Zayd Ayers Dohrn:

This was a dark time—a time when the hope and promise of the civil rights movement seemed to have been overly optimistic, even naïve. A bit like our own political moment, when each new headline seems to bring with it a new outrage, a new sense of injustice—an era when the bad guys often seem to be winning. “Of course, you could see it coming,” she says now. “But still, the way it happened. It didn’t really matter who killed him [MLK Jr.]—the CIA and all the conspiracy stuff around it. He knew he was gonna be killed. And he was killed. And it radicalized people.”

[…]

The whole nation seemed to be disintegrating, coming apart under the centrifugal forces of war and racism, like a jet engine cracking up and spinning out of control. And all you could do was either brace for impact or try to grab the controls.

Two months after King’s death, SDS held a meeting to elect new leadership. And even though she had been a member of the group for less than a year, Bernardine [Rae Dohrn] was put forward as a candidate—part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement slate, promising to take SDS in a more militant, radical direction. …

“You have to take action,” she remembers telling herself. “You have to do something.”

On June 14, 1968, SDS met in plenary session to ask questions of the new candidates. Bernardine, the only woman on stage, faced vocal skepticism about her radical bona fides. “Do you consider yourself a socialist?” a man in the audience called out, drawing jeers and mocking laughter from the crowd.

Bernardine stared him down for a long moment of silence. “I consider myself,” she said finally, “a revolutionary Communist.”

She was elected in a landslide. Suddenly, at twenty-six, Bernardine was one of three co-equal national leaders of SDS, and one of the most prominent women in the New Left.

That same year, membership in the organization surged above 100,000, with 350 chapters nationwide. SDS was fast becoming the biggest, most visible, and most active student group in the country. And while some members still wanted to focus on building a big-tent mass movement, Bernardine and her Revolutionary Youth Movement comrades were determined to up the level of protest—to turn their peaceful student debate club into a militant fighting force.

“There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine told a crowd of SDS members that month, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!”

Nick Catoggio:

“Trump had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delegitimize the opposition after 2024 through effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” he wrote [Peter Laffin]. “But he couldn’t escape his impulsiveness, and he could very well go down as the figure who ushered in socialism in the U.S.”

Is that the answer?

As I noted last week, the president’s right-wing apologists love to credit his continued political viability to a popular backlash to progressivism. “This is how you got Trump,” they’ll snort, alluding to how the elite left’s condescension and cultural excesses alienate the working class. But that logic works, or should work, both ways: If socialists sweep into federal office this fall, presumably that too would be driven by some sort of backlash among the hoi polloi—to the right this time, not the left.

What will the nature of the backlash be, according to Republicans? When they ask themselves “What did we do wrong to make a creep like Graham Platner electable?” what conclusion will they reach?

We can start with a conclusion they won’t reach. They won’t embrace Laffin’s theory.

Admitting that Trump cocked things up so badly as to make socialism attractive by comparison would require right-wingers to admit they erred catastrophically in reelecting him. They’ll never do it. They spent 10 years being warned by “elites” that the president is an embarrassing civic blight on America who’s as incompetent as he is crooked. They’d sooner pay $12 per gallon for gas before they acknowledge that those elites were correct.

[…]

Republican voters will find it hard to concede that Trump’s failure on affordability is how we got Graham Platner. For one thing, they won’t want to admit that the president’s blue-collar credentials are almost entirely cultural, not economic. But I think the right is also instinctively allergic to interpreting politics through the lens of class and redistribution. They associate such things with the Marxist left, and I think on some level they resist the idea that control of the government should depend on which side is delivering tangible improvements for voters.

To the modern right-wing tribalist, politics isn’t a contest to see who can deliver more. (Except with respect to deportations.) It’s an existential struggle to keep the left out of power so that they don’t destroy the country. Concede that socialists are benefiting from Trump’s failure to bring down the cost of living and you’re conceding that, in some circumstances, the public might reasonably prefer socialist leaders. Unthinkable.

[…]

…if you grew up, as I did, with “American exceptionalism” as the engine of your patriotic pride, the last 10 years have been a sustained exercise in having your face ground in a pile of s–t. (If you grew up during the Trump era, you never had that engine to begin with.) Americans might once have been an exception to the grubby manner in which most other populations on Earth governed their countries, but no more. If we’re exceptional now, it’s only insofar as we gave a second chance at leadership to a man any respectable people would have thrown in prison or exiled after his first term ended the way it did.

Patriotism will recover somewhat once Trump is gone, but I’ll be surprised if it ever rebounds completely. Having seen what other Americans are willing to elect and indulge, the disillusionment about exceptionalism can never be undone.

And that partly explains how you get Graham Platner. When you lose respect for your country, electing unfit, unrespectable people to office can only feel less objectionable. That’s basically what populists say when asked why they excuse Trump’s poor character, no? I came to hate the system, so I was willing to overlook a dishonorable candidate’s flaws to shake it up.

Well, a lot of people hate “the system” that Trump and MAGA have created. If there’s a guy out there willing to tear it down, who cares if he once had a Nazi tattoo? The branch of government he’s running for functionally doesn’t even exist anymore! Political squalor is like any other good: If you make it profitable, as the right did by twice electing the president, you’ll get more of it.

Needless to say, I don’t expect any soul-searching on this point from Republicans in November if Platner and the other socialists win. The market among the grassroots right for less squalor and more dignity is, shall we say, not robust.

If anything, I imagine many will seize on a swell of support for “godless communism” as an excuse to become more radically squalid in their politics. That’s another impediment to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” plans, in fact: Postliberals will want mainstream Republicans to believe that the socialist threat is real and rising, not an artifact of election chicanery. It can’t be defeated by banning mail-in ballots or tightening voting procedures. It can only be defeated by—you guessed it—the GOP becoming even more fascist.

Byung-Chul Han (2021):

George Orwell’s novel 1984 has recently become a worldwide bestseller. People sense that something is wrong in our digital comfort zone. But our society is more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1984, people are controlled by the threat of harm. In Brave New World, they are controlled by administering pleasure. The state distributes a drug called “soma” to make everyone feel happy. That is our future.

Neil Postman (1985):

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting [a hardly less humiliating] pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book [Amusing Ourselves to Death] is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Aldous Huxley, in a letter to George Orwell (October 1949):

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

From Huxley’s Brave New World (1932):

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness.

Augustine, sermon on 1 John 4:

Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

Steve Robinson (revisiting a theme):

In my 74 years this hand has learned to print and write cursive, bathe a dead man, build an iconostasis, a mansion and a bird house, wipe a tear and create one, change the diapers of a child and a parent, pour a beer (both into a glass and down the drain), dig a ditch and a grave, craft a casket, color inside and outside the lines, knead a loaf of bread dough, pound a pulpit and overturn tables, write a computer program, a Master’s thesis, a love letter, a book, and an insult, sign a marriage and a death certificate, put a Band-aid on a boo-boo and duct tape on a bleeding gash, cook for dozens and for one, turn the page of a book and a life decision, pull the trigger on a gun and an idea, pull a tooth and stop a nosebleed, bait a hook, gut a deer and a friendship, clean an altar and a toilet, hitch-hike and drive a stick shift, pet a mean dog, sew a button, take a blessing and give freely, mic a crankshaft, point in the wrong direction, draw a portrait and a cartoon, give a thumbs up and a middle finger, demolish a house and a marriage, shake hands and hug desperately, break boards and promises, beat an adversary and caress a lover, change an ostomy bag, dress a bishop, anoint the dead, wave hello and goodbye, build a motorcycle and twist its throttle, make a bar-chord and play the blues, throw a pot in anger and on a wheel, torque a bolt, develop a photograph, cleanse a chalice and a mess-kit, handle a snake, cradle a dying dog…, 

hang on too long, 

…and let go too soon.

As a young man I saw the parochial consequences of the work of my hands and judged my life by my constricted view. As I’ve aged I’ve seen beyond my own house, to a new generation, to my children’s children and to generations of people I have never met incarnationally. I’ve come to realize that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are correct: our life and the history of the world is in our hands. Today. In this present moment.

[…]

Go. Do things. Be humble. Be bold. 

Your hands will do bad things.

Repent when they do. But know this: You will be repenting your whole life. When you look back on your life the goal is not “no regrets” but “no anxiety”. Because whatever your hands have done that has humbled you will be made beautiful in the fulfillment of the mystery of God’s merciful providence in Christ.

Catherine Woodiwiss:

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the World Cup become the Unified Social Media Hivemind Games. Let me take a guess, dear reader: You, too, are obsessed with Erling Haaland? You, too, think Jude Bellingham is a smokeshow? You also were all in for Cabo Verde? You also think FIFA is rigging the Cup for Argentina?

It’s not weird that anyone might feel this way — it’s weird that everybody does. In my conversations with strangers at Whole Foods, a first-time-soccer-fan at the bar, my Instagram friends’ stories, my work colleagues, every single one has repeated this pattern. In each case, we collectively responded as a global algorithmic unit, forming these opinions suddenly, loudly, and increasingly obsessively, sometimes in the span of hours. Most of these examples are fun and lighthearted (I get it, I love my Viking weirdo).

The positive experience of a hivemind feels like collective effervescence — the phrase coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the electric feeling of energy, harmony, and connection that occurs when people gather with a shared purpose.

But the level of it still feels a little off, like someone reached into each one of our unique diverse perspectives around the world and activated “target + sentiment = GO” on all of us at once.

And the ugly side of this gets ugly fast.

If we want to talk about patterns, here’s one I’ve seen about Team Argentina: Isolated incidents in play (often clipped to be directly misleading, or look worse than they were) → essentialism (it’s not just one game, it’s every game for this team) → shame (it’s not just on the field, it’s everything about who this team is) → expansion (it’s not just the team, it’s the fans and the country’s history and honestly, kind of just the whole country itself). I’ve seen individuals go from “hey, Messi kicked his shin too hard” to “Argentina is the ethnonationalist state of Nazi-Netanyahu dreams” in, like, days.

This uncritical, highly-suggestible hivemind effect isn’t just happening with the World Cup, obviously. It’s been happening in fandoms of all kinds and political conspiracies of all stripes for years. But it feels like it’s hyper-accelerating — the velocity, intensity, and reach of this kind of narrative is a new thing, and it feels dangerous.

It also feels, hate to say it, pretty stupid.

[…]

I suspect some of us, maybe many of us, are genuinely addicted to the idea of a villain and the thrill of conspiracy. I’m a little worried that our spirits have become insistent on always finding evil lurking just beyond the fringes of our awareness.

Another French philosopher Simone Weil writes that psychological gravity — just like physical gravity — naturally tends downwards, pulling our attention toward base behaviors. Attention is a form of prayer, she says, and where we choose to put our attention reveals our values. We can decide to seek true community and harmony and joy. But we have to choose to pay attention to it.

At first, we were mostly paying attention to each other, and the surprising pride we felt to belong to a country with ranch dressing and free refills. We were paying attention to “Rock Chalk Algeria” and South Korea fans in sombreros and German coaches in cowboy hats, and the renewed capacity for imagination and trust we all felt as a result. But pretty soon, we let the algorithm direct our attention elsewhere — to a villain and to conspiracy — because that’s what we like to do.

The knee-jerk reaction to find a villain undermines our capacity to participate in this collective effervescence. And the disinclination to ask questions in the face of mistrust and anger intrudes on our ability to celebrate each other.

I can’t exactly confirm this — I don’t even know who any of the players mentioned are — but it fits pretty well with much that I’ve seen.

Nicholas Carr:

In the second half of the twentieth century, technocrats gained a powerful new weapon to deploy on the information battlefield: the digital computer. In automating the core bureaucratic function of data processing, computers vastly expanded the information that authorities could collect, store, and analyze. A new philosophy of social engineering emerged, reflecting a belief that even the most complex problems can best be solved by getting the right data into the hands of the right experts equipped with the right computers. Information makes everything transparent — and tractable.

The philosophy was given its first test on an actual battlefield: Vietnam. Early in the conflict, Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s Harvard-educated defense secretary, recruited a team of “whiz kids” from universities and think tanks to plot war strategy. Working in Washington and in “combat development and test centers” in Southeast Asia, the team conducted extensive behavioral research aimed at developing communication programs to gain the support of local villagers. At the same time, it worked on incorporating computer technologies into weaponry. American planes were soon dropping thousands of motion, sound, and chemical sensors into enemy territory to create an “electronic fence” to track troop movements and guide bombing raids. “I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real- or near-real-time surveillance,” said Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland in 1969. “I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications.”

But even as he spoke those words, the United States was in retreat, defeated by guerilla fighters armed with little more than guns and walkie-talkies. The Pentagon’s high-tech strategy failed spectacularly. It neither changed the minds of the Vietnamese population nor provided a military advantage. But rather than triggering an honest assessment of the flaws of large-scale data mining, the fiasco had the opposite effect. The problem wasn’t that computer-based decisionmaking had limits, the technocrats concluded. The problem was that the computers weren’t supplied with enough data.

This conclusion would, as Siegel shows with example after example, turn into a perverse tenet of the information age: Every failure of automated data processing becomes an excuse to collect even more data.

It’s worth remembering here something that that same Robert McNamara said in a memo to LBJ on May 19th, 1967: “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” 

Carr continues:

After the 9/11 attacks, the perversity came into high relief. America’s spy agencies, having failed to anticipate and prevent a terrorist plot on U.S. soil, were rewarded with vast new powers to gather information indiscriminately, on American citizens as well as foreign actors.

In addition to the sweeping Patriot Act, passed by a panicked Congress a month after the attacks, the administration of George W. Bush launched a raft of clandestine surveillance and propaganda programs, with names like Total Information Awareness and The Office of Strategic Influence. Flouting the Privacy Act of 1974, which had imposed tight controls on the federal government’s ability to collect personal data on citizens, intelligence agents began downloading Americans’ phone records, text messages, credit card transactions, library records, medical charts, and, as Siegel puts it, “anything else that could be fed into the maw of the super-surveillance machine.”

He closes the review of Siegel’s book with this:

Originally promoted as a medium of reason and objectivity, the Internet has revealed itself in the social media era to operate under a definition of truth so flexible it would make a postmodernist blush. The huckster, not the technocrat, is its true master.

Lawrence Lazarus:

In the coming ears, artificial intelligence will not simply change how we work It will likely erode work itself as the central organizing principle of modern society.

This is not a claim about mass unemployment or human obsolescence. It is about what happens when work gradually ceases to perform the quiet functions it has long served: occupying large populations, structuring daily life, anchoring identity, and stabilizing social and political institutions. As those functions weaken, the consequences go beyond the labor market. They spread outward, into family formation, social cohesion, political legitimacy, and how people experience purpose itself. The earliest signs of this shift are already visible.

… Different industries, regions, and roles will experience the phases of this shift at different speeds and in different sequences. Some may skip phases entirely; others may linger in one phase for years. The purpose here is not to map the future with precision but to render visible a pattern of erosion that has already begun, and to follow its logic toward a question we will eventually all have to answer.

[…]

At scale, this raises a question that economic policy alone cannot answer. When work no longer organizes daily life — when it no longer anchors identity or social contribution — what replaces it? This is the question toward which the coming years are moving — not suddenly, not uniformly, but persistently.

Who will answer it? Not economists: their tools measure output, not meaning. Not technologists: they built the displacement, not the replacement. Not politicians: they are still debating whether the disruption is real.

The question will fall to all of us: to families deciding how to raise children in a world without clear career paths, to communities trying to hold together without the rhythms of work, to individuals staring at open hours and wondering what they are for.

We will not answer it quickly. We may not answer it well. But we will have to live with the uncertainty while the old structures fade and the new ones have yet to take shape.

That is what it will mean to live through the drift.

Edward Feser:

[T]oo much contemporary art, as Roger Scruton notes in his book Beauty, reflects a “cult of nihilism” devoted to “acts of aesthetic iconoclasm” or “postmodernist desecration.” It is not concerned merely to identify the limits of reason or of traditional standards of beauty. Instead, it delights in what is irrational and ugly, engaging in subversion for its own sake. In this way it is often diabolical and leads us in a direction opposite to that of mysticism—not to a realm higher than human reason can reach, but to one that is lower or subrational.

Smith tries to assimilate the mystics to this irrationalist sensibility, claiming that their experiences are “intended to break the mind,” yielding a “decentering of rationality” and insights that are “something other than knowledge.” But this account is wrongheaded. To “break” a human being’s mind is to leave him not wiser, but insane or lobotomized. Since Smith thinks he has reasons for his position, reasons that are better than those his opponents can offer, he has hardly “decentered” rationality. He just exercises it badly, because he scorns the standards by which reasoning can be evaluated for cogency. And since he is making truth claims of various kinds—claims about art, mysticism, philosophy, and so on—he himself purports to have a kind of knowledge. Smith allows that his view may therefore sound incoherent, but he offers no solution to that problem other than gimmicks, such as use of the strikethrough when he speaks of the “knowledge” his position is supposed to give us.

A friend sent that review of James K.A. Smith’s book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark along the other day. I don’t read much FT these days but, I have to admit, it struck the same cord with me that it did with my friend. 

I have a pretty large soft spot for Smith. I started reading his stuff around 2014 and found him to be one of those breaths of fresh air, especially at that time. (I eventually pushed his book You Are What You Love on many many people. He also lead to my discovery of Comment Magazine, which continues to provide fresh air.) But somewhere along the way — probably around his departure from Comment — he started losing me. Not entirely, but largely, and some of Feser’s excerpted phrases from Smith reminded me of why.

Comment did just recently publish what I assume is the introduction to his new book. One thing I kept thinking when I read it was that Smith has been doing this “I’m a philosopher philosophizing about philosophy’s philosophical insufficiency” stuff for a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a one-trick pony (which Smith is not), but it always seems like another new discovery in that “Now I know” fashion, and it’s often in the same heady, theatrically circular ways that I don’t find very helpful.

I remember talking to a self-described church planter in Portland, ME, I’m guessing around 2016. (Yup, another southerner here to evangelize the “unchurched” of New England.) He and his group were having a meet-and-greet of some kind and he was telling me what his ethos was or whatever. After a minute of listening, if even that, I said “That sounds a lot like Jamie Smith.” His eyes lit up, “Yes, I love Jamie Smith!” I have no memory of what he said or why it was so noticeable, and I didn’t have any negative connotations even in the back of my mind at that time, but reading those excerpted phrases reminded me of it. Smith does have a unique way of waxing lyrical.

“In the search for strength, beware fine writing,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in October 2001. He went on to mercilessly criticize John Updike, who “produced a description of what he saw [on September 11th] that would not differ from a description of a painting of what he saw.”

Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible. … There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth. All this is the testimony of a man who has words for everything and nothing but words.

I’m not so confident as to accuse Smith of the same thing, but this stuff does come to mind. And to the degree that he has leaned in that direction, that is probably the degree to which I have leaned away from Smith.*

At risk of taking these thoughts too far… I believe it is to Smith that I owe my first discovery of Jason Isbell. Take a few minutes to hear Isbell describe the writing process in this 2023 interview with CBS. I think Isbell is doing a good part of the thing that Smith wants to praise but isn’t doing. “Don’t wash the cast iron skillet” is an infinitely better sentence than “I find myself dreaming of a contemplative phenomenology…”

The best I can attempt to say is that Smith might be an example of what happens when you try too hard to say things about things that can’t be said. (And, ironically, can’t stop ‘splaining to people what “true faith” is.)

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t also say that The Front Porch Republic published (a little surprisingly, I think) a more charitable review. It still points at some of the same problems — and includes, in the reviewers words, only one “cheap shot” — but it had much nicer things to say about Smith’s book.

I’m probably somewhere between these two reviews, but closer to the first. I have still been quoting Smith from time to time and I still will. But I’m unlikely to find his new book on my shelves, not only because I can’t see myself going with Smith’s version “unknowing” but because, as even the charitable review acknowledges, I can’t think of one person I could or would want to share it with.

Still, You Are What You Love will always be a good book and Smith a thoughtful theologian.

—

*There is another good excerpt from Wieseltier’s piece that doesn’t fit well in this post but is worth quoting because a) it’s good, b) I think Smith himself would appreciate it, and c) I think it fits well, albeit snarkily, with the better parts of Smith’s aims. Namely, as the FPR reviewer put it, the complicated need for solitude, silence, and mystery.

No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. Everybody was shocked by the attack, but not everybody was philosophically unprepared for it. For a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless. There are states of happiness that are not states of stupidity. We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners.

But mourners can be imbeciles, too. “[M]any of those people who died this past week,” Billy Graham instructed the prayer service at the National Cathedral on September 14, “are in heaven right now, and they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful.” This was Mohamed Atta’s eschatology, too. It is not consoling, it is insulting. We are not a country of children. Nothing that transpired on September 11 was wonderful, nothing. The only effect of these fantasies is to loosen the American grip on reality at precisely the moment that it needs to be tightened. If it makes sense to call on religion in times of trouble, it is not because religion abolishes spiritual pain, but because religion acknowledges spiritual pain. When all the political and military and economic and psychological and cultural analyses of the slaughter are exhausted, there remains the question of the justice of the world.Whether or not it has a religious answer, this is a religious question. About this question it is not easy to be brilliant. Silence is often a surer sign of mental progress than is articulateness. For some people, a house of worship is useful for such a reflection because it is God’s house; but there are those who repair to a house of worship because it is Job’s house, and therefore the natural setting for their objection to the order of things. Belief and unbelief are a disagreement, but they do not disagree about what is significant, and the vocabulary in which they conduct their disagreement is for certain purposes the only adequate vocabulary. And so Billy Graham’s degradation of that vocabulary should have sent all intelligent souls in perplexity running from the church. Of course the air outside the church is not exactly thick with lucidity: at Yankee Stadium last Sunday, at the conclusion of the greatest afternoon in the history of American pluralism, Oprah Winfrey imparted the superstition that “when you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know.” No, you do not.

Jonathan Kirshner:

The Peloponnesian War, [Thucydides’] magisterial opus on Athens’ doomed decades-long conflict with Sparta in the fifth century BC, includes the famous line, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

That well-known line comes from an important section of the text known as the Melian Dialogue, in which representatives of Athens browbeat emissaries from the island of Melos. After the Athenians fail to persuade the Melians to accept unconditional surrender, they kill all the island’s men and enslave its women and children. Thucydides’s Melos passage has long been cited as proof that little governs the world beyond strength and its exercise—and as evidence that the brilliant Athenian general, historian, and philosopher himself believed that. Generations of students of international relations have been assigned these decontextualized snippets from his vast work and instructed that this was indeed Thucydides’s lesson. Today, a cottage industry of commentators now celebrate (or bemoan) what is described as a Thucydidean turn in American foreign policy. In “How Trump Won Davos,” an essay published in January, the historian Niall Ferguson explicitly invoked the Melian Dialogue to tout the triumph of Trump as a realist in the mode of Thucydides and asserted that, at Melos, “the realists won an emphatic victory.”

But that understanding of both the dialogue and its author gets his meaning fundamentally backward. Thucydides repeatedly refers to, but never endorses, the idea that the strong have the freedom to do what they want: to the contrary, a careful reading of The Peloponnesian War suggests a rather different view. Among the principal lessons to learn from Thucydides is that the ambition of the strong can lead to their own undoing. Right after Thucydides reports the fateful words of the Athenian envoys and the subsequent destruction of Melos, he describes at great length the disastrous campaign Athens pursued in Sicily—an effort that eventually led to Athenian defeat and Spartan victory. In this light, the Melian Dialogue is not proof of the great virtue of strength in international relations but an illustration of pride before the fall.

The political scientist Graham Allison famously coined the term “Thucydides trap” to refer to the dynamic inherent in The Peloponnesian War, of how the tensions between a rising power and an existing power will invariably bubble over into conflict. The real Thucydides trap, however, is different. The crucial lesson of the book is notto sketch how Athens and Sparta found themselves sleepwalking into a war that neither side wanted or understood. As Thucydides elaborately elucidates, both went into the conflict with eyes wide open. Moreover, in his view, the start of that war was hardly a trap. Thucydides supported the commencement of hostilities and the careful strategy of Pericles, the Athenian leader who rallied the public behind his demand for war with Sparta. The true catastrophe, and the real trap, occurred many years later, when Athens abandoned Pericles’s prudence and became recklessly ambitious, most grimly demonstrated by the misguided bid to conquer Sicily.

[…]

The dialogue is less about the fate of Melos than it is about the condition of Athens, and the picture is not a pretty one. That becomes abundantly clear in the way the destruction of the island sets up what immediately follows, the ill-fated Athenian bid to take Sicily. Immediately after describing the annihilation of Melos, Thucydides continues: “The same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicily . . . if possible to conquer the island.” The Athens that operated at Melos is inseparable from the Athens that embarked on its fantastically and fatally misguided campaign to conquer the large and distant island of Sicily, the folly that would be a chief cause of its ultimate ruin. Thucydides thought the Sicilian campaign was the most important event in the war, and he devotes nearly a quarter of his magnum opus to a detailed depiction of it. One reason why the destruction of Melos (in contrast to, say, the extremely similar events in Scione) is an ideal place for extreme narrative deceleration is because it allows Thucydides to directly and explicitly link Athenian arrogance and hubris in Melos—well on display in the dialogue—with Athenian arrogance and hubris in Sicily, where that bill would come due: “They were beaten at all points altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily.”

It is reasonable to suggest that the Melians ought to have chosen surrender and survival, but in the debate they make the stronger (and more prescient) points. If the Athenians massacred those who were at their mercy, the Melians argued, a dangerous precedent might be set: “You are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.” On this point, and others, the Melians were spot on—and likely articulating a point that Thucydides wished to impart (and one that his initial readers would have immediately recognized). The classicist Hunter Rawlings has advanced the necessarily speculative but convincingly argued notion that the Melian Dialogue was intended to mirror what would have been elaborated as an “Athenian Dialogue” at the very end of the work, with the Athenians now in the shoes of the ill-fated Melians.

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With the structure of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shows that the Melians may have been vanquished on the battlefield, but they utterly routed the Athenians in the debate, leaving as their legacy enduring lessons about the limits of what brute force can accomplish.

Fascinating essay, and great conversation with Demetri Kofenas.

Kaitlyn Tiffany:

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, also pushed back on the idea that Common Core is the primary cause of mental-health problems among American kids. “This is a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what’s going on with those declines,” he told me. “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” This was generally the thesis of Etchells’s own book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), which came out the week before The Anxious Generation did, sold only a few thousand copies, and received hardly any attention at all.

Come September, the fight over that “one big thing” will be renewed. Which change that happened 15 years ago was the real source of so much misery for children? “You can’t run experiments on history,” Haidt said, so we’ll never be able to prove that smartphones and social media caused the steep decline in youth mental health. “We just have to say which hypothesis is more plausible,” he said—and he’s yet to hear one more plausible than his own.

When I met with Gray, he said that he has total confidence in his idea: “The evidence is really very overwhelming.” Later on, I tried to press the issue: Couldn’t there be some other factors in the mix? What if Common Core had been just one of many causes of the problem? “It would be nice” if there really weren’t any one big thing, he said, but he simply didn’t feel that this was the case. “So far, I haven’t heard of any other possibility that has the same plausibility.” He’d been studying the numbers and considering the alternatives, and he didn’t see how his theory could be wrong.

Definitely one of the more interesting critiques I’ve read, mostly for the schism-sketch between Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray. Gray’s hypothesis seems pretty unconvincing and much more stubbornly motivated to me, at least at face value. And Haidt has been, to my reading, pretty nuanced in handling the “multifactorial” angle.

I don’t have chapter and verse, but I’m fairly certain Haidt himself has said repeatedly that the biggest damage of cell phone use — and therefore the biggest part of the whole thing — is the “lost opportunity” for kids. (And that probably for adults as well.) And opportunity loss can cover anxiety at school (à la Gray), anxiety from social media and real-world dangers (à la Haidt), and even, to name a few more, the social anxiety of divorce, global warming, political indoctrination, and the lack of felt meaning and purpose in life (à la whoever you like).

Some notes I don’t feel like organizing:

• There will always be a category of “unnecessary suffering” for us humans — especially when it comes to kids. Which means that we will always need to ask, “What might we be doing wrong?” — especially when it comes to kids.
• Contra Gray, I have no idea how anyone could make the case for untrammeled internet freedom for kids. The internet is about as human-made as anything can get. I don’t deny some knowledge and communication benefits, but how scrolling and clicking about in it amounts to a gain of opportunity for a developing mind in a world that is not anthropocentric is beyond me.
• Not surprisingly, I want to take every chance I can to plug one of my favorite Arendtian notions within what she called “natality.” As her biographer put it, “Adults must not, she urged, forgo their responsibilities for children as children, they must not refuse to children a sheltered period for maturation, for being at home in the world.” (emphasis added)
• I’ve mentioned before the possible synergistic effect that phones might play, and how our limited but ever-overestimated ability to “study” culture will continue to complicate the correlation-causation debate. In that way, pocket-computers designed for addiction and control are certainly not the only thing preventing people from feeling at home in the world, but they may uniquely compound those things. And they may be one of the fastest growing and most ubiquitous factors contributing to such perpetual homesickness. As a combination of human assumption and human ignorance, they may also be something of an apotheosis.
• Again, the phones are designed more than anything else for addiction. They don’t have to be designed for addiction, but they are designed for addiction. And that means distraction. And you don’t need a conclusive study, nor do you need a doctorate in anthropology, nor do you need to read Jonathan Haidt in order to have the wisdom to say that these devices are robbing us of essential things and essential loves.
• Sven Birkerts:

Marcel Proust wrote somewhere that love begins with looking, and the idea is suggestive. But if that’s the case, the reverse might also be: that true looking begins with love. There’s the quote that I used to repeat like a mantra to writing students, from Flaubert: ‘Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.’ Again, the distinctions, the questions of priority. Is it that the looked-at thing becomes interesting, or that its intrinsic interest gradually emerges? Is the power in the negotiable thing or in the act of looking? If the latter, then the things of the world are already layered with significance, and looking is merely the action that discloses.