasperated Almighty or a bunch of well-aimed asteroids. Diffident creatures that we are, it never struck us that we might pull off the end of the world all by ourselves, without a helping hand from the powers of darkness or a deity at the end of his tether. In accumulating the power to destroy itself altogether, humanity has finally come of age. There’s something grimly amusing about the idea of an animal that is scuppered by its own sovereignty — one which is wiped from the evolutionary record by its own eminently civilized achievements. Power becomes weakness, and progress a stealthy self-unmaking. As Freud was aware, the very forces that make life are secretly in love with death.

Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, and with just the same stiff-necked self-blindness, we bring our fate down on our own heads while priding ourselves on our sovereignty and intelligence. It never occurred to either Oedipus or us that intelligence was not just part of the answer but a major part of the problem. Our reason is unbinding itself from our bodies and confronting us as an autonomous, potentially hostile force. This is one reason why reason alone won’t save us. For a thinker like Thomas Aquinas, reason ultimately involves a kind of love — an intensely focused attention to the object we want to understand which is open to its peculiar form of being. One doesn’t hear such talk in the boardroom of Anthropic.

There have been many calls in history for humanity to unite, or to see itself as a unified whole. Such appeals are no longer necessary. We become one species the moment we reach the point where we’re capable of mass self-extinction, a point which arrived long before AI. What we share most deeply is our common killability. Not everyone has the ability to play Mozart’s clarinet concerto, but the most inconspicuous citizen has the capacity to be annihilated. We can find solidarity in death, the greatest form of democracy yet discovered, if in little else.

It’s hard to strangle someone with your bare hands. The mechanisms which inhibit intra-specific killing would probably kick in and we would simply be violently sick. Being violently sick is unpleasant, but it’s preferable to being strangled. Because we’re linguistic creatures, however, which is to say conceptual ones, we can invent ways of killing each other at long range which circumvent these bodily inhibitions. You can put up with torturing someone as long as you don’t have to listen to the screams. Language allows us to abstract ourselves from our bodies, but also to create the kind of technology to which our bodies are vulnerable. Spiders don’t have this problem, and neither would cherubs, but the human animal, being capable of complex labor through the power of concepts, is contradiction incarnate, caught on the hop between body and mind. Creatures like this, who are made up of mutually contradictory elements, were known to the ancient world as monsters. The Sphinx in Oedipus Rex is an example.

The whole of civilization is an elaborate extension of our bodies, but these prostheses constantly threaten to slip from the control of our senses and lead a life of their own. They don’t just waltz off, however, but return to plague us. The more power we invest in them, the more our flesh and blood come under their tyrannical sway. In the economic sphere, this is what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities, in which the fruits of our labor detach themselves from our flesh and blood and come to conduct an existence of their own. We become the creatures of our own products. The relations they set up among themselves determine the material conditions of human life. It’s the market which decides who shall grow sleek and who shall starve. In this sense, superintelligence is nothing new. Bankers and stockbrokers deal with it every day. We inhabit an economy which lies within nobody’s control but which determines whether we flourish or fail. The market has a mind of its own, and like AI its intentions are by no means always admirable. It would be rash to assume that either set-up is spontaneously on our side.

There’s a long history of myths and fables which concern servants or apprentices rebelling against their masters, taking advantage of their absence in order to sport, riot and smash the dinner plates. The Shakespearian Fool wants to do this but can’t, so he contents himself with creating verbal havoc instead, running linguistic rings around the monarch and his courtiers. Ariel in The Tempest is always just about to get out of hand but just reined in by his irascible master.

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We can’t, however, root out our power to manufacture cruise missiles without at the same time eradicating our capacity to feed the hungry and heal the sick, which also require complex extensions of our bodies like aid agencies, hospitals and so on. And this is our tragedy, one of which spiders and cherubs are blithely unaware. For the ancient Greeks, it was tragedy in the most literal of senses, one represented on a stage. One of the most common causes of ruin in Greek tragic art is hubris — the process by which we aspire, overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. Humankind is its own most perilous adversary. It’s in danger of evolving too fast, breeding new tools and capabilities before it has time to work out how to regulate their most negative effects. Before history began, evolution did this for us, implanting certain instincts and constraints in our bodies. Moral prohibitions can be strong, but they aren’t always as strong as the impulse to be violently sick. Now we can override these instincts, we live in constant danger, which means that our lives are more exciting than those of slugs but a lot more precarious too.

In this sense, the current alarm about AI is symptomatic of a much deeper dilemma. “To be able to overpower the monstrous progeny of our own intelligence,” writes the philosopher Malcolm Bull, “has always been the condition of human survival.” Our problem lies in being potentially infinite in creativity yet finite and fragile in our bodies. For the mind to shake itself free of the senses is a form of madness, as Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift both understood. King Lear begins by thinking his powers to be infinite and ends up acknowledging that he is not “ague-proof”. He must see and think “feelingly”, and part of what he learns to feel in his bones is the anguish of others, not least of the poor and homeless. The play contains a magnificent passage in favor of communism. To live well for Shakespeare, one must live within the sensuous confines of the body; the only problem, as he appreciates, is that we are so built as to transgress those confines all the time, and if we didn’t we couldn’t have fire engines and penicillin along with patriarchy and poisonous gas.

There’s a popular mistake that Frankenstein is the name of the monster, not the scientist who created it. The error is a significant one. Monsters are always other people. It’s a way of avoiding the fact that as Oedipus discovers, the real monster isn’t the Sphinx but his incestuous self, and in him humanity as a whole.

A number of feminist icons were at the Café that day — but all heads turned when Steinem walked in. Dressed in skintight jeans, heeled boots, a brightly colored cowl-neck sweater and eye-catching jewelry, she oozed confidence. She looked so different from the rest of us, dutifully clad in our “feminist uniform” of ill-fitting jeans, slogan t-shirts and sneakers. Nevertheless, I noted a palpable affection between Dworkin and Steinem that day, though both told me that they had had to agree to disagree on certain important issues, not least the Lewinsky fiasco.

The scandal had broken three months later, in January 1998. In March of that year, Steinem published her defense of Bill Clinton in The New York Times. I received a fax from Dworkin the same day: she couldn’t understand how Steinem could possibly defend the world’s most powerful man against so many allegations of abuse from women. “Feminists,” she wrote, “are supposed to stand by all women to whom this happens. Gloria has betrayed those women.”

Yet Steinem was adamant: she said that even if the allegations against Clinton were true, feminists were right not to demand his resignation or impeachment. She argued that as long as Congress was controlled by conservatives — who were hostile to women’s rights in general — it was better that he remain in power: since he was a crucial defender of abortion rights and had committed to ending violence against women. In practice, this led to some strange moral contortions. In the case of one accuser, for instance, Steinem defined what Clinton had done as a crude, clumsy sexual advance. In fact, at least technically, it was sexual assault.

This tension — between principle and strategy — would persist throughout her life. I had long labeled her a liberal feminist, insofar as she was committed to reform rather than a root-and-branch shake up of the patriarchal system. Yet Steinem often described herself as a radical feminist, saying that women were oppressed under a “sexual caste system”. These attitudes were clear in 1987, when she publicly disagreed with feminists like Susan Brownmiller about whether Hedda Nussbaum had been complicit in the brutal killing of her six-year-old adopted daughter at the hands of her common-law husband Joel Steinberg, a wealthy lawyer accused of first-degree manslaughter. For allowing the death of a child, Nussbaum initially faced charges herself — but these were dropped once it emerged Steinberg had terrorized and beaten her too.

Alongside other prominent feminists — including Dworkin,  Martina Navratilova, Susan Sarandon, and Shirley Chisholm — Brownmiller accused Steinem of seeing Nussbaum as a “helpless victim”: one who dodged responsibility for failing to protect her daughter. “As an extreme victim,” Steinem responded, “[Nussbaum] forces us to do one of two things: reject and blame her, or think we could be her. It’s hard to think we could be her — so we’d rather blame her”.

That familiar blend of empathy and pragmatism was equally apparent in 1999, when Dworkin reported being drug-raped in a Paris hotel room. Some feminists abandoned her, thinking she had gone crazy. But not Steinem, who sent a psychiatrist specialized in PTSD to assess her. Dworkin never forgot this, even reminding me of it the last time I saw her. Despite their huge difference of opinion on the Clinton scandal, she and Steinem remained close. She was, by all accounts, a deeply loyal friend. I witnessed this first-hand. Despite disagreeing with my views on gender identity ideology, she enthusiastically agreed to blurb my 2017 book on the subject, in which I outlined the abolitionist position.

This flexibility was also clear when it came to gender ideology.  In a 1977 essay, commenting on Jan Morris’ medical transition, Steinem argued that a sexist, polarized society is often a factor in pressurizing individuals to alter their bodies — rather than fight the prejudice that comes from sex stereotypes. Yet that didn’t stop Steinem from later establishing herself as a full-blown ally of transgender rights. As late as 2012, she expressed agreement with Janice Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire, dismissed by gender ideologues as “hate speech”. But just a year later, she shifted on the issue, writing in The Advocate that “trans people should be celebrated, not questioned”.

Rachel Moran, author of Paid For, also disagreed with Steinem on the transgender issue — but appreciated her “respectful tones” and the “open way” she discussed such matters. “That’s rare in this cultural moment,” Moran says. “She certainly understood prostitution as a system of misogynistic exploitation, we had numerous conversations about it. She did a lot of good in the world.”

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That subtlety sometimes cost her. Fiona Broadfoot, a British sex-trade survivor, got to know Steinem following a 2017 summit on how to eradicate the practice. “She always stood with prostitution survivors, despite getting a load of flak from the pro-prostitution lobby,” Broadfoot tells me. “She saw women like me as her equal, there wasn’t an ounce of snobbery or superiority about her.”

The last time I was in contact with Steinem was on her 85th birthday, in 2019. She joked about looking forward to a good-natured sparring session the next time we met. There are lessons to be learned from this approach to politics. Though Steinem battled to end other kinds of institutionalized oppression — including racism — she never embraced the omnicause. Her absolute priority was the liberation of all women and girls globally. More to the point, she didn’t believe in a tick-box list of prescribed opinions, despite remaining firmly on the Left. Ultimately, she believed in building bridges across difference, now a dying art, particularly among younger generations.

Steinem lived long enough to see many of the rights feminists of her generation won being lost again. What will her legacy be? Beyond an openness to dissent, younger feminists will hopefully recognize how tenuous those rights are. May that momentum keep the fight going.

There are reasons for optimism. Whatever feminists think about Steinem’s views — or her relationship with the US government — there seems to be universal respect for her tenacity and outspokenness. Her role in the women’s liberation movement was pivotal, in that she didn’t try to hide the fact that she believed that the larger goals of feminism mattered more than any individual woman’s interests. That’s a hard path to tread, and I for one couldn’t do it. But Steinem did so with honesty and integrity, her principles intact until the end.

***

This article has been amended to accurately reflect the disagreement between the author and Gloria Steinem on gender identity ideology, not prostitution as previously stated.

Few suspected it would come to this. Yet in Hampshire alone, the population of under-15s has shrunk by 2%, leading to the closure of two other primary schools and half-a-dozen mergers. Nor is Jane Austen country alone. In the past two years, 40 state-funded primary schools have shut nationwide. The reason is simple: not enough Britons want to have children. For any country’s population to remain stable, its total fertility rate needs to be at or above an average of 2.1 live births per woman. Britain’s fertility rate is 1.39. If this trend continues, our population will peak at 71 million in 2034, before dropping to as low as 48 million by 2100.

This is a global phenomenon. Birth rates are tanking from Australia to India, from the US to Uruguay, while the populations of countries including South Korea and Germany have already started to shrink. This is not a good thing. Your instinct may be that, with fewer people around, there will be less competition for resources and fewer carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This is true, and immaterial: there may be less competition for minerals, say, but also fewer people to mine and process them, and Elon Musk’s Optimus butlers are a bet more than a certainty. Nor is depopulation easy to reverse. From encouraging letters (France) and tax incentives (Hungary) to limits on abortion (Russia), countries have tried everything, to no avail. Immigration doesn’t work either, not when the birth rates of new arrivals slow too.

What, then, will life be like in a world with fewer children? In places like Smannell and Hatherden, Fitchet argues, a feeling of managed decline will only accelerate. In these villages, he explains, primary schools are “the places where the families meet, the places where friendships begin, where generations put down roots” — the last place, in other words, that is likely to attract younger families to these places where the post office and the pub have long since vanished. Something similar will happen to our towns and cities. The daytime squeal of toddlers in trolley seats will diminish in our supermarkets, swimming pools and parkland. Other aspects of our social contract will also begin to fray. Expect emergency service provision in rural areas to experience further cuts, as budgets for ambulances, police and on-call fire stations are reprioritized to areas of greater population density.

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Some big inter-generational resentments are also coming. A declining birth rate means, inevitably, that a diminishing number of young people are paying for the pensions of the old, the fiscal equivalent of a sweaty, inverted human pyramid. Do not expect the triple lock to hold. If current trends continue, the Office for Budget Responsibility said last year, healthcare and pensions spending will push government debt to 270% of GDP by the 2070s (it is currently 93.8%). According to a report by Policy Exchange, budget stabilization under this regime would require income tax to rise between 1.4-7.4% per taxpayer. The recruitment and retention crises currently facing the NHS and the social care sector will worsen. Managers running our old people’s homes will either need to increase the workload of their already-harried nursing staff or embrace the Japanese model of employing more robots (though some have argued this just makes life for caregivers even busier).

The British government should avoid this fiscal disaster, says David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London — provided it is willing to make some hard choices. One is making sure that the retirement age is realistic. “The majority of people, including the over-65s and maybe well into their seventies, are perfectly capable of some work,” Miles continues, arguing that a return to the original idea of the old-age pension as a stipend received in the last decade of life, rather than the last quarter, is logical. Pervasive ageism in the economy, he continues, will disappear once it becomes clear that an oversupply of eager young adults is a thing of the past. This assumes that older citizens can be persuaded to vote for a government that spends radically less on their pensions. That might happen by mid-century, by which time the demise of the Baby Boomers will have resulted in a wealth transfer of an estimated £5.5 trillion to Millennials.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that technology will have saved us by 2050, with robots and AI ensuring we live in a less crowded, less competitive archipelago. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso are skeptical on that point. As they convincingly argue in their depopulation jeremiad, After the Spike, innovation is an incremental byproduct of a growing population: the more people you have around, the more minds capable of conceiving and communicating billions of tiny improvements to our daily lives.

Depopulation kicks the stool from beneath this framework. History begins to slow, then reverse. By the 22nd century, we will probably still know how to deflect an asteroid, but we may not be able to build the rocket to do so in time, much less put our minds together to find the cure to the next pandemic-causing virus. Similar regressions have happened before. Take the development of cement, the recipe for which was perfected under the Roman Empire only to be lost for centuries after the collapse of imperial authority — and its population — in the 5th century. A counterargument to this might be the technological progress Europe ended up making after the Black Death, which culled about half of its population. But one wonders whether the AI-addled mind will cope as well as its medieval antecedents as our towns and cities start to empty.

Why should that be important to anyone living today? Though the decision to have children must always fall to individual couples, the fact that so many are choosing either to wait or skip altogether points to much deeper failings in our society. These are failings we should all care about and try, collectively, to mitigate by acting or voting for change, whether that’s related to global warming and pervasive air pollution, to the deteriorating quality of our food, the cost of living, or the daily horrors meted out to new mothers on maternity wards.

Anastasia Berg suspects it’s deeper than all that. A philosopher at the University of California, Irvine and the co-author of What Are Children For?, Berg points to Norway as an example of a place that has invested significantly in its education, healthcare and childcare systems — and yet still faces a declining birth rate. What’s actually happened, argues Berg and her co-author Rachel Wiseman, is a nigh-on unprecedented shift in attitudes toward parenthood itself in Western culture. Men and women now feel free to prioritize their career, finding the right partner, or simply living a life free of the responsibility of raising a tiny human. “Through all these domains, there are these paradigms that all point away from the possibility of having children,” says Berg. “They conspire to a situation where we kind of tolerate children as a kind of consumer choice, like we tolerate one another ordering from Amazon, even though we know we shouldn’t.”

In some ways, perhaps, this liberation should be celebrated: at no point in history has the individual, man or woman, had so much agency to define the course of their lives. If that course involves couples deciding that having children is not for them, that’s also completely fine. Berg agrees, but also observes that the culmination of this sense of agency is an odd sense of ambivalence in our culture toward parenthood, one amplified by a slew of podcasts, films, novels and television dramas that portray raising children as, at best, something that can wait, and at worst, completely thankless. In the end, all these possibilities crowd out the nuanced arguments that can be made for having children, suggests the philosopher, especially among women. “If feminism is about empowering women and knowledge is power,” Berg says, “then we need to make sure that people have all the knowledge from the start so they can really plan out the course of their lives and not feel like they were hoodwinked.”

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It is impossible to avoid thinking that this is leading to a vast loss for society at large. As a father myself — of a two-year-old daughter, currently gathering shoes by our backdoor in the hope of a trip out, instead of one to her nightly bath — I am biased. Others make the case more eloquently. In his 1994 work The Philosophy of Childhood, Gareth Matthews convincingly argues that the child is much more than an adult-in-waiting, but someone who fundamentally changes the parent and caregiver. Children are irrepressibly curious, bold, unconstrained by the mental shackles imposed by year after year of toil, grief and accumulating responsibilities. They grant us new and bright perspectives about the world around us, pushing us to improve ourselves and our collective circumstances. Absent their plaintive cries and squeals of delight, society can only ossify. The world of adults is the world of compromises, the end of idealism.

I think, here, of Levin’s epiphany in Anna Karenina, his face lit up by summer storms, smiling at the gleaming sense of purpose brought into his life by his infant son. If God were to live anywhere, it would be in the laughter of children. You can hear it anywhere and benefit. Amid so many looming dangers, says Fitchet, “kicking a football around in a field, or going to a park and watching kids run around and scream and play with each other, makes that all disappear for a few minutes, because they’re completely oblivious to all of this.” For them, the world is a marvelous thing — and only just beginning.

In interviews and debates, Paglia would spout aphoristic daggers at her opponents: mostly liberal academics and contemporary feminists, with Gloria Steinem a particularly manic obsession. Her quick, declarative speech-style rattled off grand cultural verdicts, insightful analyses of art history, and bitchy asides like a machine gun discharging a belt of ammunition: “leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist”; “male urination is a form of commentary”; “incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name”.

In subsequent essays and books, Paglia defended child pornography and snuff films; treated campus sexual assault as hysteria; framed the AIDS epidemic as nature’s revenge against homosexual excess; and defended both the right to have an abortion and the right to characterize abortion as murder. Also, somehow, Madonna “cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.”

Paglia’s performance as popular provocateur was ridiculous, at times insightful but more often than not just exhausting. This potential to overburden an audience is clear from her debut book — both in its excruciating length and in its sweeping generalizations about history and the human condition. As critic Roger Kimball noted, Paglia has a tendency “to skid suddenly from the measured to the outrageous, from the reasonable and well supported to the utterly fantastic”. Yet for every misstep in Sexual Personae, every overconfident declaration, there follows a statement so electric one has to pause to breathe it all in:

“A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage.”

The ambition of Sexual Personae is nothing less than civilizational, charting an epic battle across centuries in Western culture between Apollonian form and Dionysian chaos. This dynamic was first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), describing the twin artistic impulses of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche cast the god Apollo as the deity of image, dream, distance and beautiful illusion; and the trickster Dionysus as the god of music, intoxication and ecstatic dissolution. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy reached excellence by holding these forces together and giving form to suffering without denying the terrifying, irrational energies bubbling sinisterly underneath.

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Paglia translates this Nietzschean lens beyond the narrow purview of Greek tragedy to encompass a variety of motifs throughout Western aesthetics. In her hands, Apollo is line, distance, sculpture, classification, hierarchy, but also the eye, the column and the sculpted hard body. Dionysus is music, frenzy, sex and intoxication but also the “chthonian” in nature: the dark, abject and underworldly — including mud, blood, rot and ooze.

Sexual Personae goes yet further: in marrying Nietzsche with Freud, linking embodied sex differences and familial psychodrama to the production of different visual art forms. Under Paglia’s vision, heterosexuality and Greek tragedy are one and the same. Womanhood has a rightful mythic place within the Dionysian, while masculinity exists as an anxious Apollonian defense against engulfing nature. Female embodiment is the unbearable truth of chthonian forces: the body as a site of blood, fertility, vulnerability and cyclical shifts in mood. Female sexuality is shaped less by a single linear drive than by blurring states of receptivity and sensitivity. In contrast, testosterone-fueled male embodiment, in Paglia’s view, is “manic depressive” driven by obsessive projective urges of spontaneous desire, visual literalness, violence, competition and excitation.

In Paglian speculative pre-history, Dionysian matriarchy reigned supreme, an “earth cult” of animality, death, vegetation and maternal abundance. Pre-historic art centered on fertile womanhood, epitomized by the Venus of Willendorf, with her swollen belly, pendulous breasts and exaggerated hips. “She is the too-muchness of nature, which man longs to direct to his salvation” notes Paglia.

It is in Ancient Egypt that we see the masculine Apollo take control. Egyptian art is described by Paglia as an intricate balancing of “earth cult” with “sky cult”. The bust of Nefertiti is all geometry and symmetry, the cosmetic correction of swollen Dionysian fertility idols. For Paglia, “Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity”. This invention of refinement is epitomized by Egyptian feline cults, particularly of Bastet, as cats are those “uncanny creatures of the night” who mold elegance with vicious cruelty. This meshing of Apollonian and Dionysian forces also gives rise to the first “sexual personae” or recurrent erotic archetypes which plague Western culture: the femme fatale, the androgyne, the vampire, the beautiful boy and the Great Mother.

Ancient Greek civilization would continue this blending of forces. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, war, lust, pride, grief and death are not sanitized nor moralized but beautified in myth and image. Greek theology is a sky cult but with roots in the earth. The Olympians are luminous fascists playing in the primordial goo in which man is drowning. It’s here that we get the first portrayals of war-like womanhood, which Paglia views as distinctive of Western culture. The Amazonian myth, Artemis the Huntress and glorious Athena are projections of a male mind seeking to reconcile nature’s engulfing feminine power with the hard outlines of heroic form. The kouros — free standing sculptures of male youths — depict smooth, hard, youthful, bodies detached from the muck of reproduction. They exist, for Paglia, as “a living idol of the Apollonian eye”.

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Whilst Nietzsche documents a decline moving from the early tragic vision of Homer into the rise of Socratic rationalism, Paglia sees such times of “decadence” as cauldrons for great art. We see during this later period an incapacity for culture to integrate the Dionysian, which it then must aestheticize or condemn. Euripides’ Bacchae shows civilization unable to contain the feminized frenzy and liquefying force of Dionysus. In the playwright’s Medea, the barbarian sorceress becomes another eruption of chthonian womanhood into civic order.

It’s as we move out of antiquity that the central thesis of Sexual Personae becomes rather unconvincing. If you share Paglia’s vision of history, there is no aspect of Western literature or visual art that doesn’t contain some veiled reference to sexual personae. In her pagan eyes, the entire edifice of Western art is merely a series of veiled projections against devouring mothers, oozing sex, lust for twinkish ephebes and hidden transsexual desire.

That’s not to say all her claims are implausible. The Renaissance, of course, sought to revive pagan iconography along with corresponding sexual personae in the process. That Donatello’s “David” is “perverse and pederastic” is no coincidence. Also inarguable is that Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is blatant Apollonian aestheticism, womanhood masked and constrained in beauty. Finally, there’s no denying that the 18th-century dandy is pure pagan throwback. Oscar Wilde, who gets two chapters all to himself, is decadent aestheticism free of womanly influence with his lust for rent boys and cult of beauty.

There is also merit in Paglia’s notion in Sexual Personae that there are two strands of Romanticism: one strand epitomized by Rousseau in his sentimentalization of nature as innocence, and the other by the Marquis de Sade, who embraced nature as Dionysian cruelty and domination. For Paglia, it was the tendency of Romanticism to flip from the former to the latter which gave rise to the decadent genres of gothic horror, where nature’s ugly side is masked through sexual personae of vampires and ghouls.

All the same, Paglia has to make some ridiculous leaps in order to extend her psychosexual drama across centuries of art. It’s one thing to say that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is “the most extended meditation on sex in the history of poetry”. It’s quite another to claim that the English epic is mere set dressing for Spenser’s desire to explore a “encyclopedic catalog of perversions” that would make Bonnie Blue blush. Goethe’s genius apparently came from an inner “hermaphroditism”; Lord Byron was channeling the beautiful boy personae linking him spiritually with — I kid you not — Elvis Presley given their shared “brooding menace” and “urbane magnanimity”. By the time you get to “Emily Dickinson is the female Sade” it’s difficult to mount any resistance. Sure, why not?

It can be tempting to extend Paglia’s critique into the 21st century, as she did in the Nineties as part of the feminist “sex wars” over pornography and BDSM. Is looksmaxxing a masculine Apollonian resistance? Do K-pop idols signal the “beautiful boy” is in full bloom? Is the trans movement a sign of burgeoning decadence in culture? However, this would be continuing the mistake in assuming our pagan heritage is still within us. Under Paglia’s theory of the Western eye, our visual culture of buzzing screens and ceaseless images should be a high point of Apollonian artistic achievement. That it isn’t should signal that there is more to cultural flourishing than dazzling spectacle.

The strongest parts of Sexual Personae remain in its early chapters describing the pagan vision of early civilization. A pagan view of modern culture is desperately needed as an alternative to the increasingly exhausting ideologies of liberal progressivism and Christian nationalism. Nietzsche’s vision of an intricate integration of both Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life in pagan culture, a beautiful melding of the primal and the classical, remains a powerful ideal. However, Paglia’s simplification of these elements — her visions of a humanity separated into two distinct groups with one side responsible for the entirety of civilization and the other signaling its imminent downfall — is absurd.

Given the questionable validity of Freudian psychoanalysis, one has to wonder why man, just as much a composite of ooze and filth as woman, is not also at risk of signaling dissolution. Paglia’s oft-quoted line that “[i]f civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” envisions a certain heroic, stable masculinity that has not existed since the fall of the Roman Empire. Your average modern man is, both physically and spiritually, more Venus of Willendorf than Achilles.

Perhaps, a more universal pagan lesson can be taken from Sexual Personae, free of gender war and silly provocation: that it is our duty to our Western heritage to wrestle beauty and splendor from the muck and that both sexes are required for the hard labor of civilization.

But today, logos — and therefore our humanity — is under intellectual, political, technological attack. It’s not that people have stopped talking. Rather, the difference between speech and what Aristotle called “voice” (phōnē) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced. Indeed, the most troubling social phenomena of our time are all reflections of misology: the effective, if largely unconscious, hostility to logos that is perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.

Academic culture has, for decades, perversely promoted misology. In the early Nineties, I told a new assistant professor at my university that I taught and wrote about the Ancient Greeks. When I asked her what she worked on, she said: “Sure as hell not dead white males!” The incident was a harbinger of contemporary intellectual trends. The assistant professor’s aggressive dismissal of DWMs, as they were then known, was an expression of academic radical chic: the view that the poets, statesmen, philosophers who founded and developed the Western tradition have nothing worthwhile to teach us, because their (unchosen) membership in certain groups stained them with some sort of indelible sin. What had long been regarded as essential was now understood to be accidental, and vice-versa; being white and male counted for more than being human. This was little more than voice — the communication of feelings of pain or pleasure, as in a dog’s bark — masquerading as speech.

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Misology has now taken root far beyond the academy, degrading political discourse and curtailing essential human freedoms. The notion that speech is violence and violence is speech, a confusion of the fundamental categories of liberal democracy that are enshrined in the US Constitution, justifies shutting down speakers and badgering those who wish to remain silent into endorsing positions they do not support. Nor is it permissible for actors to “play the other” — sympathetically to inhabit roles that do not match their identities as members of particular groups — even though doing so has been the lifeblood of dramatic performance since antiquity, when free Athenian males enacted the suffering of female slaves. All these developments constrain and weaken the capabilities of thoughtful speech and moral imagination that make it possible for human beings to live decent and elevated lives together.

At the same time, ideological imperatives have warped and corrupted language. Words like “racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist”, and “genocide” are applied so broadly and inconsistently that they have ceased to signify anything other than the speaker’s disapproval. “Equity” — which originally meant reasonableness and moderation in the exercise of one’s rights — now has virtually the opposite sense: imposing extraordinary measures to ensure equality of outcomes. Neologisms like “undocumented immigrant” or “birthing people” have become necessary in order to avoid acknowledging plain matters of legal and biological fact. Some, notoriously including the Smithsonian Museum, have even condemned objectivity, scientific reasoning, and good grammar as expressions of “whiteness” and “patriarchy”. And, of course, politicians’ constant resort to hyperbole (President Trump being the primary example of this trend) has exacerbated the decay of logos. The looseness of our language and imprecision of our thought have left a void that is increasingly filled by intemperate emotion, making citizens leery of publicly sharing their perceptions of what is just and unjust, or what is best for the body politic — an activity that is vital to the health of any free society.

But it is digital technology that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the development and exercise of logos. Social media connected individuals, but also allowed them to melt into “flash mobs”. The possibility of remaining anonymous encouraged angry outbursts, personal attacks, and other threatening behaviours, so much so that these phenomena required new words: “flaming”, “doxxing”, “swatting”. The online world also promoted simplistic binary thinking: swipe left, swipe right; thumbs up, thumbs down. By limiting users to 140 (later 280) characters, Twitter — now X — got people into the habit of communicating in crude, telegraphic ways: acronyms, truncated phrases, and emojis. All the while, smartphones offered addictive distractions that shortened attention spans and sent reading, already in decline, into a tailspin. These developments have undeniably made us dumber: less able to concentrate, less knowledgeable, less articulate, less nuanced in thinking, and more inclined to respond to political or intellectual challenges with “hot takes”.

Yet all this is nothing compared to the destruction of logos being wrought by AI, which is merely a mechanical simulacrum of a living human intelligence. Chatbots that can summarise books, do homework, and produce exam papers have made it largely unnecessary for students to study, or to read and write beyond a basic level, in order to get good grades. So far, academic leaders have found no adequate solutions to this problem. They’ve either embraced AI, which will ultimately reduce education to efficient prompt engineering, or they’ve allowed professors to formulate their own policies, which will incentivise laziness and low standards on the part of instructors (some of whom are already using AI to write lectures and grade papers). Few universities and colleges are likely to hold the line against AI, especially because continuing to educate students the old-fashioned way is expensive. Yet that’s the only way to ensure that students will learn how to think (or even really come to understand what they think), let alone develop the individually distinctive way of expressing themselves that qualifies as style.

Nor is AI a threat only to young minds. Its sycophancy (it is deliberately engineered to tell users what they want to hear) is sophisticated and seductive — but also manipulative. A small example: Google’s Gmail is using Gemini to summarise long email chains, and these summaries include nudges that are designed to eliminate wrongthink. Gemini’s recent summary of a chain I was on stated that one person “incorrectly claimed Trump opened Straits” and another “used an offensive term for head coverings”. As AI learns more and more about each and every one of us, it will be able to deploy an unlimited number of individualised nudges to influence our thoughts and actions in ways that it (or its hidden masters) prefer. That is misology on the deepest level, for it may irreparably damage the capacities of independent thought, speech, and action that constitute our innermost individual being.

In Plato’s Phaedo, the philosopher Socrates says that “one could suffer no greater evil” than misology. He associates the affliction with misanthropy, the hatred of human beings, as if to suggest that hating logos just is hating human beings. The Phaedo ends with the execution of Socrates for the civic harm he allegedly caused by publicly asking questions that, as he freely admitted, annoyed and embarrassed many of his fellow citizens. That victory of the many over the individual, emotion over logos, was short lived — Plato renewed Socrates’ living speech in his dialogues — but future ones are likely to be more permanent. And what makes this prospect particularly horrifying is that, if independent thought should ever be completely extinguished, its passing will be as unremarked as snuffing out a candle.

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Reflecting on life in the Soviet Union, where the Western ideas were criminalised and surveillance, indoctrination, censorship, and violence sought to eliminate the individual human centre of logos, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that, “Nothing can be predicted with certainty: people could even forget how to read altogether and books moulder away to dust. We might even stop talking with each other and communicate only by emitting calls of bloodcurdling war cries.” That future seems more likely to me than the supposedly utopian, total biological control of humans by machines predicted by transhumanists like Cristian Daniel Bolocan, when “words become useless” and “only feeling remains”. Yet in either case, we will be faced with the hideous prospect of a world populated entirely by beings that may look (and even genetically be) human: but lack the capacity of speech.

How can we combat misology and reclaim our logos? First, understand that the very core of our humanity is at stake. That’s worth fighting for, so we must screw up our courage for grassroots personal effort, without which we cannot count on institutional or other help. We’ll need courage to stand up to totalitarian impulses wherever they assert themselves, from campus bullies to governmental speech controls, and to relearn how to say what we think in public. We must also try to put down our phones, read good books, reclaim the meanings of high-jacked words, and seek out face-to-face conversations with family, friends, and fellow citizens. Above all, we must purge education of petty politics, and once again make the cultivation of logos a central focus of everything from grammar school through university.

Homo sapiens — the wise hominid, the one said to be made in the image of God — is clearly an endangered species. Who will save us if we are not for ourselves? The capacity of logos is, thankfully, a source of freedom. It enables us to make deliberate choices about the direction of our lives, and, to the extent that we have the means and the will, to shape our collective fate. To do nothing in the face of the present crisis is itself a choice. But would it not be shameful to knowingly abandon what is highest and best in us?

Now, should the worst come to pass — should Western civilization be erased from the face of the earth — then those of us who make it to the fallout shelter will be able to add another crime to the list. Annihilation will also be Sydney Sweeney’s fault. A culture that can produce a scene like the one in Euphoria season three — in which Sweeney’s character performs sex-cam work while dressed as a baby — apparently deserves all the hydrogen bombs coming to it.

The HBO drama appears to have been the final straw for the influential ultra-nationalist Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who earlier this month launched into an extraordinary rant on X, apparently inspired by his late-night TV viewing. “Look: is there at least one argument why the US shouldn’t be erased from the face of the earth?” he asked. 

To those who might respond: “Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle jeans”, Dugin offered short shrift. Sweeney may be a MAGA darling — she is, after all, blonde haired and blue-eyed and comes from a Republican-coded family — but to a committed Russian nationalist, this is irrelevant. “You are not the people,” he wrote. “You are stupid slaves on the Epstein’s menu of cruel cannibal elites. You are eaten, your brains are. It is why you watch Euphoria. Because all of you are perverts. Disgusting civilization. No reason to exist. Please, die.” Thanks — we’ll take that on board. 

It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria — with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher. Born in the Khrushchev era, Dugin spent his youth vaguely agitating against communism before the break-up of the Soviet Union deeply wounded his national pride. Like every fascist before and since, he became obsessed with the idea of humiliation. He co-founded the National Bolshevik Party — the “Natbols” — with Eduard Limonov in the Nineties. The party’s flag was a Nazi-style white circle on a red background — only instead of a swastika, it had a black hammer and sickle. Russians aren’t generally fans of the Nazis; Dugin admired both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks for their Nietzschean will to power. It was the liberal West, with its dangerous ideas like human rights and free speech, that he regarded as the true evil. A hairy ogre of a man, Dugin conveyed his ideas with charisma and force. He was a hard drinker and a rich storyteller with a deep resonant voice in which he delivered mesmerizing monologues about the destiny of Russia to the eager young jackbooted Natbols. 

For all his mad array of influences — Hitler, Stalin, Guy Debord, Terminator, Lao Tzu, Mishima, Rosa Luxemburg, René Guénon — and his fondness for terms like “rhizomatic” and “hermeneutic circle”, Dugin’s philosophy is actually pretty simple. In Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), he argues that Russia must reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse by rebuilding itself as the core of a new Eurasian empire that is destined to challenge and ultimately dismantle Western (i.e. American) hegemony. America and the EU in this vision are not merely political rivals like China, India or Iran, say — but decadent forces, intent on dissolving Russia’s identity and historical purpose. Beneath the book’s strategic language lies a messianic strain: a wounded civilization is redeemed through expansion, action, spiritual renewal and permanent struggle. Only Russia, with its spiritual depth, its powers of endurance, its capacity for hard action, is capable of saving the world from the liberal antichrist. The book has become a set text for Russian military leaders and seems to have guided Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. Asked what policy Russia should take towards its Western neighbor as early as 2014, Dugin’s response was: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion.” 

Dugin’s pronouncements became more deranged following the assassination of his daughter Darya in a car bomb in 2022, and his targets have become a little more scattergun. He has a particular hatred of the popular Russian cartoon character, Cheburashka, for example — “the concentrated expression of that very feeblemindedness against which I have battled my whole life” — and frequently rails against Marvel movies, McDonalds, and various other symbols of American cultural power.

But Euphoria — in which literally every character is performing sex work to support their crystal meth addiction and/or gender reassignment surgery — would strike Dugin as a representation of everything evil and degrading in Western culture. And the fact that America permits this depiction of itself — indeed, that Euphoria has launched the careers of some of its most lauded stars, including Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya — is further evidence of the moral degeneracy of a culture. In his fawning interview with that useful American idiot, Tucker Carlson, Dugin declared that the dystopian futures depicted in Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Terminator were not warnings, but actual visions of where the West was heading. Why do American filmmakers never depict happy families or thriving communities in their future visions, he asked. It’s because Americans are willing on this apocalypse. Thus Euphoria’s self-loathing, atomized, narcotic, nihilistic, multi-racial hell is basically a warning — this is what America would impose on the rest of the world, a staging post on the way to Skynet. 

What’s interesting about all this — and what Russocurious American conservatives like Carlson often seem to miss — is the strain of messianism in Russian thought. Americans are so accustomed to thinking of their culture as the envy of the world and their eccentric conception of “freedom” as the universal absolute that the idea Russia might have its own global vision seems not to have occurred to them. They are more comfortable patronizing Russia as a backward, violent, pitiful place — much of which goes back to those images of Russians in the Eighties queuing for Big Macs in Red Square and going crazy for Levis (which clearly made Dugin furious). Thus Carlson could tour a Moscow supermarket in 2024, simply amazed that they have affordable groceries. But this cultural complacency frequently leads non-Russians to miss Russian critiques of the West (say, of American racism) and to underestimate the very real strain of messianism in Russian thought — that is, Russia’s own mission to save the world.

So as ludicrous as Dugin often appears, there is a coherent set of ideas behind his philosophy — and in any case, recent history tells us that it is the ludicrous people we need to take most seriously. To understand where Dugin is coming from you need to understand the Eurasianist tradition of which he is a mutant 21st-century outgrowth, as well as Russia’s dual conception as both an Asiatic and Christian civilization. There are many ways this dichotomy manifests. You can see it in the rivalry between the two capitals: St Petersburg, constructed by Peter the Great as a “window onto Europe”, and Moscow, the older Slavic center of Orthodoxy and imperial memory. But there are two key moments in Russian history that the Eurasianists have drawn upon to lend grandeur to their vision.

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The first is the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when the forces of the Russian principalities defeated the Tatar army of the Golden Horde and began to free their lands from their Mongol oppressors. In the Russian cultural memory, this event has mythic significance: the point at which Russia begins to define itself through resistance to, and absorption of, the steppe world. “Our path runs through the steppe – and boundless anguish / Your anguish, O Russia!” wrote the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in his cycle On the Field of Kulikovo (1908), which conjures a “holy banner” and the “Khan’s sabre” rising against a blood-red horizon. The idea this animates is Russia as a land formed of Mongol violence and Christian redemption — with a destiny of, hurrah, “boundless anguish”. 

The influential Central Asian scholar (and virulent antisemite) Lev Gumilev — son of the appallingly persecuted poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, both acquaintances of Blok — built an entire civilizational theory from this image. He argued that the Mongol period had not merely been an occupation but a formative synthesis. Rather than seeing Tatar horseman rampaging through Russian villages, raping Russian women, burning Russian crops as a catastrophe, he reframed it as a creative ethnogenesis. The Russian “ethnos”, in Gumilev’s formulation, emerges from a fusion of Slavic and Turkic elements, formed through long cycles of what he calls “passionarity” — a kind of heroic fusing of land, soul and idea. Gumilev developed an entire theory around this “ethnos”, arguing that this was no mere abstract theory but a “biophysical reality”. 

From here comes the notion that it is actually the liberalizing, secularizing, Enlightenment Europeans who are actually the dangerous ones — since they want to flatten out all ethnoi into one rainbow coalition of consumerism. Or as Dugin had it in his rant on X: “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” (He is said to speak 15 languages, and you have to wonder if his grammar is as bad in the others.)

The second foundational moment was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From this rupture emerges one of the most consequential ideas in Russian political theology — of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. As Philotheus of Pskov argued in the 16th century: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.” Rome itself had fallen into heresy (i.e. Catholicism), Constantinople to conquest, which meant that Moscow remained as the final guardian of true Orthodoxy. This notion would guide Russia’s self-conception not only as a state, but as a providential civilization — the nation destined to preserve and ultimately redeem Christendom itself and, certainly, its near neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia. So, Russia is no mere country but a vessel of sacred history, a restraining force against chaos — a katechon holding back dissolution; the dissolution of Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and friends. 

This is the deeper ideological field upon which later debates about Russia’s destiny take place. Whenever “Westernizers” have argued that Russia should reform itself along liberal, democratic, secular lines (Dugin would say “white” lines), there are always “Slavophiles” to argue that this is not the Russian way. In the 19th century, Slavophile philosophers like Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky argued passionately against European modernity, insisting instead that Russia’s strength lay precisely in what Europe had lost: Orthodoxy, communal life, and a form of spiritual wholeness they called sobornost — a notion of organic unity in which truth emerges not from isolated individuals but from a living moral community.

There are traces of this in many of the great 19th-century Russian novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, indeed, had his own Euphoria moment when he visited London in 1862 and was appalled by what he saw. “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly,” he wrote. “Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility…” But what unsettled him most was not vice but order — or rather, the promise of a new kind of world order. He was one of millions of international visitors to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which featured 28,000 exhibitors from dozens of nations showcasing steam engines, telegraphs, leech barometers, machine tools, Japanese prints, American cocktails — the whole world assembled in one glass pyramid. Forever after, the “Crystal Palace” recurred in Dostoevsky’s work as a horrifying hallucination of mankind forced into rational order through science, commerce and industrial progress. Where Western visitors might have seen a vision of global harmony, Dostoevsky saw spiritual erasure: atomization, loneliness, the reduction of human beings to interchangeable units in a vast rational machine. If you have ever toured the shopping malls of Los Angeles or Dubai, you may have experienced a similar shudder. 

“All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal,” Dostoevsky later wrote — that is, “the universally human ideal”. But in striving toward this abstraction they dissolve the very cultures that give human life meaning. Only Russia, he concluded, had the spiritual vigor to withstand such a fate. Russia possessed “a distinct peculiarity of its own” — a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity”. This is the essence of sobornost: a paradoxical unity that preserves difference within a shared spiritual whole. This idea is the great theme of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, where he presents the Russian national character as uniquely capable of absorbing and reconciling all cultures while remaining spiritually intact. It is also a theme Dugin resumes in his X commentary: “To be on the side of Russia, of Iran, of China, of multipolarity is to be on the side of the being against the non-being. The (post)modern West is the citadel of the non-being, of nihilism.” Liberalism, in his reading, is a project to liberate the individual from any form of collective identity — be it Church, family, nation, empire, even gender (trans-related scare stories are a particular source of horror).

So Russia’s mission is to save the world from all this — and especially its near neighbors in the so-called Russkiy Mir, a telling phrase. Mir in Russian means “world” and also “peace” — but it also has a connotation of a peasant village community (as opposed to svet, which means “light” but also high society). So when Putin appeals to the Russkiy Mir he is not merely referring to the Russian-adjacent peoples of Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc — but harking to an idea of organic peasant communal life. Come back to the village-empire! (Mir is, of course, also what Russians call the International Space Station. The progenitors of the Soviet space program often referred to the idea that the USSR, owing to its enormous spiritual depth, was the most suitable nation to represent Earth in the cosmos.)

All of this would be wonderful if Russian peasant life were not famously brutish, miserable and subject to ultraviolence from on high. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha recounts the story of an eight-year-old peasant boy who accidentally injures his master’s favorite hunting dog while throwing stones. The landowner orders the child to be stripped naked and spend the night in a miserable hovel. In the morning, he is torn apart by hunting dogs in front of his mother and the whole village. For Alyosha the story represents the failure of any kind of system — Christian, political, philosophical — to account for human suffering: “If the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him!” In other words, any system or theory that tries to justify or excuse the suffering of the innocent is obscene. The realism of Dostoevsky’s depiction of this horrific event — and the social hierarchy that permits it — serves as a convincing repudiation of any argument that could be used to justify it. 

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Indeed, it is never entirely clear what the Russian Utopia actually looks like — beyond “eternal anguish”, that is. Nor have I ever seen any of these thinkers truly spell out what those in the Russkiy Mir are supposed to get from their spiritual communion; the millions of Kazakhs who starved during collectivization, for example, or the Siberian tribes slaughtered as the Russian Empire marched eastward; or for that matter the more than 350,000 young men (predominantly from the Muslim-dominated monotowns of the South) who have died fighting to impose brotherhood on the disobedient Ukrainians. A vision of nationhood that promises redemption through suffering is quite useful when you want to explain away millions of dead. The hardest pill to swallow for many following the Soviet collapse was the idea that all of that suffering meant nothing — hence the ever-escalating need to put all the famines, all the wars, all the purges and sieges and atrocities into the service of some higher ideal.

Still, rather like the oligarchs of America who romanticize honest blue-collar work but have no idea what it actually consists of, the great romantics of ordinary Russian life tended to be from the svet as opposed to the mir. Most of the Slavophiles were serf-owning aristocrats. Putin’s legitimacy, such as it is, is largely predicated on his ability to provide shopping malls and farmers’ markets for a Moscow elite who are quite happy to shuttle back and forth to their villas in Dubai, Zurich, London, Nice and Cyprus when it suits them. Dugin himself seems to spend an awful lot of his time watching HBO and scanning social media — and, I would suggest, not enough time reading Dostoevsky. 

It seems outside of Dugin’s philosophy that Euphoria might itself be a critique of precisely the kind of societal atomization that capitalism produces — and that this capacity of Western democracies to critique themselves might indeed be a source of strength. Putin has been careful to provide modern capitalist comforts to Russian elites, but he has meanwhile cranked up the state censorship machinery to pre-Glasnost levels, so any Russian who attempts anything like an honest depiction of Russian life will soon be censored, banned, banished, imprisoned, or voluntarily exiled, like the recent Cannes Grand Prix winner, Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s not as if Russian youths are all happily singing patriotic songs as they march towards the drones of the Donbas. 

Meanwhile, the third season of Euphoria does gesture towards redemption. After she winds up in the home of a family of Texan true believers, the character of Rue (played by Zendaya) experiences a growing religious obsession — culminating in an epiphanic vision of God and a hint that there is, in fact, a higher meaning, beyond lonely pleasure-seeking. As Dostoevsky wrote: “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

That philosophy has a marginal role, even in the academy, is undoubtedly true in the West. But After Virtue doesn’t just examine what MacIntyre saw as the exhausted political traditions and moral confusions of liberal individualist Western societies. It also tries to offer an alternative, grounded in an idea of human essence and purpose, of the good life, inherited from the philosophy of Aristotle and largely, as MacIntyre saw it, abandoned.

In other words, in this book, MacIntyre is trying to change the world. He does so in a way that has particular resonance today, even a year after his death. His endeavor, in After Virtue, is to push humanity in a different direction — sometimes referred to as a “post-liberal” one — and, in a sense, to go backwards, to recover something lost through the turn to Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism. You don’t find much that even vaguely resembles this in modern philosophy, characterized as it is largely by pedantic quibbling and unreadable obscurantism.

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The critique that MacIntyre presents also informs his alternative. He argues that Western mankind became morally homeless by abandoning the foundations of Aristotelian morality in community and arete — excellence in one’s work. This Aristotelian morality does still live on, but only as a sort of remnant, being found for example in distaste for “dysfunctional” individuals or institutions which fail to serve any useful purpose. But it rarely carries the day.

Its abandonment exposes us to the claims of untutored human nature, for which there are no ethics, no enduring standards and little conception of  excellence in and of itself. In this context, other types of moral assertion tend to prevail, generally based around ideas of equality and equity which tend to be suspicious of achievement. But these moral assertions often seem inappropriate — rewarding dysfunctional and even illegal behaviors.

One example would be the current arguments surrounding illegal migration in Britain. Our moral discussions on such topics typically go around in circles of assertion and counter-assertion. The state and other conforming institutions try to enforce a consensus, invoking Christian-style moral sentiments  like “kindness” and “compassion”. But these attempts don’t convince — and indeed, often appear to be attacks on other kinds of moral sentiment, say, based on ideas of deserving versus not-deserving. Meanwhile we find the “harm” of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” — that individuals should be free to act just as long as they don’t harm others —  expanded and exploited. Anything disliked is asserted to be harmful, thereby turning the harm principle into a rationale for preventing freedom when in fact, it was meant to facilitate it.

There is an unreality to a lot of this cod-Christian, equity-centered moral assertion and its opposition. Both appear disconnected: sometimes futile; sometimes open to exploitation by the powerful. Moral statements about right and wrong still project moral passion. But the aims and ambitions those passions embody die on contact with the real world. Immigration activists preach compassion to refugees, but the migrants they seek to help hardly meet a compassionate world, trapped as they are between bureaucracy on the one hand and criminal gangs on the other. Those who wish to “Stop the Boats” meanwhile find themselves talking into a void. MacIntyre says: “We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have — very largely, if not entirely — lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” Nothing works, nothing improves — and our divisions embed themselves more and more over time.

MacIntyre suggests that the government’s inability to express a moral consensus makes patriotism, which he sees as a virtue, no longer possible like it once was. Western governments appear merely as means to impose “a bureaucratized unity on society”. As a result, they struggle to mobilize collective commitment. The nature of political obligation itself “becomes systematically unclear.”

Our customary way out of this state of confusion is to fall into a pervading cynicism, MacIntyre tells us, reflexively dismissing moral statements from others as mere projections of self-interest. This cynicism gathers itself into a theoretical approach that he called “emotivism” and which sees self-serving, arbitrary motives behind others’ moral utterances, exposing the very idea of morality to routine denunciations of hypocrisy.

MacIntyre saw emotivism in everyone from Evangelicals to the Bloomsbury Group, Sartre and Nietzsche, and the liberal rights theorist John Rawls. Freud’s “superego” is another example. This conceptualizes an arbitrary, irrational eye of society that controls our actions via conscience, preventing us from being free. Emotivism coheres into a reflexive refutation of inherited morality, treating existing social bonds as oppressive. But the alternative it presents, of self-realization — the individual creating their own values — only leads us into more confusion as individual examples are unmasked in turn and rejected. And so we go around again, propelling ourselves into a brighter future only to refute it.

As MacIntyre presents it in After Virtue, emotivism is the dominant philosophical standpoint of our times. As with previous moral worldviews, it finds itself embodied through characters who morally legitimize certain forms of behavior. While in past times the public school schoolmaster, explorer and engineer furnished such ideals, MacIntyre says, nowadays the function of emotivism is fulfilled by the archetypes of the rich aesthete, the bureaucratic expert, the therapist and the protestor.

We might think of DEI as a sort of culmination of the emotivist spirit. For it is demonstrative and assertive, placing all wrongness outside itself and the groups it sponsors. It operates very much in the moral register. And it brings at least three of those archetypes together: wielding expert authority via the law-like generalizations of critical social science; protesting against the oppressive existing reality decreed by this science; and prescribing the overturning of existing functional society in order to fix it.

For the emotivist, MacIntyre says, moral agency is located “in the self and not in social roles or practices.” That individual self can pass judgment on the world — and can freely reject it. The emotivist perspective is universal and abstract and protected from criticism. It is apart from the world — at least until it starts to shape the world itself, at which point it finds itself assailed variously for cynicism and hypocrisy. And so we go around again.

MacIntyre’s alternative, Aristotelian, version of morality seems strange and counter-intuitive to the Western individualist mind. Bound up in social roles and the work we do, it does not exist in a walled-off individual self. It is not purely our own. MacIntyre uses the example of a sea-captain to justify it, showing that, in his role, the sea-captain should do whatever good sea-captains do. At least some moral agency is to be found in him being functionally effective in his work rather than in some sort of inner essence of goodness.

MacIntyre uses the idea of the “practice” to articulate this perspective further, explaining it as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized”. In this sense, kicking a football isn’t a practice, but the game of football is. Planting turnips isn’t, but farming is. Bricklaying isn’t, but architecture or housebuilding is. To enter into a practice is “to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice” — standards which change over time through a continuous process of critique and improvement. Painting and music qualify, since they are long-term traditions with standards that evolve over time; so does academic work like physics, chemistry and the study and teaching of history.

There is contrast here with our conventional utilitarian way of seeing things, for which the point of work is to achieve external goods — that is, work as a means for achieving separate ends. MacIntyre doesn’t dismiss such things, but focuses also on the “internal” goods of the practice, on maintaining and extending standards, which in turn requires the presence of virtues like justice, courage and honesty. For this perspective, your moral essence is to be found not in statement-making nor in abstract ideas about who you are, but rather attached to what you do — and whether this reflects the virtues of the practice. In this view, a sea-captain is no more virtuous for striving to ensure his crew is diverse.

The virtues help protect the integrity of practices against the acquisitiveness of institutions. But practices require institutions to protect and nurture them. When we consider the decline of institutions like the Civil Service and BBC, we might see it in MacIntyre’s framing, as reflecting a discarding of the virtues in favor of a sort of moralistic self-promotion.

Is there a possible political philosophy in all of this?

John Gray, perhaps our greatest current political philosopher, dismissed After Virtue in a New Statesman article soon after MacIntyre’s death a year ago, suggesting that, as “an avowed critique of the modern world”, it offered little useful guidance for modern urban-industrial societies. “Reading the book when it first appeared in 1981, I was struck by its political thinness,” he said.

This seems unfair. MacIntyre’s account of virtues and practices applies to modern industrial societies as much as any other society, embracing as it does science and improvement as part of a continual process of criticism and critique. Gray’s account, accusing MacIntyre of “pursuing an imaginary prelapsarian idyll”, appears to be at least partly influenced by a torrid four-hour exchange they once had in an Oxford college garden.

I, at least, found the book to be original and refreshing. It also offers a contrast to the reflexive pessimism that Gray falls into. It taps into our confusion about morality. But it also offers an alternative, and strangely practical vision, based on a deeper, more meaningful conception of work. Under MacIntyre’s idea of practices, work is essential to human flourishing, giving us meaning and purpose, a role and status in our community, something we can be expert in and work to improve. This emerges as a different way of looking at morality, assigning moral value away from judgment-making and towards making a contribution through our actions.

There is plenty to question about this vision. Applying such an idea to the low-paid drudgery of much work is not straightforward. But giving extra substance and recognition to work that is “socially useful”, in Mervyn King’s phrase, like street cleaning and caring for the elderly, is surely well within the bounds of our imagination.

It is also easy to imagine “practices” being employed to prop up unjust and oppressive regimes. But on the other side, you could argue that the integration of practices into the workplace could be transformative in a good way, infusing both capitalism and the state with a new spirit, infused with the virtues. There is hope here, possibility, surely a sine qua non for any democratic politics.

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In a postscript included in a later edition of After Virtue, MacIntyre admitted that the book’s argument is underpowered in certain aspects. Its confrontation with modern moral confusions is certainly limited, having little to say about sexual morality for example.

The book’s value can be found precisely in application. MacIntyre’s analysis offers both critique of what has gone wrong and a route back to what may be made right again. Under his framing, such things as media production, academia, housebuilding and architecture, town planning, war-fighting, crime-fighting, public cleanliness and sport might all be thought of as practices to which standards of excellence apply over and above the assertion of moral supremacy. Certainly, the idea of practices runs counter to the promotion of self that we find so widespread in institutional life nowadays, which divert attention and resources away from delivery.

Indeed, far from being politically thin, After Virtue appears to open up a deep and rich seam of applications. As an account of work, it applies equally to public and private sectors. And, encompassing these two sometimes antagonistic sectors, it might just confer on us a practical theory of state and society: a political philosophy, requiring collective political action to implement in all areas where work matters. It ought to be an ideal prompt for the think-tank world.

The fashionably jaded thing to say when you hear all this is “Didn’t we already know who Banksy was?”. In my case, though, it wouldn’t be true. I vaguely thought it was that bloke from Massive Attack, and it seems I wasn’t alone. While Robert Del Naja is relieved at the clarification, the man identified as Banksy seems to have been irritated by the fresh exposure, protesting via his lawyer that he does not “accept that many of the details contained within [the] enquiry are correct”.

Banksy also says that the reporting will interfere with his ability to make art in future, though I find this unlikely. On the contrary, I predict that the wielding of stencils and spray paint will continue unabated, assuming that their owner still manages to get up and down a ladder. Such is the cult built around the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art over the years, few passers-by are going to believe it is really a middle-aged geezer in a Barbour jacket.

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Philosophers of language love such cases, finding that they raise an interesting question about proper names and belief. Say that, unaware of the new reports, I had continued to believe that Banksy was both a world-renowned visual artist and a famous trip hop star, while separately believing that Robin Gunningham was a scruffy non-famous person pottering around his allotment. In that case, it seems, I would be holding contradictory beliefs, quite rationally: both that Banksy was a famous celeb, and that he wasn’t. Yet the combination of contradictory beliefs and rationality is often supposed to be impossible.

In 1979, Saul Kripke made basically the same point with respect to an imaginary French man, Pierre, who learns from books that Londres est jolie, and then “through unfortunate or fortunate vicissitudes” moves to the English capital. More specifically, he moves to “an unattractive part … with fairly uneducated inhabitants”, where apparently nobody possesses the language skills to tell the by now London-loathing Pierre that “Londres” is the very same place. Pierre, seemingly unable to visit other parts of London, now believes of London as a whole that is both pretty and ugly. Depending on your politics, this text seems either presciently Reform-friendly or horribly dated — though perhaps not as dated as the old logic primer which gave readers the example of not knowing that Gary Glitter was identical to Paul Gadd.

The puzzle in question arises on the assumption that the names “Banksy” and “Robin Gunningham” directly refer to the same person at all times, irrespective of what users of the names believe about their bearer. But perhaps this isn’t true of “Banksy” anyway, despite the revelations in this week’s papers. Helped by deep anonymity for most of his career, his is a name that seems to have become essentially tied in its reference to a set of public artworks, rather than to a particular person.

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Another counterfactual illustrates the point. If we found out tomorrow most of Banksy’s famous works were secretly done by Damian Hirst, not Robin Gunningham, wouldn’t “Banksy” start to refer to Hirst not Gunningham? This was roughly the view of Michel Foucault about authors generally — or, more pedantically, the view of whoever it was that wrote Discipline and Punishment and Madness and Civilization. As that person once wrote: “the disclosure that Shakespeare was not born in the house that tourists now visit would not modify the functioning of the author’s name”. But things would be quite different, he suggested, “if it were proved that he had not written the sonnets that we attribute to him”. Equally, Foucault argued, when people say that Homer never existed, they don’t mean to ascribe non-existence to a particular man, but only to indicate that the famous works had more than one author.

Even leaving aside such semantic arcana, the anonymity of Banksy does seem crucial to his legend. Giving interviews with shaded face and electronically distorted voice, as if in a witness protection scheme for crimes against buildings, he left viewers free to project their own entranced imaginings into the void. The mystery became integral to the perceived meaning of his pieces. And as he got more popular, the original reason given for secrecy — namely, fear of arrest — became less credible. It seems more likely that he started to fear arrest precisely because it would make future revelation of identity more likely, rather than the other way around. (Indeed, that is how the new investigation caught up with him, using old NYPD arrest records.)

Without the vagueness, it is obvious there would have been little drama around the appearance of new works, and a lot less public interest. In this respect, Banksy’s work differs from that of another famously secretive creative, Elena Ferrante. The lack of knowledge of Ferrante’s true identity is fairly superfluous to her artistry and prestige. In contrast, supposedly iconic Banksy works like “Girl with Balloon” and “Flower Thrower” would have been quickly recognized as naff and sentimental — albeit technically well executed — had they been openly done by a Bristolian called Robin sporting Nineties shades and a cheerful expression. But conceived of as emanating from an elusive superhuman, they became po-faced and solemn, full of big, capitalized feelings: Hope, Innocence, Peace.

By far the best thing Banksy ever made was his brilliantly quirky film Exit Through the Gift Shop, about an otherwise talentless French superfan who Astro-turfed his way into the street art pantheon and became known as Mr Brainwash. Here, for once, the director’s well-known anonymity hindered perception of his work’s many virtues rather than covering up its vices. Most viewers concluded the story was too improbable on its own terms, and — given the reticence of the man who made it — must be a tricksy artworld hoax.

Indeed, I can’t help wondering if ultimately Banksy won’t feel liberated by this week’s reporting: his creative persona rescued from the cage of other people’s projections, placed back within an ordinary mortal body thoroughly incapable of bending the space-time continuum. Since his artistic identity could only be defined in relation to an existing corpus of work, the well-known style could not evolve much at all. Effectively untethered from a human body with a known biography, recognition of any new work as a Banksy depended on it existing in traceable visual relation to the famous ones which went before it. The man got stuck in the Nineties and needed rescuing.

I sometimes think similar things about anons posting on the internet. Being anonymous online can be liberating — sometimes too liberating, apparently. Not all self-expression is good. But equally, anonymity can be limiting. When a public identity gets traction in a particular social world, tied to a particular kind of posting content or style; when it lacks a traceable relation to the living, breathing, more multi-faceted person who is its originator; then there is less chance for meaningful reinvention of one’s persona. You can’t hope that your readers will trust you while you metamorphose into a new and less restrictive shape; for they don’t have any idea who “you” are. For them, you are just the old shape with a made up name.

In Banksy’s case — though perhaps it doesn’t feel like it right now — he has been given an opportunity: to say and make things under his own name. That is personal liberation of a kind. He has been handed the chance to reclaim his famous past, and join it up with present and future. His expressive acts have been publicly reconnected to the self that actually made them, as a heart-shaped balloon is connected to a hand by a piece of string. In retrospect, the works now ascribed to Robin Gunningham may look more earthbound; but equally, Banksy will no longer be made entirely out of paint.

My chief guide to the unsuspected riches of Islamic thought — particularly its mystical tradition, the subtle wisdom of the Sufis — is a French philosopher of the 20th century who, despite his formidable scholarly achievements, remains relatively little-known outside of academic circles. Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was, in the words of the literary critic Harold Bloom, a “scholar of genius” and “a wisdom writer of the highest eminence”. Other commentators have described Corbin’s special brilliance as “visionary scholarship” that combines “a refined spiritual sensibility with vast erudition and impeccable scientific honesty”. Having spent a year studying his work, I might add that, with his otherworldly concerns illumined by fierce intellectual acumen, there is nobody else like Corbin. His unique synthesis of Heidegger and Islam is as strange and startling as it sounds. Rarely since discovering the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in my early twenties have I been so entranced by an author and the cosmos he represents.

The country with which Henry Corbin is most closely associated is the one that screams from today’s headlines of war, massacres, oppression: Iran. But, enthralled by its civilizational splendors, Corbin shows us instead a land of the most exquisite spirituality and philosophical refinement. Moreover, the insights he discovered there, particularly those pertaining to what he called “the imaginal world”, suggest a missing, potentially regenerative link in Western thought.

The arc of his life indicates a mirroring of inner and outer worlds. Henry Corbin was born in Paris (let’s get it out of the way: he’s a Frenchman, so it’s pronounced Enree Corban), and his mother died six days later. A sickly child, he spent long periods in the enforced contemplation of convalescence. The young Henry had a keen aptitude for music, which would not be incidental to his later understanding of mystical ecstasy (he was to rhetorically ask, “But is it not frequent in the Bible for the Prophets to demand the assistance of a harp-player in order to open the eyes of their inner vision?”). He was raised as a Catholic, later moving to Protestantism because it allowed him greater freedom to engage with symbolism and sacred imagery. A brilliant student, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne while also studying numerous languages. During a period of “notorious asceticism”, he taught himself Persian and Sanskrit simultaneously, having already mastered Arabic, Greek, Latin, and various European languages. After finishing his degree in philosophy, he worked as a researcher at the Bibliothèque National, where he was much inspired by the pioneering scholar of Islamic studies, Louis Massignon. It was Massignon who made the decisive introduction that would set the course of Corbin’s destiny, by gifting him a manuscript by the 12th-century, Persian mystical philosopher Suhrawardi.

Known in the Islamic world as the “Shaykh al-‘Ishraq” (the Master of Illumination), Suhrawardi died a martyr’s death in Aleppo in 1191 and addressed his writings “to those who aspire at once to both mystical experience and philosophical knowledge”. Taking inspiration from Plato, pre-Islamic Iranian spirituality, and his Sufi forebears, Suhrawardi’s mystical theology held that reality is made of light, its gradations conjuring up the world of multiplicity we see before us. To Corbin, Suhrawardi would henceforth be “mon Shaykh”. He later told an interviewer that “with my meeting with Suhrawardi my spiritual destiny for the crossing of the world was sealed”. Following his studies, Corbin became a professor at the Sorbonne, commencing a remarkable career as a scholar of religion, philosopher, and eventually “Iranologist” — a pioneer in the field of Iranian Studies which he redefined through his philosophical and spiritual focus, and whose parameters he explores in the essays collected in The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy.

In 1939 he traveled to Istanbul with the intention of staying for six months, during which he would gather for publication all of Suhrawardi’s extant writings. The outbreak of the Second World War kept him in the city for five years — a period of intensive immersion in Suhrawardi’s texts and the mysteries of Islamic gnosis. The work of this period strikes me as one of the great feats of sympathetic scholarship — a quiet heroism of the mind while the world raged and burned outside. Henry’s wife, Stella Corbin, remarked that her husband wanted to create a bridge between East and West such as existed, briefly, in the 12th century of Spain’s “Al-Andalus” and the Islamo-Hellenic thought which flourished contemporaneously in Persia. From Corbin’s immersion in arcane texts in Istanbul, three decades of extraordinary work would flow.

After the war, Corbin moved to Tehran, where he established a university department in Islamic philosophy. On arriving in Iran for the first time in 1945, he described it as “a country the color of heaven”. He was to live there for many years, spending only his summers in Paris. In 1949, he attended the Eranos Conference in the Swiss resort town of Ascona for the first time. He was to become a central fixture at this annual gathering of luminaries with an interest in metaphysical, psychological and spiritual matters. At Eranos he met the likes of Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and the American depth psychologist James Hillman, who would write a short book inspired by him (Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis would prove pivotal for Hillman’s rich work on dreams and the psyche).

Corbin’s mastery of Oriental and Islamic thought was matched by his deep erudition in Western philosophy. He described himself as a born Platonist (“just as one can be born an atheist, a materialist, etc. It is a question of the impenetrable mystery of pre-existential choices”), and he called the great Iranian sages he studied the “Platonists of Persia”. These Muslim philosophers had indeed absorbed classical Greek thought, and it’s well-known that they reintroduced Greek philosophy to Western Europe following the Dark Ages. Corbin was passionately engaged with the West’s visionaries and heretics such as William Blake, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists. Moreover, his intellectual outlook was decisively shaped by his engagement with the philosophical schools of phenomenology and hermeneutics. In fact, years before his journey to the East, Corbin was responsible for the first French translation of the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he traveled to Germany to meet. In archives in Paris there exist copies of books by Heidegger owned by Corbin — in which his marginal notes are written in Arabic and Persian! Towards the end of his life, when Corbin was interviewed on his philosophical itinerary, it was published under the title “From Heidegger to Suhrawardi”.

Henry Corbin died of lung cancer in Paris just as the Islamic Revolution was catching fire in Iran — a development he observed with great sorrow. Even still, there’s a street named after him in Tehran, and his intellectual influence in the country remains potent (before anyone cries “Orientalism!”, it’s worth noting that prior to Corbin’s arrival in the Shah’s Iran, university philosophy departments taught only Western philosophers). Corbin translated and edited many critical editions of works of Islamic philosophy previously unknown in the West, and wrote numerous extraordinary books (his magnum opus, the four-volume En Islam iranien, remains untranslated into English). His History of Islamic Philosophy is a valuable work of reference with which to familiarize oneself with the names, disputes and concepts that comprise a tradition little-appreciated in the West.

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But all of that is mere context: it can give no more than a hint of the intoxicating strangeness of reading Henry Corbin. Admittedly, at the outset the prospect can appear daunting. So much in Corbin’s world will meet Western readers as radically other, unfamiliar, mysterious, even suspect. Some might be put off by the titles alone: Corbin’s major works include The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism; Alone With the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabī; Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. A typical list of chapters partly reads:

The Heavenly Twin (Mandeism and Manicheism)
Visions of the Pole in Rūzbehān of Shīrāz
The Senses of the Suprasensory World
The “Heavenly Witness”
Black Light in the “Rose Garden of Mystery”

But to read these books is to roam through marvelous landscapes of the imagination — visionary topographies described in a lexicon of dazzling metaphysical exoticism. A sample of Corbin’s vocabulary might include: hypercosmos; the eighth climate; the barzakh; metahistory; Parousia; the Cosmic North; Sophiology; Cherubic Intelligences; prophetology, the eternal syzygy; precosmic eternal entities; hierocosmology; hierognosis; Zoroastrian angelology; superconsciousness; the Night Ineffable; the mountain of Qāf; the resurrection body; the earth of Hurqalya; the interworld; disoccultation; theomorphism; the supreme pleroma; supracelestial Earth.

While such language might suggest the kind of florid effusions to be found inside dubious books shelved in the “Mind, Body and Spirit” section, Corbin’s works are written to the highest standards of French scholarship. It’s as if Roland Barthes or Jean-Paul Sartre were philosophizing from inside the universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune. More importantly, the Islamic mystical philosophers whom Corbin meditates on — “theosophers” is his preferred term, marking the fact that Islam has never undergone a process of secularization by which theology and philosophy split into separate disciplines — are as rich, subtle and nutritive as they are initially unfamiliar. The cast of characters across Corbin’s books is immense, but three central figures are: Ibn ’Arabī, the mystical sage of 13th century Andalusia whose influence on the Islamic world has been without parallel (he is known as the “Shaykh al-Akhbar”, the greatest master); Suhrawardi, the aforementioned Persian philosopher, who looked back to Iran’s pre-Islamic spirituality — Zoroastrianism and Manicheism — to develop his “Illuminationist School” of Islamic theology; and Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Persian philosopher whose influence has likewise been vast.

So this is niche stuff… but only on the surface. The truth is that, insofar as one is willing to take any of this material seriously (and an entire philosophical orthodoxy resists this, about which I’ll say more later), Corbin’s engagement with such figures allows him to write passionately into the profoundest and most universal of themes: the nature of reality; the origins, purpose, and ultimate destination of human life; the true nature of the self; and the mystery of what will follow “the supreme ecstasy of death”. You don’t need to be a Muslim to find intellectual wonderment and spiritual insight in his books, any more than he needed to be one to write them. (Contrary to what is often assumed, Corbin never converted to Islam.)

The first of Corbin’s books that I read, Alone With the Alone, not only introduced me to a figure, Ibn ’Arabī, who has come to captivate me; it gave me a strikingly novel vocabulary and framework — almost a new mind — with which to understand religious experience… which in turn has revitalized a long-dormant curiosity about the monotheistic tradition I was born into as a Catholic. (In a time of religious war, it’s worth recalling the obvious fact that the Christian, Muslim and Jewish nations all fight in the name of the same, Abrahamic God.) Corbin’s elucidation of Ibn ’Arabī’s metaphysics persuaded me that, while he was intensely rooted in the Islamic faith, this sublime Spanish mystic created the visionary-philosophical framework for something like a universal meta-religion, wherein the ineffable divine mystery reveals itself to diverse peoples in their own unique theophanic forms — the many dazzling faces of an inconceivable radiance. Though only some 140 pages, Corbin’s later book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism took me an entire summer to read, such is its compression of frequently startling insight. While many have intuited the lineaments of an invisible architecture of being beyond the realm of the senses, Corbin, with his restless trawling through humankind’s gnostic legacies, goes further by mapping it out, charting a means of ascension by which those who are compelled to might embark on an inner, suprasensible journey. Taking Man of Light a few pages at a time, I could feel it realigning my perceptions, altering my experience of being alive.

As a writer, Corbin might be categorized alongside other giants of comparative religion such as Mircea Eliade and the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Sholem. But Corbin stands apart for how, without losing the run of his superlative scholarly faculties, he writes consistently from inside the experience of gnosis — knowledge of spiritual mysteries. Although he is not given to autobiographical divulgence, his work exudes the sense of an urgent philosophical quest fueled by ineffable private experience. In other words, Henry Corbin was himself a mystic, a gnostic, a visionary, even if discretion kept him from discussing such matters publicly.

Stella Corbin emphasized that across her husband’s work, “the real goal is self-transformation”. That is, Corbin did not merely collect picturesque lore from arcane faith traditions in far-flung lands; he sounded out the hidden depths in such traditions for what he called “salvific knowledge” — the elixir of gnosis that he believed enables human beings to discover who they truly are, thereby fulfilling the profoundest purpose of earthly life. For Corbin as for the Sufis, the divine is not a matter of mere belief, but is to be encountered first-hand in transfigurative inner experience. He saw no need to limit his investigations to any one era or faith. Ontologically, his instincts are multiplicative rather than reductive. Occam’s Razor — the principle that every concept should be explained in its simplest form — doesn’t get a look in. Corbin is a great one for complications, comparisons, finding resonances across ages and spiritual lexicons. He seeks the truth not only behind but within multiplicity. Concerned as he is with “events in Heaven” — not history but “metahistory” — he gathers evidence from a plethora of sources to get to the heart of a given spiritual phenomenon. This sees him ceaselessly shuffling through what one critic irritably calls “religion after religion”: schools, doctrines, languages, concepts, prophets, ontologies, cosmologies and mythologies pullulate in a way that can leave the reader dumbstruck. Everything in Corbin’s thought shoots for the baroque. Worlds and dimensions branch off into a dizzying, ever-shifting ontological anti-structure that suggests a limitlessly complex and mysterious “beyond” — a vast angelological meta-universe which the human intellect can only ever hope to penetrate in fleeting transcendental moments.

Nowhere in his books does Corbin lay out any definitive philosophical “system”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, he saw himself as a wayfarer in thought and ideas, never resting in one place for very long nor being content with final classifications. However, certain elements lend his body of work its unity. In one of his many arresting phrases, Corbin writes of “the metaphor of the phenomena”. To him, as to his beloved theosophers, the visible world is replete with signs and symbols pertaining to an invisible world that is more real than the one simultaneously revealed and veiled by the senses, and this higher world is a level closer to the absolute inscrutability of what the Islamic sages call al-Haqq, “the Real”. In the words of one commentator, “to invoke the name of Henry Corbin is thus to invoke the primacy of the invisible.”

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For those to whom all talk of mysticism (let alone angelology) induces automatic skepticism, one way to approach reading Henry Corbin might be to regard him as a sui generis literary figure who pioneered a singular form of avant-garde, scholarly-theological fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, who Corbin sometimes reminds me of, might have welcomed such a reading: the great Argentine claimed to appreciate metaphysics and theology as specialist branches of fantastical literature. It helps that, unlike many philosophers, Corbin writes beautifully. To enter his imaginal space is to be transported out of our habitual reality to an alien universe populated by hosts of numinous beings, enigmatic sages, ethereal prophets. Consider Khidr, the “immortal wanderer” of Sufi lore who visits solitary mystics in dreams and visions; or the “Hidden Imam” of Shi’ite apocalyptic theology who went into occultation many centuries ago and will reveal himself again at the end of time. I’ve found that reading Corbin’s work, which abounds with such Borgesian personages, can induce trances of amazed perplexity more akin to the effects of music than of fiction. In this sense, form mirrors content. Ibn ’Arabī has written: “True gnosis is bewilderment.”

But ultimately, whether one truly connects with Corbin’s work will depend on one’s openness to the possible existence of dimensions beyond the immediate realm of the senses, classes of experience beyond rational comprehension. Corbin’s philosophy is incompatible with the dogmas of scientific materialism that have gripped the Western mind since the Enlightenment and still dominate the 21st century’s skylines even as their foundations have come to seem unstable, inadequate, not modern enough. In an Iranian documentary that examines Corbin’s intellectual legacy, dubiously translated as The Seeker of Orient, one commentator remarks that Corbin was too advanced to be properly appreciated in the 20th century. The implication is that our own century, in which the scientific imagination has begun to harmonize with the religious imagination it formerly displaced — panpsychism, Simulation theory, a renewed interest in mysticism and so on are all in the air — may provide a more receptive context for Corbin’s geographies of the invisible.

His critics have noted that Corbin has little to say about Islam as a religion of laws and beliefs as practiced by millions of Muslims around the world — the fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharia (divine law) of the clerics and mullahs. It’s true that Corbin’s thought is predominantly in service to what I might call his spiritual individualism. In this regard, while his heart is in the 12th century, Corbin’s mind has a modern cast. The inner event of spiritual birth “implies a break with the collective, a reunion with the transcendent ‘dimension’ which puts each individual person on guard against the attractions of the collective, that is to say against every impulse to make what is spiritual a social matter”. To Corbin — and perhaps this only affirms him as an honorary Sufi — the challenge of religion is profoundly personal, both in that he urges a private, immediate experience of the divine, and by way of the diverse ontological schemata he reconstructs for understanding the soul as individuated phenomenon, site of unique theophany. To Corbin, the Nietzschean injunction to become what one is necessitates casting off the mask of worldly persona to unveil “the essential individuality, the ‘celestial’ transcendent ‘I’”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, Corbin fathomed oceans of meaning in a celebrated hadith: “He who knows himself knows his lord.” That is, self-knowledge not only entails knowledge of God, it entails God’s own self-knowledge. In the formula of the German theologian, Meister Eckhart: “The seeing through which I know him is the same seeing through which he knows me.”

Rather than its outward practices, Corbin’s concerns lay chiefly with the esoteric side of religion. This word, like gnosis or mysticism, will make some readers wary. But Corbin reminds us that alarm around the term “esotericism” forgets that, “in accordance with its Greek etymology, it merely expresses a notion current in every traditional culture: inward things, hidden things, suprasensible occurrences”. Elsewhere he writes, “The terms ‘esotericism’ and ‘initiation’ do not imply any exclusive claim to teach by some self-instituted authority. They refer, respectively, to hidden, suprasensory things, to the discretion which the words themselves suggest in regard to those who, not understanding, scorn them, and to the spiritual birth that causes the perception of those hidden things to open.”

Corbin makes frequent appeal to the Arabic word ta’wil: the exegetical practice of following an idea, symbol or sacred text back to its source, penetrating its interior meaning. An adjacent lingual pairing is that of the zahir — the exoteric, outward, sensible, phenomenal — and the batin: the esoteric, inward, suprasensible, noumenal. Corbin’s concern with veiled, interior meanings owed much to his earlier engagement with Heidegger’s hermeneutics. His procedure was not that of an academic vivisectionist, analyzing dead materials into ever more rigid states of unlife, but rather one of intensive, living identification — a marriage of scholarly attentiveness and visionary absorption. He presents Shi’ite sages of bygone centuries as vital, undimmed presences. During his lifetime Corbin faced hostility from within the academy due to his rejection of the dominant academic mode, historicism, in favor of the phenomenological. That is, Corbin insisted on studying a given phenomenon as it is experienced. The ideas within a religion were to be understood as they are experienced by believers in that religion.

The beating heart of Corbin’s work is what he called the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world. The former is Corbin’s direct translation of the Arabic term found recurrently across centuries of Sufi thought: the Alam al-Mithal (the world of images). So, Corbin did not invent this notion, but unearthed and reanimated it for a Western mind which had long lost sight of it. The mundus imaginalis is an ontologically real zone of “metaphysical images” that exists in between the senses and the intellect, between pure matter and pure spirit. The italicized words in the previous sentence are crucial: to Ibn ’Arabī, Suhrawardi and their successors, the imaginal realm is the barzakh, the interworld by which human consciousness can interface with the divine realm of absolute, inscrutable being.

To Islam’s theosophers, this barzakh of freestanding metaphysical images is objective and consequential, just as the quandaries of nihilism and agnosticism that prevail in the West because of our losing contact with it are alien. Corbin reminds us that in the West our “official philosophy” admits only two sources of knowledge, namely empirical sense data and rational, intellectual understanding. We have amputated the vital faculty of the “active imagination” which is the locus of intuitive knowing and the site of vision, prophecy, dreams, and symbolic understanding. Note that we’re talking here of the imaginal and not the imaginary: to Corbin, the imaginal faculty became degraded in status in the West till it was confused with the imaginary, which denotes mere fantasy and make-believe. Contemplatives and visionaries of all traditions have cultivated this faculty by which may be accessed ‘a suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the senses nor the abstract world of the intellect’. In the secular West, it is left to poets and artists to draw nectar from this officially excluded realm.

Corbin discovered the “key” to this imaginal interworld in “the two ages of the spiritual world in Iran”, namely the Islamic and the pre-Islamic, as they were synthesized by Suhrawardi. Building on Suhrawardi’s thought, the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra argued that the imaginal faculty, which allows us to perceive the mundus imaginalis, is an organ of perception that exists independently of the physical body — and hence survives biological death. By way of such concepts, the Islamic sages make an unnervingly credible case for the persistence of postmortem consciousness in a hellish or blissful afterlife, each soul realizing a personal eschaton. Frequenting their philosophy could make words resound ominously, words I initially thought were uttered by the Prophet Mohammad, but which I now suspect I heard in a dream: “Death will meet men like a mirror.” Or the stark words in the Qur’an: “On that day, no intimate has he.”

To Corbin, the consequences for the West that ensue from “the loss of the interworld” are tremendous. No longer recognizing an inner organ of perception by which we can access the symbols, images and figures of the invisible world, we fall prey to psychic and civilizational maladies against a horizon of ever more suffocating nihilism. In the “Prelude to the Second Edition” of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Corbin writes:

Our western philosophy has been the theater of what we may call the “battle for the Soul of the World.” […] Is it a matter of a battle that has finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whose consequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world without compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not a refutation.

In the 2020s it’s hardly controversial to observe that in the West something has gone catastrophically wrong. Corbin insists that our malaise is not to be located in this or that symptom, be it societal, political or cultural, but must be traced into the philosophical foundations of secular modernity itself. An orientalist by vocation and Iranologist by profession, Corbin’s zeal for the thought of the East was driven by a sense of the self-impoverishment of Occidental vision, and the ache of “a nostalgia that nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out of the human heart”. Although he spent much of his lifetime in the Middle East, Henry Corbin always maintained that the true Orient he sought was not to be found on any map. The orientation his books encourage is a matter of inner adventure, an ever-renewed voyage to realms unknown.

It’s hard to offer a pithy summary of what A World Appears is about, but one can scarcely blame its author Michael Pollan for that. As the science journalist and polymath acknowledges, there is just too much vagueness in how “consciousness” gets used. One split is between those who use it loosely to mean awareness or experience generally, and those who insist the term refers only to subjective aspects in particular. The latter are interested in our capacity to mentally focus on “the windowpane” — Pollan’s metaphor — and not just what can be seen through it.

According to the standard story, conscious experience has an internal perspective built into it, and so implicitly refers to a self — as the sight of a candle flame also indicates your own (distant or near) spatial position to it. Or as philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?”: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism”. And if that doesn’t help, just focus on what it is like to be a reader now, failing to understand Nagel’s deathless prose.

The “subjective” part has made many a philosopher conclude that the inside is less real than the outside. Galileo split the world in two, putting quantifiable, objectively detectable stuff like mass, weight, and number in first place, and relegating private subjective aspects like color and taste to the realm of so-called secondary properties. Other thinkers followed; eventually, as Pollan nicely puts it: “the method morphed into a metaphysics”. We got the idea that the felt reality of consciousness is deceptive, and despaired of it ever being fruitfully studied by science at all.

Yet more mystical types have suggested that it is possible to drop the subjectivity completely — to reach a state of pure “self-less” awareness — and that counts as consciousness too. Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, tells Pollan that this idea would be better understood if researchers did more meditation and more drugs. “You have these people who are superambitious and dominating the discussion yet in their own mental lives are … completely impoverished” he complains. 

The temptation to take your own inadequate mind as your only laboratory seems to be a frequent hazard. Pollan relates how some of the loudest voices in the field possess what psychologist Alison Gopnik calls “professor consciousness”, a fact which tends to skew their findings in a different way. Socially clueless, screen-bound boffins discover that the essence of consciousness lies in the capacity to process information, while being physically embodied and having feelings turn out to be of negligible interest. What are the chances?

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Worse: effectively, these theorists are then rewarded for their literal narrow-mindedness. For if you define the thing you are investigating in a relatively circumscribed way to begin with, you’re more likely to derive a sexy-sounding answer to a hot button question like “are computers conscious?” later. If, for instance, consciousness is simply equivalent to information processing, then by definition you won’t need a human brain for it. Abracadabra! — information-processing computers can now be conscious too. 

Alternatively, if you treat consciousness as a kind of sentience, involving positive or negative responses to a changing environment, then it will turn out that plants can be conscious as well. Wordsworth’s “faith that every flower/ Enjoys the air it breathes”, vindicated at last. Again, this is a cool-sounding result; except that by stripping the original phenomenon down to something so minimal, you conveniently changed the subject.

Pollan avoids this mistake, as you might expect from someone who co-founded a center for the science of psychedelics at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the whole shebang: “the sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions, and occasional insights”, not to mention the “the banalities, the trivialities, and all the seemingly arbitrary bits and bobs of mental flotsam”. At one point he takes part in an experiment, wearing an earpiece which beeps randomly throughout the day, so he can then write down everything he is aware of at that moment. Having hoped for mental brilliance or even just a bit of edgy transgression, he is dismayed at “the sheer tedium” of his inner world.

He agrees that there can occasionally be self-less consciousness, recalling a markedly non-tedious mushroom trip where he saw himself dissolve into a puddle of blue paint, yet from “a completely unfamiliar vantage — perfectly disinterested, uninflected, unruffled, and utterly indifferent … a state of consciousness without a subjective perspective or qualities of any kind”. At this point, the skeptic in me sprang briefly to life, as I wondered how you can see anything without at least an implied spatial perspective, indicating the position of a self that is looking. But maybe I just haven’t taken enough drugs yet.

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Casting your net this widely increases the complexity of what is to be analyzed, and makes a complete physical explanation of consciousness look further off. Understandably, a central question of the book is what recently has become known as the hard problem of consciousness: how to explain all that subjective, ephemeral, flickering mental stuff in a way that shoves it firmly back into the brainbox. Or as Pollan puts it, more beautifully: “no scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray and white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester.”

In my view, there are better and worse defenses of the ultimate insolubility of the hard problem. The philosopher who coined the phrase, David Chalmers, has argued that materialism — that is, the attempt to tether every aspect of consciousness to a physical cause — must be false, because he personally can imagine the existence of a zombie duplicate, physically identical to a human, who does not have consciousness at all. Quite why we are supposed to take what Chalmers can or cannot imagine as relevant is unclear, though. Imagination, precisely, thrives on an absence of knowledge about the limits of reality; and philosophers’ imaginations especially so, in my experience. 

But there are better reasons to think consciousness can’t smoothly reduce to the physical, as Pollan explores. One is that “the very act of sneaking up on our experience becomes part of the experience”, so that we can’t get a stable hold on what is to be explained. When the beeper goes off and the mind dutifully looks inward to monitor its own stream of thought, does it actually create something new? Is there really a fact of the matter about whether the thoughts I had 10 seconds ago took the form of images or words, before I stopped to inspect them? We are tempted here by a homunculus fallacy, imagining consciousness like a livestream or ticker tape, passively watched by a miniature version of the self. But there is no clean separation between the watcher and the watched. Nor, says Pollan, is there even a sharp distinction between hardware and software; for experience is constantly rewiring the circuitry.

And there’s also the fact that — thanks to Galileo and co — moving from the third-personal, objective idiom of science to the first-personal stance feels like moving beyond the official remit of science altogether. But even if this inference is unfair, it still looks improbable that we could ever get a satisfying translation manual, exhaustively transforming the experience of a memorable meal or a terrible dream into information about neuronal activity, electric pulses, and hormones. 

And nor is the inert language of scientists or philosophers ever likely to properly capture our feelings of awe at the mystery of it all. For this we have poetry — specifically Wordsworth, described by Pollan as the “great poet of the numinous”. His Prelude, for instance, gives us: “Dust as we are/ The immortal spirit grows/Like harmony in music/ There is a dark/ Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles/ Discordant elements, makes them cling together”. It’s a magisterial riposte to the hard problem, and without a stupid zombie in sight.

Not surprisingly, scientists intent on formulating the evolutionary purpose of consciousness tend to play down such issues. They say they don’t require a physical explanation for every fleeting thought, but only a general account of consciousness’s function and origin. According to one approach — championed by figures such as Karl Friston, Antonio Damasio, and Mark Solms — the point of consciousness is to advance the system’s basic goal of homeostasis: maintaining internal equilibrium in response to changing external conditions. Just as hunger prompts us to find food, and feelings of cold to find warmth, more sophisticated conscious feelings — including the capacity to reflect on one’s own perspective, as such — help us to explore, understand, and predict the behavior of complicated fellow humans, again for the purposes of survival. Summing up the depressingly disenchanted thrust, Solms tells Pollan that “the mind’s ultimate goal is to render consciousness superfluous by reducing uncertainty to zero and putting the maintenance of life on autopilot”.

But again here — this time, thankfully — we run into the unbridgeable gulf between the scientist’s bloodless coding of the material world, and what goes on in the private here-and-now. From the inside, as it were, rendering consciousness superfluous is absolutely not on my bucket list. On the contrary: having read Pollan’s illuminating book, I long to dive further in. What count as adaptive goals for a species or an individual, couched baldly in scientific terms — the passing on of genetic material, fuel acquisition, the hoarding of resources, or whatever it is — are scarcely ever recognizable amongst the desires, fancies, whims, and wishes a person is aware of right now. Nobody can stay in the language of science for very long; not even the scientists. It’s too inhuman.

Why, then, do we fear that this consciousness stuff somehow lacks reality, even when we each know our own version so intimately? After all — as idealist philosopher Bernard Kastrup points out to Pollan — “matter is an inference” while “mind [is a] given”. Right now, each of us has already access to a boundless, telescoping universe full of fascinating transformations. All we have to do is go in.

To stay on the correct end of this axis requires a person to organize his moral energies around a boutique picture of reality. It is a picture that doesn’t even try to comprehend common experience — most pointedly, the experience of receiving millions of migrants from different societies (some of them quite alien to our own), with the attendant dislocations. These include the thinning of the social fabric and a retreat into further isolation — what the sociologist Robert Putnam called “hunkering down” in his study of the effects of diversity.

The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore the downsides of immigration — including rising rates of sexual violence — it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it. Yet while a traditional potlatch is made possible only by an underlying asceticism (a nobleman must be ready to do without the fine things he destroys), the renunciation demanded by our leaders falls most heavily on those they rule. Embracing the open society is the ultimate luxury belief.

As conveyed by the latter half of  Popper’s title, the idea of the “open society” is inherently polemical. It requires a foil of closedness. “In what follows,” he writes, “the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.” The alternative to the open society, then, is tribalism and magic, or some version of collectivist effacement of the individual. The paradigmatic activity of the open society is “personal decision”.

Popper’s original advocacy of the open society carries over to those who speak today in the idiom of universal “human rights”, as opposed to the civil or political rights that attach to citizens of a particular, bounded nation. Anything bounded is “closed”. If the mindset of human rights is given to moral militancy, Popper’s treatment helps us to see that the agenda of human rights carries with it a literal military corollary.

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Given the date of publication, this military frame of mind is understandable. As Popper writes in the preface to the 1950 edition, his ideas for the book had been germinating for some time but “the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria”. Clearly, the proximate enemy of the open society that he had in mind was Naziism. That would be the “magical or tribal” enemy. But he also takes on communism, the collectivist enemy. Popper speaks for the third combatant in the conflict, which goes by the conventional title “liberal democracy”. Whatever we call it, it is the regime-type that ultimately prevailed over both adversaries in the longer conflict that began with the Anschluss in 1938 and stretched through the Cold War. Arguably it is neither democratic, in the literal sense of rule by the demos, nor liberal in the 18th-century sense of limited government. Rather, it is “open”.

What interests me is the disposition that animates the ideal of the open society. Those who share it invoke the Nazi threat ritualistically, so 1938 remains important as an emblematic moment. But the open society ideal slipped the bounds of any particular circumstance to become a permanent imperative, never satisfied so long as any concrete, circumscribed political community remains. The end of the war in no way relieved enthusiasts of the open society of their need for enemies.

Both points of polemical orientation for Popper — Nazi racialist tribalism and Marxist collectivism — are forms of human association. The remedy for both, then, is individualism. Popper seems historically obtuse, willfully so, in his failure to register the fact that there are non-malignant forms of association that can provide the basis for social order. He skips straight from the Nazi and communist threats to an equally radical counter-ideal of individualism that is meant to inoculate us against both hazards. In this, he comes across as reactive and simple-minded, unable to conceive of a social order mediating between individuals which would satisfy his ideal of openness.

I believe the problem for Popper is that any kind of order that is already established is external to individual will. (Recall that the open society is marked by “personal decision”.) The freedom of the will is compromised when it is impinged upon by binding associations, such as family or nation, that are not chosen. To be innocuous, any association must be provisional; it must be continually re-chosen on a case-by-case basis as circumstances shift. Accordingly, the open society will be one of disengaged monads who come together episodically for various forms of exchange but have no deep or abiding connection to one another.

Popper recognizes that an open society therefore tends to become one of “abstract relations”. In this he is prescient. “We can conceive of a society in which… all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. Artificial insemination would allow even propagation without a personal element.” He offers this sketch “by way of an exaggeration” in 1943, but in 2026 it seems less so.

Given this thinned-out anthropology, Popper commends economics as the proper mode of doing social theory, because it treats human actors in their abstract relations of exchange. He condemns sociology — for example, that of Durkheim — for its “dogmatic belief that society must be analyzed in terms of real social groups”. It almost sounds like the fact that they are real counts against them. We are not to dwell on the concrete differences of habit and character among different social groups. Ideally we would not even notice them, as such noticing could compromise our allegiance to the ideal of the open society and its corollary: permissive immigration policy. The open society will be a society of individuals denuded of those qualities they acquire in association, as encultured beings. Openness seems to require positing sameness, so the variety of persons and of peoples can be treated as a mass of interchangeable human resources.

Somehow, Popper and his political descendants have succeeded in attaching the word “democracy”, used as a term of approbation, to this imperative of abstraction and replaceability. A better name for it would probably be “bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy takes as its object of rule what Popper’s contemporary Robert Musil called the “Man Without Qualities”.

Popper recognizes that achieving the open society will require a vigorous imperial project. What he had in mind, writing during the war, is not fully spelled out. But arguably, today’s interventions in the internal affairs of putatively sovereign nations by the trans-national organs of openness would seem to capture the spirit of what Popper had in mind. Such organs include the European Commission, USAID and indeed George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Whatever Popper envisioned, he was discreet enough to make his case for imperialism by historical proxy, treating the Peloponnesian War as a conflict between the open society of Athens and the closed society of Sparta.

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For Popper, any criticism of Athenian imperialism can only be a cover for reaction. “Thucydides himself was an anti-democrat. This becomes clear when we consider his description of the Athenian empire, and the way it was hated by the various Greek states. Athens’ rule over its empire, he tells us, was felt to be no better than a tyranny, and all the Greek tribes were afraid of her.” But Popper, writing over two millennia after events, knows better. All people of goodwill loved being ruled by Athens. Note his pointed misapplication of the term “tribe” to any city that resisted Athens’ enlightened exactions of tribute, or its beneficent control of commerce throughout the Aegean, made possible by its naval superiority.

“[I]t is necessary, I believe, to see that tribalist exclusiveness and self-sufficiency could be superseded only by some form of imperialism. And it must be said that certain of the imperialist measures introduced by Athens were rather liberal.” One expression of Athens’ liberality that Popper points to, which anti-imperialists fail to appreciate, is Athens’ offer to the island of Samos. As reported by Thucydides, the offer was that “the Samians should be Athenians from now on; and that both cities should be one state; and that the Samians should order their internal affairs as they choose and retain their laws.” There is no contradiction here, if the Samians choose wisely — for openness.

What Thucydides says sardonically, bringing out the confluence of Athens’ high moral self-regard with her insatiable need for conquest, sounds very much like how Samantha Power or Ursula von der Leyen might scold the Hungarians today for their recalcitrant independence. But without Thucydides’ irony, of course.

Popper reads backward into the fifth century his own determination to defeat “tribalist exclusiveness”, which requires total hegemony of the enlightened. The word “tribalism” is frequently used by bien pensants to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as provincialism; as a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. The political philosopher Pierre Manent pointed out that “in a deliberately provocative way, the most archaic political form, and traditionally the most despised, becomes the generic name for all political forms and human groupings”. That is, all groupings that fall short of the Universal and Homogeneous State that is to be administered by a post-political clerisy of the open-minded. The most efficient way to combat closed-mindedness is with open borders, global labor markets, and plenty of foreign interventions to keep up a steady flow of migrants and refugees. Invade the world, invite the world.

Popper argues against utopianism, because it leads to totalitarianism. Yet it does not seem to bother him that his hope for a post-political condition is itself utopian and requires a total program; an empire of openness from which no exit is to be countenanced.

Just as unrealistic were Samuel Johnson’s 1769 hopes of rising by eight in the morning, a self-command plaintively repeated many times over 50  years of diary entries, without much success. Woody Guthrie’s  “New Year’s Rulins”, written down in 1943, were a mixed bag: “change bed clothes often” and “listen to radio a lot” sound eminently SMART, but “help win war — beat fascism” less so. Meghan Markle’s resolution a decade ago to “let the magic know that there is an open door policy with me in 2016 and that it is always welcome to join the party”: time-bound, certainly, but neither specific nor measurable. But then again, she did land a prince that year, so what do the psychologists know?

What the SMARTies miss is that turning an essentially optimistic ritual into a piece of efficient project management is a depressingly cowed way to kick off the year. If we are forced to view them in psychological terms, New Years’ resolutions are better framed as a socially sanctioned form of Borderline Personality Disorder. For a few weeks in the depths of winter, there is collective permission to dream of personal reinvention in the most exuberant and improbable of ways. Or as G.K. Chesterton observed, equally unheeding of the SMART imperative: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.”

Never mind your unspoken conviction that you are bound to fail in your self-improvements sooner or later. Right now, you are in a generous imaginative realm where anything is possible. You are listening for bells, and letting the old year out through the back door. You are first-footing the homes of your friends while carrying propitious gifts. During this mysterious interlude, full of icy dark and ghosts, why not dare to dream of miraculous transformations too?

All this technocratic talk about New Year’s resolutions misses the point because it doesn’t fully grasp what they are. In making one, you are not offering a sober prediction about the conduct of your future self, based on available evidence. If questioned, many fervent annual resolvers would predict that they are bound to default eventually, but still place stern notes to selves on the fridge in the meantime.

Unlike with prediction, your will is involved. You are forming an intention, and it can only come from you. For this same reason, Zoe Williams’s half-serious suggestion in The Guardian last year, that we start choosing resolutions for our friends instead of ourselves, is a non-starter. An intention has to relate to your own perceptions of what is valuable in life, not theirs.

Intentions are weird mental entities, and philosophers struggle to pin them down. They are different from mere beliefs, because of that presence of the will. But they also seem different from desires, because you can long for something you have no intention of trying to get. In order to properly count as having an intention, some philosophers think you must display commitment, having already started to make preliminary steps towards your goal. Others disagree: it can be the kind of “pure” mental state you can have while sitting around doing nothing whatsoever. New Year’s resolutions look like they fit the latter model better than the former, and not just because of all that turkey. Had you embarked upon realizing your goals already, they wouldn’t have the requisite dramatic promise of a fresh start.

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Accordingly, you should ignore any so-called experts ludicrously exhorting you to “soft launch” New Year’s resolutions in September, on the grounds that this will be more effective. Such pedestrian minds are apparently blind to the awe-filled sensation of standing between two huge temporal edifices in the dark. You are shedding the old self with the old year, and plunging headlong into the new on both counts. In September, telling yourself you are going to start running five miles every day is mundane. On 1 January, it becomes a magical incantation.

So: thanks to its symbolic context, a New Year’s resolution isn’t just any old intention. This context also explains why it has a kind of solemn import that the everyday version lacks. The felt gravity is hard to explain otherwise. You might say that it is because you have made a promise to yourself, but self-promises are the easiest kind to break. You might say it is because you have told others about your resolutions, in order to “hold yourself accountable”. But even if you have, it is unclear why others should care either way. Your projects are not theirs, and vice versa.

Perhaps to overcome this difficulty, an article in this week’s Atlantic suggested that New Year’s resolutions be agreed collectively with family or friend groups, the better to avoid future backsliding. Once again, possibilities of thrilling self-transformation are made to sound more like completing a group presentation at work. A better story is surely more Nietzschean. It is a crucial part of the January fantasy that your body and soul will be forged into some new and miraculous shape, simply by the force of your own will.

For delicate souls, this might sound disturbingly oppressive. Indeed, to explain the difference between an everyday intention and a resolution, some philosophers picture the latter as a piece of self-imposed legislation. Alain de Botton has said that “we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws, to keep ourselves in check”. Meanwhile, Richard Holton pictures resolutions as involving intimidating meta-intentions. When you make a resolution, behind your ordinary pusillanimous intention to do such-and-such in future stands another intention, armed with a metaphorical cattle prod, there to stop you giving into temptation to break the first.

Since some people don’t like being told what to do, even by themselves, it is presumably these kinds of legalistic or military conceptions that give rise to endless variants of the “Why my resolution is to give up on New Year’s resolutions” article from Guardian authors. Others worry that resolutions are bad for mental health, apparently defining “feeling disappointed in yourself” as a form of mental illness. The good news is that you are likely to get over this sort of illness very quickly — and that as long as you are alive, there will be further New Years to try again.

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For this is surely the best side of the annual ritual of resolutions, properly understood. They are not just an expression of what you want to do, but of who you want to be. They are an intrepid acknowledgment that you are capable of being a better person, couched not in the bitter language of self-recrimination but of hope. Whether they actually lead to a slimmer waistline or more efficient working habits is neither here nor there. The point is that, right now, you can almost believe they will.

And the new year serves a further function: of allowing you to leave certain things behind. As with rituals of confession and forgiveness, you now have a formalized opportunity to mentally cast off the past and start again. Without religion we have precious few occasions dedicated to symbolic renewal, and certainly no collective ones. Our vernacular may be full of punishing talk about public “accountability”, but says little that is useful about meaningful repentance. This means it can be very unclear when repentance may legitimately end, and how exactly one is supposed to move on. Here, perhaps, we really do need something time-bound. In lieu of a priest, a calendar can help.

None of this immense value can be described in the language of “measurable” or “achievable” outcomes. Indeed, it can barely be described in words at all, without flat-footed literalism stamping the life out of it. Those who are keen to dismantle the institution of New Year’s resolutions are taking away more than a bit of February self-recrimination. Who wants time, boringly viewed as an undifferentiated plane? Who wants human life seen as a monotonous toil, with no small deaths along the way nor invigorating rebirths?

As for me: in 2026, I resolve to be more loving to my family, more attentive in my friendships, more fastidious in my habits. My January will be the driest on record. My language and my kitchen will both be impeccably clean. I will go walking in nature every day, laugh in the face of thunderstorms, and leap hills effortlessly. My columns will soar like an eagle, float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee. I will finally finish reading The Brothers Karamazov. In Russian. And if I can help it, I will mostly be staying away from the psychological professions. Their disenchantment can be horribly catching.

***

Variety is the spice of life and all that. Last Thursday I was at Channel 4, attending the premiere of porn star Bonnie Blue’s new documentary, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself. The next day I was in the Cotswolds to give an after-dinner speech at “Scrutopia”, the annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. One of these events was much more fun than the other.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

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With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgmental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanization. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualizing, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammeled by civilizing religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

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Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualized choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster-in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgments out of the carpark and back on the road.

In the United States, especially, church membership is soaring among the young. The assassination of Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk poured fuel on the fire, but the spark kindled well before that horrific event, and it’s the more conservative churches that have welcomed the bulk of the newcomers. It’s not accidental that young men make up the vanguard in this movement back towards traditionalism. Every social movement with a future worth watching starts by attracting young men, who always seem to be the vanguards of enduring social change.

Why, though, is this shift benefiting conservative Christian denominations? There are plenty of other options for disaffected young men, some of them far more threatening to the status quo than attending Mass, finding Jesus by way of Wednesday night Bible classes, or indeed watching Charlie Kirk videos. Very few of them are making bombs, for example, or shooting at politicians they dislike — in the United States, at least, that has been far more common on the Left in the last few years. I can see several reasons for this state of affairs.

The first, put simply, is that these days conservative Christianity is perhaps the best available way for a teenage boy to shock his mother. I don’t mean this as a joke. A core part of the process by which teenagers define their own identities in contrast to the expectations of their parents is the quest for new and enticing ways to spark parental outrage. Young people half a century ago could still do that by moving further out toward the notional cutting edge than their parents were willing to go. This they accordingly did, and cultures thus lurched Leftward generation after generation.

Now? If a teenage boy says “Mom, I think I’m gay,” he’s likely to be told, “That’s nice, dear.” The same is almost as often true if he says that he thinks he’s transgender, while if he announces that he’s decided to worship some strange pagan cult, his mother may just invite him to the local Wiccan circle next time there’s a full moon. It’s hard to imagine anything more crushing to the teenage ego than being patted on the head and told that your mother approves of your attempted act of rebellion.

By contrast, imagine what happens if that same teenage boy comes home wearing a MAGA hat and announces that he’s just found Jesus. In most of today’s middle-class households, that would evoke a truly satisfying display of parental hysterics. Meanwhile, those teenagers who aren’t quite willing to face so epic a tirade from their liberal parents can pursue a less overt version of the same rebellion, swapping conservative Christian memes with their friends online in much the same spirit that led their parents to smoke cannabis with their friends after school. Cannabis itself and the other erstwhile trappings of Leftist radicalism are now too socially acceptable to fill that role. In our present culture, radicalism has become the conventional wisdom, and so the conservative has become the transgressive.

There’s a second dimension of this shift, which inevitably gets left out of simplistic linear notions of “progress”. Glance back over the history of the Anglophone world and what emerges is a curious alternation of public morals over the course of roughly a century. After the rollicking Elizabethan bawdiness of the 16th century came the Puritanism of the 17th, with its Roundheads and its colonizing Pilgrims. After that came a return to looser morals in the Georgian era of the 18th century, which was among other things a golden age of pornography and saw London get a reputation as Europe’s capital of prostitution; following that, the 19th century made “Victorian” a byword for strident moralizing, and this was reversed in the usual way by the exuberant decadence of the 20th.

Now the 21st century has arrived. The moral license of the 1900s has already undergone sharp restrictions at the hands of feminists, while conservative Christians are taking things further. None of this is accidental. Moral rigidity and moral laxity, in sexual and other contexts, both have their pathologies; there is a middle path of balance between them that avoids the problems of both, but humanity being what it is, this is rarely reached except as a transient stage between one extreme and the other. People of good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of Victorian morality, set the process in motion that led to the Sexual Revolution; people of equally good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of that revolution, are setting processes in motion that are giving the pendulum a good hard push the other way.

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Conservative Christian churches have a great deal to offer those who see the value in moral restrictions, partly because they have so long a history of aggressive puritanism, and partly because they are among the few institutions in the modern world that have consistently pushed back against the liberal moral tides of the last century. It thus makes perfect sense that, as public attitudes swing back toward puritanicalism, conservative churches should become attractive again.

Yet there may be another process at work in all this, one playing out over a far greater timespan. Over a century ago, it was anatomized with mordant clarity by Oswald Spengler, the most accurate and therefore the most angrily dismissed of the 20th century’s students of historical cycles. What we are seeing is the early stages of what Spengler called die zweite Religiosität. The usual translation of this phrase is “the Second Religiousness”, but for reasons I will explain shortly “the Second Religiosity” is a better fit. To understand the way this is taking shape behind today’s headlines, it’s necessary to trace the outlines of Spengler’s unfashionably perceptive theory of history.

It’s crucial, in approaching Spengler, to realize that he was discussing morphology, not causality. Like Newton, he “feigned no hypotheses” to explain why history unfolds the way it does; his quest was simply to show what happens, and to seek a comparative morphology of great cultures that can be used as a basis for prediction, in much the same way that Newton’s theory allowed the accurate prediction of planetary motions. Spengler sought to line up history’s great cultures side by side, and look for the common patterns, in the same way that a comparative anatomist puts the bones of a bat’s wing, a dog’s forelimb, and a porpoise’s paddle side by side, to show that each has the same underlying structure as a human arm. Did he succeed? The jury’s still out, but his predictions so far have proved accurate, while those of his critics have generally flopped.

The Second Religiosity is a core element in both Spengler’s theory and his predictions. Every great culture starts out under the sway of a distinctive religious vision, one that embodies and frames the culture’s understanding of the cosmos. As the culture moves out of its springtime era into maturity, the mythological language of its religious vision gives way to a secularizing trend. The result is an age of reason, in which the old vision is pried loose from its religious setting and turned into an assortment of rationalist ideologies.

The pathbreakers and cheerleaders of the age of reason inevitably convince themselves that society has put its superstitious past behind it, but their ideologies turn out to be far more fragile than the faith they supplanted. Eventually, as the age of reason crashes to ruin around them, people find themselves confronted by chaos, and flee for refuge to the one resource that remains: the traditional religious forms of their culture’s springtime. This is the Second Religiosity, the return to religion that marks the fading of every great culture. The revival of Confucianism as a religious ideology in imperial China after 1100 and the return of India to Hindu faith around the same time are examples well documented in the history books. As for the Western world, Spengler expected the Second Religiosity to arrive sometime soon after the year 2000.

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Whatever the culture, the Second Religiosity always presents itself as a return to the source of a culture’s early greatness. In a crucial sense, however, it’s nothing of the kind. The religion of a culture’s springtime is forged of the shattering impact of transcendent realities on individual human prophets and visionaries. It is accordingly rough-hewn, unruly, and comfortable with contradictions that look like absurdities to the later, more logical consciousness of a later era.

The religion of the Second Religiosity, by contrast, is ordered, formal, and reasoned: all the hallmarks of religiosity, as distinct from religion in any deeper sense. Its goal is to provide a bulwark against inward and outward chaos, and it does this by relying on history rather than on the terrifying transrational shock of direct religious experience. Where the original religious impulse faces the future, the Second Religiosity is always oriented toward the past. The winds of autumn can always be heard whistling through it. Eventually they will tear it to tatters, leaving the ground cleared for the newborn religious vision of some future great culture, but that time is still far off for us.

Just now, by contrast, there are good reasons why the flight from chaos into the Second Religiosity is in the ascendant. The most important of these is the accelerating failure of faith in progress, the unacknowledged pseudosecular religion of our time. Barbed jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety are merely the cutting edge of a broader collapse of faith in progress. This doesn’t merely impact what we may as well call the “Tomorrowland future”: that world of fading daydreams in which flying cars, fusion power and interplanetary colonization all have their natural habitat. Rather, it embraces the entire belief that history must move in whatever direction we think we want it to go.

At the moment, that faltering faith is being propped up by the overblown hype surrounding large language models (LLMs), which are currently being marketed under the misleading label of “artificial intelligence”. This label is a misnomer: LLMs aren’t intelligent. All they do is string together statistically likely sequences of words or other symbols in response to a prompt. Computer scientist Emily Bender has described LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. The phrase isn’t quite apt, because parrots are highly intelligent birds, but the metaphor still has value. LLMs, like unusually stupid parrots, repeat strings of words without any connection to the realms of meaning, purpose, and value that underlie the phenomenon of intelligence.

Yet right now, blind faith in LLMs is propping up more than the mythology of progress. Rather, these overhyped programs are propping up one of history’s great speculative delusions, with the usual concomitants of wildly inflated stock prices and equally distorted investment decisions. Readers who don’t yet know how this ends may find it useful to consult John Kenneth Galbraith’s wry history The Great Crash, 1929, or Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

We are already starting to see close equivalents of Irving Fisher’s famous insistence, nine days before the 1929 crash, that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau”. While it’s true that the market can stay insane longer than most investors can stay solvent, a speculative bubble on this scale has only one possible outcome. It’s just a matter of when the crash finally hits.

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The future is barbarian

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Here again, though, it’s not just the technological side of progress that has crumpled in recent years. One of the odder features of contemporary political life is the way that so few political parties on the Left offer proposals for the future that differ in any noticeable way from the present, and the ones that do — Marxist parties come to mind here — harken fondly back to the dreams of a past era just as enthusiastically as any conservative. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, this shows the twilight of an age of reason that once put grand dreams of the future at the center of its cognitive universe.

The opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States just now is a case in point. The Democratic Party has stopped talking about anything but their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies — this at a time when a huge share of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the state of the country and the government policies that shape their lives. “Vote For Us So Life Will Continue To Suck” isn’t exactly a compelling election slogan, but it’s a fairly good summary of the Democratic platform these days. Trump’s populist movement, by contrast, has specific proposals for change, and is enacting them at a respectable pace despite the concerted opposition of the Washington establishment. This likely accounts for a good share of Trump’s popularity, even among those who don’t necessarily share his opinions.

The same weird sense of stasis appears throughout today’s industrial Western cultures. Consider our popular movies, dominated by remakes of decades-old franchises and dreary morality plays. As another example of the same exhaustion, there was a time when the goal of activists working on racial and gender issues was to heal once and for all the social wounds inflicted by various bigotries. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the only one to speak movingly of a future in which people of all colors would live together in peace, harmony and equality. That sense of a potential for change has all but vanished from the rhetoric of today’s activists. What they offer instead resembles nothing so much as an unusually dour sort of secular Calvinism, in which the Original Sins of racism and sexism bear down immovably on humanity.

At least Calvinism offered the promise of redemption; today’s activist culture does not. Eternally cursed with the burden of privilege, due to the actions of some few of their ancestors, those who happen to belong to the wrong race, gender, and on and on through an ever-proliferating swarm of categories, can look forward to nothing but endless humiliation and repentance, with no hope of any change to their sinful condition. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a growing number of people so stigmatized are backing away from ideologies of this sort and seeking out a different setting — that of the nearest conservative church — where, whatever else they may find, they can at least hope to encounter a Redeemer.

As this suggests, there is a very real sense in which the vagaries of popular culture in recent years, unbeknownst to their creators, have been setting the stage for the coming of the Second Religiosity. This comes as no surprise to readers of Spengler, or for that matter to anyone familiar with the phenomenon of the return of the repressed. Religion — not in the sense of ideology, but in its deeper and truer sense as the confrontation of human consciousness with transcendent experience — was for several centuries rigidly repressed by the mainstream currents of Western industrial society. Now it is back in force.

Yet it bears remembering that the coming of the Second Religiosity is to a very great extent a leading symptom of that return, not its full expression. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, as the age of reason set in motion by the rise of Greek philosophy imploded in a shower of failed dreams of the world made rational, people across the empire turned back to the established religions of their time, making the traditional offerings to Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the polyglot pantheon of the ancient world. That was their Second Religiosity, their refuge from the tremendous chaos of their age, and it played an important role in maintaining classical society during its latter centuries.

It did not last, however. While incense billowed upwards to the gorgeous marble statues of the gods and goddesses, new beliefs wholly alien to classical polytheism spread through the crawlspaces of Roman society. A few centuries on, one of them would rise up to overthrow the temples and clear the ground for cultures yet unborn. From the rise of the cult of Osiris in Egypt’s First Intermediate Period to the predominance of Amidist Buddhism in early modern east Asia, it’s a familiar story.

The first stirrings of the same process are doubtless under way, though it would be just as impossible to point to the faiths of the future now as it would have been for a Roman intellectual to pick Christianity out of the turbulent religious underworld of the Roman world and identify it as the inheritor and destroyer of the classical world. It will be a century or more yet before it becomes clear which beliefs seize the imaginations of the dispossessed and disaffected, overthrowing the institutions of our Second Religiosity in their turn. Dealing with that is a task for future generations. What we face now is the resurgence of traditional religion in Western societies that had dismissed it as an outdated relic of a barbarous past. Dramatic changes for good and ill can be expected as that process continues, and the future in which so many thought we would spend the rest of our lives goes whistling down the wind.

This was an entirely reasonable matter to raise. After all, political thought has taken place across all human cultures, throughout history, around the globe (although by no means all of it has been written down in a way accessible to undergraduates). Nonetheless, as regards teaching, it presented a challenge.

I had made the conscious decision to combine breadth with depth. Rather than racing through the great works of 10 “canonical” thinkers, I elected instead to do two weeks on each of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, with a bonus week on Mary Wollstonecraft squeezed in. The aim was pedagogical. For many students this would be their first and last time coming into sustained contact with some of the greatest works of political philosophy ever written. Deciding on a list of six was always going to be somewhat arbitrary. (No Plato! No Augustine! No David Hume or Adam Smith or Max Weber!) But in picking these six, I wanted to introduce undergraduates to just how powerful political thought can be when practiced by the best. Also, I felt duty bound to keep the flame alive.

Also, it seemed not inappropriate to privilege Western political thought. After all, it is a brute fact that the Western state form has come to dominate the rest of the world, being now universally encountered wherever there are states. China, Russia or India may conceive of themselves as in geopolitical opposition to the West. But their bureaucratically managed governmental organizations, displaying a monopoly over the legitimate uses of violence within their territories, are adoptions of the originally Western form of state organization. If you want to understand modern politics, not just in the West but across the whole world, then you need to understand Western political thinking. The great texts of that tradition are, therefore, a good place to start. And that remains true even if you ultimately want to oppose Western politics, perhaps because of concerns arising from the very real legacies of brutality, exploitation, and injustice that the histories of Western states are undeniably bound up with.

Looking back, I should have made this kind of case more explicitly to my students. (In fact, I did, whenever any of them bothered to ask me about it in person. But typically, the ones who bothered were not the ones driving complaints.) However it was the period of peak awokening, and I didn’t fancy a public fight. So, acting out of cowardice, I tried to fob off the complainers by simply renaming the module “The History of Western Political Thought”.

That worked about as effectively as you might imagine, and it shows how naïve I was to think it would make any difference. The complaints kept coming, increasingly under the banner of demands that we “decolonize the curriculum”. Which always struck me as odd, with its implication that the curriculum had first been colonized. By who exactly, and how? Well, a good way to answer that would be to read the most insightful people who thought and wrote about such things…

For the most part I hunkered down and tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on teaching the students who wanted to be taught. Happily, that was the vast majority of them. Indeed, one of my most satisfying moments as a teacher came when a student stopped by my office hours one year, toward the end of the course. He had initially been a vocal proponent of “decolonize the curriculum”. But he said that he had really enjoyed engaging with the module, and was increasingly skeptical about “decolonizing” reading lists. Specifically, that he appreciated how much the thinkers I had assigned disagreed with each other, in particular about the roles of class and hierarchy. As he put it, it didn’t matter if they were dead white men: what mattered was diversity of thought. (For those who care about such things, they might be interested to learn that the student was himself black.)

Still, I felt grubby having renamed the module “Western political thought”. After all, this was straightforwardly inaccurate. Indeed, it was (ironically enough) an instance of cultural appropriation. I spent the first two weeks requiring students to read Aristotle’s immensely challenging The Politics — and yet I knew damned well that claiming Aristotle for Western political thought was at the very least intellectually suspicious. Not only did the idea of “the West” simply not exist in the fourth century BCE, when Aristotle wrote, but he would have been appalled by the suggestion that he was part of any such grouping. According to Aristotle, people to the geographic west of Greece were barbarians, incapable of proper political living — hence why none of them lived in city states, a prerequisite for properly functioning political animals to achieve natural flourishing. Retrospectively claiming Aristotle for the West was to surreptitiously trade on his genius to burnish the credentials of an idea that came much later, yet which he would have wanted no part of. Not to mention the fact that Arab Muslim scholars were making extensive use of Aristotle around the time European Christians were scratching around in Dark Age mud.

Well, if I felt grubby back then, Georgios Varouxakis’ new book The West: The History of an Idea has left me feeling positively filthy (in the best possible way). This is because he brings home just how complicated the history of “the West” really is, but also how much of that history has now been forgotten, its meaning constantly changing in the wake of successive political battles. Recent salvos in the culture wars about how “we” ought properly to appraise “our” history are merely the latest installment in a long series of fights.

Varouxakis demolishes two leading narratives around “the West”. The first (typically “conservative”) proudly claims that “we” in the West can trace our heritage back, via an unbroken pedigree, to the glory of the ancient world: the Romans, and especially the Greeks, themselves originators of civilization itself, and to which we are the heirs. (This is the style of thinking underpinning, for example, Boris Johnson’s recent lecture at Liberty University on the importance of defending Western values). The second (typically “progressive”, and self-consciously opposed to the first) says something like the opposite: that “the West” was an idea invented in the 1890s to justify British imperial expansionism, and thus provide spurious legitimation for colonial domination, expropriation, and violence (and should be ditched accordingly). (This is the line put forward, for example, by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his high-profile book The Lies That Bind.)

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Both these stories are wrong. It is true that widespread use of “the West” did not emerge until the 19th century. (Prior to this, the main distinction preoccupying political thinkers was between North and South, i.e. the difference between powerful European monarchies and the apparently unrelated ancient politics of the Mediterranean.) It came, however, around 50 years earlier than the 1890s, and not because of the activities of the British, but thanks to the innovations of the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who used it to advocate something like the opposite of colonial domination, envisioning a federation of free republics committed to citizen equality.

But “the West” as opposed to what? Well, “the East”. But what was that? With the brief exception of the early 1940s, since Comte it has mostly meant Russia — the de facto leader of a “Slavic” alternative, long perceived as a threat (militarily, culturally, spiritually) to Europeans located to the geographic west.

Not that it has been a simple story of “us” versus “them”. Where did the Germans fit in? Including them as part of “the West” threatened to displace the centrality of France to this European grouping — and that was even before two World Wars in which Teutonic supremacy was attempted. Still, since about 1945, most have been happy to include them. Similarly, Japan was recruited as a “Western” Soviet antagonist until the early Nineties, when its threat to American economic dominance after the end of the Cold War meant it was pushed out of the club.

The point of tracing these (constantly contested) evolutions of the idea of “the West”, Varouxakis shows, is not to assert one “true” definition. For there is no one “true” definition of the West. The idea comes down to us through multiple generations of political disagreement, with prevailing understandings changing depending on different political, economic, military and cultural pressures.

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Which is by no means to say that the idea of “the West”, is somehow empty, unreal, or meaningless. It does pick out a shared history of political forms, cultural developments, military arrangements, and much else besides. Right now, the citizens of Ukraine are understandably grateful for the continuing idea of “the West”, into which they have only recently been inducted. Similarly, the Taiwanese have good reason to hope that Western nations take an interest in supporting ideologically friendly regimes not just in the geographic west, but as far away as China’s backyard. And there is surely something important in insisting that Western values go deeper than just consumer culture and light entertainment. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may recently have brought stand-up comedy to Riyadh, but nobody is under any illusion that he is somehow also inviting in our values. Quite the opposite — as victims of Saudi torture and imprisonment might attest.

Furthermore, there is a family of political ideas that has originated in the West, and which we have good reason to try and hold on to — and that Varouxakis does not shy away from supporting. Liberal democracy comes with constitutional guarantees about what can and cannot be done to individuals and minorities. It operates according to the rule of law, and delivers (albeit imperfectly) meaningful freedom to citizens. It upholds values like meritocracy, religious toleration, freedom of sexuality, and many more besides. As Varouxakis puts it: “to my mind [these are] to be preferred, and we should defend them against alarming alternatives.” Indeed. One wonders if those decrying the evils of “the West” from within the safe cloisters of academia have fully thought through what the available alternatives entail.

Varouxakis, of course, admits that the West “may have immense failings and much to answer for”. But, he adds, “it is in terms of its own register of normative principles and values that it is found wanting in practice—not according to any impartial comparative universal standard”. More generally, what makes Western values valuable is not that they are Western, but that if applied properly and by their own logic, then they apply equally to everyone. Not because people are (or are not) “Westerners”, but because they are human beings. To be sure, the societies of the West have frequently failed, in practice, to live up to such a lofty goal. But the appropriate response is to try and make them do so in future — not to denounce the goal as somehow not worth having.

Yes, this is a Western idea. But it is a good one that we should be proud of. One place where the legacy of such an idea can be continued is in the university classroom, and in the service of which Varouxakis provides a most valuable resource. More generally, I am happy to report that the specter of the close-minded, AI-dependent, woke Gen-Z zombie is grossly exaggerated. The vast majority of my students want to learn, and are prepared to read difficult historical texts accordingly. The thinkers I assign to them are one way of introducing the complicated story of how the complex, contested ideas underpinning the West came about. It turns out that the revised module title was appropriate, after all.

A million viewers would tune in to watch Bryan Magee deep in conversation with a different distinguished philosopher each week. The two would be perched at opposite ends of a beige leatherette sofa, furrowing their brows over such matters as “the Frankfurt school” or “logical positivism and its legacy”. Magee’s idea of diversity was inviting Iris Murdoch to be an honorary man of ideas for one episode. No quarter was given to short attention spans either: ADHD was apparently not a big thing in the Seventies. Anyone in search of visual excitement had to make do with the sight of Charles Taylor’s blue velour suit, Noam Chomsky’s expansive hand gestures, or the elegant way A.J. Ayer puffed on his fag.

In 1987, and by then no longer an MP, Magee made another series: The Great Philosophers. This week it became available to watch on BBC4 and iPlayer. Magee’s specs have grown comically large and Ayer seems to have given up smoking, but otherwise the series format is similar to that of a decade earlier. Contemporary luminaries of Anglo-American philosophy are each given an intellectual titan or two as their specialist subject; and so we get Anthony Kenny on medieval philosophy, Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger, and Ayer on Frege and Russell, for instance.

With Magee’s skillful promptings, the viewer is treated to a fascinating tour of the cathedral of information nestling within each guest’s mind. Arguments and theories are treated not as historical curiosities but as live cognitive possibilities, and are taken very seriously. In an abstract world, the tense is always the present, even when you are talking about concepts from the past.

My favorite episodes from The Great Philosophers involve, respectively, Aristotle as illuminated by Martha Nussbaum — the only female guest in the series — and Bernard Williams on Descartes. Nussbaum’s mannered, queenly delivery and vice-like grasp of her subject matter is exactly what you might expect from a person who once revealed that she didn’t listen to music when she went running, preferring to memorize an opera score from start to finish, then mentally rehearse it as she jogged along. In her episode, she also spends quite some time distinguishing between “wearing brown” as a contingent property of Magee, and “being human” as a necessary one.

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Williams, meanwhile, is a picture of relaxation in corduroy. Eyes crinkling and a smile perpetually hovering on his lips, the urbane Essex native and former RAF pilot is clearly having a whale of a time explaining the Cartesian method of doubt, why wax doesn’t lose its identity even when melted, and why the soul absolutely does not interact with the body through the pineal gland. As an undergraduate a few years after this was filmed, I would sometimes go to hear Williams give lectures on similar themes. Entranced, I’d watch as he would pace about the room, stare at the ground, or look out through the diamond leaded windows behind him, all the while uttering complicated sentences fluently without any notes. Rarely having done the reading beforehand, I had only the scarcest idea what he was on about, but the towering intellect and huge charisma were perfectly obvious.

Nussbaum apparently also found Williams mesmerizing. When he died in 2003, she wrote a lengthy, emotional tribute in the Boston Review. In this extraordinary piece, she confesses feelings of admiration and love for her former teacher, but of rivalrous anger too. She remembers the first time she ever heard him lecture: “It will tell you a great deal about that moment that I remember both his dark green sports jacket and precisely what I myself was wearing: a pink minidress from Bergdorf Goodman and black fishnet stockings.” She also says that their friendship eventually became strained due to his developing interest in “Nietzschean anti-rationalism and pessimism”, and her inability to hold back criticism because of it. Another thing that appears to make her angry is remembering once going running in “orange running shorts with a pink top”, then being told afterwards by Williams, who had seen her in motion, that “the primary qualities were acceptable, but the secondary qualities rather off”. To this, she complains that “women live in objectification the way fish live in water” — a point which seems slightly disingenuous, given all that previous sartorial detail.

Williams died in 2003, far too early; but at least he missed the vituperative hellhole the philosophy profession would become a decade later. Cheered on by a pitiless online mob, harsh, career-wrecking punishments were meted out for what had been treated as mild and forgivable infractions only a few years before. A question, already artlessly foreshadowed in Nussbaum’s memorial for Williams, became prominent for many women philosophers in the 2010s: is my fellow male philosopher my colleague, friend, lover, or deadly enemy? Several prominent thinkers discovered the narrative could switch from one answer to another overnight; and that if it did, the world you thought you knew would melt around you like Descartes’ wax.

One famous case involved John Searle, author of the famous “Chinese room” test for machine consciousness. Searle can also be seen in The Great Philosophers, talking with lucid brilliance about Wittgenstein. Thirty years later, he would be presented with a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment at Berkeley, where he had taught for most of his life. A petition, signed by thousands of alumnae, would see him stripped of his emeritus professor status. He died last month in a care home. According to a former colleague, Searle “never recovered” from the reputational loss.

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In this respect then, The Great Philosophers puts us in mind of a simpler, more innocent time. We are invited not just to thrill at the originality and ingenuity of giants in the history of philosophy, but also to admire the improbably gifted, marvelously eccentric people on screen talking about them. What these people get up to in their personal lives is irrelevant; indeed, as one watches one can barely imagine them having any personal lives at all. And as we enjoy them showing off their prodigious discursive talents, we are also invited to try to understand complicated abstract ideas — for no useful or self-interested reason, but simply as a valuable goal in itself.

All of this is very old-fashioned, and not just because nobody has the requisite powers of concentration anymore. The concept of a “great philosopher” has been suspect for years, a bit too male and hierarchical for comfort. These days, it always has to come with lots of caveats. In the short film which accompanied the broadcasting of The Great Philosophers on BBC4 this week, public philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs rushes depressingly quickly to the cliché that, as young female philosopher watching the show in the Eighties, “it was really important for me to see a woman on that sofa”. She also tries to justify the value of philosophy in the present day in instrumental terms, claiming that it helps people discern “the fake news and the conspiracy theories and the snake oil merchants out there”. This is a point I’m surprised any member of the philosophy profession can make with a straight face, given ongoing mass delusions therein.

But the truth is that the vast majority of the millions of viewers enthusiastically watching Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers in the Seventies and Eighties were not at university, and had no desire whatsoever to be professional philosophers themselves. Fretting over equality issues, worrying about the latent prejudice of Thomas Aquinas or David Hume, or selfishly looking for inspiring “representation” was very far down the list of their priorities. And nor were they watching in order to improve their falsehood detection skills in ordinary life. Their aim was just to understand these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual ideas, as articulated by these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual people — for no motive other than sheer curiosity. I hear that corduroy is coming back into fashion. Perhaps we might also allow philosophers to be unreservedly great again too.

One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colorful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

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The silence of the storm

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Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilize reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavors of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalized liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

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As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalization, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanized nations on Earth, and the one which urbanized earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

We have always questioned the realness of this world. Taoists pondered whether the man who dreamed he was a butterfly was not a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Gnostics believed the material universe was created by a demiurge and that light from a heavenly Jerusalem shines upon this forsaken world through the stars, the perforations in the cosmic veil. In Plato’s allegory a group of prisoners spend their lives chained up in a cave and gaze upon its wall while, unbeknownst to them, guards project images cast by shadows, which the prisoners mistake for the true reality. The philosopher, according to Plato, is the one who ascends from the cave into the light of wisdom and dismisses those who cannot distinguish between “substance and shadow”. Yet increasingly we are unable to do so. As captives in a simulated, digital cave, we are so spellbound by the projections that we neglect the true reality beyond. Even the cave’s architects have become enthralled and, in their puppet show, see flickerings of a god-like intelligence.

The simulated world is making the real one redundant. Once physical things, such as banks and high-street shops, have dissolved into the digital world. Work and social life is increasingly mediated through online apps, whose slickness minimizes contact with other people. Artificial intelligence gives us the power to produce images instantaneously and repetitively, and soon it will be difficult to tell simulation from reality. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey predicts that within a decade we will not be able to distinguish a real image or video from a fake one. Adverts, television and film will be produced without flesh and blood actors. Consumer trends will be galvanized by imaginary influencers. Social movements will be led by fictitious politicians. When artificial intelligence can even do the jobs of remote, digital workers, then the simulated reality will have become self-sufficient, a world completely unto itself.

Meanwhile, the real world comes to resemble what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the disquieting strangeness of the desert”. Bereft of the bustle of commerce and conversation, city centers are bought up by ghost-like foreign investors and turned into lifeless mausoleums through which tourists wander. The earth itself becomes a fuel station to power the simulated world. According to MIT, by 2028 artificial intelligence could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of US households. Swamped by contextless information — the news feed and the reel — we cannot root ourselves. Culture withers. The new cannot burst forth. Everything is repeated in what philosopher Byung Chul-Han calls “the inferno of the same”. In a 1935 essay, Walter Benjamin observed that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art causes a “decay of the aura” of the original. Today we might say that the aura, the presence of reality itself, is being lost. So, it is no wonder people increasingly feel lonely, bereft of contact with the aura of reality itself.

This is not, strictly, a new phenomenon. Hegel’s disparaging motto for the Enlightenment was: “Everything is useful.” The experimental study of natural phenomena meant animals, plants and minerals had to be dissected in order that their constituent parts might be understood. To observe the natural world in this way we must imagine ourselves separate from it. A tree, for instance, is no longer experienced as an individual but rather categorized as one of a certain type. When an object becomes isolated and abstracted, it can be more easily manipulated and instrumentalized. What is true of objects is also true of human beings. This is the source of our wealth and scientific knowledge. But it deprives us of a deeper connection with the world.

And the more time we spend in the simulation, the more disconnected we become. A recent paper in the science journal Nature found that increased use of digital media correlates with feelings of what psychologists call “depersonalization” or “derealization” — a sense of being estranged or detached from oneself and reality. The sense that the world is not real. These are symptoms typically associated with schizophrenia. Yet they have become the norm. To have a world, we must be physically present in it. We must be able to relate to and communicate with it. We must be able to touch and taste it. Martin Heidegger called this “being-in-the-world”. To be at home in the world requires a connection with it that artificial intelligence can never have. Yet homelessness, as the philosopher observed, is “becoming the destiny of the world”.

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There was not always such a separation between us and reality. For the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales all of nature was “full of gods”. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus believed that the body dwelled in the soul rather than the soul in the body. In Literature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso, writing of the ancient Greeks, observes: “In the Greek language the word theós, ‘god’ has no vocative case”, rather it “designates something that happens”. The divine presence, in other words, was for the ancients dazzlingly immanent.

Art strives toward our lost connection with the world by reacquainting us with its presence or reminding us of our discontinuity from it. The novels of Tolstoy describe everyday objects as if they are being seen for the first time. The still lifes of Cezanne fizz with vitality and aliveness. In his recent book, Cosmic Connections, philosopher Charles Taylor might have been talking about all art when he said that the work of the Romantics “brings us into contact with a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken”. Like nature, art’s capacity to reveal brings us into contact with a mysterious presence. Latent within the shapes and rhythms of art, it is this presence that could still release us from the darkness of the cave.

But we may need to become truly bereft of this presence before it can. Perhaps we will create new myths to articulate the extent of our disconnection. Or perhaps the old ones will still do. When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge and were banished by Yahweh from paradise, they severed the primal connection between humanity and the world. “Man”, Yahweh says to the angelic host, “has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. This was the Fall. But perhaps it is unfinished. Perhaps, in our endless desire for useful knowledge, we have much further to go. Yet even in their despair, Adam and Eve were not hopeless. According to a Jewish myth, when, on the night of their banishment, they saw the sinking sun, they believed the world was returning to its primordial chaos because of their fault. Then the new dawn broke.

One reason for this is that the dimensions of ourselves that are churned up while under the influence of psychedelics are ones that we often have difficulty squaring with the persons endowed with moral agency that we ordinarily take ourselves to be. It is normal to recoil from some of what we find within ourselves, to seek to disavow it once the trip is over. But the fact that we are able to find hidden dimensions of ourselves that seem to have a life of their own, whether we like what we find or not, while under the influence of certain substances, is itself of interest, or should be, to anyone who wants to understand what it is to live in this world, with a human mind and a sense of wonder.

It raises the question: how is it that we perceive reality the way we do? And what does it say about our perception of reality that it can be so fundamentally altered through an intentional alteration of our internal chemistry? Do psychedelics warp our perception of reality, drawing us further than in our ordinary lucid state from the actual way things are? Or do they rather reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? It seems that to answer in favor of the view that psychedelics push us further from apprehension of the world as it is presupposes that our mind is, in its default state, naturally and adequately constituted so as to know reality itself. But philosophy has spent the last few millennia coming up with some pretty good reasons why we should be skeptical of the idea that the mind is so constituted.

Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers, along with the surrounding culture, shy away from psychedelics, whether taking them or studying their effects, on the grounds that they distance you from reality. Philosophy is born of the realization that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world? That is exactly what I did while researching my new book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.

Not so long ago, I was in a city in the Netherlands for three nights. I had been invited to give a public lecture, and I decided to stay on over the weekend to conduct some research for my book. In that time, I took psychedelics twice.

The evening of the second psilocybin trip, having taken more than before, and far more than is recommended, would turn out to be one of the most intense and transformative experiences of my life. Though I bump up against the limits of language when I try to convey what it was like.

My hotel room had a cheap-looking poster of Marilyn Monroe framed on the wall. One of the first signs that the psilocybin was taking effect arrived when I was walking towards the bathroom, and I saw her there and paused in front of her image and stared at her in absolute wonder. “Do I know Marilyn Monroe?” I asked myself. I never met her, but she has been with me my whole life, just as she has probably been with everyone reading this piece. She is at least as familiar to me as, say, any of my first cousins. And yet, I reflect, I have never so much as greeted her. How strange! So, there in that hotel room, I greeted Marilyn Monroe, and it was heartfelt, and I was certain that whatever just transpired counted as a meaningful interpersonal exchange.

But this was just the beginning, as the particular quality of that encounter with Marilyn would be felt 10 times more strongly when I returned to the bed and pulled up old clips on YouTube of Cass Elliott, more commonly known as Mama Cass. For some inscrutable reason, earlier in that day I had had an earworm from The Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 song “Creeque Alley” going through my head, in particular the line that runs: “And no one’s gettin’ fat except Mama Cass.” This had come to me in my completely unaltered mental state, a reminder that the mind and memory are a marvel, too, without psychedelics. I don’t know what it was doing there. I’m not particularly a fan of Sixties folkpop. But there it was, in my head, and so I pulled it up on the computer, and I ended up spending the next few hours watching clips of Mama Cass on the talk show circuit, all the while feeling not only that I knew her, and had always known her, but that I had always loved her.

To say it like this sounds ridiculous, but the feeling was entirely sincere. Something about Mama Cass seemed to tell the whole story of my own existence. I suddenly recalled a black-and-white picture of my parents, from the summer of 1972. My mother is pregnant with me, and she is unusually heavy. Then I recalled a distant memory from early childhood when that photo was being shown around to guests at our home. I knew I was in it, though still unborn, and I knew I was the reason why my mother had gained so much weight. Then I recalled that someone, I don’t know who, said, when looking at the photo, that my mother looked like Mama Cass. Resemblance, now, seemed to collapse into identity, or rather the distinction between them no longer mattered. Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as “Mama” in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.

I am not going to attempt to defend this conviction, which felt so strong at the time. That it is indefensible, that it is ridiculous, is precisely what I am attempting to convey. Why did such thoughts come to me so intensely and unbidden? The mind, it seemed to me as I reviewed the experience on the following day, is just so much more wondrous, so much stranger, than my professional colleagues ordinarily take it to be! We philosophers are typically concerned to understand how a human mind can entertain such propositions as “There is a pain in my foot” or how it can perceive a red dot on a screen. These are fascinating problems, too, but surely we might also gain from considering how the mind can become convinced that a long-dead pop star has become identical with one’s own mother or with something like “cosmic motherhood”.

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I think at least a part of the reason we tend to stick with the pain in the foot or the dot on the screen is that, in order to talk about the stranger divagations of the mind, we generally have to acknowledge that we have experienced them, and that is an acknowledgment that typically entails a measure of shame. Part of my motivation in writing what I have written here is to push beyond that shame, to write about conscious experience in a way that truly faces up to the weirdness of the world.

Was my encounter with Mama Cass so ridiculous in the end? Was I completely out of line in my conviction that I loved her? In the Symposium Plato has Socrates describe the ideal ascension of this emotion, from its lowest to its highest expressions. Early in life, we experience love mixed with sexual desire for the beauty of a particular other person’s body, and then we move from there to love of all beautiful bodies. But if we progress as we might hope to do, towards wisdom, then as we age we will also gradually come to love all beautiful minds, and in turn all beautiful institutions and endeavors, then all beautiful knowledge, and in the end, as wise old philosophers, our love will be focused upon nothing but Love itself.

The truth is that most of us vacillate throughout our lives between the various positions on this imagined hierarchy. But whether we think of the ascension as a one-way journey or not, the key philosophical idea in it is that there is a real entity, Love, that exists independently of any of its instances as we know them from experience. This is what we generally refer to as a “universal”, and the question whether such a thing exists or not — not just loveable creatures and things, but Love itself; not just instances of justice, but Justice itself, and so on — will divide the schools of the philosophers, with their running “footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead described the history of Western philosophy, for millennia to come.

I am certainly not going to make any progress towards solving the problem of universals in my book, nor even stake out a position on either of the familiar sides of the debate. But I will remark, first, that psychedelic experience can itself deliver a strong argument in favor of the realist camp in the debate. Under the influence of psilocybin, I seemed not to love Mama Cass, for example, in her particularity, but rather to love her because this love is a point of entry, so to speak, to the experience of Love itself. When I listen to music while on psilocybin, I love the particular song, but I also feel, much more strongly, that the song is my point of entry to Music, with a capital “M”, to the thing itself that exists eternally behind and before all the songs that have ever been sung.

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We all have this feeling from time to time, to some extent. It’s the feeling, in fact, that music and poetry excel above all at conjuring in us: the feeling that there is another dimension that these works of art are coming from. Ordinarily, in a sober and lucid mind, this feeling mostly gets expressed in the form of longing. Songs we love have a particular power to make us feel as though there is a world that we know, somehow, but from which we are cut off. Songs seem to emanate from that world but generally do not seem fully to open that world up to us. Yet under the influence of psilocybin, one of my most vivid thoughts goes something like this: “So that other world is real after all, and it is now open to me! I wasn’t only imagining it!”

Do I still think that other world is real, now, when my brain chemistry is back to its default setting? The answer is complicated, but I believe philosophy can help us face up to the challenge somewhat.

The trouble is that Western philosophy has long valorized the sober, lucid mind above the drugged, drunk, or dreaming one. For at least the past two millennia, Western philosophy has defined itself in contrast to other related endeavors, such as mysticism, theology, poetry, and myth, even as nonspecialists often run these endeavors together. The key difference between philosophy and mysticism in particular, and indeed a key point of pride among the philosophers, is that unlike the mystics — who often rely on techniques to bring themselves into altered states of consciousness, which might include drugs, but also include meditative practices, or attention to one’s own dreams, or the hallucinations induced by descending into the dark depths of a cave — we philosophers are expected to rely entirely on the cognitive faculties available to us in our lucid, waking, and sober state. Our aim is to produce natural-language propositions that can be shared with other philosophers, discussed, argued about, and nitpicked.

Philosophy is almost always held to be concerned, by definition, with meanings and arguments, not with what lies beyond these. But there has also always been a dissenting camp, which says that philosophy should occupy itself with whatever human beings experience, whether easily rendered into propositional form or not. It may be that it is ultimately for the good of philosophy if some of its practitioners willingly run the risk of being seen as having gone off the deep end.

***

This is an excerpt from On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. Copyright (c) 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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 the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

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With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgemental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanisation. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualizing, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammeled by civilizing religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

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Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualized choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgments out of the carpark and back on the road.

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling, some parts of the UK seem more stuck in transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalizingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.

I am obviously particularly fascinated about what is happening in my former discipline. For years, I watched as a small number of philosophers, on both sides of the Atlantic, took a barely comprehensible proposition from the internet — “trans women are women and trans men are men” — and tried to build a system around it. The central proposition was treated as non-negotiable; any datum that didn’t fit would have to be jettisoned. Those who objected were either insufficiently well-read, too stupid to understand complexity, or simply bad actors. Quiet lifers across the Anglosphere quickly read the seminar room and went along with things.

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The logician W.V.O. Quine argued that beliefs exist in holistic webs: each belief is interconnected and mutually supported by lots of others. If you reject one, you normally have to make adjustments elsewhere. Faced with a new, apparently confounding piece of evidence — say, the sight of a friend in London, who you believe to be in Dundee — you are more likely to update beliefs near the periphery of your web (“she is not in Dundee”; or “I mistook someone else for her”) than its center (“people can be in two places at once”).

Still, it is always possible to work from the center outward. Genderists in philosophy parachuted “transwomen are women” into the middle of their webs, defined a “woman” as anyone who said they were, and renamed the ensuing epistemological anarchy “progress”. And they were perfectly open about it. In 2020, for instance, Sally Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, told an interviewer: “if we wanted to include trans women among women, the body wasn’t sufficient… the pressure was to find a conception of woman that would enable us to accommodate all these differences”.

Once in the semantic upside down, there was a lot of profitable work for these web-spinners to do: not just to re-theorize every human idea and practice formerly conceived of as sex-based; but also to build up a satisfyingly dark story about the women and men who would not comply. Haslanger became a fan of authoring open letters, and other heroines in philosophy rose to the occasion too. “I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginalized women,” wrote Jennifer Saul, a senior philosopher of language at the University of Waterloo, putting a typically charitable gloss on dissenters’ attitudes to trans-identified males. “No one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe,” wrote the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Isaiah Berlin… only joking, I mean Amia Srinivasan, reframing erotic attraction toward a single sex as ethically problematic, whether hetero or homo.

Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.

The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.

Circa 2019-2022, these women — and they were mostly women — were trying in their own way to be what Cass Sunstein has called “norm entrepreneurs”. Their preferred norms quickly cascaded through a mostly male discipline, one made timid by several high-profile scandals, and with a general air of scary feminine malevolence floating about post-MeToo. Acolytes flocked, grants flowed, invitations proliferated, and their critics were silenced or exiled.

But the thing about norm cascades is how rapidly they can collapse. In a situation of pluralistic ignorance, each member of a particular group believes that every other member of that same group endorses some particular norm, even if very few still actually do. Still, private skeptical thoughts remain hidden as long as most people pay lip service to the norm for fear of reputational cost. If you don’t know what everyone else really thinks, chances are you will continue to keep quiet, especially if an example has previously been made of dissenters.

This situation can go on for a long time, yet should a tipping point of public dissent be reached, things can change fast. (The news that Gen Z are now reportedly abandoning sunscreen en masse looks like a good example.) Overnight miracles can occur: the most marginalized women can suddenly become men again, and formerly insightful thinkers revealed as deeply unserious people.

Of course, this possibility is not confined to academia. In every hospital, school, or civil service department, local transactivist gurus and witchfinders currently being treated like emperors by colleagues may eventually turn out to have no clothes. But apart from fanatics posting on the internet, most will be able to deny they ever really believed any of it.

The wonderful thing about philosophy, however, is that genderists wrote it all down. For this reason, perhaps, attempts to suppress discussion in philosophy seem to be ramping up, even as the rest of the world starts to come to its senses. Haslanger’s colleague in the MIT department, Alex Byrne, has recently disclosed in the Washington Post that he is the author of a report highly critical of pediatric transition, written for the Department of Human and Health Services. A hostile open letter has duly followed by an unnamed “concerned colleague”. One wonders who that might be. Meanwhile Justin Weinberg, the academic webmaster of one of the profession’s two main websites — the Daily Nous — is point blank refusing to host an open discussion of the Kodsi and Maier piece, reportedly responding to queries with the claim that the piece does not “merit attention”. As someone who has hosted hundreds of transactivist pieces masquerading as philosophy over the years, one can certainly see why he is nervous.

Perhaps the reign of genderism will truly be over when philosophers of sex and gender start acting like philosophers again: no foot-stamping about incontrovertible axioms, no smearing opponents, no anonymous open letters, no refusal to platform uncontrolled discussion. In an alternative scenario, it will end when the general public gets thoroughly fed up with universities altogether, no longer seeing the point of supporting supposed intellectuals who can get things so obviously wrong. Unfortunately, this possible world seems to me an increasingly close one. There are many philosophers who have so far kept quiet about genderism to save their jobs, but for the very same reason they should probably start talking.

And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analyzed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.

Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularized as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilization. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.

Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.

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Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?

Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.

His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.

Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenizing effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.

So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodeled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.

The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.

Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilizations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.

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Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organizations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.

Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.

The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.

Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.

***

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month at the age of 96, was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent, learnt how to read Irish as a child, and could still do so well into middle age. His father was one of the first generation of his family who spoke English as his first language. His hero was Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England. Though he taught at a range of universities, from Brandeis to Boston, Duke to Notre Dame, he kept Oxbridge for the most part at disdainful arm’s length, uneasy with its high-toned English culture. High Table and croquet in the quad weren’t his style. When he delivered a public lecture in Dublin some years ago, and was afterwards guest of honor at a banquet, he fled from the festivities and was found eating a sandwich alone in the bar.

Despite his suspicion of sociability, MacIntyre was a compulsive joiner, and in this sense true to his belief in the corporate rather than the individual. In the Fifties and Sixties, he moved from Presbyterianism to Christian Marxism, then to Marxism proper, joining the Communist Party only to leave it for various Trotskyist grouplets. He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Two decades later, he came (almost) full circle by converting to Roman Catholicism. Aristotle, Marx, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas competed for his intellectual loyalty, most of them distinctly out of favor in orthodox philosophical circles. In fact, MacIntyre was throughout his life a ferocious critic of that orthodoxy — a scourge of liberal individualism, abstract human rights, the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth and the whole moral temper of Western modernity. (A belief in universal rights, he once wrote, was equivalent to a belief in witches and unicorns). His disillusion with Marxism first set in when he was dean of students in the late Sixties, at the politically turbulent University of Essex, then in the grip of student insurrection. One suspects that some kind of personal trauma was involved in this confrontation between a Marxist dean and his unruly flock. Not long after, MacIntyre published a blistering critique of the revolutionary students’ guru, Herbert Marcuse.

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In the wake of this disenchantment, he moved to the United States, renounced all political engagement, and began to speak in mildly nostalgic terms of small, self-governing cooperatives, communities of frugal fishermen, craftsmen and the like. It was this — the self-help America of the early puritans, not the later human jungle of Wall Street or Hollywood — which helped to tempt him, rather improbably, across the Atlantic. At the point when the capitalist system was becoming increasingly global in reach, MacIntyre was singing the praises of the local. Advanced capitalism was here to stay, but more humane forms of life could be practiced on its fringes. The operatives of capitalism were citizens of the world, and thus what the ancient Greeks knew as barbarians, meaning those who belonged to no city. But mini-cities could be constructed in the system’s shadow.

Despite his international celebrity, achieved through such masterpieces as After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture. He was keenly aware how the liberalism it took for granted was itself a specific, contestable tradition. Those who stand at an angle to conventional society can unmask what it takes as natural and universal as arbitrary and contingent. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the luminaries of the so-called New Left of the late Sixties and Seventies were exiles and émigrés of one kind or another. Perry Anderson, for many decades the leading Marxist intellectual in Britain, is an Anglo-Irishman from County Waterford; Alexander Cockburn was an Anglo-Irishman from County Cork; Raymond Williams hailed from the Welsh borderlands, Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. Tom Nairn came from Scotland, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall from Jamaica and the philosopher Charles Taylor from Quebec.

As a Scot of Irish descent, MacIntyre was heir to a history which for all its violence and deprivation was more attuned to the communal than the individualist. It could therefore provide the basis for a powerful critique of a liberalism for which men and women weren’t fundamentally social animals, reason was abstract and instrumental and the most precious value of all — freedom — would tell you little or nothing about what the good life is or how to attain it. Instead, it leaves such matters to one’s subjective choices in the moral marketplace. In MacIntyre’s view, this way of seeing overlooks the fact that individual reasoning participates in a more collective reasoning, one which is always historically specific. Liberty is in the end the liberty to seek truth, another concept increasingly redundant in the modern age. Ethics become little more than an expression of personal preference in a world which has lost almost all sense of the common good. The moral universe is privatized. We still use terms like “goodness” and “happiness”, but the concrete contexts in which they were once embedded have disappeared with the onset of modernity, leaving moral concepts hanging uselessly in the air.

For MacIntyre, by contrast, the good must be more than just what I happen to desire. It’s always embedded in a particular set of collective cultural practices. If we have forgotten this, it’s largely because the 18th century Enlightenment stripped the self of its concrete social identity, so that each of us becomes an isolated, autonomous self in a world of abstract universal principles. Anxious to avoid moral relativism, MacIntyre acknowledges that there are certain standards which different cultures share. But to live well is less to conform to principles common to everyone from 13th century Padua to 20th century Pasadena, as some Enlightenment thinkers would hold, than to flourish in a way appropriate to one’s role in a concrete form of life. A good merchant is someone who behaves as a good merchant should, according to the standards set by his particular culture and tradition. Whether this is also true of a good blackmailer is rather less obvious.

Since social roles are in some sense objective, moral values become so as well. A lot of modern moral thought makes a sharp distinction between facts and values. You can describe a situation as scrupulously as possible, but doing so won’t lead you to a moral judgment or obligation. In the era of modern science, facts are just blank, inert stuff, and values must consequently be imported from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re simply subjective, or the arbitrary decrees of a capricious God. MacIntyre rejects this dualism: for him, describing a social role already implies certain values, in the sense of the need to act in certain ways. It’s because the self has been shorn of this social dimension in modern times that the problem arises. At the same time, it has been deprived of what MacIntyre sees as its status as a form of narrative. In his view, we live in narrative, but can no longer recount coherent stories of ourselves.

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All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the skepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the center of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.

MacIntyre celebrated rootedness, yet as an academic was continually on the move. He was a critic of capitalism who rejected multiculturalism and looked askance at the struggle for recognition of women, gays and others. His dislike of the autonomous self could lead him to overvalue the corporate and collective, as well as to bowing the knee to an authoritarian Church. Yet in an age when Anglophone philosophy had been reduced to a trivial game for those in the know, complete with its in-jokes, ritual gestures and stereotypical turns of phrase, he never ceased to raise the most profound of questions.

The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.

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There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.

This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favorably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.

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So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.

Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.

There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.

There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.

Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.

For one thing, Donald Trump has brought to the ascendant a general suspicion of the humanities and liberal arts as a preserve of decadent elites. Among the wilder fringes of his supporters, there are loud-mouthed admirers of Sparta’s warriors. But that hardly amounts to serious engagement with the past, and it risks tainting the entire legacy of ancient Greece.

America does, of course, have a distinguished cohort of traditionalist, classics-minded intellectuals and they have sought to protect the discipline from passing intellectual currents behind the high walls of private schools and colleges. But that too makes the subject ideologically charged.

On the cultural Left, meanwhile, there has been a searching of soul: is America’s tradition of classical learning, so beloved by the Founding Fathers, irredeemably tainted by association with white hegemony and colonialism? Such a view has found an eloquent exponent in the Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta who is not sure whether the discipline deserves to survive at all.

To those who fear that the diligent study of Mediterranean antiquity may now disappear in a cloud of ideological contention, help seems to be on its way — from an unlikely quarter, namely China. Even while Xi celebrated an anti-Western alliance when he fraternized with Putin in Moscow last week, the Chinese leader is busy appropriating what we think of one of the foundation stones of Western culture.

The enthusiasm of that country’s intellectual and political leaders for the study of Europe’s ancient world seems to grow by the month, as several recent developments show.

In November, the authorities in Beijing hosted a World Classics Conference, where hundreds of scholars from all over the world were lavishly accommodated and invited to give short papers. Tim Whitmarsh, a Cambridge professor of Greek history, wrote afterwards that the gathering was on a scale he had never experienced. President Xi Jinping sent his warm blessings, and there were rumors he might appear.

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At that event, it was announced that China would imminently open a research center for the Hellenic past in Athens — joining the 19 existing schools from Western countries, including the American School of Classical Studies which is probably the US academy’s most important offshore research institution in the liberal arts.

China has its Latin scholars (it organized a conference on the Roman poet Ovid in 2017) but recently the country’s cultural and intellectual diplomacy has put a particular focus on Greece: both the ancient Hellenic heritage and the modern state of Greece, which was invited to co-host the gathering in Beijing.

Academic synergy between Greece and China is burgeoning on many fronts, albeit from a low base. Four Greek universities are committed to a formal partnership with four Chinese ones: this makes possible joint research projects, seminars, exchanges of scholars and jointly administered qualifications. The Greek philosophy professor who has co-directed this cooperation effort, Stelios Virvidakis, was gratefully amazed to receive a personal letter from President Xi — and then multiple inquiries from China’s state media, inviting him to say how he felt about getting such a missive.

As Virvidakis has discovered, one Sino-Hellenic pairing which his Chinese partners especially like has involved Confucius as the father of Asian thought, and Aristotle as the progenitor of European philosophy. There have been three recent symposia on that wise duo: two in Greece and one in China. The Chinese also enjoy comparing their most famous sage with Plato and his pupil Socrates. People who visit the Athenian Agora may observe that this sacred, US-funded archaeological space is now adorned by a brash pair of Chinese-funded statues of Confucius and Socrates.

It feels as though a new chapter in educational history is being written. The huge American investment in the study of ancient Athens, especially noticeable in the cold-war fervor of the Fifties, had an obvious connection with the global contest between communism and what was then called the Free World. By showcasing the story of the world’s first democracy, American scholars were — consciously or otherwise — fighting the good fight against Soviet totalitarianism. The new Chinese zest for Greece also has a certain strategic dimension, given that the port of Piraeus is now controlled by Chinese interests and has flourished under its new bosses.

Commerce and economics aside, to what purposes are the Chinese now promoting the study of golden-age Hellas? The answer is both complex and surprising, according to Shadi Bartsch, an American classics professor at the University of Chicago.

As she shows in her book Plato goes to China, Greek philosophy (briefly introduced to China by Jesuits in the 16th century) has been put to many ideological uses over the past century. In 1912 the Chinese Republic saw a burst of enthusiasm for ostensibly pro-democratic texts from ancient Athens. Those texts were largely forgotten amidst the cultural revolution — but then rediscovered during the political spring that preceded the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.

What happened next, as Bartsch describes it, is a spectacular piece of intellectual legerdemain. Chinese scholars have continued to read Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides — but much of their enthusiasm focuses on passages which deplore democracy and its tendency to degenerate into demagoguery.

For liberal lovers of Plato, one of his troubling ideas is the “golden lie” — his idea that states need a false but legitimating ideology which helps to underpin social order and a stable class system. Since Tiananmen, Chinese readers of Plato have warmed to that gilded falsehood, or at least to the idea that statecraft and philosophical integrity may be in conflict.

Among the Chinese political philosophers who have gained attention in the West is Tongdong Bai — a professor at Fudan University who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy in Rome. His book Against Political Equality carefully distills Plato and Confucius and their ideas for reconciling private and family concerns with the public interest. Confucius fares better — partially because he respects the family — but Plato is given a very fair hearing. Albeit in a moderate form, Bai’s whole approach reflects the idea that worthy elites can deliver better political and social outcomes than the voice of the mob.

As Bartsch demonstrates, the current Chinese reading of ancient Hellas is far from monolithic: there are those who study Greece, and its influence on the modern West, simply in a spirit of “know the enemy” while others see great wisdom in ancient Greek thought but regard the contemporary West as a poor successor.

At least one Chinese scholar has put forward the surreal notion that the medieval West simply invented the classical heritage as a fiendish trick; and in October 2023 a well-connected pundit on US-China relations, Jin Canrong, opined that Aristotle could not have produced such a vast oeuvre before the advent of paper.

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For the time being at least, there is a striking contrast between the rather formal, stiff and cautious rhetoric which has been heard in set-piece interactions between Chinese and Greek officialdom, and the variety of views aired in Chinese academia.

In state-to-state cultural diplomacy, a very simple picture is often presented. It feels as though 19th-century nationalism is being revived, with a clear emphasis on undifferentiated historical continuity: Greece has always been Greek, just as China has always been Chinese. As Whitmarsh wrote after attending the Beijing shindig, this is a proposal for dialogue between (stereotypically defined) nations, but not within them. Its tone is almost at the opposite extreme from the internal turmoil of the American academy.

That siloed vision is a pity, because despite all the ideological pressures, China’s intellectual response to the European past and present — as described by Bartsch and others who know the scene — seems to have retained a measure of diversity.

For example, there is Chinese interest in Leo Strauss, the German-born philosopher who is also revered by American neo-cons. Strauss found much to admire in ancient Greek thought and much to criticize in liberal modernity; that could help to explain why his face fits in contemporary China. But what of the fact that the leading Chinese follower of Strauss, Liu Xiaofeng, is a self-described cultural Christian who wrote a doctorate on Christian theology in Switzerland? That fits no pattern.

Long may that relative diversity last. To put it mildly, today’s China is not a land of intellectual freedom. To quote the civil-liberty watchdog Freedom House, it is a place where “following a multi-year crackdown on political dissent, independent NGOs and human rights defenders… civil society has been largely decimated”.

In the officially encouraged romance between China and Greece, it is too early to tell what ideological constraints might be imposed. But if China replaces the West as the most generous sponsor of research into Greek history and thought, there is good reason to fear that such investigations will take place within narrower confines than was the case at least in pre-Trump America. Idealistic belief in democracy may well lie outside those confines, to judge by the zeitgeist of today’s China.

Veterans of Classical studies are watching with mixed feelings. If the new Sino-Hellenic moment really helps to save the serious study of classics from becoming collateral damage in America’s culture wars, that might be a blessing. But only if the global conversation about Ancient Greece and its meaning for today can still be pursued with intellectual freedom and parrhesia — the right to shock and offend. It is that sort of freedom which is exuberantly exercised in America by mavericks like Princeton’s Padilla. Let’s hope this does not become an exception.

Why is the commander wrong? Partly because, morally speaking, he is a consequentialist. He believes that the way to judge human actions is to calculate their probable effects, then assess whether they are largely positive or negative. What counts as positive or negative is clearly a problem. Different people are likely to return different, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. Perhaps the most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which weighs the sum-total of happiness which will result from your action against the sum-total of unhappiness it may cause. (You will, of course, need to define what counts as happiness, since what it meant for Plato isn’t what it meant for Marx or Jacob Rees-Mogg). What matters isn’t so much your intention, or the nature of the action itself, as the impact it will have on the world, which is to say whether it will increase overall human happiness or not. Actions are as actions do.

But how do we know what impact it will have? Any ethics based on consequences is bound to be retrospective. Only when you look back can you evaluate the fruits of your actions, since only then will they have come into existence. Trying to calculate them in advance is a tricky business. It would take a sizable team of investigators to trace the results of even the most trivial act. Perhaps I see an advertisement from the top of a bus, the colors of which remind me of another advertisement some years ago, which first turned me on to smoking. I take up smoking again — then die of lung cancer a few years later. As a result, one of my children drops out of college, becomes delinquent and hits you over the head with a whisky bottle one dark night in Hackney. After the assault, you develop blurred vision and drive your car into a butcher’s shop in Greenwich, gravely injuring an elderly customer. Their partner sinks into depression, and jumps off a bridge.

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It’s impossible, then, to say how many people are involved in a single action — and I haven’t even mentioned the agency which designed the advertisement, the workers who built the bus, or those who extracted the rubber which went into its tires. Who owns an action is a question which much concerned the ancient Greeks. For them, humans move precariously, in a tangled net of cause and effect which can never be grasped as a whole. Only God, or an omniscient narrator in a novel, can do that. What we do can spin out of our control, breed multiple effects, merge with the acts of others and confront us as an alien force. In this sense, we are all, like Oedipus, “guilty innocents”, caught up in potentially lethal situations which we never got to choose and might not even be aware of. The Christian doctrine of original sin, for which we’re all implicated in a condition for which none of us is actually guilty, is an equivalent of this tragic way of seeing.

There’s also the question of what doesn’t happen as a result of what you do, or don’t do. Maybe one of the schoolchildren you blow up would have grown up to discover a cure for cancer. We’re speaking here of what one might call the subjunctive realm — the spectral world of what might have come about had you acted differently. Here, however, one needs to tread carefully. It sounds reasonable to say, “If I hadn’t been delayed in getting to the airport, I would have been on the aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic with no survivors”. But it could be argued that if you’d been on time for the flight, history would have been different, and this alternative history might not have included the air crash. Perhaps you can’t alter one bit of history without changing the lot.

So judging solely from consequences has its problems. And there’s another reason, too, why it isn’t the soundest form of ethics. It’s strongly counterintuitive to claim that we think things are good or bad only according to the difference they make in the world. It’s not only that a bad action can have positive effects, or vice versa. It’s that we sometimes feel like saying that a way of acting is good in itself, regardless of the results it might produce. It’s good that someone is willing to go to their death to defend the cause of the innocent, even if the whole project backfires and leaves the innocent worse off than they were before. Similarly, it’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, the 16th century martyr Thomas More refuses to take an oath denying the authority of the Pope even though this means his beheading. He takes his stand, regardless of the consequences, because to do otherwise would be to betray his own identity. The real-life Thomas More was more of a consequentialist: he refused to deny the sovereignty of the Pope because he feared burning in hell if he did.

Actions which contain their value wholly in themselves are rather like works of art. Like art, they resist being treated in a merely functional or utilitarian way. We don’t ask what the “Mona Lisa” is for. Even actions of this kind, however, may have consequences which they don’t intend, or which are surreptitiously intended. Take, for instance, Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend Milly Theale, a fabulously rich young American woman, who Kate discovers to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that he and Milly may marry and Densher will inherit her fortune when she dies. Milly learns of the plot against her, but bequeaths her wealth to Densher on her deathbed anyway. Like a martyr, she uses death creatively, placing it at someone else’s service. The effect of this astonishing act of forgiveness and generosity causes Densher to fall passionately in love with Milly’s memory.

Remorseful for his and Kate’s plotting, he refuses to accept the heiress’s bequest. He is willing to marry Kate — but without Milly’s fortune. If Kate chooses not to marry him, he will make the legacy over to her. For her part, Kate insists that she will marry Densher only if he accepts Milly’s money, thus testifying that he has put his devotion to the dead woman behind him. Unable to resolve this deadlock, the couple part forever and the novel closes.

Milly’s dying act is meant to transcend the tangled web of cause and effect in its supreme disregard for consequence and calculation. It belongs to the category of action which James often calls “beautiful”, meaning those ways of behaving which have nothing in them for oneself and are performed purely for their own sake. There is a recklessness about living in this self-squandering way, a kind of extravagant pointlessness, but it is more than outweighed by its sheer grace and radiance. Milly’s is an aristocratic ethic, so to speak, as opposed to the mean-minded bookkeeping mentality of Kate and Densher.

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Milly’s final act seems like a riposte to consequentialism. It will certainly have no consequences for her, since she will very soon be dead. Yet her action has momentous effects for Kate and Densher. The question is whether Milly herself has foreseen those effects. Is she a saint or a schemer? Has she acted to demonstrate her moral fineness, win Densher’s heart forever or break up his relationship with Kate? Is her splendid disinterestedness a devious act of aggression? As usual with James, the answer is unknowable. The novel carefully allows us no access to Milly’s motives. It’s hard to say whether her graciousness is a form of egoism or altruism, a humbling of the self or a final assertion of it.

The commander who orders the school to be blown up, then, seems to believe that, morally speaking, the end justifies the means. This can certainly be the case. Hardly anyone thinks that it’s wrong to lie to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of your Jewish grandmother. The greatest of all theologians, Thomas Aquinas, wouldn’t have agreed. But though he thought lying was absolutely wrong, he didn’t think that “absolute” meant “very wicked”. He just meant it as a synonym for “should never be done”. Almost everyone, however, maintains that if you see a 10-year-old kid sneaking out of your front door with a five dollar bill of yours, it’s not permissible to shoot him in the back. (A lot more Americans are likely to do this than the British are — not because the British are morally superior to Americans, but because they don’t have guns.)

So there can be no general rule here. Some people probably believe that it doesn’t matter if you kill a million Palestinians, so long as you eliminate Hamas in the process. It’s worth asking how this makes such people different from Hamas. There are also those of us who hold that massacring the innocent — non-combatants — is never morally permissible whatever gains it might bring you, and that to see such mass slaughter as mere collateral damage is a moral obscenity. Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima were cases of mass murder. If you’re allowed to do that, then you’re allowed to do more or less anything, and all talk of morality becomes superfluous.

You are probably thinking that Perfection is about how Millennials are shallow, demotivated and image-obsessed. You are right, but the book goes one step further, offering a diagnosis of that predicament: according to the novel, the real problem facing Millennials is perfection. Millennials are stuck in the paradox of utopia, living lives so good that they’re bad.

To get a feel for this paradox, try a thought experiment: describe an ideal world. Fill it with all the things you think make life great and remove everything that makes life terrible. In the world you are creating, all of your social and political ideals have already been achieved, and nobody has to worry about survival, or oppression, or violence. The food tastes great, it never rains on your picnic, children don’t throw tantrums and everyone always gets a good night’s sleep. Now imagine you have a choice between living there, in that perfect world, and here, in the imperfect one with all the flaws you routinely bemoan. If you are inclined to choose our world, because the one you made up seems too smooth, too perfect, too unreal, then go back and add in a few of those obstacles you removed. Now you have an almost perfect world, perfectly imperfect, with just enough of a taste of struggle to mix things up. If you still don’t want it — because those struggles are too small and too fake — go ahead and add a few more. Good now?

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If your answer is still no, then it is starting to look as though you aren’t going to be satisfied until you’ve added back everything. Nothing short of the real world, with all its real problems, will do. Utopia might be something you want to aim for, but it is not something you want to have. This is the paradox of utopia: why strive for social progress if the endpoint of those efforts is a hollow and sterile world bereft of meaning or purpose? Why do we work so hard to solve problems we would prefer remain unsolved?

Anna and Tom are the couple at the heart of the utopian world of Perfection. There is a lot we never find out about them. We don’t know what they look like. We never hear them converse. We don’t learn about their childhoods, or get a comparison of their temperaments, or access either’s inner life. Generally we are not privy to information that could differentiate them from one another. They have the same job, the same priorities, and, most importantly, the same aesthetic: “Either of them could choose anything on their joint behalf — be it a dish from a menu or an apartment — without a second thought, confident that the other would like it.” They almost always show up as a unit: “Anna and Tom” occurs 121 times in the short novel, 10 times more than the number of times that either name appears on its own.

Most of those solo-namings are in the few pages describing their sex life, which is a source of mild concern to them: “a thought would worm its way into that bliss: that was the same sex they’d had last week, two months ago, three years ago.” But sex is an exception to the rule: they don’t have the corresponding worry when it comes to the basic pattern of their lives, their jobs, their tastes, the amorphous friend group that stays the same even as its members come and go, their relationship with their families, or the prospect of children — they don’t want any, and that’s that. They enjoy their lives, and each other, and each falls asleep with “a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were. It was always answered.” The novel offers us what passes for a plot in the small rumblings of discontent that Anna and Tom experience — remember the little fake obstacles you added back in to your utopia — which prompt them to travel, to return home, to travel again. In Perfection, nothing really changes, because nothing can change. Everything is the same.

Anna and Tom are not different from each other, nor do they differ from the other expats who populate their friend group. Their apartment is not distinctive either: on vacation in Lisbon, they look at listings of Airbnbs and encounter one indistinguishable from their own. Anna and Tom are originally from somewhere in Southern Europe, but we never learn exactly where. Spain? Italy? Greece? It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because it’s all the same. Sameness saturates the novel, even though Anna and Tom, by profession and self-conception, are explicitly presented as curators of difference: “Their exact titles varied depending on the job, but they were always in English, even in their native language: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist. What they created were differences.” They worked their way into these jobs from youth, having grown up alongside the internet, already as teens pre-occupied with constructing “personal websites and profiles that reflected their tastes and interests, lists of things that made them special”. Why does the quest for difference end in a blanket sameness?

To answer that question, we have to return to the paradox of utopia, which is to say, the tension between what makes a world feel good and what makes it feel real. Humans are creatures who reshape their environments to suit their needs. We are artificers; we produce artificiality. The better we get at crafting the world that works for us — eliminating the parts that cause us trouble and rearranging the remainder — the more perfect and more artificial our environment becomes. This applies to our physical environment: a tangled heap of fallen twigs becomes a neat cone, the better to start a fire. But it also applies to our social environment and even our intimate relationships. A cadre of humans thrown into a wilderness will be forced to stick together for warmth and security, but, given the resources to move into giant mansions where each family member has their own wing, they will. You can blame this on capitalism, but only in the sense that capitalism makes us rich, and wealth supercharges our power of artificing.

As lovely as that bright, warm, smooth, safe artificial world looks to the humans stuck in the scary dark forest, as soon as we insert them into it, they complain. They start to feel lonely. No longer sure that anyone needs them, each tries to prove their value — “this mansion is better off with me in it!” — by showcasing their own distinctiveness. But the more exclusively they devote themselves to producing this impression of uniqueness on one another, the more similar they become. They’re living what was once their dream, but they are not happy. They continue to feel that what they need is just a bit of difference, a touch of authenticity, some jagged edges. Remember those little fake obstacles again. Where are they going to get them? They might travel, only to find that everywhere is pretty much the same. They might take up the plight of those less fortunate, whom they regard with a touch of envy — after all, their struggles didn’t have to be invented, because their obstacles are not fake. Or they might occupy themselves with normative pictures. Anna and Tom try all of these routes, settling on the last.

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A normative picture is a picture that reverses the typical direction of evaluation. Usually, the quality of a picture — be it a drawing, or a photograph, or a painting — lies, at least in part, in its ability to accurately capture an independently existing reality. A normative picture is, by contrast, a picture that tells you what reality is supposed to look like. Reality succeeds if it matches the picture, rather than vice versa. Social media is filled with normative pictures, and Anna and Tom spend their lives, first, producing such pictures, both on behalf of their work clients, and so as to populate their own Instagram accounts, and, second, consuming them, which is to say, wrangling their lives so as to make them match the aforementioned pictures. The normative picture tells you that you have not quite arrived at utopia, because this — this image of two glasses of Campari on a table overlooking a vineyard backlit by the sunset, “laptops usually somewhere in the frame to prove they weren’t on holiday” — is what utopia looks like. The normative picture reassures you that perfection still has to be struggled for, that there is still work to do, which means that complete happiness could, in fact, be yours, if only you could close that last little gap.

Perfection doesn’t wear its genre on its sleeve, but I read it as horror. It describes a human future that is bad in a brand new way. It is not violent, or painful, but something even worse: deadly quiet. And I think this horror story is meant as a warning for the reader. On the one hand, Anna and Tom are profoundly unreal. They couldn’t be real people. On the other hand, we could become them.

If worries about Millennials eating too much avocado toast seem like a distant, foolish dream now that we have real problems like rising authoritarianism and runaway inflation and the prospect of confronting whatever AI is going to turn (us) into, then Latronico’s novel suggests a reframing. Yes, there are problems everywhere, and yes, we should try to solve them, but the fact that we won’t know what to do with ourselves once we have succeeded — that is also a problem, and it remains with us even when we are not thinking about it.

It would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation after it had put forward such a radical anti-imperialist ideology. Luckily, he didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes across 12 different series that followed, Star Trek’s Prime Directive allowed writers and directors to explore the political and philosophical repercussions of such a concept, primarily its reliance on a prior transition to a humanist communism.

That Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode, the starship USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel containing human plutocrats who had paid large sums to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that aliens might find and cure them of whatever disease was killing them. After the crew of the Enterprise thawed and cured them, one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman, demands to contact his bankers and law firm back on Earth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is left with no option but to break the news to him that, in the intervening three centuries, much has changed: “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.”

Their conversation points to the reason why the Prime Directive is incompatible with the spirit of capitalism. As long as accumulation, fuelling the expansion of markets, is our society’s motivating force and ideology, imperialism is inevitable. To escape it, humanity must first eliminate scarcity of material goods – an elimination that, in the United Federation of Planets, was achieved on the back of the invention and widespread deployment of replicators: machines that convert plentiful green energy into any form of matter one desires, from food to gadgets to spaceships.

This is not exactly a novel idea. In 350BC Aristotle predicted that “if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus… chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society on machines like Star Trek’s replicators that liberate us from non-creative, soul-crushing labour. In one of his early writings, he imagines what will follow the invention of such machines:

“I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practice in theatre criticism after dinner — without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.”

Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who in the 24th century runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans for free because money is now obsolete — he is simply motivated by how much his neighbours appreciate the cooking. They also resonate with Picard’s answer to Offenhouse who, upon hearing that he was to be sent back to an essentially communist Earth, asks glumly: “What will happen to me? There is no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How do I live? What is the challenge?” “The challenge Mr Offenhouse,” replies Picard encouragingly, “is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself. Enjoy it!” Marx would have, I am in no doubt, applauded energetically.

Joy is not a word that naturally rhymes with communism, at least the Soviet variety. But pleasure is central to Star Trek‘s version of communism, which rejects the notion that escaping the logic of accumulation requires individuals to submit to a collective. Star Trek‘s writers make this point brilliantly by contrasting the Federation, made up of creative individuals who are free to choose their projects and partners, with the Borg — a dystopian cyborg collective made up of drones linked together in a beehive-like social order that expands by assimilating every species it encounters.

Star Trek rejects collectivism while still avoiding lazy critiques. We are treated to the traumatic reintroduction of a Borg drone to humanity, who experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the collective’s voice in her head. It is a reminder of how authoritarianism can be dangerously attractive to the lonely, but also of how important it is to pay the price of personhood.

But Star Trek does not just offer a vision of a splendid future. Like any other practical manifesto, it offers a theory of change: of social evolution founded on solid historical materialist tenets.

Consider, for example, the episode where the USS Voyager is locked in the gravitational field of a strange planet on whose surface time moves much faster than within the orbiting spaceship. The starship crew realise that during each one of their minutes the backward humanoids on the planet experience 58 sunrises. Thus, the crew enjoy a bird’s eye view of that society’s evolution, as if observing it unfold on fast-forward.

What they see is a rendition of humanity’s history — how technological innovations clash with superstitions and antiquated exploitative social relations, bringing about revolutions, progress, but also wars and environmental disasters. At times, it seems as if the species under observation, like humanity, might destroy themselves. But, in a happy ending, they too manage to overcome their imperialisms and their accumulative urges to press new technologies into the service of their common good.

Some of the most interesting insights occur at the edges of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.

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There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians, a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In one episode a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. I can think of no other TV programme which, within 40 minutes, can better educate the young on the horrors of the Holocaust — a reminder that good science fiction is as much about the past as the future.

Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station where different species mingle to trade, a meeting point between the communist, post-money Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station, there is a sleazy bar run by one of the hyper-capitalist Ferengi who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: he calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. For the Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion — it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. “War is good for business,” but “Peace is good for business too.”

To balance the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny, Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet ruled by bureaucratic centralism. An abducted doctor is forced to work in a hospital where he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index — a number compiled by a centrally controlled computer.

Star Trek interrogates our humanity through encounters between the Federation and other species. In truly Hegelian style, the planting of alien officers inside Federation spaceships forces humans to reflect through the eyes of those with a sharply different philosophy and outlook. There are numerous examples, but the one face-off most pertinent to our own times is what follows when a supersmart android, known as Data, is introduced on USS Enterprise.

Data has no capacity to feel but nevertheless is driven by the urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data carefully studies our behaviour, and our art. He becomes not only a much-appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from today’s perspective, a character that serves our thinking about AI.

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Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights comes to the fore. When a Federation laboratory requests that Data agrees to be disassembled for the purposes of replication, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and thus retained, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure,” he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that Data has no choice, Captain Picard demands that the question — of Data’s agency — be taken to court.

The trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android is not sentient. Data, therefore, has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism. Instead, it acknowledges that simulating sentient beings, as Chat-GPT does already, is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion in which it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness like Data.

More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and technophobia. For example, the Federation heavily regulates genetic engineering, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities as done in eugenics. On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire, the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life — Captain Picard’s defence of Data on the trial concludes with the point that “Starfleet was founded to discover new life”— with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.

The United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the starship crew return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans abuses the ship’s doctor in what is a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell holds the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with. Its own secret services, outfits such as Section 31, also pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.

Suggested reading

Ballard predicted the collapse of the middle class

By Paul Heron

The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.

In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared to dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagined a world where mankind’s “economic problem” had been solved:

“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity has edged closer to an early Star Trek episode in which “cloud minders” live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines?

Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-optimists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.

Today’s moribund Left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.