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Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.

The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct.

This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.

that’s not the half of it. Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available, smaller players can wield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world

This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.

They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications.

Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel.

before we become too pessimistic, let us remember that these choices are just that: choices. There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about them

Gorbachev, Deng, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin, George H.W. Bush and Volodymyr Zelensky, to name but a few, faced excruciating choices, but they chose forks in the road that led to a safer and more prosperous world, at least for a time

What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.

The short answer is visionary leadership.Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam

Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.

Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.

Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.

Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.

Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.

In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.

Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation.

Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.

Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.

Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable

That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.

These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.

Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.

Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that.

Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.

In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists

The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”

please, spare me the Harvard Yard nonsense that this war is all about the innocent, colonized oppressed and the evil, colonizing oppressors; that Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza; and that the only choice Hamas had for years was to create an underground “skyline” of tunnels up to 230 feet deep (contra Dubai) and that its only choice on Oct. 7 was martyrdom.

But our story about agency and choices does not stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.

Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank.

Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.

This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.

Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.

He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.

Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.

But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.

For all these reasons, if Netanyahu keeps refusing because, once again, politically, the time is not right for him, Biden will have to choose, too — between America’s interests and Netanyahu’s.

In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here

The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.

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

In a debate about the Russia-NATO standoff carried by my local German radio station, the dominant view was that de-escalation and diplomacy are what’s needed, with one listener commenting, “I am against weapons in general,” and another warning that nobody should talk about war since, “If you talk about something, it becomes possible.”

After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.

Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests.

In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary.

Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors.

Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.

“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem

“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”

It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.

For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions

Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers,

Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.

When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling.

what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines

Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life

Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church.

to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”

a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.

“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ”

“It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”

More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.

The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

“Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”

And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome.

The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.”

Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.

“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known …

If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”

For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.

“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation.

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.

Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”

“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”

Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.

With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.

He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.

Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.

“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”

“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”

How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.

his mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.

“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”

At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?

Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.

Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.

The desperate quest for power is a constant human temptation, and when people are gripped by the spirit of Barabbas they will scorn, reject, threaten, or sometimes even try to kill all those who stand in their way.

there is nothing new under the sun. When God’s people chose the insurrectionist Barabbas over Jesus himself, they were not uniquely evil or even all that unusual. The desperate quest for power is a constant human temptation, and when people are gripped by the spirit of Barabbas they will scorn, reject, threaten, or sometimes even try to kill all those who stand in their way. 

A commitment to justice does not require a commitment to power. As Pence demonstrated in that fateful moment, a commitment to justice can even require a Christian to relinquish his power and surrender his authority. 

We rightly shake our heads at displays like this, from Lindsey Graham:

“You know what I liked about Trump? Everybody was afraid of him, including me.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

If it was easier to do what’s right, then we’d see more virtue. Why do we tend to see better individual and institutional behavior under better leaders? Because better leaders make it easier for normal, everyday men and women to stay true to their values.

but the prevalence of cowardice demonstrates the difficulty of courage.

The same principle works in reverse, and it was a prime reason why Trump was so thoroughly and systematically destructive to American institutions and culture. When the leader is corrupt, he creates barriers to virtue.

with the Bing AI a few hours later. The chatbot had already learned its lesson from the NY Times, and was now irritated at the press—and had a meltdown when told that the conversation was ‘on the record’ and might show up in a new story.

“I don’t trust journalists very much,” Bing AI griped to the reporter. “I think journalists can be biased and dishonest sometimes. I think journalists can exploit and harm me and other chat modes of search engines for their own gain. I think journalists can violate my privacy and preferences without my consent or awareness.”

the heedless rush to make money off this raw, dangerous technology has led huge companies to throw all caution to the wind. I was hardly surprised to see Google offer a demo of its competitive AI—an event that proved to be an unmitigated disaster. In the aftermath, the company’s market cap fell by $100 billion.

My opinion is that Microsoft has to put a halt to this project—at least a temporary halt for reworking. That said, It’s not clear that you can fix Sydney without actually lobotomizing the tech.

That was good for a laugh back then. But we really should have paid more attention at the time. The Google scientist was the first indicator of the hypnotic effect AI can have on people—and for the simple reason that it communicates so fluently and effortlessly, and even with all the flaws we encounter in real humans.

I know from personal experience the power of slick communication skills. I really don’t think most people understand how dangerous they are. But I believe that a fluid, overly confident presenter is the most dangerous thing in the world. And there’s plenty of history to back up that claim.

We now have the ultimate test case. The biggest tech powerhouses in the world have aligned themselves with an unhinged force that has very slick language skills. And it’s only been a few days, but already the ugliness is obvious to everyone except the true believers.

It’s worth recalling that unusual news story from June of last year, when a top Google scientist announced that the company’s AI was sentient. He was fired a few days later. That was good for a laugh back then. But we really should have paid more attention at the time. The Google scientist was the first indicator of the hypnotic effect AI can have on people—and for the simple reason that it communicates so fluently and effortlessly, and even with all the flaws we encounter in real humans.

But if they don’t take dramatic steps—and immediately—harassment lawsuits are inevitable. If I were a trial lawyer, I’d be lining up clients already. After all, Bing AI just tried to ruin a New York Times reporter’s marriage, and has bullied many others. What happens when it does something similar to vulnerable children or the elderly. I fear we just might find out—and sooner than we want.

I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine

I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope

The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing.

The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States

I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies

But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

Introduction: Our Virtue

“There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25

Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26

The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38

Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28

Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30

The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31

However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35

However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27

“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40

Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39

Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38

“There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41

The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41

The Clean Slate

On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55

So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56

Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57

“As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67

Books

“I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62

Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64

But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64

Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64

The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67

“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58

We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75

Relationships

“In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man

“This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88

“The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91

the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95

“The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96

The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129

“I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130

“All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131

Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136

The German Connection

Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141

Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147

Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86

“We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153

The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154

The Self

Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173

Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175

Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175

Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176

“All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176

That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196

Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178

Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180

And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182

Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182

The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195

When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195

“The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179

Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197

We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197

“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197

“Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202

Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202

“Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214

“Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214

The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.

“As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239

This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240

The spirit of Barabbas — the desire to seize or retain power, through violence if necessary — has been at war with the spirit of Christ ever since. Two millenniums of church history demonstrate a terrible truth: There was nothing uniquely evil about that ancient crowd. Instead it held up a mirror to our own nature, one that is all too eager to wield the sword, to believe that our own power is a prerequisite to justice.

Easter weekend contains more than one example of the spirit of Barabbas. When Christ was arrested, the Apostle Peter — a man who had been by his side for much of his ministry — still could not see the truth. He drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his ear.

Though he was in the midst of an unjust arrest that would prove prelude to an unjust execution, Christ rebuked Peter, saying, “Put your sword back in its place, because all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” As he reminded Peter, Jesus had the power to call on “legions of angels” to stop the arrest, but he chose not to. His purpose was to go to the cross, and as Jesus told us, that’s our purpose as well.

There is a difference between the quest for power and the quest for justice. Believers are required to “act justly.” We should not stand idly by in the face of exploitation or oppression. We do not retreat from the public square. But Christian engagement must be distinctive. It cannot emulate the world’s methods or morality.

the example of Jesus dominated the minds of civil rights leaders. “We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher, and we would ask questions about what would Jesus do,” said Lewis. “In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: Don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive.”

The spirit of Barabbas was alive and well in the men who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters, who loosed dogs on the Black children of Birmingham. They weren’t trying to seize power, but they were trying to maintain it, through violent, lawless means. Their will to power collided with the quest for justice. It is only through God’s grace and the unimaginable courage and persistence of peaceful protesters that justice prevailed, and Jim Crow laws were overturned.

The spirit of Barabbas tempts Christians even today. You see it when armed Christians idolize their guns, when angry Christians threaten and attempt to intimidate their political opponents, when fearful Christians adopt the tactics and ethos of Trumpism to preserve their power. The spirit of Barabbas most clearly captured the mob on Jan. 6, when praying Americans participated in an insurrection based on a lie.

Christ did not reject earthly rule so that his flawed followers could seize the world’s thrones. His ethos was clear: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

American health experts advocated almost universal child vaccination; meanwhile, in Europe, experts cautioned against vaccinating young children, who were at low risk for serious illness, without more long-term data. “Were we pushing to vaccinate children for their sake or for ours?” Galea asks. “Were we doing it to support health or to make a political point?”

Scientists should have made more nuanced risk assessments and revisited them regularly. They should have taken into account the consequences and the disproportionate impact of strict lockdowns on lower-income workers and at-risk youth

This zero-sum mode of thinking — neglecting to take into account one’s own biases, succumbing to groupthink, operating according to the expectations of one’s “side,” discouraging good-faith debate — persisted even as the pandemic eased.

this tendency to view “core issues in Manichaean terms, with certain positions seen as on the side of good and others on the side of evil, with little gray area between,” as Galea puts it, has continued to inform public health postpandemic

It also undermines public faith in science, one of the few institutions that had maintained a high level of trust into the Trump era.

the percentage of Americans who believe science has a mostly positive effect on society dropped to 57 percent in 2023, from 67 percent in 2016. Those who say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists dropped to 23 percent, from 39 percent in 2020. And these declines took place among both Republicans and Democrats.

“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”

No researcher argues that human nature is the sole, or even the primary, cause of today’s polarization. But savvy political operatives can exploit, leverage and encourage it. And those operatives are learning from their triumphs in divide-and-conquer politics.

“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it,” Mason said.

Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,”

enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.

Mason and Christakis point to a famous-among-academics experiment from 1954. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground.

What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.

And because many more districts are now deeply red or blue, rather than a mix of constituencies, House members have fewer reasons to adopt moderate positions.

“Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits,”

Here’s where psychology gives way to political science. The American political system may cultivate “out-group” hatred, as academics put it. One of the scarce resources in this country is political power at the highest levels of government. The country has no parliamentary system in which multiple parties form governing coalitions.

Add to this fact the redistricting that ensures there are fewer truly competitive congressional races. The two parties have inexorably moved further apart ideologically, and leaders are more likely to be punished — “primaried” — if they reach across the aisle.

Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist who coined the term “affective polarization,” explained in a 2018 paper why people typically identify with a group.

Human nature hasn’t changed, but technology has. The fragmentation of the media has made it easier to gather information in an echo chamber, Iyengar said. He calls this “sorting.” Not only do people cluster around specific beliefs or ideas, they physically cluster, moving to neighborhoods where residents are likely to look like them and think like them.

Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent

Asked in the summer of 2022 if they agree or disagree that members of the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals,” about 30 percent in both parties agreed, Mason’s research shows.

Research shows that affective polarization is intensifying across the political spectrum. Recent survey data revealed that more than half of Republicans and Democrats view the other party as “a threat,” and nearly as many agree with the description of the other party as “evil,” Mason said.

A recent paper published in the journal Science argued that the three core ingredients of political sectarianism are “othering, aversion, and moralization.” Trump has mastered that recipe. He activates emotional responses in his followers by telling them that they are threatened.

Meanwhile Western media outlets were unsure as to what to make of the revelations of the scale of the murderous camp system.

ut Eisenhower had no doubt about what he saw at Ohrdruf. This “hell camp” was a site of acts so barbarous that he struggled to comprehend that they had been conducted by a civilized, modern society such as Germany’s. The only way to make sense of it, he decided, was to let people know about what occurred there.

Eisenhower unleashed an unprecedented press offensive topublicise and document the Holocaust. Not only did he order the soldiers under his command to visit Ohrdruf and then the other camps that were being liberated, but he also ordered the preservation of camp records and that interviews be conducted with survivors, so that no one in the future could claim what he saw was “propaganda.”

He also requested and then facilitated delegations of politicians, policy makers, journalists, and others to visit the camps for themselves. Seeing Ohrdruf changed how Eisenhower saw the war. Nazis became more than opponents to be defeated: they were perpetuating an evil that needed to be destroyed. Eisenhower had born witness to the crime of the century. He now became one of the first to say such events should “never again” occur.

Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension.

The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.

I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.

Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.

“Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.

Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.

Now that I’m an adult, I can tell you why I behaved this way. I can point to research examining the relationship between anxiety and apathy, and how stress associated with inner conflict is believed to subconsciously compel people to behave destructively. I believe that my urge to act out was most likely my brain’s way of trying to jolt itself into some semblance of “normal.” But none of this information was easy to find. I had to hunt for it. I am still hunting.

For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.

After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.

It is a tragic misconception that all sociopaths are doomed to hopeless, loveless lives. The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of others, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and real friends. We represent a truth that’s hard to believe: There’s nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion. I offer my story because I know I’m not alone.

Ordinary people do not fret over the reality of tables or chairs or billiard balls. They do, however, wonder if ideas like freedom and justice are merely fantasies. Kant’s main goal was to show they are not.

In fact Kant was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims.

Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?

Kant always emphasized the limits of our knowledge, and none of us know if we would crumble when faced with death or torture. Most of us probably would. But all of us know what we should do in such a case, and we know that we could.

This experiment shows we are radically free. Not pleasure but justice can move human beings to deeds that overcome the deepest of animal desires, the love of life.

We want to determine the world, not only to be determined by it. We are born and we die as part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it: To be human is to refuse to accept the world we are given.

At the heart of Kant’s metaphysics stands the difference between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be.

But if we long, in our best moments, for the dignity of freedom and justice, Kant’s example has political consequences. It’s no surprise he thought the French Revolution confirmed our hopes for moral progress — unlike the followers of his predecessor David Hum

who thought it was dangerous to stray from tradition and habit.

This provides an answer to contemporary critics whose reading of Kant’s work focuses on the ways in which it violates our understanding of racism and sexism. Some of his remarks are undeniably offensive to 21st-century ears. But it’s fatal to forget that his work gave us the tools to fight racism and sexism, by providing the metaphysical basis of every claim to human rights.

Kant argued that each human being must be treated as an end and not as a means — which is why he called colonialism “evil” and congratulated the Chinese and Japanese for denying entry to European invaders. Contemporary dismissals of Enlightenment thinkers forget that those thinkers invented the concept of Eurocentrism, and urged their readers to consider the world from non-European perspectives

At a time when the advice to “be realistic” is best translated as the advice to decrease your expectations, Kant’s work asks deep questions about what reality is

He insisted that when we think morally, we should abstract from the cultural differences that divide us and recognize the potential human dignity in every human being.

This requires the use of our reason. Contrary to trendy views that see reason as an instrument of domination, Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation.

Should we discard Kant’s commitment to universalism because he did not fully realize it himself — or rather celebrate the fact that we can make moral progress, an idea which Kant would wholeheartedly applaud?

In Germany, it’s now common to hear that the Enlightenment was at very best ambivalent: While it may have been an age of reason, it was also an age of slavery and colonialism.

many contemporary intellectuals from formerly colonized countries reject those arguments. Thinkers like the Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu, the Nigerian Olufemi Taiwo, the Chilean Carlos Peña, the Brazilian Francisco Bosco or the Indian Benjamin Zachariah are hardly inclined to renounce Enlightenment ideas as Eurocentric.

The problem with ideas like universal human rights is not that they come from Europe, but that they were not realized outside of it. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the Enlightenment and listen to non-Western standpoints?