Postman was a cultural and media critic who wrote prophetically about the dangers of technology, and, more importantly, how it shapes society. That the book emerged from a talk he gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984 only gives it greater piquancy. There has never been a time in my political consciousness where people weren’t bloviating about the (either imminent or established) arrival of authoritarianism. And as far as reliable ways of spotting a bore go, hearing someone pronounce that our world is “Orwellian” is pretty much a failsafe.

This is because, unlike most cliches, it is self-evidently untrue. Apart from anything else, we in the West are hardwired to reject overt signs of totalitarianism. The Second World War is pretty much our only large-scale, and obviously righteous, military victory for about a century, and any form of governance that comes adorned with jackboots — physical or metaphorical — will be resisted. Our self-image depends on it.

Postman gets this. He envisages a future emerging not from the pages of 1984, but Brave New World. While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared that there would be no reason to do so. Postman argued, using TV as his example (which is, very loosely speaking, his version of Huxley’s soothing, happiness-producing drug “soma”), that this is where things were headed: not enslavement by the state, but by our own appetites. His genius was to understand this fact during the Cold War, when the USSR offered a genuine authoritarian alternative; and to lay out exactly why and how it might emerge.

Like many media theorists, Postman understood how news “content” does not exist in the public consciousness independently of its medium. Stuff — wars, births, marriages, bank collapses and so on — obviously still happens. “[But] lacking a technology to advertise them,” he argues, “people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business. Such information simply could not exist as part of the content of culture.” This idea — that there is a content called “the news of the day” — was, he continues, entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move “information over vast spaces at incredible speed”. Crucially, without a medium to create its form, the “news of the day” does not exist. “Our tools, our language, our media,” he writes, “[are what] create the content of our culture.”

It was the nature of this content that bothered Postman. For him, the city that had come to symbolise the United States was now Las Vegas, a place “entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment”. Politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce had been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business”.

In his day, with Ronald Reagan as President, he understood that the most adept — and often most entertaining — public performers were no longer professional entertainers but its abnormally attractive and well-groomed TV anchors and, more perniciously, its politicians. On TV, which is to say in the public consciousness, the credibility of the teller, and not what he or she was saying, had become the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. This naturally benefited a professional actor such as Reagan, while those who couldn’t perform suffered. As for Richard Nixon, it wasn’t that he was a liar that gave him a reputation for shiftiness throughout his career (before it imploded with Watergate). Kennedy lied lots, too. It was that Nixon looked like a liar.

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In this kind of world, when “the credibility of a politician is not determined by whether or not they are lying, but by how well their performances generate a sense of verisimilitude”, the outcome is all too familiar: a leader like Donald Trump, or the useless and sinister Jeremy Corbyn, a first-class dullard and fanatic, who his supporters nonetheless saw as “authentic”.

Yet, Postman noted, truth is always “intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice.” Imagine the Chancellor rapping the budget or a newsreader announcing the Queen’s death via a haiku. Truth is only ever a “product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented”. When those techniques become a “stylised dramatic performance that has been staged to entertain”, much that is serious is lost. Even worse is when what is serious needs to become a “stylised dramatic performance” in order to be heard.

This is a pretty apt description of the state of contemporary public discourse. People blame social media for this: its privileging of emotion over fact, the chaos of its global multiplicity of voices, and its desperate need for clicks and shares has, they argue, rendered the public sphere a vast digital circus. But, in truth, it really started with the introduction of the 24-hour news cycle. Suddenly, the facts relayed by a single presenter was no longer enough. Rolling hours needed to be padded out with “analysis” and “debate”, meaning the jabbering, gesticulating and haranguing chorus of experts, pundits and other entertainers that this involved.

After this, the step to the present moment was a small one. And what has suffered is, above all, the written word, and the qualities of concentration needed to engage with it. It is a fallacy that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; the car is not merely a fast horse. TV and social media have not amplified literate culture but attacked it. We began with Facebook and its statuses, which allowed you to write several paragraphs of content; then came Twitter with its 140 characters (which swelled to 180 and now, who knows?) and then Instagram, which privileges the visual over the written; followed by TikTok which sees anything beyond the most basic written description as a distraction.

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What Postman wrote about 40 years ago is reaching its most mature expression yet. Public life has morphed into entertainment; the image subverts the written word; and there is so much information that we are unable to discern truth from lies. Huxley talked about a “vast descent into triviality”, but this is an unfair description of our public sphere. The appetite for the subjects I cover, from Ukraine to Iran, is large. But why read a book on Ukraine when you can watch a two-minute TikTok “explainer” on it? We still want the serious, but we want it to come packaged in trivial ways, which is far, far worse. Believe me, you can’t explain Ukraine in two minutes.

What Huxley got right was “man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction”. As Postman observed, when we think about propaganda we generally consider only two possibilities: that it might be true or it might be false. What has happened is something different: “the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant”. The truth is rarely concealed; it is lost amid trivia. We are not prisoners of the state, “but of our own endless desire for the superficial and inconsequential”.

Orwell wrote that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. Well, almost 40 years on from Amusing Ourselves to Death, the picture of the future is here: imagine a human face, scrolling through a phone, its features settled into a contented spasticity — forever.

It’s fair to say that the morbid fixation on mental health among a certain class of visible and voluble teenage girls has grown to be its own mental health crisis. Yet, the PR teams at psychiatric hospitals can say without laughing that people who would speak of mental health must first overcome a culture of silence, and that the people who do manage to pierce the layer of stigma, who defy the heavy shame to voice the forbidden theme, they are heroes. This includes those who celebrate the brave heroes mentioning mental health, since they also are mentioning mental health.

I’m generally torn when I hear these solemn, delusional pronouncements. On the one hand, I find them irksome. However sincere or sympathetic the intention, they express the interests and ways of thinking of powerful institutions that are, I think, increasingly destructive. On the other hand, in the sheer scale and clarity of their falseness, and the vaguely religious tenor of their repetition, they’re kind of funny. The devolution of psychotherapeutic expression from the clinic and the couch to the individual’s bedroom and his TikTok account, and the valorising of this common form of status-chasing as rare and brave, are undeniably comic, from a certain angle.

This undeniable comedy is something Michel Foucault captures about the moral melodrama through which our therapeutic age celebrates itself — especially in Volume I of his The History of Sexuality. I’m tempted to say that this book, along with his other main historical work of the early Seventies, Discipline and Punish, belongs to the formal division in classical theatre between comedy and tragedy — the traditional comedy being about sex (and ending with a wedding), and the standard tragedy being about death (and ending with, well, a death). Discipline and Punish begins (rather than ends), with an 18th-century prisoner’s prolonged and gruesome execution by a method I’ll call “enhanced dismemberment”. The History of Sexuality, on the other hand, begins with a quick paragraph that lets us know we’re descending into a lampoon, impish mockery of a familiar “story”: “For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.” Foucault sets out to show that this “story” is so distorted and self-serving it’s funny.

The “story” that Foucault wants to expose as a sort of kitsch, a corny inverse moralism, is often told by sex professionals (sex doctors and sex bureaucrats, that is, not prostitutes), as well as by the influential historians Foucault is making fun of in this book. It says that, thanks to habits and methods codified in Victorian times and then revived and intensified in the conformist years of the Fifties, we are heirs to a culture of sexual repression. Even today we struggle to cultivate open, authentic relationships with our own sexuality. Queen Victoria came to eponymise the themes and methods of this culture, indeed to embody them as the sovereign frump of a mighty empire. But she didn’t found this culture. Rather, the story goes, it began to take form a century and a half before her reign. And this — the dating of this culture to the 17th century by influential historians — is powerfully convenient. Foucault writes: “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century…, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”

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With a droll professional insult — “one adjusts it” — Foucault places conventional histories of sexuality and repression within their own inherently comic narrative of desire. Unconsciously but earnestly and systematically, the historian makes certain pleasures available to himself by “adjusting” the history of repression to coincide with the history of capitalism. With this concurrence in place, he can cloak himself in “the honour of a political cause” simply in doing his job. If sexual repression emerged to serve capitalism, then merely talking or writing about sex “has the appearance of a deliberate transgression”. Such transgressions add up to a piquantly rewarding political programme — sex and sexual frankness as resistance to capitalism — that “combines the fervour of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for a garden of earthly delights”.

Attached now to a political programme, this erotic longing provides both the inner drive and the highest goal in a total vision of historical progress, which bears certain comic similarities to religious conviction. Conspicuous within the historians’ “discourse of sexual oppression”, Foucault writes, is “something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law”. In this discourse, “some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated”. The rousing lesson of this prophecy, its final message or promise about the future, is: “Tomorrow sex will be good again.”

Within this hopeful vision of liberation through sexiness and sexual frankness, however, Foucault locates a darker motive, a hint of puritanical loathing familiar to students of both religious enthusiasm and revolution. He asks: “Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our past, against our present and against ourselves, that we are repressed?” This resentment is also semi-conscious at best, fraught with irony and cognitive dissonance, and so Foucault can treat it in a comic register as well. Indeed, for almost a page he repeats his question in forms so overt in their jokey wordplay it’s like he’s doing — as comedians call it — “material”. “By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide?” “[W]hy [do we] burden ourselves with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin?” “How have we come to be a civilisation” that prudishly judges itself for having “sinned against sex?”

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The received histories of sex deserve this comic summary because their story of repression is not just errant or wayward, a little off in its critical heading, but diametrically wrong. The real story as Foucault tells it points in the exact opposite direction. The 300 years that the historians circumscribe as a time of repression actually saw an “explosion” of talk about sex. This time is marked by the furious, incessant creation and multiplication of sexual discourses, as an intensifying scientific spirit of observation and classification discovered people’s hidden sexual worlds in their infinite potential as objects of study. Far from being silenced or repressed over this period, people were increasingly prompted and prodded and harassed to name and describe the sexual truths they bore in their souls, by priests, doctors, psychologists, government bureaucrats, and employers, whose power grew with the sexual details they collected and collated. After you read The History of Sexuality, the classic scene in which a repressed person is freed into psychosexual hygiene — “empowering” herself against the forces of shame and repression by divulging her sexual secrets to a professional psychotherapist — appears in a very different light. You’re newly inclined to see empowerment happening not in the speaking — as our melodrama of psychotherapy would have it — but in the listening.

This reversal of the political valence of sexual discourse and sexual silence, and Foucault’s killing mockery of the sexual ideology of the New Left, have recently won him admiring readers outside his original fan club of literary academics and other postmodern Leftists. But a deeper affinity between him and his new readers owes to the fact that Foucault was 50 years ahead of his time in emphasising the deep moral power of administrators and bureaucrats, doctors and psychologists deputised by sovereign and corporate authority to burrow inside people’s minds and bodies, extracting secrets and implanting helpful suggestions. He showed how institutions deploy a sort of relentless inquisitorial energy that remakes their charges into new and more pliant types of institutional subject, more agreeable to administrative power precisely because they’ve been rendered more open about their inner selves.

Diversity training is a telling recent example of this sort of power, a vivid analog of the forms of sexual study and discipline Foucault describes, resting as it does on a pageantry of confession, of redemption into moral fitness through acts of self-narration and self-description. It would be simpler and cheaper, and almost certainly more effective, for employers to minimise racial offence among their white employees by simply telling them what their non-white co-workers are likely to find offensive or racist, and perhaps why. But the idea of piercing the understandable reticence on racial matters of their nervous employees, goading them to “open up” about the racism they hide inside themselves, is simply too attractive to pass up. These records of racial resistance and confession are a source of immediate pleasure and value and power for the department of human resources and its partners in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) consulting world.

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For my part, I came to a curious realisation two decades ago, while researching the politicised, dim-bulb scholarship prominent in teacher-training programmes in the US. The more an educational approach bore the influence of supposedly Foucault-inspired postmodernism, the more “critical” or “constructivist” it was, the more its retail methods resembled the models of institutional power that Foucault describes in History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. Educational relativism reverses the flow of language in a classroom. Instead of receiving agreed-upon knowledge from a stable authority (an arrangement that, let’s be clear, is not without its disciplinary potentials), prone students are induced to produce discursive performances for an authority who, instead of lecturing and overtly prescribing, is now observing, listening, notating, patiently waiting through awkward pauses, prodding the student to keep talking when useless silence threatens to dominate.

When content and curriculum are demoted as teachers’ duties, what tends to replace them is a therapist’s probing interest in inner states, attitudes, and dispositions. This is the direction of virtually every faddish innovation in education. Instead of students learning about the outside world from teachers, it is teachers learning about the inner selves of students, from the students’ own confessional output. I always imagine Foucault hearing the popular slogan from teacher-training programmes, “the child-centred classroom”, and shuddering.

The growing centrality of this psychotherapeutic outlook to our moral culture and the perpetual, self-fuelling revolution of sexual expression and identity continue to make Foucault look like a visionary 40 years after his death. As I note above, therapy-minded young people now commonly perform — upon themselves, often for a public audience of social media followers — the main psychological operations, the patient’s confession as well as the clinician’s diagnosis. They (and we) have internalised not only the expressive imperatives of the clinical setting but also the analytical biases, the drive for identifying and classifying and subdividing human types, that marks the human sciences to which psychology belongs. In this analytical process, the ambiguous, changeable matter of human behaviour is translated into legible categories of human person.

Like the institutions that observe and nurture and mould us as we pass our days within them, we are impatient to specify what human type we belong to. We are keen to nestle into a nice category, match ourselves with a diagnosis, map ourselves on the great taxonomy. This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny. Foucault is taken to be a great inspiration for the sort of “queer theory” that informed, or at least provides a stockpile of quasi-academic jargon for, the ongoing revolution in sexual and gender identity. To its ideologists, I imagine this revolution appears in dialectical terms, suppressed or hidden “subjectivities” pushing against the harm and violence of outdated understandings, emerging into the light of dignity and recognition, properly seen, finally, for example, as asexual.

But Foucault didn’t buy into the dialectic of history. Anyone truly inspired by him would watch as another pastel strip is added to the gender flag, as the quivering “+” at the end of the list of initials invites a new identity into the official fold, and see something very different from history being steered toward ultimate justice by ever-freer self-expression. They would see the techniques of the human sciences — now devolved to us, internalised by our suggestible selves — doing the unending work of analysis and classification and discipline. Remembering their reading of Foucault, they would find this all so absurdly familiar they’d have to laugh.

It is a sign of how far our self-imposed childishness has gone that grown-ups today are unashamed to express passion for books aimed at teenagers — or, to use the ubiquitous but optimistic American expression — “young adults”. Only the very crustiest resist the trend. Would he ever write a children’s book, the late Martin Amis was once asked. “If I had a serious brain injury,” he is supposed to have replied.

It is not only that grown-ups have failed to put aside children’s books, but that their attitude to grown-up things remains childish. Those whose day jobs (like mine) put them in regular contact with older teenagers have been remarking for a while on the increasing demand that fiction be “relatable”. Rebecca Mead defined the attribute in the New Yorker as one possessed by “a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected”. It has increasingly become a stick with which to beat works, often classic works, featuring characters or situations with whom it’s harder to identify. Anna Karenina, for instance, or Hamlet: who among us is a haunted Danish prince or Russian adulteress?

Childishness, Kant said, is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”, and Mead’s case against relatability echoes him. “To demand that a work be ‘relatable’,” she says, expresses the expectation that “the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer … expects the work to be done for her.” If you can’t relate to Hamlet, in other words, you should be open to the possibility that the fault is yours, not Shakespeare’s.

But might there be a way to read children’s books without reading them childishly? The best case for the defence was made by C.S. Lewis in his apologia for reading fairy tales. “They accuse us of arrested development,” he said, “because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?” I regularly return to the books of my childhood and find exactly what Lewis describes: “Being now able to put more in, of course I get more out.”

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The book of my adolescence to which I have recently returned is one to which I really oughtn’t to be able to “relate” at all, so socially alien are its setting and characters. Its protagonist and narrator is a 17-year-old English girl, an aspiring novelist and already talented diarist called Cassandra Mortmain, living with her impoverished aristocratic family in a crumbling (and rented) castle.

Her novelist father, who achieved some success with his obscure modernist debut (Jacob Wrestling), is blocked. Her stepmother, an artist’s model absurdly named “Topaz”, spends her evenings running naked through the castle grounds. Her elder sister Rose, desperately lonely, says things like: “It may interest you both to know that for some time now, I’ve been considering selling myself. If necessary, I shall go on the streets.” When Cassandra gently points out to her that she is unlikely to come by much trade in the country lanes of Suffolk, Rose asks their stepmother for “the fare to London and … a few hints”. Alas, her stepmother has none to offer.

I Capture the Castle has long inspired more than enough affection in adult readers to tolerate its whimsy; we see in it merits that can survive the reader’s passage into adulthood. It was written by Dodie Smith, best known as the author of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, another novel that can survive an adult reading — especially if you can turn away from the adorable, imperilled puppies to the fabulously camp creation that is their fur-loving nemesis, Cruella de Vil.

The tone of I Capture the Castle is less camp than fanciful. Cassandra and Rose find their bohemian, somewhat cut-off lives, transformed when two American brothers move to a nearby house and turn out to be their landlords. Rose falls in love — or so she claims — with one brother; the other brother dismisses her — or so he claims — as a mere “gold-digger”. Meanwhile, Cassandra struggles to reciprocate the affections of her “swain”, the maid’s son, who is “very fair and noble-looking” even if “his expression is just a fraction daft”. No one is saying what they think, and no one is ever fully admitting how they feel.

Are these anxieties “unrelatable” because they are about posh (if penniless) English people? Or, as I found, almost painfully relatable, because they are about the insecurities of adolescence? And because they come from asking those old questions: will I have the good fortune to find a relationship in which I can both love and be loved back, and a career that allows creative expression but also pays the bills?

Dodie Smith’s whimsy, then, is planted into a world where the stakes are real. Rose’s desperate urge to marry well — that is to say, marry wealth — is entirely familiar from the work of the author who must have been her inspiration. All the characters in I Capture the Castle are intensely aware of what W.H. Auden, in his wonderful lines about the world of Jane Austen, had called “the amorous effects of ‘brass’” — a phrase that could only come from a grown-up reader for whom Lizzie Bennett’s love life is now of less interest than the financial security of her impossible mother and sisters.

Likewise, Smith’s awareness of class. Young Stephen, the maid’s son and general dogsbody, is a more economically productive figure than any of the central characters in the book. But at one painful point he reminisces to Cassandra about when his mother told him “never to play with you unless I was invited. And to call you ‘Miss’, and never to presume. She had a hard job explaining what ‘presume’ meant.” What better image is there of the mechanisms of social class than that of a maid to an impoverished aristocrat explaining to a seven-year-old what it means to “presume”? An adequately empathetic child will understand enough to be sorry for Stephen; it may take a grown-up reader to be indignant on his behalf.

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Rereading the book, I was struck by the extent of Cassandra’s moral seriousness in a story that it is tempting to see as purely comic. Nearly every one of her diary entries seems to contain a mention of her feeling guilty or ashamed about one thing or another. Is this the paralysing self-consciousness of the teenager? Or does it reveal an important axis of gender difference? Is it about a girl being trained to put other people’s needs above her own? About growing up in a society that demands more maturity of girls than of boys?

A memorable passage in Rudyard Kipling’s marvellous novel of schoolboy antics, Stalky & Co., has a schoolmaster observing the boys doing a cruel impersonation of him, and responding simply: “It’s not brutality. It’s boy; only boy.” As the American critic Steven Marcus put it in his classic essay on Kipling, “the word is being used here in a metaphysical sense and as descriptive of a metaphysical state”. I Capture the Castle is one of the few classic books I know where “girl” is treated with an equivalent reverence.

Dodie Smith encourages both her characters and her readers to grow up through an acceptance of girlhood, rather than a rejection of it. If growing up means, as the Bible says, putting away childish things, that must include what C.S. Lewis once pointed out was the most childish of things: “the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up.” Cassandra’s sister Rose repeatedly embarrasses herself because both her fear and her desire are so transparent; she is not grown-up enough to know what it looks like when you’re trying too hard. Cassandra, by contrast, allows herself to be naïve.

My favourite passage of the book is the one where Cassandra gives vent to her resentment at her father’s obscure modernist writing: “Why should Father make things so difficult? Why can’t he say what he means plainly?” Her sister’s beau takes her question entirely seriously, and gives her about as good an answer as that question has ever been given: “Because there’s so much that just can’t be said plainly.” Modernists, he says, are all that stands between us and stagnation. “That’s why one ought not to let oneself resent them — though I believe it’s a normal instinct, probably due to subconscious fear of what we don’t understand.”

It’s this passage that distinguishes I Capture the Castle from the sorts of “YA” fiction that would prefer to keep people in a state of nonage. Smith’s wisdom is really the same as Lewis’s: the point is not to replace childish stupidity with adult sophistication, innocence with experience, naïveté with worldliness. As adults know well, adulthood does not mean replacing the vulnerabilities of childhood for invincibility.

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Writing in the Fifties about the modish and self-consciously sophisticated novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch observed that English philosophers, unlike their French counterparts, appeared to live in a world where “people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party”. The remark was taken at the time to be a joke at the expense of the English philosophers, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. There is something positively alarming about the idea that the sort of adult seriousness we should be striving for is what Sartre’s novels — emphatically not for children — represent. As if there were anything contemptible about adults doing such things as playing cricket, baking cakes and going to the circus: in a word, about adults playing.

One of Smith’s many contemporary admirers, and an inheritor of her English tradition of clever, self-conscious whimsy, is the scholar and children’s writer Katherine Rundell. In her essay-length book, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, she reminds us of just how much grown-ups have in common with the child they once were. Adults too, she writes, need “autonomy, peril, justice, food”. They too need “acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart”.

Of course, not every children’s book can survive its readers growing up. W.H. Auden remarked, in an essay on Lewis Carroll, that “there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.” I haven’t met any adults who can get anything out of the Secret Seven, for instance — or, for that matter, any contemporary children, which suggests that they were always just mediocre books. The ones that survive do so because they know how the child lives on in the adult — not as a remnant of something that should have been shed, but as something essential.

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form…”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

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In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

Peter Brown, in his excellent new autobiography Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, identifies the kind of dogged, even cheerful resourcefulness exhibited by Symmachus as one of the hallmarks of the later Roman elite. Brown’s long historical education, which has taken him from Oxford to Berkeley to Princeton, began as a child in Forties Dublin. Born into a Protestant society unmoored by Irish independence, he observed “what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground — in the small world of the little big men of the provinces — and to do so with dignity and good nature”. Embattled but not embittered, Brown’s family taught him that “a lively and imaginative culture could coexist with constrained political and economic circumstances. It was, perhaps, a good start with which to approach the world of late antiquity…”

This is the lesson of Symmachus, who dealt uncomplainingly with his own constrained political circumstances. The governing class of his generation was under extraordinary pressure, and yet it managed to keep the show on the road, to hand its civilisation on to the next generation despite the dramatic changes wrought by increasing barbarian incursions and the transformations brought about by an insurgent Christianity. Gratian had ordered a bridge to be built and Symmachus was going to damn well see it done.

Indeed, spend a few hours reading his dispatches and you would agree that asking whether Britain is “declining like Rome” is nothing less than an insult to the Roman Empire. The city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, by the Vandals in 455, and finally swallowed up by a new Gothic regime in 476. But while the legions held on the borders and the lawyers argued in the forum, while the tax revenues rolled into the treasury and the grain shipments cruised into Ostia, Symmachus and his friends do their duty to the patria. There had been crises before, after all, and Rome had always muddled through. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that men like Symmachus acquire the glamour of an endangered species.

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Even after the disaster of 476, there were still men around to keep the cogs turning. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus held multiple public offices during the early sixth century. His masters were Ostrogothic kings, not emperors, and the capital was no longer at Mediolanum, but at Ravenna. None could doubt that the western Roman Empire was at an end, especially when compared to the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, which was about to flourish anew under the reign of Justinian. And yet, what do we find Cassiodorus doing? He did not waste his time on elegies for a lost world. He was far too busy for that sort of thing. Many of the city’s great buildings were falling into disrepair, so he decreed that Rome’s main brick depot be refitted with a view to manufacturing 25,000 new roof tiles every year. He chased the Governor of Lucania for his region’s taxes. He ensured that teachers of Rhetoric were properly paid. When a Goth settler seized the land of two Italians and reduced them to slavery, Cassiodorus was there to intervene.

This is not to minimise the impact of Rome’s collapse. As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, the post-Roman West was a bit of a dump. Timber supplanted dressed stone, flagged floors gave way to beaten earth. Coinage vanished. Cows shrank. Honorific statuary disappeared, as did indoor plumbing. The Roman ceramics industry, which had pumped out vast numbers of high-quality, wheel-thrown vessels for centuries, ground to a halt. Britain’s decline was among the most dramatic. In one moving passage, Ward-Perkins draws attention to a small object excavated at the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This famous site, which yielded intricate gold jewellery and elaborate ceremonial armour, also contained a small pottery bottle. Even the humblest Roman family would have regarded such an item as an unremarkable piece of household clutter. In seventh-century Britain, that small bottle sat naturally among the exquisite grave goods of a celebrated man.

And this is revealing. When our journalists and billionaires ask whether Britain or America is “declining like Rome”, they are really thinking about the grim realities of the early Middle Ages — a time of deprivation rather than plenty. And perhaps they are right to do so. However terrible life was in the post-Roman West, it was nothing like as bad as a similar rupture would be today. Most of us lack both the land and the knowledge to grow our own food. The support structures provided by extended family networks and stable local communities — the mortar of the pre-industrial world — have been fatally weakened. Many people rely upon regular medical intervention simply to stay alive. Our most basic goods are imported from the other side of the planet, as is the fuel required to power the machines that make contemporary life possible. Above all, centuries of peace have left us ill-equipped for the return of a society in which war is commonplace and might makes right. A fourth-century Roman would regard modern Britons as laughably weak, ignorant and dependent.

If Rome’s fall still resonates today, it is only because we know so little about the subject. Popular images of Roman decadence — Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar; Nero’s Golden House — are largely drawn from the first century, when the empire was at its height. Later emperors had no time for such diversions. They were an overworked and harassed bunch who often died violent deaths, but they often got the job done. In a sense, to ask whether the modern West is “declining like Rome” is to ask whether we are governed by people with the grit of Symmachus and the tenacity of Cassiodorus. One might as well compare a woollen toga to a polyester T-shirt.

Denis Johnson’s novel The Stars at Noon (1986) is the great American example of this form, a wet, hallucinatory junket through the jaws of hell that foreign interventions can become — in this case, 1984 Nicaragua, as CIA-backed Contras wage war on the Sandinista government. One of Johnson’s lesser-known works, the novel takes the form of an anti-travelogue narrated by an unnamed young American woman who will definitely not be documenting this unaesthetic excursion for Instagram.

The book begins with submachine guns in a grimy Managua McDonald’s, an American outpost patronised by horny officials and soldiers of the junta. It is here that we learn that our narrator may or may not be some kind of journalist, or at least aspires to be one, but for now is selling sex in an effort to acquire enough hard currency to purchase a flight out of Nicaragua.

This has led to her being sexually extorted by local officials, who are gratuitously taking advantage of her fallen position while promising to help. And she has fallen very far. Before this, we learn that she worked as a human rights observer with an organisation called Eyes for Peace. After bearing witness to the suffering of others, she quickly became disillusioned with this line of work — in her world, the word “humanitarian” has acquired a sinister meaning. Other exalted concepts — “justice”, “liberty”, “equality” — are equally scorned. “I’ll show you liberty and some of that other bullshit,” she tells one character.

We follow our young American to the bar at the InterContinental Hotel, where the assembled international press corps is drinking heavily and complaining about the lack of “bang bang”. It is better in Beirut, they all concur. But our narrator is similarly unimpressed with them: “As the cabdriver had understood they would be, several journalists were drinking here tonight, the usual bunch, every one the sort of person who really ought to be shot dead right away.”

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It is in this sad hotel bar, among these war tourists, that our narrator first meets her love interest. He is a bland British consultant (“pudding-like and ghostly”), who works for an oil company. “Consultant” is another opaque, sinister-sounding vocation in these parts, and she implores him “not to go into detail” about his dealings. “The Englishman”, as she calls him, is remarkable only for his total lack of remarkability (elsewhere, she notes that he reminds her of a cloud, with a vaporous, forgettable face and white skin). And this is a central point of the book: the title comes from a line from an W.S. Merwin poem, “what we are looking for / in each other / is each other / the stars at noon / while the light worships its blind god”. This is a love story rooted in narcissistic idealisation and self-delusion, with the libidinous political tumult and tropical locale lending the affair a frisson it would not otherwise have. Back in London or New York, we imagine, these two might never give each other a second look.

The political drama is as nebulous as “the Englishman” himself. We eventually learn that he has engaged in industrial espionage. His oil company, along with the Costa Ricans, knew of some possible oil deposits beneath Lake Nicaragua, and in the interest of “fairness” — and perhaps vague political sympathies with enemy states, though like the rest of him, these remain gestural — he passed them on to the Nicaraguans. But the Nicaraguans informed the Costa Ricans of this duplicity, and soon the lovers are pursued by the security services of several state agencies at once, including the omnipresent CIA. Under increasingly unbearable surveillance, the pair make a long, dramatic dash for the border. It is significant that it is the Englishman’s ostensibly “humanitarian” act that triggers this panicked chase. In proxy wars, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

Read some 40 years after the counter-revolutionary war in Nicaragua, The Stars at Noon feels exhilarating, even liberatory. In more ways than one, Johnson’s novel is an escape, unencumbered by tedious contemporary puritanism. No one is mythologised in Johnson’s world, and we are invited to mock and revile both the dull revolutionaries and “the stupid CIA”.

This kind of cynicism in war is not new in literature, but it almost feels that way filtered through a female narrator. Johnson gives us a young woman in excruciating circumstances who is nonetheless not the traumatised female subject of so much millennial women’s writing, reflexively narrativising her experiences through the lens of victimisation. As Caitlín Doherty has written: “MeToo’s impact is detectable not in any political transformation among the professional women who comprised its constituency, but rather in the desiccated dregs of a ‘feminist’ linguistic mode: a speaker who narrates in the first-person, invokes the literary and wants you to know of her pain.” Though our narrator is mistreated by men, she always has something that they don’t: the knowledge that these men, however powerful in the present circumstances, are pathetic, even pitiful.

“Not that the pleasure and comfort of an incompetent small-time official in a floundering greasy banana regime surmounts my every concern, but all men tend to grow innocent, wouldn’t you agree, at the breast,” she muses during one unfortunate encounter. “You can’t help but feeling a little something, if only a small, sharp pity, as if you’d just stepped on a baby bird.”

Young women in the contemporary West have not lived under the top-down institutionalised patriarchy found elsewhere in the world, but this is precisely how women who do have to navigate it: by viewing powerful men not as totems of unearned privilege, but as pathetic prisoners of their own desire and therefore riddled with weaknesses to exploit. That Johnson was able to understand this as a man suggests that “lived experience” is not the only kind that illuminates: in this novel, he gives his female narrator a more powerful, eviscerating voice than most contemporary women would grant themselves. For that, he would undoubtedly be indicted by certain literary puritans today — for failing to make his female narrator sufficiently disempowered, or for writing in the voice of a woman at all.

Yet Johnson’s female narrator is also self-evidently him. The Stars at Noon was written after his own trip to Nicaragua, where he had hoped to produce an article on the revolution for a magazine. Instead, it was during this trip that he realised that he could never be a journalist. He reportedly flew home, fell into a depression and wrote this book. Certain details — the professional journalists in Managua restaurants observed with a mixture of envy and disgust — are clearly lifted from his own experience. At one point early on, Johnson’s narrator calls the editor of a magazine in the US with a desperate pitch; he laughs before hanging up on her. Among other things, this is a book about failure. And this, too, is refreshing in an era in which writers are more invested in constructing the identity of a writer on social media than they are in writing.

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Last year, the French director Claire Denis released a film based on the book. It is a fine enough adaptation, capturing something of the sensual yet sickly atmosphere of the novel, though Denis opted to lift the story from its original Cold War context and resituate it in present day, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the film, the run-down InterContinental Hotel has been partly transformed into a grimy Covid hospital, with a menacing biomedical security regimen and unsmiling guards carrying submachine guns. The story loses something essential set in the present, as the voluptuous and ideological Cold War setting is swapped for our vacuous, post-ideological Cold War 2.0, wherein dictatorship and democracy alike are drifting towards a tech-facilitated authoritarianism. If the movie feels less substantive than the book, then it’s partly because our times are hollower, too.

But how would the contemporary commentator, trained to reflexively pincer apart each piece of media for hidden loci of oppression, react to the novel it is based on? For one, it’s a story that “centres” the experiences of two white Westerners in Nicaragua. Further, our narrator is not interested in signalling awareness of her “positionality”, her “privilege” and her “Westernness”. But, at a time when the CIA would probably employ the language of decolonisation to justify arming the Contras, it is invigorating to read outsiders who are allowed to be simple outsiders. The narrator of The Stars at Noon belongs to the American pantheon of drifters, losers, outsiders, drunks and dreamers. These are not figures that “speak over” local voices, to use the bloodless academic-activist parlance, but from beneath them, as they come from below.

What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

During the Thirties and Forties, four brilliant but unknown young thinkers — Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand herself — were obsessed with questions about the individual versus the social world. Unfamiliar to each other, they wondered how best, in Beauvoir’s words, “to make oneself an ant among ants, or a free consciousness facing other consciousnesses”. Their respective philosophical conclusions and the surrounding life events that helped give rise to them are the subject of a wonderful book, The Visionaries by the German author Wolfram Eilenberger.

No member of this quartet was a natural team-player; all were fiercely non-conformist in their own ways. The book depicts them living through a tumultuous decade (1933-43) that included Stalin’s Holodomor, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler. To Arendt, history resembled not so much an arc bending towards justice as something more like the vision of her suicidal friend Walter Benjamin: “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. Weil accused the “whole of the 19th century” of believing, wrongly, “that by walking straight in front of one, one necessarily rises up into the air.”

Metaphysical questions assumed to be long settled took on new political urgency as legal rights were repealed, hostilities stoked and the death camps built. The challenge, as far as Arendt was concerned, was for Jews like her to “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies” against the forces that would dehumanise them. From 1933 on, she wandered rootless and alienated across Europe, settling uneasily for a while in Paris before being forced to move on again.

Like Arendt, Rand and Weil were also Jewish, relegating them to the status of metaphysical Otherhood in the eyes of many. Rand’s prosperous Russian family had lost nearly everything during the revolution. Weil, assimilated (at least superficially) in a bourgeois French family, suffered less from antisemitism than the others, but still was forced to leave for England in 1942. As a non-Jew, Beauvoir underwent the least personal upheaval, but even she had a breakdown during a flight from the Germans in 1940.

Between them, these thinkers produced a fascinating spectrum of philosophical positions, each inflected by thoughts and feelings about the chaos around them. At one pole was the atheist Rand, arriving in the States aged 21 with a visceral hatred of totalitarianism, and with a self-willed, asocial, rational egoist in mind as a moral hero — someone a bit like her, it seems. Autonomy was everything, suffering was pointless, and the self was most free when alone.

Rand rejected any Christian or socialist calls to altruism or “equality” as vehemently as she rejected tyranny from the Russian state. Equality meant only interchangeability, which meant a descent into mediocrity and nothingness. Refusing modesty as a refuge of the feeble-minded, she would declare in her diary that “Nietzsche and I think…”. She dreamed of becoming completely impervious to other people’s opinions — to “refuse, completely and uncompromisingly, any surrender to the thoughts and desires of others”, as she put it for one of her fictional protagonists — and very nearly managed. In 1943, as her family still starved back in Leningrad, her novel The Fountainhead finally took off. She negotiated an unheard-of sum of $50,000 for the Hollywood film rights and bought herself a mink coat.

At the other end of the spectrum was the admirable Weil, equally eccentric and passionate in her attempts to make a moral art out of living, and the real star of the book. During a short and intensely lived life she moved from Marxist-inspired socialism to ascetic Christian mysticism, but was always drawn to self-sacrifice and suffering as a means of understanding others. She sent all her spare money to the poor; wouldn’t eat at her parents’ house unless she could leave the cost of a restaurant meal on the table afterwards; and worsened her already fragile health by getting a job in a factory, in order to better understand the experience of workers. During the Spanish Civil War, she became the International Brigade’s least useful volunteer, determined to carry out secret missions for the Republic but short-sighted to the point of near-blindness and unable to shoot a rifle.

Physically emaciated and tortured by terrible headaches, she deliberately sought out sacred music in churches to transform her physical suffering into meaning. By the end of her life, Weil was advocating total selflessness and renunciation of will, and framing the act of suffering as a direct route to communion with God. But even as she lay dying in a Kent hospital in 1943 — muttering verses, refusing food to the frustration of her doctors, and telling nurses to send her allocated milk to the starving — she still found the energy to write to the leaders of the Free France movement, remonstrating about their failure to send her behind enemy lines on a solo mission.

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In between these two characters and outlooks are placed the more moderate Beauvoir and Arendt. Partly because of the persecution she suffered, Arendt appears the more sympathetic one here, and the more politically serious. While being chased across Europe, she agonises about Jewish identity and the self-destructive futility of trying to “assimilate”, feeling lonely and unwelcomed wherever she fetches up.

Living precariously as a refugee after escaping from a French internment camp, she starts to articulate the ideas that would later inform her famous analysis of totalitarianism as an émigré to the United States. Internees in camps were not being arrested for anything they had personally done, she noticed, and no difference was made between the innocent and the guilty. The individuality and inner life of a person was irrelevant — was treated as non-existent, even. The Nazi plan, embraced by collaborating French too, was to turn “every individual human being into a thing that would always behave the same way under identical conditions”.

In comparison to the travails of Arendt, the life of the young Beauvoir can’t help seeming slightly decadent. Granted, she waxes enthusiastically about the importance of “metaphysical solidarity” with others as a precondition of personal freedom, but makes it sound all rather grubbily transactional — I’ll grant you recognition, if you grant me some. While, by force of circumstance in the Paris of 1936, Arendt and her fellow refugee lover are living hand-to-mouth in sparsely furnished hotels and wandering aimlessly between cafes during the day, Sartre and Beauvoir are doing the very same thing — by choice, for kicks.

The immediate focus of both Sartre and Beauvoir is not the suffering millions, but their shared “family”, composed of young lovers and acolytes. When not reading or writing, Beauvoir conducts a complicated romantic schedule that would make the average polycule these days feel inadequate. Resembling Rand in her rather sociopathic detachment from other people’s feelings, she treats this quasi-incestuous group as a psychological testing chamber through which she can analyse various permutations of what the existentialists called “Being-for-others” — and then set them within her novels.

One of Eilenberger’s strokes of genius is to reflect the book’s content in its form. Just as hidden aspects of the self are revealed only in a process of comparison with others, so too do elements of each woman’s life and outlook emerge in fascinating relief by juxtaposition with the other three. As the episodic narrative unfurls, strange harmonies and discords between the thinkers appear as if in musical counterpoint.

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Poles apart, Rand and Weil both end up thinking of social life as a source of evil, though for different reasons. For Weil, Plato’s “Great Beast” — public opinion — can only lead us away from God. For Rand, it can only lead us away from the god-like self. Arendt embraces love between two people as the antithesis of totalitarian impersonality, while Weil treats romantic love as “manifestly unjust and morally random”. Just as Arendt argues that Jewish assimilation into society requires a destructive embracing of antisemitism within the self, so too will Beauvoir eventually go on to argue in The Second Sex that the assimilation of women into a universal “humanity” requires something similar — but with misogyny taking the place of antisemitism. Meanwhile Rand, Weil, and Beauvoir all think of themselves as adopting masculine roles.

The basic philosophical questions addressed so ardently by these iconoclasts have not gone away. Invasion and war are back on the continent, along with dehumanising war crimes and the strategic othering of ethnic and national populations — all encouraged by leaders who sneer at democracy. But even without all that, there are quieter and more everyday invasions: of your mind, for instance, filled up by other people’s thoughts and feelings every time you look at a screen.

The boundary of the self in relation to others has never been more porous. Resistance to the “Great Beast” is increasingly difficult, even if we now answer to bureaucrats in HR departments and not to party apparatchiks. In an age of virtual and machine-mediated relationships, we invent new selves online for the benefits of imaginary beings but take every opportunity to avoid other people in the flesh. In doing so, we avoid ourselves. Indeed, for some of us, lost in online worlds, Being-for-others in Beauvoir’s sense barely gets going. And destructive ideology can easily seep into the gaps where human contact used to be.

Equally, the public square has also got a lot noisier since 1943, and it’s even harder to tell who the bad guys are. Widespread cultural familiarity means that, perversely, the narrative of a minority being cruelly dehumanised can be cynically recycled by pretty much any group seeking power or attention, no matter how ludicrous the claim at face value. (“Acephobia”, otherwise known as discrimination against asexual people comes to mind — indeed, surely it’s only a matter of time before some bright spark reclaims Simone Weil as an early fighter for asexual rights). Tap into the right tropes and it’s a work of minutes to persuade the guilt-ridden and the gullible that a new identity group is being persecuted horribly, simply because rampant political ambitions are being criticised. The book-burners and censors these days do it in the memory of past victims of totalitarianism, and many onlookers don’t know which side to take. Even worse, the phenomenon of confected-grievance-as-power-grab allows many to dismiss genuine social ills in the same light.

Still, despite the epistemic confusion, we have to keep on trying. As Arendt wrote presciently in 1951: “The self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality… The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In other words: technologies may come and go, but the challenge of staying an individual in the face of the mob is always with us.

If the 20th century was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere — I hardly know anyone who lives as a pure-blood rationalist, nor do I encounter many who dwell entirely within one faith or metaphysical tradition. Astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream daylight, while a revived interest in psychedelic experience and synthetic drugs has opened up gnostic wormholes amid the high-res sound-systems of nightclubs that seem more than ever like techno-pagan temples.

Attempting to understand this paradoxical synthesis led me to TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis, a deeply Californian writer who was born in 1967 but is very much a child of the Nineties. His outlook was shaped as a cultural journalist in that decade he recalls fondly for its “ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come”. He describes TechGnosis as “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology”, and insists that “religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality”.

Starting from the maxim that “magic is technology’s unconscious”, Davis explores the myriad ways in which an ostensibly rationalist-materialist-atheist civilisation invests its new machines with ancient animism and archetypal dreams. Think of the recent hype around AI; how ready we are to project sentience and malign — Chtulian! — will onto a technology that, considered rationally, can never possess such qualities. He also considers the ways in which “ecstatic technologies” such as psychedelic drugs, meditation and shamanism now influence and modify questions of the soul, while asking if religious experience, defined by Carl Jung as that in which “man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other”, may itself be evolving in tandem with technocultural mutation.

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The first edition of TechGnosis was published in 1998 — the same year, it’s always startling to recall, in which Google was founded — a prelapsarian time of heady economic growth and triumph-of-liberal-democracy optimism. It’s dizzying to think how much has changed since then, the spree of relentless cultural, societal and technological upheaval we’ve undergone. Yet Davis’s first book has remained relevant (helped by multiple revised editions with updated material). In part this is because it was never fully taken in by the Nineties’ now painfully discredited techno-utopianism, nor did it paint an especially rosy picture of our tech-civilisational future (yes, the one we’re now in). Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1962 about how the Global Village might turn out to be a more uncomfortable place than we anticipate: “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside…  we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.”

Is there a better description of the online mobs, omni-paranoia, mass derangement, moral outrage, scapegoating, and polyphonic extremism that have defined the years since they put devices in our elegantly evolved hands? This sceptical edge may make Davis an appealing writer to those who find other psychedelically informed theorists too far out, too loose and easy with rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. He is attractively open to gnostic, mystical, religious and, yes, psychedelic experience — a “heady seeker of sorts”, as he describes his younger self — yet he is also cool-headed and rational, even cynical when it comes to the exploitativeness of technocapitalism. Now in his late fifties and a compelling guest on podcasts and YouTube talks (as well as the producer of many excellent articles on his Substack) Davis advocates a “middle way — between reason and mystery, scepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique”.

His book churns up an unrelenting, often brilliant spray of ideas, funnelling a dizzying range of information across multiple cultural-intellectual byways and minority belief systems. Davis examines the seminal, future-shock cyberpunk fictions of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and the gnostic dystopias of Philip K. Dick. But he also ranges onto magical-esoteric-religious history: the Greek-mythic trickster Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee’s “Enochian” magic, the discovery in 1945 of the heretical gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi — even the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s experiments in telepathically communicating with dolphins by way of intravenous ketamine and a sensory-deprivation tank. He traces the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s messianic vision of a noospheric Omega Point — in which all minds are fused in an ecstatic oneness that brings the divine principle to its earthly apotheosis — through the delirious rhetoric of Nineties Wired-era tech propagandists and Singularity hucksters, whose effusions glossed the acceleration into our era of surveillance capitalism, epistemological fragmentation, radical inequality and political extremism.

Davis insists that the digital age teems with religious and supernatural metaphors. His distinction between the analogue “soul” and the digital “spirit” is memorably suggestive: “The analogue world sticks to its grooves of soul — warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality.” It is not lost on Davis that his book appeared shortly before the arrival in multiplexes of The Matrix, an exhilarating film that mainlined the mythos of simulation, alienation, deception and sacred uprising into the global psychic mainstream and perhaps primed teenage minds to plunge into the nightmarish hyperrealities of the decades to come.

He is also sympathetic to the neo-psychedelic culture that emerged from a post-Sixties underground to fuse with a more broadly gnostic cultural mood (you can’t open the New York Times or New Yorker these days without seeing articles on psychedelic research, though acknowledgement of the irreducible weirdness of psychedelics is less common). But Davis regards our connected devices and social media as the real acid in the civilisational punch-bowl: perhaps the ruptures we’ve lived through over the past decade are just the beginning of a cyberdelic horror-trip we’ll never wake up from.

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Today, the digital future-present keeps echoing the magical-animist-pantheistic past — and vice versa. What are shamans if not “ecstatic technicians of the sacred”, LSD if not a “gnostic molecule”, and Gnosticism itself — the heretical Christian doctrine that declared our universe the botched work of a sinister demiurge, a lesser god — if not “the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory”? Meanwhile, the revival of virtual reality and the increasingly realistic texture of video games conjures up the ancient fantasy of simulation and nested realities (“the protagonists of Hindu yarns often found themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds”). It is only a short, psychotic leap from there to believing that consciousness is itself a game within a game, that there are levels parallel to or above this one. Even if reality turns out not to be a video game, actual games reanimate gnostic longings. “The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds.”

At least in its younger form, Davis’s is the sort of intelligence that can barely give itself room to breathe. TechGnosis covers so much ground that you wish he’d linger in one place for a while, probe more deeply into some of the intriguing areas he races over, or make more of the arresting, speculative ideas he frequently dashes out. His book’s enduring cult appeal has arguably made him a touch self-important, assessing (and hyping) its continuing relevance across a series of overlong afterwords. But these are quibbles against the high appeal of a writer so alert to “the powerful, archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology”, and the value of psychedelic thought in generating new metaphors. Davis writes of such strange, compelling things with real poetry, his meta-muse unleashed in “those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning”.

I was a bratty, bookish 15-year-old when it was published in 1996. A 1,000-page-plus novel bloated with endnotes that have their own footnotes was an irresistible challenge. David Foster Wallace was not an obscurantist in his own literary taste — he taught Stephen King and Thomas Harris at Illinois state university — but Infinite Jest is a book at bloody-minded war with its own bookness. With its maddening excess of information that you must hold in your hand as best you can, it feels more like trying to absorb the internet than reading a regular novel.

As well as being attention-repellent, it is also sometimes just repellent. There are scenes of comedically extreme horror: a woman dying after the handbag that holds her artificial heart is snatched from her, a man dying in his own filth while obsessively watching reruns of M*A*S*H, a dog dragged behind a car until all that’s left is a leash, a collar and a “nubbin”. Before livestreamed mass shootings and animal cruelty for clicks, Wallace knew that the grisly and grotesque was what the public wanted.

He did not see the future. But he saw the forces shaping the future, and understood the ways they would deform people in turn. 

In an aside, Wallace writes about how, with the introduction of the “Teleputer” (what we would call a laptop), video calls enjoyed huge popularity, followed by dramatic decline. Users quickly discover that being seen is enormously anxiety-inducing, partly because it means you must visibly be paying attention to the other party at all times, partly because you must also pay attention to how you look when making a call.

The answer to this anxiety is, first, “high definition masking” — a flattering composite of the user’s face digitally overlaid on the screen. Then comes actual masking — hyperreal rubber versions of the user’s face that can be quickly strapped on for calls. Eventually, in response to this “stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance”, consumers revert to audio-only, which is now “culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity”. 

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By Sarah Ditum

This divide between the real and the represented has been borne out by our experience of Zoom, Instagram and TikTok: filters are now so advanced that they can be applied to moving images, and you can digitally beautify yourself while livestreaming. Only instead of resorting to rubber masks, we remodel the flesh itself: “filter face” tweakments, intended to bring the human closer to the digital ideal, are on the rise. Wallace was right about the way pervasive exposure to our own image would break us. It’s just that the way we’ve responded is, somehow, even more dystopian than he imagined.

Infinite Jest’s near future is now our near past, and in 2008, Wallace killed himself after suffering decades of profound depression. By the middle of the next decade, his greatest novel had been recast as a byword for tedious white masculinity, the author himself cancelled. This was, at least in the biographical sense, deserved. In 1990, Wallace had met the poet Mary Karr. He was a resident in a halfway house, she was a volunteer, and he became obsessed with her. They dated, they broke up, then he assaulted and stalked her. In 2018, Karr tweeted that he had “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”

The novel includes multiple men in recovery steeping in the shame of their past violence, and it would be nice to imagine that this was Wallace examining his own conscience. On the other hand, it also includes a reciprocated love story between the large, lunkish, David-Foster-Wallace-ish character Don Gately, and the beautiful, idealised, Mary-Karr-ish Joelle van Dyne. Infinite Jest was, arguably, an implement of his ongoing harassment and should not be dishonestly mined for signs of redemption.

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Still, it is a very contemporary thing to demand moral purity in artists: the kind of impulse that, perhaps, comes from seeking simplicity when far too much knowing is possible. “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” asked Claire Dederer, as though to be an audience is inevitably to be an accomplice. Good art can be made by people who’ve done bad things, and perhaps only a monstrous man can faithfully portray the outlines of his own monstrosity. Reading is not an act of worship, although one of the problems for Infinite Jest is that certain male readers have treated it as such. 

And so, Infinite Jest has plummeted from literary touchstone to confirmed red flag. In a viral tweet from 2020 listing “Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf”, the first item was “A dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest”. The “dog-eared” was important: it was the act of having read it, rather than posing as someone who might read it, that sounded the klaxon.

But unread copies could be equally alarming: when the actor Jason Segal bought Infinite Jest in preparation for playing Wallace in a film, he recalled that the female bookseller rolled her eyes and said: “Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.” Nicole Cliffe made it number four on her catalogue of “Books that Literally All White Men Own”. 

I have never run into a “DFW guy” — they’re probably more of an American campus thing. But I ran into the “Philip Roth guy” at university and recognise the type: clammy, proprietorial, forcing his literary taste on girls in lieu of forcing himself. That I had read Infinite Jest felt vaguely embarrassing. All that effort, and it turned out the most high-status option would have been to not read it and then be glibly dismissive. 

It’s perversely appropriate that Infinite Jest ended up holding such a key place in the vocabulary of this irony-bound strand of performative feminism, because irony was one of the things that Wallace was both appalled and fascinated by. In a 1993 essay, he writes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Infinite Jest isn’t above irony, but it often pits itself against irony. “It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy,” thinks one character. Another feels an “aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief” (the weird syntax is because this character is Quebecois). When sincerity is untenable, it becomes easier to engage with symbols than things. 

Over and again in the novel, the “real” gets displaced by the representation, like the rubber faces that can replace flesh ones on video calls. One of the centrepiece scenes of Infinite Jest features a geopolitical strategy game called Eschaton — a kind of Risk, but played by teenagers with balls and rackets to stand for missiles. The game comes violently undone when the players start hitting each other and the referee can’t work out how to distinguish between the territory and the map. As for the M*A*S*H-obsessive, “crucial distinctions had collapsed” between the fiction and the real.

And maybe this is connected to the novel’s weirdly well-informed interest in transsexuality. The gender ideology that makes front-page news now was a niche interest in the Nineties, confined mostly to academic papers and message boards for transitioners. Wallace’s inclusion of a young, effeminate, gay, “gender-dysphoric” character and a middle-aged, masculine, straight crossdresser suggests a hefty familiarity with the sexology literature long before any of this had crossed into the mainstream — it’s effectively a thumbnail sketch of the influential theory, developed by Ray Blanchard in the Eighties and Nineties, that male transsexuality divides into “two types”, the autogynephiliac and the homosexual.

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But it also fits with the vision of an America where the signifiers that stand for “woman” hold more weight than the physical fact of femaleness. Gender as we experience it now — the idea of an “essence” or “true self” that renders the material body irrelevant — couldn’t have come to exist without the internet. Only when technology allowed people to present themselves as pure language, signifier unmoored from signified, did it become possible to believe that sex was malleable or unreal. Maybe transsexuality fascinated Wallace because he saw it as another way that humans confuse the symbol with the thing itself, the feminine with the female.

This summer, I started rereading Infinite Jest, mostly out of curiosity. It is, still, a very annoying book. But there’s something I didn’t understand about it in 1996 that I do now I’m older than Wallace was when he wrote it. He saw American culture as an exhausted force, trapped smirking in a hall of mirrors. And he saw that getting worse as screens extended their influence.

One of Wallace’s influences, Thomas Pynchon, wrote stories about the technology that made America possible: geographical surveys (Mason Dixon), the postal service (The Crying of Lot 49). Infinite Jest is about the technology that could undo a state: a kind of entertainment so compelling that it turns consumers utterly away from reality. It asks whether the real, or something like it, might be worth recovering. 

It is, still, a difficult book — and difficult in new ways. The wheedling presence of my phone is competition that Infinite Jest never had to contend with the first time around. The disturbing fact of Wallace’s own bad acts, too, was not available to me in the Nineties, and even if it had been it probably wouldn’t have struck me as a problem for the novel. But the difficulty is, and always has been, the point. Of course Infinite Jest could be shorter, lighter, less infuriating. But if it’s heavy, it’s because it’s weighing you back down in the physical world.

Critical theory was born in Germany between the two world wars. It was founded by a clique of Marxist academics in Frankfurt who were horrified that the grand march toward the communist utopia predicted by Marx wasn’t happening on schedule. On the one hand, communism in the Soviet Union had devolved into a totalitarian nightmare with a reliable habit of mass murder. On the other, the working people of one of the most educated and cultured nations of Europe, who according to Marxist theory should have been flocking to the banners of proletarian revolution, were instead rallying around a weird little man with a toothbrush moustache and an unhealthy obsession with an archaic, bloodthirsty mysticism of race and soil.

Obviously, something had gone wrong, not just with Marxism but with the entire enterprise of Western rationality summed up in the phrase “the Enlightenment”. Consider what that phrase means for a moment. One of the basic credos of the cultural mainstream in Western countries is the rather odd notion that, at a certain point not that many centuries ago, for the very first time in human history, intellectuals in Western Europe saw the universe as it actually is. Before then, despite fumbling attempts in the right direction by ancient Greek philosophers, humanity was hopelessly mired in superstitious ignorance; afterwards, Western intellectuals led a rapid ascent towards true knowledge of humanity and the universe. People still speak of that period using such far-from-neutral terms as “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment”; in Germany, the term is die Aufklärung, literally “the Clearing-Off”.

It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it, and they set out to understand what had gone wrong. Since they were Marxists, of course, they still framed things in terms of the march toward a utopian society of the future, and critical theory thus set out not just to understand society but to change it. It sought, in Horkheimer’s words, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” — but it tried to do that by understanding the entire panoply of reasons why those circumstances happen to exist at a given place and time.

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This is what makes critical theory useful. Treat a belief as though it’s timeless and context-free and all you can do is accept or reject it; recognise that every belief has a history and a cultural context and you can understand it instead. Critical theory attempts to do this with the core beliefs of Western society. The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It’s still worth reading today, even though much of what passes for critical theory now is little more than empty propaganda.

In the opening lines of his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound wrote: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say ‘founder,’ to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom is it blamed.” Similarly today, in circles unsympathetic to what critical theory has become, it is common to assail Adorno, Benjamin, et al., because of the current antics of their followers. This is unfair. The founders of critical theory did in fact make a massive mistake, but it’s one that pretty much everyone made in those days and too many people still make today.

That mistake? The failure to recognise that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged — and to which their followers by and large belong today — form a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory by and large avoids talking about this. A genuine critical race theory would interrogate the discourses concerning race used by Left-wing activists in today’s society, and show how those discourses are used as instruments of hegemony by those activists and the people who pay them. A genuine critical theory would also interrogate the implications of “liberating human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and talk about how that rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving circumstances with another. You can read a whole lot of critical theory and never catch the least whisper of this sort of thinking.

This is what makes Jason Josephson-Storm’s work so fascinating. He tiptoes very close to the edge of that forbidden territory, by suggesting that one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern thought — the notion that we modern people are disenchanted, freed from the superstitious burdens of the past and venturing heroically forward into a new world free of myth and magic — is simply another myth. He has applied the tools of critical theory to one of the basic assumptions underlying critical theory, and showed that belief in disenchantment is just another narrative employed to advantage certain people over others. It is an impressive project.

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One of Josephson-Storm’s greatest influences, a scholar he frequently cites, did much the same thing on a bigger scale and to an even more vulnerable set of narratives. This is Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”. What does this mean? Well, it’s part of the mythology of science that claims that scientists in their research are simply following where nature leads. In practice, it’s very nearly the other way around.

Consider the steps you’d need to take if you wanted to do some research into any branch of science: reading the relevant literature, crafting a hypothesis, considering the available equipment, designing an experiment, and, of course, finding funding for it. It’s common for such steps to be dismissed as mere details, but in fact they are more significant than that.

For instance, the literature you’ve read is the product of peer review and the evolution of scientific opinion, which has at least as much to do with academic politics as with nature. The hypothesis is a product of your education, and also of current fashions in academia (anyone who thinks that scientists are immune to the blandishments of intellectual fashion has never met a scientist). The equipment available depends on who has invested money into developing certain kinds of experimental gear, and also on what gear is popular and readily available. The experimental design is just as subject to fashion, and it also has to appeal to funding sources. And finally, the decision to grant or withhold funding for an experiment depends entirely on the behaviour of human beings.

On top of this, after conducting an experiment, you’d have to interpret the results, write a paper, get a prestigious co-author or two to sign on, submit it to a journal, wait nervously while it goes through the peer-review process, and revise the paper at least once in response to comments by the anonymous peer reviewers. Then, once the paper is finally published, other researchers will respond to it and potentially adapt their own research projects in light of what you’ve found. All these, again, are social processes.

The end result of such a research project — a half sentence and footnote, say, in some future textbook — is thus almost entirely a product of social interactions among human beings. At the centre of those interactions, the flake of grit at the heart of the pearl, is the fact that you asked nature a specific question and got an equally specific answer. That process of question and answer is the thing that makes science as effective a way of making sense of the world as it is, but it does not erase the effect of social processes on the result — it just means that the result has to have some contact somewhere with nature.

Now take that and multiply it by four centuries or so of scientific effort, and the result is a vast social process built atop a relatively narrow foundation of natural facts. Those facts are carefully selected, curated, and assembled by the social process into a model of the world. Ask different questions, use different equipment, give the results a different theoretical spin, and you can quite easily end up with a completely different model of the world. That’s not something most people want to talk about in the scientific community, because it would weaken their claims to influence, wealth and privilege. That’s why so many scientists were shouting “Believe the science!” at the tops of their lungs not so long ago: maintaining the cultural prestige of science, and thus their own social status and its perks, took precedence over nearly everything else.

If you want another glimpse at just how far the social enterprise of science veers from its imagined ideal, look up the phrase “replication crisis”. One of the essential principles of science is that any scientifically valid finding has to be replicable; it can’t be some kind of fluke. These days, for an astounding number of studies in a very wide range of sciences, that’s no longer true. Very few people in the sciences want to talk about how much of this is caused by experimental and statistical fraud, both of which are pervasive in those branches of science where corporate profits are involved and far from rare even in less lucrative fields of research.

If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.

This is the kind of thing Bruno Latour wrote about. In We Have Never Been Modern, he proposed that most people are convinced, or at least act as though they’re convinced, that the modern world is something new and unique in human history because, unlike all others, our sciences really do tell us the objective truth about nature. These people also appear to be convinced that the same thing is true of everything else in our culture.

This is the heart of modernity — the conviction that keeps people today from making use of any of the hard-won lessons of past civilisations, or even learning from our own civilisation’s catastrophic mistakes. It is a fond, false, foolish belief — and Latour and Josephson-Storm have both shown that it can’t be justified except by the most absurd sorts of special pleading and circular logic.

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What does it mean if we give up the myth of modernity, the conviction that we — alone of all the human beings who have ever lived — see the world truly? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to give up science. That our scientific worldview is not given by nature, but assembled out of data points drawn from nature, does not make science meaningless or false. It simply makes the work of the scientist a product of human society and culture, rather than a revelation handed down from on high.

In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.

This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.