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Industry officials and the maritime organization say such arrangements give a voice to the experts. “If you don’t involve the people who are actually going to have to deliver, then you’re going to get a poor outcome,” said Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping.

The company, based in Virginia, did all the work and, on paper, the Marshall Islands became home to one of the world’s largest fleets. The government shared in the revenue — roughly $8 million a year as of recently, one official said.Things got thorny, however, when the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, traveled to the I.M.O. in 2015. His stories of his vanishing homeland had given urgency to the Paris talks and he expected a similar reception in London.

When delegates met last October — five years after Mr. de Brum’s speech — the organization had not taken any action. Proposals like speed limits had been debated and rejected.

German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way of even limited progress.

One of the first breakthroughs in keyboard technology was the invention of the teletype machine. Also referred to as the teleprinter, the technology has been around since the mid-1800s and was improved by inventors such as Royal Earl House, David Edward Hughes, Emile Baudot, Donald Murray, Charles L. Krum, Edward Kleinschmidt, and Frederick G. Creed.

In the 1930s, new keyboard models were introduced that combined the input and printing technology of typewriters with the communications technology of the telegraph. Punch-card systems were also combined with typewriters to create what were known as keypunches. These systems became the basis of early adding machines (early calculators), which were hugely commercially successful. By 1931, IBM had registered more than $1 million in adding machine sales.

The most compelling explanation is that Sholes developed the layout to overcome the physical limitations of mechanical technology at the time. Early typists pressed a key which would, in turn, push a metal hammer that rose up in an arc, striking an inked ribbon to make a mark on a paper before returning to its original position. Separating common pairs of letters minimized the jamming of the mechanism.

The system encouraged the development of a new user interface called the video display terminal (VDT), which incorporated the technology of the cathode ray tube used in televisions into the design of the electric typewriter. This allowed computer users to see what text characters they were typing on their display screens for the first time, which made text assets easier to create, edit, and delete.

The first of handheld devices was the HP95LX, released in 1991 by Hewlett-Packard. It had a hinged clamshell format that was small enough to fit in the hand. Although not yet classified as such, the HP95LX was the first of the Personal Data Assistants (PDA). It had a small QWERTY keyboard for text entry, although touch typing was practically impossible due to its small size.

As PDAs began to add web and email access, word processing, spreadsheets, personal schedules, and other desktop applications, pen input was introduced. The first pen input devices were made in the early 1990s, but the technology to recognize handwriting was not robust enough to be effective.

One fairly popular method was the "soft keyboard." A soft keyboard is one that has a visual display with built-in touchscreen technology. Text entry is performed by tapping on keys with a stylus or finger. The soft keyboard disappears when not in use.

Should our politicians fail to reform regulations for internet platforms and digital advertising, our political future will be at risk. The 2016 election revealed the tremendous harm to the American democratic process that can result from coordinated misinformation campaigns; 2020 will be far worse if we do nothing to contain the capacity for politicians to lie on social media.

Warren responded to the Trump ad with a cheeky point: In an ad she has circulated over Facebook, she claims that "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election." Later in the ad, she acknowledges this is a falsehood, and contends that "what [Mark] Zuckerberg has done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters."

It is disconcerting to think that by fiat, Facebook can deem a political ad to be dishonest because it contains fake buttons (which can deceive the viewer into clicking on a survey button when in fact there is no interactive feature in the ad), but the company will refuse to take action against ads containing widely-debunked political lies, even during an American presidential election.

Facebook has one principal counterargument against regulation: that the company must maintain strong commitments to free speech and freedom of political expression. This came across in Mark Zuckerberg's speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, in which he described social media as a kind of "Fifth Estate" and characterized politicians' calls to take action as an attempt to restrict freedom of expression. Quoting at times from Frederick Douglass and Supreme Court jurisprudence, Zuckerberg said "we are at a crossroads" and asserted: "When it's not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of free expression."

Unfortunately for Facebook, this argument holds little water. If you determine that an ad containing a fake button is non-compliant because it "[entices] users to select an answer," then you certainly should not knowingly broadcast ads that entice voters to unwittingly consume publicly-known lies -- whether they are distributed by the President or any other politician. Indeed, as one official in Biden's presidential campaign has noted, Zuckerberg's argumentation amounts to an insidious "choice to cloak Facebook's policy in a feigned concern for free expression" to "use the Constitution as a shield for his company's bottom line."

If Facebook cannot take appropriate action and remove paid political lies from its platform, the only answer must be earnest regulation of the company -- regulation that forces Facebook to be transparent about the nature of political ads and prevents it from propagating political falsehoods, even if they are enthusiastically distributed by President Trump.

Where coal’s plentiful energy came at the cost of grueling, dangerous work, early oil culture was even more exuberant. Speculators could strike it rich with minimal investment or work.

And then came oil.

That frontier adventurism soon gave way to what Buell calls “oil-electric-coal capitalism.” John Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry, eliminating the bold speculators but transforming daily life for consumers.

By the time Buell was writing, in 2012, a new cultural regime had begun, one blending exuberance and catastrophe, or so he argues. Robotics, nanotechnology, and the internet promised rapid advances for human culture

Will climate disaster, or intentional self-restraint, create new scarcity, rolling back the material progress of the twentieth century? Will dangerous, highly technical power sources like nuclear plants elevate technocratic authorities? Could distributed renewable energy systems and microgrids promote new kinds of localism and democracy? The history of energy cultures suggests that the implications of following any of these paths will be more complicated than we can predict.

“That’s the existential context of the statue. It’s not just a statue of a man being subservient to Lincoln,” said Jackson, who described the moment in his 2001 book “A More Perfect Union.” For years after the dedication, he says, former slaves came to the statue and laid wreaths at its base.

“We can’t tear everything down,” Jackson said. “You can’t, on the one hand, celebrate Juneteenth . . . and then tear down the statue that marks the event. How much sense does that make?”

“You see a new generation that says, ‘All right, your generation wanted to get rid of segregation law, anti-discrimination laws — thank you, people — but you didn’t take care of all of it,’” Norton said. “Now we’re scrubbing. We’re scrubbing the country of remnants of racism.”

“As long as those symbols of racism are alive and well, we have not gored the snake,” she said. “It lives among us.”

Norton said destroying statues or placing them out of public view “is about the worst thing you could do.” Instead, she said, they should be preserved in museums to “tell what is still the untold story” — how and why the monuments were conceived and erected and “why they came down.”

“Oh, boy, that is important,” she said. “In fact, the statues are a better way to tell it than reading it in books.”

Norton said the country needs to be careful that it doesn’t “erase history for its own sake.” She said a commission is needed to study the lives of the Founding Fathers, and suggested additional markers could be added to existing monuments that reflect the complexity of their lives. Although Washington owned slaves, she pointed out, he struggled with the morality of the practice and, at the end of his life, ended up freeing them.

In her 20s, as she attended Yale Law School, she became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, work that took her to Jackson, Miss., and a meeting with Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963.

Evers picked her up at the airport that day and later dropped her at the bus station, from where she traveled to Greenwood to visit a voter-registration drive.

The next day, she learned Evers had been shot to death in his own driveway.

the inauguration platform they had been diligently assembling was wrecked: sound systems and photo equipment irreparably damaged or stolen, two lanterns designed and built by the eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century ripped from the ground, and blue paint tracked all over the stone balustrades and into the hallways.

“At this rate, counseling and consultation services in 2021 would increase by 65 percent over 2020 and by 200 percent as compared to more typical recent years,”

Since the siege, congressional aides have reported trouble sleeping and feeling anxious, claustrophobic, angry and depressed. Lawmakers have requested additional resources to support the mental health needs of employees in response to surging demand.

Thus government does not create rights, nor does it dispense them. It merely recognizes and respects them. As George Will likes to say, the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

The assumption of natural rights and government’s limited role to secure those rights, the bedrock premise of American political thought, finds itself widely embattled today. It is under pressure on university campuses and in the prestige media, and even challenged by self-professed advocates of human rights

The United States was from its beginning a republic “dedicated” to certain self-evident truths, foremost among them that “all men are created equal.

These founding principles of equal rights and human freedom—America’s public philosophy—contain what Will (in his bracing tome The Conservative Sensibility) calls “an epistemological assertion” that important political truths are not merely knowable but known.

In the world of 1776, the truths held to be self-evident by America’s founders were ferociously contested by kings and monarchs who claimed a divine right

Today, although despots still contest America’s great epistemological assertion, the problem in the West is closer to the opposite: everyone claims the truth is known, but with the crucial stipulation that no one’s truth is better or worse than anyone else’s.

Tom Nichols has written deftly about this phenomenon. “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

Thus does the American Founders’ assertion of truth, and its implication that not all claims to truth are equally valid, comes off as “judgmental” to modern ears

A central aim of progressivism has been to blur the distinction between what have been called “negative rights” (those that, like the Bill of Rights, protect life and liberty) and “positive rights” (those that obligate the government to provide certain services in pursuit of equality). This project brings concentrated focus on economic and social rights rather than fundamental political freedoms, and this ever-widening circle of rights has brought the older, limited system of rights under scrutiny.

If their expansive vision of rights is accepted as legitimate, it would bring the older vision—with its ironclad protections for free speech, and its ideals of a colorblind society, rational discourse, and the scientific method—into disrepute. These classical liberal ideals self-evidently clash with newly asserted rights, since they have already begun to be curtailed to make way for them.

The commission assails the left’s elastic conception of rights on the logic that Frederick the Great would recognize: “to defend everything is to defend nothing.” It argues that this proliferation of elective rights for certain groups (some of which are good in and of themselves) endangers the essential liberties of all.

Modern politics, built on progressive foundations, assumes that natural rights constitute an incomplete and therefore inadequate body of rights.

The presumptive Democratic nominee drew a wise distinction between statues of Confederate heroes who tried to destroy the Union, which should be removed from public plazas, and those of imperfect Americans who tried mightily to improve it.

We tend to erect them as markers of our progress, reminders that even flawed men and women can leave the nation less flawed than they found it.

If activists can’t acknowledge the intellectual perversion in going after statues of American statesmen, then they should at least consider the breathtaking political negligence.

Carlson offered a preview of that strategy in his diatribe this week, when he vowed to “preserve our nation and our heritage and our culture” from leftists who think America is “horrible.” The preview was good enough that Trump himself promptly tweeted a link.

If you’re the Democrats, why on earth would you go out of your way to make this cultural indictment seem even halfway plausible?

The competing vision—let’s call it race-consciousness—was best encapsulated by the Black Power movement

it was to demand that black people, understood as a collective, receive more recognition, more respect, and more resources. Underlying this vision was the assumption that society is a zero-sum power struggle between oppressed groups and oppressor groups—and that a win for the former requires a loss for the latter.

In the race-conscious vision, racial harmony is an afterthought. At times, it is actively shunned. Race-consciousness seeks to “problematize” relations between members of different ethnic groups in a variety of ways

For black people, race-consciousness seems to promise more status and more access to opportunity. For white people, it promises a way to act on, rather than simply brood over, feelings of guilt over their complicity (real or imagined) in America’s past sins. For the nation as a whole, it seems to promise solutions to ongoing problems like mass incarceration and police brutality.

Yet race-consciousness cannot deliver on its promises because its foundational assumptions are flawed. For one thing, it does not reject the old rigid racial categories so much as it transforms them, sneaking them in through the back door.

More fundamentally, race-consciousness misdiagnoses the problems facing our society and therefore prescribes the wrong cures. The preoccupation with electing black politicians (or politicians “of color” more broadly) is one example.

Cities such as Atlanta and Detroit, which have had five or six consecutive black mayors, see all the same problems as cities with mostly white leadership. As Bernie Sanders pointed out not long ago, caring about the skin color of politicians, as opposed to their policy proposals and qualifications, is just as wrong-headed as it sounds.

Where will race-conscious anti-racism of this kind lead in the long run?

We might get a clue from the work put forth by thought leaders within the movement. Consider Ibram X. Kendi, the bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, who has proposed a constitutional amendment that would enable actual authoritarianism. I do not use that word lightly: In Kendi’s ideal world, there would be a Department of Anti-Racism that would have the constitutional power to investigate private businesses, reject any local, state, or federal policy that is deemed to contribute to racial disparity, and discipline public officials “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” (What counts as a racist idea would, of course, be determined by a panel of experts like Kendi.)

Thankfully, very few people would sign on to Kendi’s proposal right now. But it is still a useful document for one reason: it accurately summarizes what would be required in order to achieve the world that today’s race-conscious anti-racists want to see

A movement that defines any racially disparate outcome as white supremacy will inevitably tend toward policies that seek to erase such disparities by fiat—individual rights be damned. If, for instance, the fact that Asian-Americans are vastly over-represented in New York City’s elite high schools (which admit students on the basis of a single test) comes to be seen as a racist outcome, then Asian-American applicants may be discriminated against to eliminate that disparity.

The question is not whether a proposal like Kendi’s could gain enough support to be implemented wholesale today; it couldn’t.

The question is this: if Kendi’s proposal enters the political mainstream in, say, fifty years, will there be a robust, liberal anti-racist movement to provide an alternative? Or will liberal principles—such as individual rights and freedom of speech—have been so thoroughly stigmatized that Kendi-like proposals seem to be the only viable option for those who care about fighting racism?

Writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have done an excellent job of owning the term “anti-racist.”

Many people who are horrified by their illiberalism are thus tempted to give up on the label of anti-racism. That would be a mistake—for it is up to us whether anti-racism will continue to move in an illiberal direction

America has a long tradition of liberal anti-racism that reaches back to Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Frederick Douglass, and beyond. It is an anti-racism grounded in the idea that there is a single human race to which we all belong

Today, many feel that this principle represents the very status quo that we must depart from in order to begin making progress. The goal of getting past race, in this view, is precisely what has prevented us from implementing the race-conscious policies that would meaningfully address racial inequality.

But this underplays how much progress we have already made. Back in the early 1970s, the NYPD killed 91 people in a single year. In 2018, they killed five. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has been cut by more than half. Most people don’t know this

As a result, they imagine that the system must be overturned in order for progress to occur. But though there are, of course, still a lot of injustices in today’s America, they are wrong.

The current system, warts and all, has enabled huge progress for black people in recent decades. Overturning the liberal principles on which our institutions are based would not hasten progress towards racial equality; it would threaten the very stability that is required for incremental progress to occur.

It is time to restore Martin Luther King’s dream for American race relations—a dream that, even as it refuses to flinch from the injustices we still need to overcome, defiantly holds onto the idea that what we have in common is ultimately more important than what divides us. We must defend that principle even when it is unpopular, even when it marks you as “tone-deaf,” and even when it elicits eyerolls from those who imagine they have found more worthy principles. Our ability to remedy racial injustice depends on it.

if I type “educate yourself race” into my Google search bar, I am met with book lists compiled by Hello magazine, Variety and Glamour. They include titles like White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that these authors’ anti-racist projects run directly up against each other, nor that many of history’s most important anti-racists would strongly disagree with their recommendations.

The message seems to be that there is a set of uncontested facts about race, and anyone can find them with the help of a how-to guide. So long as you are willing to follow a preordained path, you can walk a straight line from A to B, coming to understand both your unearned privilege and how to make up for it.

But even a cursory glance at America’s intellectual history makes clear how false this presumption is

The disagreements between American anti-racists go back centuries: there were angry letters between William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Furious exchanges between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin exchanged critical essays. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Williams, Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X engaged in vigorous debates.

All these heroes explicitly disagreed with each other about how to move America towards a better racial future. Their work ought to be a reminder that any attempt to educate oneself about racism must involve understanding the conflicts between those who have sought to eradicate it.

Among contemporary intellectuals and activists, you have to look a little harder for disagreement, if only because an orthodoxy is quickly taking hold of many of our mainstream institutions. But even today, there are black economists—from Thomas Sowell to Roland Fryer—who strongly disagree with the depiction of our current reality laid out on those reading lists.

And there are many black sociologists—from Orlando Patterson to Karen E. Fields—who vehemently disagree about what an anti-racist America would look like.

There is an irony in the fact that many of those who claim to be suspicious of grand narratives and objective truths have such faith in a stringent, absolutist picture of racial education.

it is tragically ironic that they use their adopted slogan to corrupt the essence of independent learning.

Education is not re-education. It is, at least in part, figuring out why we think the way we do, and examining the inevitable contradictions in our thought

That means understanding why 54% of black people in America don’t think hiring decisions should take skin color into account, and why 81% don’t want reduced police presence in their local areas.

It also means understanding how racial attitudes have changed over time, and critically assessing the ideas and policies that even the most well-intentioned anti-racists take for granted. It does not mean fighting for a world in which everyone looks different but thinks the same.

A national conversation about racism that isn’t just an empty cliché—one that actually debates the different types of racial or post-racial worlds we want to live in, and the different ways in which we might get there—could propel that work to greater heights.

But telling people that there is only one right way to think about a question is a guaranteed way to convince them not to think at all. The current conversation is dominated by the pernicious use of a phrase that is doing more to erase that work than to bolster it.

It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. 

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military–deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South. 

fter Johnson vetoed the bills–causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868–the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized.

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. 

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned. Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874—after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. 

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

it is also a recipe for zero-sum conflict between different groups. For example, when teachers at a private school in Manhattan tell white middle schoolers to “own” their “European ancestry,” they are more likely to create racists than anti-racists.

According to Mr. Bell, the Constitution — and even key Supreme Court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education — cloaked the reality of racial discrimination. The only remedy, he claimed, is to create a society in which the way that the state treats citizens would, whether it comes to the benefits they can access or the school they might attend, explicitly turn on the identity groups to which they belong.

To take critical race theory — and the wider ideological tradition it helped to inspire — seriously is to recognize that it explicitly stands in conflict with the views of some of the country’s most storied historical figures. Political leaders from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that the Constitution was not enough to protect Black Americans from horrific injustices. But instead of rejecting those documents as irredeemable, they fought to turn their promises into reality.

Critical race theory is far more than a determination to think critically about race

similarly, the identity synthesis as a whole goes well beyond the recognition that many people will, for good reason, take pride in their identity

It claims that categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society, from major historical events to trivial personal interactions. And it encourages us to see one another — and ourselves — as being defined, above anything else, by the identities into which we are born.

These kinds of practices encourage complex people to see themselves as defined by external characteristics whose combinations and permutations, however numerous, will never amount to a satisfactory depiction of their innermost selves

though few people acknowledge defeat in the middle of an argument, most do shift their worldview over time. Our job is to persuade, not to vilify, those who genuinely believe in the identity synthesis.

There is even growing evidence that the rapid adoption of these progressive norms is strengthening the very extremists who pose the most serious threat to democratic institutions

Derrick Bell, widely seen as the father of the tradition, cut his teeth as a civil rights lawyer who helped to desegregate hundreds of schools. But when many integrated schools failed to provide Black students with a better education, he came to think of his previous efforts as a dead end. Arguing that American racism would never subside, he rejected the “defunct racial equality ideology” of the civil rights movement,

Many people who were initially sympathetic to its goals have since recognized that the identity synthesis presents a real danger. They want to speak out against these ideas, but they are nervous about doing so

They fear that opposing the identity synthesis will, inevitably, force them to make common cause with people who don’t recognize the dangers of racism and bigotry, push them onto the “wrong side of history,” or even lead them down the same path as Mr. Weinstein.

the first part of that is to recognize that you can be a proud liberal — and an effective opponent of racism — while pushing back against the identity synthesis.

critics of the identity synthesis should claim the moral high ground and recognize that their opposition to the identity synthesis is of a piece with a noble tradition that was passed down through the generations from Douglass to Lincoln to King

one that has helped America make enormous, if inevitably incomplete, progress toward becoming a more just society. This makes it a little easier to speak from a position of calm confidence.

Instead of trying to “own” the most intransigent loudmouths, critics of the identity synthesis should seek to sway the members of this reasonable majority.

Mr. Trump has attracted a new group of supporters who are disproportionately nonwhite and comparatively progressive on cultural issues such as immigration reform and trans acceptance, but also perturbed by the influence that the identity synthesis has in mainstream institutions, like the corporate sector.

To avoid following the path charted by Mr. Weinstein, opponents of the identity synthesis need to be guided by a clear moral compass of their own. In my case, this compass consists of liberal values like political equality, individual freedom and collective self-determination.

For others, it could consist of socialist conviction or Christian faith, of conservative principles or the precepts of Buddhism.

what all of us must share is a determination to build a better world.

It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.

Because, again, more often than not, the very faults we find so unbearable in them are apt to be versions of the same faults that we are more or less blind to in our ourselves.

On this day, my text luckily came from the great Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister, highly-decorated writer, and theologian.  I’ll let some of his words play us out. They might seem a bit preachy. But that’s to be expected, since they come from a book called Secrets In the Dark: A Life in Sermons.

some shit arrived in the mail. Not figuratively. A literal bag of shit, postmarked with a return P.O Box, but which came by way of an anonymous sender. My wife asked who would send such a thing to me. It’s hard to say – the suspect list is a mile long.  Irate subjects? Irate readers? My mom?

Forty-two percent of those survey respondents reported they themselves were angrier in the last year than they had been in the past

a 2019 NPR-IBM Watson Health poll found that a whopping 84 percent of survey respondents said Americans are angrier today than they were a generation ago.  (The other sixteen percent were presumably too angry to stay on the phone.)

According to The 19th, an Austin-based nonprofit news organization, in 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration initiated 183 investigations of unruly passenger behavior, well above average, even for a COVID year in which air travel was significantly diminished. By November of 2021, that number had increased to 990 investigations, after reports of 5,240 unruly incidents

Meanwhile, STEM’s conquest of the university has wrecked old humanistic homes. As Nathan Heller’s recent article in The New Yorker documented, the English department is now an unpopulated, undesired version of its former self.

That her book doesn’t feel terribly urgent perhaps speaks to a fundamental weakness within humanism.

Bakewell self-identifies as a stalwart of humanism, but even she concedes that this is an elusive label. “Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner.” Without a pithy definition or clear doctrine, she can manage only to narrow humanism down to three characteristics: freethinking, hope, and inquiry

By setting aside all thoughts of the afterlife, the humanist can focus on making the most of earthly existence, pursuing happiness and mitigating suffering.

the belief that people can feel genuine solidarity for one another, despite their differences—but this is a paper-thin morality that hardly survives the skepticism that Bakewell celebrates.

she would clearly like humanism to be more substantial than it actually is. The ism suffix in Bakewell’s subject is, in fact, a bit of misdirection, because it implies a political idea or perhaps a coherent worldview

Humanism is not a synonym for liberalism or philosophical pragmatism. It more accurately describes a temperament

he humanistic canon she constructs sprawls to include the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Mann.

It can sometimes be a struggle to see the commonalities, other than some degree of skepticism about religion, an underlying decency, and a general cheeriness in the midst of dreary struggles against the prevailing politics of their times.

While it’s true that freethinking is the enemy of authoritarianism, humanism suffers from a tendency to oversell itself. It doesn’t have a good track record of effectively standing up to facism,

in the current American context, right-wing ethno-nationalists have cynically draped themselves in the trappings of humanism. The likes of Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson present themselves as the true defenders of freethinking and open inquiry.

Self-doubt, a cheerful disposition, and a joyous pursuit of knowledge are qualities that might make for wise leaders, but can also produce hapless political combatants. Or, as Mann once declared: “In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which … may be its ruin.”

humanism is more like religion than Bakewell is prepared to admit. At its best, it is a secular faith. Its universalist spirit and open-mindedness are ethical stances. Its wishful optimism about human possibility can provide spiritual nourishment in a fallen world.

This makes it a style of dissidence well suited for the age of AI. The humanist becomes the contrarian who insists on maintaining that which automation seeks to render obsolete: the faculties of the independent mind, the very core of intellectual personhood.

Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”

Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”

The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim.

Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?

They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles

They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites

Individual rights? They come second to group identity.

The old black-white paradigm to which so many are still attached has been superseded by the kaleidoscope society, in which “race” is almost always mixed, complicated, or one difference among many.

Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.

So do we do nothing? Not at all. In fact, blaming an abstraction — “white supremacy” — takes us backwards practically and analytically. Hughes advocates for color-blind processes wherever possible: blind grading in schools and colleges; or hiring policies that remove names from applications to deter racism.

the implosion of bad ideas is not the same as the resuscitation of good ones. What Hughes has done in this book is remind us what we already knew: that racism and neoracism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, and that treating everyone regardless of race is the only feasible way forward for a multiracial America, just as it is the only morally defensible regime that can actually counter and erode racial hatred. The proof is in our past progress. But the potential for multi-racial individualism is as unknowable as it is exhilarating.