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Sometimes, of course, dramatic change is destructive, and opposition to it is often justified.

I have written multiple articles criticizing progressive overreach. But there is a necessary distinction between measured criticism and hysteric reaction. 

“opposition politics” and “threat inflation,”

Reactionary anti-communist movements in the 20th century are a good example of understandable but harmful reactionary movements.

in taking this reaction too far, and leaning into hysteria and extremism, these movements ended up making terrible mistakes of their own. 

“Any time of profound social change will create reactionary counterpressures. I don't even think that's a bad thing. It all depends on the change, and the reaction. The question is really how people individually navigate those currents, and the nuance demanded by, well, life.” 

many thinkers have managed to oppose certain forms of social change without becoming reactionary themselves.

Take seriously the possibility that you are wrong. This is by far the most common bit of advice that I received.

Here are the five best recommendations that came from those conversations.

“the set of people who talk a lot about politics on the internet is much, much, much, much more left-wing than the American electorate. At the same time, the structure of American political institutions … [means that] electoral outcomes are meaningfully to the right of the actual electorate.”

This dynamic, according to Yglesias, leads reactionaries to lose “sight of who in fact holds power in the United States” and respond “primarily to vibes on Twitter rather than to the realities of the political situation.” 

Learn to recognize and avoid “us-vs-them” thinking

“to escape an us-vs-them mindset, it's [...] helpful to be able to pause and ask yourself when you've entered into a counter-dependent relationship with someone or some idea, where your identity has become dependent upon countering someone else.”

Be skeptical of convenient narratives.

whenever it looks to me like people are reaching hardened consensuses because of social media mobs I have a knee jerk ‘slow down and think about this.’” 

Avoid the “zeal of the convert.” Newcomers to a philosophy often take it to an extreme.

Becoming so preoccupied with who or what they are against that the foundation of their politics is reflexive opposition rather than first principles or reason.Vastly inflating the threat of whatever it is that they oppose, driving responses disproportionate to the scale of the harms they critique.

Reactionary politics is an easy trap to fall into these days, given that so much of what is deemed progress is really the opposite. Ultimately, however, reactionaries do more harm than good.

Third, relatedly, the French view everything from the perspective of scarcity, meaning they assume they have to compensate for a lack of resources with smarts and courage, and by making the most of what they have.

It is true that at the heart of Foch’s thinking about war is a Romantic interpretation of “modern” warfare that owes a lot to Clausewitz as well as ambient French Romanticism, which encouraged rejection of materialist or positivist philosophies and valorized spirit and will.

Wars for Foch were contests between wills; the most obstinate wins. But they were also fundamentally about aggression. If you want to push your enemy back, “hit him, otherwise nothing is done, and to that end there is only one means: battle.”

Foch believed that strategy boiled down to maneuver. But the maneuvering had to be for the sake of setting up the decisive attack.

Napoleon maneuvered to kill. Foch believed he could teach the art of maneuvering to kill by studying not formulae for victory but rather fundamental “principles of war” that he believed should guide commanders’ analysis of how to proceed.

Foch’s catchphrase was said to have been “De quoi s’agit-il?” meaning “What’s it all about?” The idea is to think and adapt rather than do anything mechanically, an imperative that gave commanders full license, for example, to abandon the disastrous tactics of 1914 and try something else.

What he actually wrote is this: economy of force, intellectual discipline, liberty of action, security, strategic surprise, and the decisive attack.

what most French officers would say if quizzed about Foch: economy of force, concentration of efforts, and liberty of action.

“one does not hunt two hares at the same time.” Elaborating on the idea, he defined economy of force as the “art of [dispersing one’s efforts] [ in a profitable manner, of getting the greatest possible benefit out of the resources one has.”

Foch argued for what later would be referred to by Americans as mission command, and, in the French army, the principle of “subsidiarity,” which boils down to the idea that an officer should communicate his general intent to his subordinate officers, but leave to them the authority and autonomy to figure out the best way to fulfill it.

Intellectual Discipline and Liberty of Action

Just as when one walks through a dark house one extends one’s arm in front to guard against walking into obstacles, Foch wrote, an army must deploy a force ahead as well as to the sides and rear. The objective is to protect the major portion of the force, the gros, from being forced to react and thereby losing its liberty of action

Security

Though Foch spoke of the need for decisive battles with language that evoked the physical destruction of the adversary’s armies, he was really interested in imposing upon the enemy a psychological effect that was analogous to the effect ideally brought about by a surprise: namely, a combination of terror and paralysis.

Strategic Surprise and Decisive Attack

the French army today recognizes five principles of war. The first three are straight Foch: liberty of action, economy of means, and concentration of efforts. To these the French have added two more, reportedly derived from the 1992 book on strategy by Adm. Guy Labouérie (1933–2016). These are “uncertainty” and foudroyance.

Uncertainty quite simply is something one most go to great lengths to cultivate among one’s adversaries: uncertainty about what one is doing and going to do, where, when, and why

Foudroyance, derived from the word for thunder (foudre), means a sudden crippling shock. In truth, it amounts to a rephrasing of Foch’s principle of strategic surprise

At the 2019 “Principles of War in 2035” conference, participants discussed whether or not new technologies, new forms of conflict, and new contextual realities (such as new political landscapes, the role of the media, and the much smaller size of most militaries) had changed or would in the foreseeable future change warfare so significantly as to make Foch finally useless. In essence, the answer was no,

Foch’s principles also make particular sense given the French army’s lack of resources, compared not just to the U.S. military but even the French army of Foch’s day. Economy of means when means are limited is not a thought exercise

Foch above all counseled fighting smart, and trying always to answer “de quoi s’agit-il?” even if this amounts to nothing more than the imperative to take a moment and think through what one is trying to achieve. This seems self-evident, but recent American military history suggests civilian and military leaders could benefit from the reminder.

My boyfriend was supportive of my focus, but he didn’t share it. When I brought up global warming, he’d often try to comfort me: to wrap me in a hug, cue up an old episode of “Seinfeld,” offer a CBD gummy. I struggled to tell him that I didn’t need anesthesia or answers, I just wanted a relationship where we shared more of the same inquiries.

“if you do care about the same questions, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers.” Soon it wasn’t just the far-off future we’d stopped talking about, it was our dreams for the weekend. Outside of quarantine, our lives had slipped onto different rails. We broke up when it became easier not to talk about feelings at all.

relationships succeed not because you like holding hands but because you like looking in the same direction.

When another man told me he was looking for a woman with whom to visit places like Venice, in part because they were sinking into the sea, I didn’t know what to say except that I wasn’t her. As someone drawn to gray areas, I was put off by the guy who quipped that only “dumb” people were still having children.

If relationships depend on a shared fantasy of the future, then global warming does more than unsettle our environment; it creates uncertainty in our interpersonal ones.

I’ve started dating again. This time, I am swallowing my fear of sounding too anxious and am talking about climate change early on. After all, it is hard to fall in love with a person if we are not also falling in love with the future we want to create together.

I’ve found that talking about how global warming affects our lives, however casually, becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for learning about people’s broader beliefs and behaviors. How black-and-white they see the world, how they view their role in the community, how they engage with science and systemic inequality.

I knew I wouldn’t mesh with the man who texted me “Life is better if you’re cheerful. I don’t read the news :)” but neither did I want to be with the one scheming up a walled compound of canned goods in Idaho.

She and my father had married while facing a horizon of stability. As middle-class white Americans, they saw a future of homeownership, health care and retirement funds

I don’t presume my own perspective is right, but I do know from my last relationship that I’m tired of trying to be chill. I can’t care any less than I do.

Chatting about climate change within the first few dates might not be standard yet, but the issue was the No. 1 concern for OkCupid daters in 2022, with a 368 percent increase in environmental and climate-change-related terms on profiles over the last five years

Tinder released a new campaign featuring a rendering of two people holding hands before a giant monster made of trash. “Someone to save the planet with,” it says.

I don’t think those daters just want a partner who believes in global warming: We want someone willing to grapple with it, to do the inconvenient work of reimagining our own lives in the face of it

It’s not just about when or whether to have a baby. Because global warming and pandemics go hand in hand — the progression of the first may increase the likelihood of the second — it seems likely that new long-term relationships could include both prolonged periods of staying inside and snap judgments about hitting the road.

I see now that it was not only conversations about our planet’s future that I struggled to have with my ex; it was conversations about our own future, too. It can be easy to feel as if the question of whether to have children, like rising sea levels, will be dealt with down the road.

But the future, as with the sea, does not obey its supposed bounds. If being alive right now sometimes feels like standing on a cliff, I want to be with someone who’s not afraid to peer at the frothing tides.

Not because I need to solve anything but because I don’t want a relationship built on looking away.

romantic relationships are not just distractions; they’re places for nourishment, bolstering us to face what’s outside the door.

The size of the United States makes it hard to see outside it. Away from it, I realized that many things I thought of as normal are not, in fact, normal.

Learning to live here meant mastering a grammar that gave me access to other ways to see — other ways to be. I wanted to learn that grammar. I didn’t want to be a clueless foreigner forever.

if you decide to stay longer, to make a life here, you have to press delete on the nasty politicians and the social tensions, the traffic and the hideous sprawl, that are as much a part of life here as they are anywhere else.

For a kid from Texas, contact with old buildings and old paintings seemed vital in a way that I’m pretty sure not all Europeans understand. Many would just as well sweep that past away and dream of coming to America in search of a country that is just as much of a fantasy as our dream of Europe. To such people, it’s often hard to explain why for so many Americans, that past seems so necessary. We long to feel a connection to a history older than our own, and to the aspirations that “Europe” has always symbolized to us

This is not the Europe that exists on a continuum with America, as different expressions of a single Western civilization, but the Europe that exists as a counterpoint, as an alternative. And if, to a large degree, this place is a fairy tale, a fiction, it has the reality that a great film or novel has. We need it in the same way that we need art itself — to help us rearrange our minds, to make us see the world differently.

Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to “dissuasion commissions.” For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. The decision to attend is voluntary.

Other countries have moved to channel drug offenses out of the penal system too. But none in Europe institutionalized that route more than Portugal. Within a few years, HIV transmission rates via syringes — one the biggest arguments for decriminalization — had plummeted. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5 percent. Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation. There was no evidence of a feared surge in use.

None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass,” a landmark Cato Institute report stated in 2009.

But in the first substantial way since decriminalization passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

“At the end of the day, the police have their hands tied,” said António Leitão da Silva, chief of Municipal Police of Porto, adding the situation now is comparable to the years before decriminalization was implemented.

the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage

even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.

In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last.

Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use

When crack pipes are available, the social workers give them out. There’s no judgment, few questions, and no pressure to embrace change.

Summing up the philosophy, Luísa Neves, SAOM’s president, said: “You have to respect the user. If they want to use, it is their right.”

Police deployed in force to the area three months ago to crack down on dealers, who can be and are being arrested. Patrol cars are now stationed in the neighborhood 24 hours a day, scattering people using drug

overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.

“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,

“Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”

An eight-minute walk uphill from Porto’s safe drug-use center, in a neighborhood of elegant two-story homes with hedgerows of roses and hibiscus, neighbors talk of an “invasion” of people using drugs since the pandemic

In Oregon — where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model — attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation

We have to do something with the law. We know they can’t stay here forever. What happens when the police leave?”

Porto’s mayor and other critics, including neighborhood activist groups, are not calling for a wholesale repeal of decriminalization — but rather, a limited re-criminalization in urban areas and near schools and hospitals to address rising numbers of people misusing drugs.

In a country where the drug policy is seen as sacred, even that has generated pushback — with nearly 200 experts signing an opposition letter after Porto’s city commission in January passed a resolution seeking national-level changes.

ave today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.

After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.

Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”

Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab

“Why?”

“Because we know most of them. We’ve registered them before. Nothing changes if we take them in.”

Our vocabulary of commendation and condemnation is perpetually changing, but it has always relied on “thick” ethical terms, which combine description and evaluation.

“How to flourish” was one such topic, “flourishing” being a workable rendering of Aristotle’s term eudaimonia. We might also translate the term in the usual way, as “happiness,” as long as we suspend some of that word’s modern associations; eudaimonia wasn’t something that waxed and waned with our moods

For Aristotle, ethics was centrally concerned with how to live a good life: a flourishing existence was also a virtuous one.

“famously terse, often crabbed in their style.” Crabbed, fragmented, gappy: it can be a headache trying to match his pronouns to the nouns they refer to. Some of his arguments are missing crucial premises; others fail to spell out their conclusions.

Aristotle is obscure in other ways, too. His highbrow potshots at unnamed contemporaries, his pop-cultural references, must have tickled his aristocratic Athenian audience. But the people and the plays he referred to are now lost or forgotten. Some readers have found his writings “affectless,” stripped of any trace of a human voice, or of a beating human heart.

Flourishing is the ultimate goal of human life; a flourishing life is one that is lived in accord with the various “virtues” of the character and intellect (courage, moderation, wisdom, and so forth); a flourishing life also calls for friendships with good people and a certain measure of good fortune in the way of a decent income, health, and looks.

much of what it says can sound rather obvious

Virtue is not just about acting rightly but about feeling rightly. What’s best, Aristotle says, is “to have such feelings at the right time, at the right objects and people, with the right goal, and in the right manner.” Good luck figuring out what the “right time” or object or manner is.

Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.

The phrase “prudent person” here renders the Greek phronimos, a person possessed of that special quality of mind which Aristotle called “phronesis.” But is Aristotle then saying that virtue consists in being disposed to act as the virtuous person does? That sounds true, but trivially so.

it helps to reckon with the role that habits of mind play in Aristotle’s account. Meyer’s translation of “phronesis” is “good judgment,” and the phrase nicely captures the combination of intelligence and experience which goes into acquiring it, along with the difficulty of reducing it to a set of explicit principles that anyone could apply mechanically, like an algorithm.

“good judgment” is an improvement on the old-fashioned and now misleading “prudence”; it’s also less clunky than another standby, “practical wisdom.”

The enormous role of judgment in Aristotle’s picture of how to live can sound, to modern readers thirsty for ethical guidance, like a cop-out. Especially when they might instead pick up a treatise by John Stuart Mill and find an elegantly simple principle for distinguishing right from wrong, or one by Kant, in which they will find at least three. They might, for that matter, look to Jordan Peterson, who conjures up as many as twelve.

the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity

But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”

In a passage missing from Meyer’s ruthless abridgment, Aristotle warns, “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things. . . . For we begin from the that; if this is apparent enough to us, we can begin without also knowing why. Someone who is well brought up has the beginnings, or can easily acquire them.”

Aristotle suggests, more generally, that you should identify the vices you’re susceptible to and then “pull yourself away in the opposite direction, since by pulling hard against one fault, you get to the mean (as when straightening out warped planks).

Sold as a self-help manual in a culture accustomed to gurus promulgating “rules for living,” Aristotle’s ethics may come as a disappointment. But our disappointment may tell us more about ourselves than it does about Aristotle.

Michael Oakeshott wrote that “nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to the good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in the cookery book.” Proficiency in cooking is, of course, a matter of technique

My tutor’s fundamental pedagogical principle was that to teach a text meant being, at least for the duration of the tutorial, its most passionate champion. Every smug undergraduate exposé of a fallacy would be immediately countered with a robust defense of Aristotle’s reasoning.

“How to read Aristotle? Slowly.”

I was never slow enough. There was always another nuance, another textual knot to unravel

Sometimes we acquire our skills by repeatedly applying a rule—following a recipe—but when we succeed what we become are not good followers of recipes but good cooks. Through practice, as Aristotle would have said, we acquire judgment.

What we were doing with this historical text wasn’t history but philosophy. We were reading it not for what it might reveal about an exotic culture but for the timelessly important truths it might contain—an attitude at odds with the relativism endemic in the rest of the humanities.

There is no shortcut to understanding Aristotle, no recipe. You get good at reading him by reading him, with others, slowly and often. Regular practice: for Aristotle, it’s how you get good generally.

“My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong,” he said, “and I can’t think what more there is to say about it.” The appropriate response, and the Aristotelian one, would be to agree with the spirit of the remark. There is such a thing as the difference between right and wrong. But reliably telling them apart takes experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought u

we are all Aristotelians, most of the time, even when forces in our culture briefly persuade us that we are something else. Ethics remains what it was to the Greeks: a matter of being a person of a certain sort of sensibility, not of acting on “principles,” which one reserves for unusual situations of the kind that life sporadically throws up

That remains a truth about ethics even when we’ve adopted different terms for describing what type of person not to be: we don’t speak much these days of being “small-souled” or “intemperate,” but we do say a great deal about “douchebags,” “creeps,” and, yes, “assholes.

In one sense, it tells us nothing that the right thing to do is to act and feel as the person of good judgment does. In another sense, it tells us virtually everything that can be said at this level of generality.

If self-help means denying the role that the perceptions of others play in making us who we are, if it means a set of rules for living that remove the need for judgment, then we are better off without it.

Aristotle had little hope that a philosopher’s treatise could teach someone without much experience of life how to make the crucial ethical distinctions. We learn to spot an “asshole” from living; how else

when our own perceptions falter, we continue to do today exactly what Aristotle thought we should do. He asserts, in another significant remark that doesn’t make Meyer’s cut, that we should attend to the words of the old and experienced at least as much as we do to philosophical proofs: “these people see correctly because experience has given them their eye.”

Is it any surprise that the Internet is full of those who need help seeing rightly? Finding no friendly neighborhood phronimos to provide authoritative advice, you defer instead to the wisdom of an online community.

“The self-made man,” Oakeshott wrote, “is never literally self-made, but depends upon a certain kind of society and upon a large unrecognized inheritance.”

It points us in the right direction: toward the picture of a person with a certain character, certain habits of thinking and feeling, a certain level of self-knowledge and knowledge of other people.

We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?”

the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem—which is everybody’s problem—of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t.

At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis doesn’t come that easy. Aristotle devised a theory that was vague in just the right places, one that left, intentionally, space to be filled in by life. 

Twenty-four centuries later, we’re still guided by the approach toward ethical life that Aristotle exemplified, one in which the basic question is not what we do but who we are

The Internet has no shortage of moralists and moralizers, but one ethical epicenter is surely the extraordinary, addictive subreddit called “Am I the Asshole?,” popularly abbreviated AITA

Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective ages

Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential

Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices

That’s one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action

There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.

Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless

Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts

The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.

A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.

The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them

Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it

on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.

This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.

When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)

a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”

Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content

Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.

In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.

Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach

“influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.

social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.

When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.

Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.

when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive

The ensuing disaster was multipar

people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.

From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.

That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse

Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation

The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.

when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.

To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well

We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

He also disagreed with Friedman’s nemeses, the Keynesians, who worried that nations wouldn’t be able to fine-tune spending and taxing policy for domestic conditions if they had to keep their currencies in sync with the dollar.

Although the United States’ share of global domestic product has shrunk since the aftermath of World War II, the dollar continues to play a dominant role in financial flows. “Around half of all cross-border bank loans and international debt securities are denominated in U.S. dollars,”

the world today is closer to Kindleberger’s vision than he or his intellectual opponents could have imagined

What’s more, the Federal Reserve has become in effect the world’s central bank: When the Fed raises rates aggressively, as it’s doing now, other central banks tend to follow sui

t the British Empire really was an empire; London bankers were happy to extend loans to British companies operating in the colonies because they were subject to British law. That enabled the colonies to develop somewhat, albeit under Britain’s thumb. The United States has less control over borrowers in emerging markets. Kindleberger’s goal was “to get the economic boost of imperialism, but without the political and social downside of actual imperialism,” Mehrling wrote.

Roosevelt worsened and extended the Depression in 1933 by torpedoing central bankers’ efforts to stabilize exchange rates between currencies.

In contrast, Paul Volcker, who chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, comes across as a hero in the book for working with other central bankers and finance officials to resume international cooperation after the Nixon shock of 1971.

There’s a concept in economics of the optimal currency area. In theory, the area of a shared currency, such as the euro, should be big enough to encompass a lot of economic activity but not so big that it includes nations that are disparate and require different economic policies. To Kindleberger, no area could be too big. He thought the whole world was an optimal currency area.

In essence, his goal was to duplicate on the world stage what was achieved in the United States by a mentor of his, Henry Parker Willis, who was a designer of the Federal Reserve System that knitted the nation together financially.

Kindleberger was realistic enough to observe that nationalist politics was an obstacle. “While the optimum scale of economic activity is getting larger and larger, the optimum social scale appears to be shrinking,” he once wrote. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Whereas the economic logic of the payment system pushes toward hierarchy and centralization, the political logic of subglobal and subnational groupings pushes toward autarky and pluralism.”

Bertrand Russell’s observation that philosophy was born out of the ‘conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science’.

the Odyssey is crammed with life lessons. That could be a book in itself. Each adventure yields a moral, from the dangers of drugs (the Lotus Eaters) to the superiority of brains over brawn (the Cyclops) to the nature and essential value of love (the ending)

How to Be, then, is best taken not as the self-help book its title implies but as a poetic tour of philosophical thought which persuades us that, on the contrary, the pre-Socratics are the last people to look to for life advice. As Socrates himself observed wryly about Thales’s pratfall: ‘Philosophers always look like idiots.’

Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective age

Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential.

Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices.

one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action. There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.

Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless.

The economist Thomas Malthus, now dismissed by mainstream economics as an interesting crank, is resurrected by Galor as the man who correctly saw that for millennia humanity had been trapped by its own fertility into subsistence, starvation and famine. As soon as material matters improved, the birthrate went up, so did the population, and the pressure on food resources exploded – returning humanity to starvation

great sections of Galor’s book are to be applauded

What broke the Malthusian armlock on humanity’s destiny, argues Galor, is the gradual quickening in the introduction of technologies that required mass education for their successful implementation. This triggered a virtuous circle of more innovation, more investment in education, more need to invest in the quality of children rather than quantity, so that birthrates declined sufficiently to allow living standards and life expectancy to rise. Because it was now rational to invest in children’s education rather than get them working, child labour and exploitation fell away

Above all he shows how cultural attitudes persist long after whatever concatenation of events brought them into being, so that countries and cultures that get ahead tend to stay ahead

He is scathing about the shock programmes of market liberalisation that accompanied the “Washington consensus”, ignorant of these persistent traits. Effective market economies can’t be built spontaneously in cultures that are hostile to the very conception.

his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth

It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic

a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.

The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others.

The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins

A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants.

A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.

Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.

Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants

Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic

Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.

Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted

This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022.

Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.

It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle.

In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.

“Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable.

A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.

An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.

The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.

At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.

Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension

Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”

as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age, and they have collectively accumulated a much larger proportion of the world’s wealth

In 1983, there were 66,000 households worth at least $10m in the US. By 2019, that number had increased in terms adjusted for inflation to 693,000

Back in the industrial age, the rate of total elite wealth accumulation was capped by the limits of the material world. They could only build so many railroads, steel mills and oilwells at a time. Virtual commodities such as likes, views, crypto and derivatives can be replicated exponentially.

Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.

on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.

Zuckerberg told the New Yorker “through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace”, finally acknowledging “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”. It’s that sort of top down thinking that led Zuckerberg to not only establish an independent oversight board at Facebook, dubbed the “Supreme Court”, but to suggest that it would one day expand its scope to include companies across the industry.

Any new business idea, Thiel says, should be an order of magnitude better than what’s already out there. Don’t compare yourself to everyone else; instead operate one level above the competing masses

Today’s billionaire philanthropists, frequently espousing the philosophy of “effective altruism”, donate to their own organisations, often in the form of their own stock, and make their own decisions about how the money is spent because they are, after all, experts in everything

Their words and actions suggest an approach to life, technology and business that I have come to call “The Mindset” – a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. It’s a belief that with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals and exist on an entirely different level, or planet, altogether.

By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while “God is dead”, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world “in his own interests”

Nietzsche’s language, particularly out of context, provides tech übermensch wannabes with justification for assuming superhuman authority. In his book Zero to One, Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”.

In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset

In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

For Thiel, this requires being what he calls a “definite optimist”. Most entrepreneurs are too process-oriented, making incremental decisions based on how the market responds. They should instead be like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, pressing on with their singular vision no matter what. The definite optimist doesn’t take feedback into account, but ploughs forward with his new design for a better world.

This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.

The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures.

This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.

I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative

As Paul Valéry, the French poet, once said, “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.” To treat Andreessen’s essay as an argument misses the point. It’s a vibe. And the vibe is reactionary.

It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.

The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”

He continues:Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.

The Silicon Valley cohort Andreessen belongs to has added a bit to this formula. In their story, the old way that is being lost is the appetite for risk and inequality and dominance that drives technology forward and betters human life. What the muscled ancients knew and what today’s flabby whingers have forgotten is that man must cultivate the strength and will to master nature, and other men, for the technological frontier to give way

Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark bullet points in his latest missive, the buzzy, bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism

Andreessen’s argument is simple: Technology is good. Very good. Those who stand in its way are bad.

“The Enemy.” The list is long, ranging from “anti-greatness” to “statism” to “corruption” to “the ivory tower” to “cartels” to “bureaucracy” to “socialism” to “abstract theories” to anyone “disconnected from the real world … playing God with everyone else’s lives”

So who is it, exactly, who extinguishes the dancing star within the human soul?

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “E.S.G.,” “sustainable development goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “the limits of growth.”

The enemy, in other words, is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures

For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society

I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit or even see when technologies or policies go awry

The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable

Did we, in some cases, overcorrect? Absolutely. But the only reason we can even debate whether we overcorrected is because we corrected: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and a slew of other bills and regulations did exactly what they promised.

It is telling that Andreessen groups sustainability and degrowth into the same bucket of antagonists

Degrowth is largely, though not wholly, skeptical of technological solutions to our problems

But the politics of sustainability — as evidenced in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act — have settled into another place entirely: a commitment to solving our hardest environmental problems by driving technology forward, by investing and deploying clean energy infrastructure at a scale unlike anything the government has done since the 1950s.

Andreessen focuses at some length on the nuclear future he believes we’ve been denied —

but curiously ignores the stunning advances in solar and wind and battery power that public policy has delivered.

He yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology. “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,” he writes, italics included. “We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.”

There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan.

Andreessen’s ideas trace an odd, meme-based philosophy that has flourished in some corners of the internet known as effective accelerationism

“Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,”

“E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.” OK!

Take Andreessen’s naming of trust and safety teams as among his enemies.

That, in a way, is my core disagreement with Andreessen. Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but deccelerationist in practice

How has that worked out? A new analysis by Similarweb found that traffic to twitter.com fell in the United States by 19 percent from September 2022 to September 2023 and traffic on mobile devices fell by almost 18 percent. Indications are that advertising revenue on the platform is collapsing.

Andreessen spends much of his manifesto venerating the version of markets that you hear in the first few weeks of Econ 101, before the professor begins complicating the picture with all those annoying market failures

Throughout his essay, Andreessen is at pains to attack those who might slow the development of artificial intelligence in the name of safety, but nothing would do more to freeze progress in A.I. than a disaster caused by its reckless deployment

It is hard to read Andreessen’s manifesto, with its chopped-up paragraphs and its blunt jabs of thought delivered for maximum engagement and polarization, and not feel that Andreessen now reflects the medium in which he has made his home: X. He doesn’t just write in the way the medium rewards. He increasingly seems to think in its house style, too.

One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements

There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.

Musk purchased Twitter (in an acquisition that Andreessen Horowitz helped finance) and gutted its trust and safety teams. The result has been a profusion of chaos, disinformation and division on his platform

Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.

Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.

both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.

on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.

More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.

MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”

the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.

Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”

. Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.

Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”

More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.

If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.

“Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.