Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Scribner, 2025. Paperback: March 3.

U.S. Army Private James Kutcher slipped away from the Battle of San Pietro to pee. In the next moment, a German mortar shell found him. Kutcher went home without his legs, moved into a subsidized housing unit in Newark with his elderly parents, and worked as a file clerk for the Veterans Administration. In 1947, four years after his injury, the VA fired him. The Army canceled his disability pension, and then a notice in the mail informed him and his parents they were to be evicted from their home. The Red Scare had found them. In particular, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a loyalty program for federal employees. Because Truman’s Attorney General placed the Socialist Workers Party on a list of subversive organizations, and because Kutcher belonged to the party since the 1930s, a file clerk accused of no substantive wrongdoing was retroactively classified as an enemy of the state he had sacrificed his legs to defend.

Kutcher sued to reclaim his rights of speech, association, and due process. Prominent figures such as John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and I.F. Stone lent their names to the Kutcher Civil Rights Committee, which won a hearing from many Americans who did not share his politics. Kutcher took his artificial limbs on a tour to promote The Case of the Legless Veteran, his autobiography. “What has the majesty of the U.S. descended to,” the Washington Post asked, “when a crippled veteran can be so hounded and harassed in the name of national security?” No fired federal employee generated more public sympathy. No ordinary American did more to discredit the Red Scare. In 1956, a Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Kutcher. Two years later, the U.S. Court of Claims returned his pension and pay. The rulings dealt the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations a mortal blow.

Clay Risen begins The Red Scare with Truman’s loyalty program. He concludes in 1957 with a series of Supreme Court decisions limiting the government’s power to punish dissent. In the book’s four hundred pages, James Kutcher receives one passing mention. Boldfaced names hog the attention: Whitaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethal Rosenberg, Henry Wallace. The action takes place not in subsidized housing, but at the White House, the House Un-American Activities Committee, tony hotels, and an occasional cocktail party.

Risen’s book is not without considerable merits. The prose is brisk, the detail sharp. That the theme is timely, even urgent, needs no elaboration—and the author gives none. Readers of the New York Times, where Risen works as a reporter, may need little help connecting the logic of guilt by association to NSPM-7, the Trump administration’s national security strategy. Others may see in the postwar repression a precursor to the current campaign to slander New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as foreign agitator, due solely to his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. In these respects, The Red Scare is a useful book, well worth reading. Besides, one desultory nod to the disabled, working-class socialist does improve on Ellen Schreker’s Many are the Crimes and Richard Fried’s Nightmare in Red. Both major studies omit Kutcher entirely.

Like most histories of the Red Scare, Risen’s takes the phenomenon to be an invigilation. The storyline identifies a spate of “dark energy” that inculcated panic in the corridors of power running between Manhattan and Washington D.C. What needs to be explained, then, is why the repression “went far beyond what was necessary,” as Risen says. Given that the U.S. government controlled both oceans, owned half of the world’s wealth, and held a monopoly on the most powerful weapon in human history when the Red Scare began in 1947, a skeptical reader may wonder what proportion was necessary—and exactly who thought so.

Risen ascribes the loyalty program and its foreign policy companion, the Truman Doctrine, to a panic roiling the whole nation. “Observers in the United States,” he writes of responses to Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri, “were quick to conclude that the threat extended wherever Communism was found—even at home. Winning this new Cold War, they believed, would necessitate an unmitigated, unblinking effort to root out domestic subversion and dissent.” Which “observers?”Outside of Washington, public opinion snarled at Churchill’s incitement. Polls reported eighteen percent of Americans approved of the speech; more than forty percent disapproved.

“There was no question,” Risen continues in the vein of tragic necessity, that the Truman administration had to intervene in the Greek Civil War. “It is impossible to overstate just how overpowering the fear of a new world war became,” he asserts. Did the U.S. counterinsurgency destroy a popular, anti-Nazi resistance movement of Greek workers and peasants because officials felt overpowered by fear of a wider conflagration? The motivation imputed would be more credible if Risen had showed them pursuing measures to reduce the likelihood of world war three. He comes closest to doing so in praising President Dwight Eisenhower. IKE brought “a level of sanity to the Cold War through his New Look strategy, which reconceived the Soviet threat as a long-term, chronic challenge.”

On March 15, 1955, Eisenhower gave evidence of his level at a news conference. Asked whether his administration was prepared to use tactical atomic weapons in a general war against communism in the Far East, the genial president said sure why not: “I see no reason why they shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet.” Economic warfare, global counter-subversion, and atomic brinksmanship evidently count for sanity.

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In truth, the repression was necessary only to the social classes and institutions that benefited from it. The Catholic Church and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, neither of which receives a page in Risen’s book, worked assiduously with the FBI to promote the devil theory of communism. Why? Because the rational interests of their institutions demanded they do so. The Chamber wanted to roll back the New Deal. The FBI wanted bureaucratic legitimacy for a secret police force. The Church, previously a target of counter-subversion, wanted to preserve its moral authority from Hollywood’s mass culture.

Robert Justin Goldstein’s Political Repression in America encompasses the wider and deeper context of global class war. What Risen describes as “the second red scare” was in truth the third or fourth. The first, transpiring between 1873 and 1878, reacted to restive industrial workers at home and the Paris Commune abroad. An ensuing half-century effort to outlaw the labor movement fostered the instruments of domestic repression that accompanied the two world wars and the Cold War, which replaced the immigrant working classes with the Soviet Union as chief scapegoat.

In American Blacklist, Goldstein calls the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations “the single most important domestic factor that fostered and facilitated the Red Scare.” Risen scants the list because he treats the Red Scare as a narrative potboiler rather than class warfare. The mere existence of the list transformed conflicts over economic interests into anxieties over identity. An unlisted organization could not be presumed approved by the government. Countless Americans begged off signing any petition or attending any meeting, lest the AG plant the kiss of death that landed on James Kutcher.

It was not hysteria that motivated the mandarins at the acme of their power to isolate and censor left-wing thought and practice. The new national security apparatus they installed transformed dissent into criminal disloyalty to end political imagination itself. What the mandarins actually feared was the open competition of ideas enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Today, as Washington prosecutes a forever war against the ideals of the American Revolution, dismantling what remained of the distinction between elected official and demagogue, the cognoscenti cock their ears for “vibes” and “dark energy.” But it’s not political physics. It’s not the jitters. Folks, it’s tyranny.

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A version of this post is also published at Cambridge Day.

Anne Fleischman Bernays is the author of ten novels, the daughter of Edward Bernays, and the widow of Justin Kaplan. Her novel, Growing Up Rich, won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for its contribution to the Jewish experience in America. Her father, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, founded the public relations industry. Her husband, a biographer of Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman, introduced storytelling into the genre. Anne and Justin cowrote The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters and a memoir, Back Then: Two Literary Lies in 1950s New York.

The memoir leaves off where our chat begins, with their move to Cambridge in 1959. The Francis Avenue home she shared with Justin (whom she calls Joe) once occupied the center of literary society in the city. Anne helped to found PEN/New England and served on the board of the National Writers Union. Since Justin’s death in 2014, ending their marriage of nearly six decades, she has lived alone in a high-rise along the banks of the Charles River.

I met her recently in the course of researching my biography of the sociologist C. Wright Mills. Justin, an editor at Simon and Schuster in the 1950s, had edited Mills’s pamphlet, The Causes of World War Three. That much I knew before I rang Anne’s buzzer. Inside, I learned about the personal relationship she and Justin enjoyed with Mills.

When I returned to chat, Anne shared some impressions of John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bernard Malamud. She mused on her husband’s paradoxical relationship to words and discussed the weekly writing class she still teaches. I found her, at 95, full of the mordant humor she appreciates in Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh, her favorite novelists. When I asked whether fellow scribblers still come by to see her, she said no. Why? “They probably think I’m dead.”

Anne: I considered writing a sequel to Back Then. Cambridge in the sixties was so dramatic, so earth-shaking. I remember families breaking up, friendships breaking up, friends stopping talking to one another. It split right down the middle, and it was angry. It was all over the Vietnam War. At one point we were called by a neighbor who happened to be a vice president of Harvard. He said, “Anne, pack up your manuscripts and whatever else you need, pack up the children, get in the car and leave Francis Avenue, because a mob of antiwar protestors is on the way.” Never happened.

Julia Child lived on Irving Street. She was a bit antisemitic. She used to shop at Savenor’s Butcher Shop, which she made famous. If you were one of their special customers, they would let you buy the whole side of beef or the whole side of pig. They would hang it up, and whenever you needed some meat, they would cut into it for you. We did it. Once, Julia and Joe were walking back from Savenor’s, discussing an article that had just come out in the Boston Globe Magazine. The article had suggested Savenor’s weighs the hook along with the meat—you know, that they cheat. “Well, what do you expect?” Julia said. Joe was horrified.

We lived in Cambridge for seven years before anyone talked to us. Then Joe won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly, everybody started coming by. Kurt Vonnegut was teaching at Harvard when he visited. He was sitting on the couch chain smoking. I bugged him about it. I didn’t like smoking. I didn’t like it in the house, and I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Finally, Kurt turned to Joe and said, “will you please tell your wife to shut up?” Well, I had it coming. Kurt was charming. He and Joe got along fine. They had the same view of life. Joe was deeply skeptical and very humorous. And those two qualities you seldom find in the same person. Kurt was one.

Bernard Malamud was a good friend. He and Justin went for long walks and talked about writing their books. And then Joe would come back and report to me, “Bern was taking notes while I was talking.” When Bern’s next book came out [Dubin’s Lives], it was about a biographer. Joe said some passages in the novel were verbatim from the notes Bern took without permission. He never said a word to us. Meanwhile, Bern was trying to get me in bed. “You’ll like it,” he said, “and I’ll like it.” I never told Joe. I thought, well, if I tell him, he will stop liking Bern. They were very close.

John Updike was also a great admirer of Joe’s. He was a shit. He fucked every woman he could. I was rumored to be one of his girlfriends—absolutely untrue. I did play volleyball at his first house in Ipswich, a little town on the North Shore. We were there a lot. When he got very, very, very, very, very famous—and very, very rich—he bought a mansion with a driveway. We went out there for a party. He and Joe were talking by the fireplace. Joe noticed a pile of books on the table. “Those are galleys the publishers sent me,” John explained. “They want me to blurb these books.” When Joe asked what he did with them all, John said “I’ll show you.” He grabbed the top one and tossed it into the fireplace. I thought that was blasphemous. I thought, how can he do that? Can’t he imagine what that author would feel like if he knew? It was so brutal.

For the last five or six years, Anne has been giving a free writing class once a week for ninety minutes. In What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, she and her coauthor Pamela Painter claim “students learn to write not by thinking about writing or negotiating with their feelings, but by sitting down and actually writing.” I wondered whether the first question isn’t why some students aspire to become writers at all.

Anne: I think that they have an exaggerated feeling about what it’s like to be an author. I give them prompts and exercises. They’re supposed to do it during the week, and then we gather for a workshop. They read aloud while a partner takes notes. And then the pair goes quiet and the others comment. I’m teaching them how to be good editors. But it’s amazing how hard it is to get some things through their minds. They have no idea how to edit, to self-edit. They have to be two people. First is the writer, and then when you have a draft, a nasty, mean self-editor. You question every word.

I was never taught writing. I took one class in four years of college [at Barnard]. I became a New York Times stringer. So I was writing, but I wasn’t writing fiction. Okay, how did I turn to teaching? It was 1975 and I just had my fifth novel published, Growing Up Rich. And that made it a little bit of a splash, with a very nice review in the Times. A close friend, a trustee of Brown & Nichols, mentioned the school’s English teacher had gotten sick and taken a leave. “Would you come and teach writing for this semester?” I said, “I don’t know how to teach. She said, “you know how to write, don’t you?” So that started it.

It took us maybe over two years to write What If. It’s the only book of mine that earns any money. It’s been adopted by hundreds of colleges. I’ve published ten novels, but whenever I go someplace and I’m introduced and someone says, “I read your book,” I know which one. At least somebody’s reading me.

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As the general editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Justin modernized the venerable compendium of 20,000 utterances with additions by the likes of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. But Justin’s own speech was not quotable. Middle daughter Hester recently published a biographical essay exploring the paradox of her writer father’s verbal reticence.

Anne: Joe was a man of written words, not spoken words. I learned this on our very first date together. We went to the Museum of the Metropolitan Museum. He was working for an art book publisher. I finally blurted out, “what are your enthusiasms?” I was so frustrated. But I sensed that he had enormous reservoir of emotion and love and brilliance. He could recite almost every poem he had ever read. Reams of it! Shut up with your poetry! He was a real introvert. And that’s not a negative thing, except that it can be difficult to communicate with him. I mean, it doesn’t mean that you’re unpleasant or that you don’t like people. It means that you’re incredibly shy. He told me about that, when he was younger, he sometimes crossed the street to avoid having to talk to somebody. Not because he didn’t like the person, but just because he was too shy to talk to them. He went through five years of psychoanalysis in New York.

Just a couple of years before he died, I said, “the children would like you to say ‘I love you’ to them.” He replied, “they know I love them.’ I said, “but they have to hear it.” For some reason, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say, “I love you.” He had a hard time saying it to me, but I knew he did. I mean, just the way he looked at me, the way he supported me, the way he comforted me, the way he suggested things for me to write, the way he was always thinking about me first. Maybe he was afraid of too much love, too much of an attachment. He certainly was not an unloving person.

He loved telling jokes and dirty limericks. He had the best sense of humor of anybody I’ve ever met. When we first got to Cambridge, a painter friend of mine who was married to a big wheel in the psychoanalytic community asked Joe to come and talk about parallels between psychoanalysis and biography. “I’d love for you to come and talk to the doctors about how you write a biography,” the big wheel said. “How do you dig into a man’s or a person’s life to make a story out of it, which is essentially what a psychoanalyst does.” I went with him. There was an auditorium full of people. At question time, a woman got up asked: “Mr. Kaplan, how do you feel about the oral triad?” He said, “the only oral triad I know is bacon, lettuce, and tomato.” He was what they used to call “a wit.”

I could not find the nerve to bring up her account in Back Then of a youthful erotic encounter with Anatole Broyard, author of Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. Asking a woman of 95 about wild sex atop a kitchen table seemed indecent. (See pages 89 and 90 of Back Then, if you really want to know). But I did feel obliged to ask about the time she and Justin agreed to be photographed for one of WAAF radio’s bikini calendars.

Anne: Joe didn’t want to do the calendar. I talked him into it. They didn’t show any of the good parts! Even so, my friends said, “how could you do this?” Well, I’m a scamp. I’ll do anything.

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Justin Kaplan lived a good life, according to Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography (Catapult, 2025). After leaving his job as an editor at Simon and Schuster and relocating to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959, he and his wife Anne Bernays settled into a large house on Francis Avenue. There, grinding out words behind the closed door of his study, he wrote Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman. For his labors in biography he won a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and American Book Award. Kaplan also wrote a social history of the Astor Family of New York and a fetching joint memoir with Bernays, Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York. Unlike some writers of his generation, he didn’t gamble, fall to drink, or embarrass his three daughters with a scandal. His marriage lasted nearly sixty years. When he died, aged 88, Cambridge mourned him as one of the city’s last unaffiliated men of letters.

A successful career and unimpeachable private life would seem unpromising fodder for an interrogation. Twice Born, by middle daughter Hester Kaplan, zeroes in on Justin’s patrimonial disposition. “We never faced each other or found comfortable or honest footing because we were too alike: shy, cripplingly private,” she writes. When they talked, they discussed stories. “I felt alone with my father, always nervous with him, even as we talked, because I wasn’t really sure if it was us we were discussing.” Her father never came out and uttered the words, “I love you.” She called him by his nickname, Joe.

The gravamen of the indictment centers on his relationship to his past. By age thirteen, Justin Kaplan lost both parents to cancer. How did he cope with the catastrophe? What psychic formations crystallized as a result of the loss? Although he never kept his orphanhood a secret, he didn’t evince any interest in the details. He didn’t know where his parents had been buried. Once, Hester reports, he forgot his mother’s maiden name when applying for a passport. That one of America’s most acclaimed biographers showed no interest in his own biography is a trivial irony in itself. But Hester holds it up as the key to unlocking the provenance of his problem. In turning away from his past, he “avoided knowing his three daughters.”

In December, the National Book Critics Circle long-listed Twice Born for an award in autobiography. The book is indeed tenderly composed, and when it peeks into the social world, adroitly observed. For approximately 15 years, we learn, the Kaplan-Bernays home on Francis Avenue served as a hub of literary culture in Cambridge. John Kenneth Galbraith lived a few doors down, Julia Child across the back fence. John Updike, Annie Dillard, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bernard Malamud attended their parties. The vignettes are steeped in pathos. When the party ended, an injunction to silence gripped the neighborhood. “I had watched as an older boy dropped his clothes, one piece of a time, out of his bedroom window so that shirts and underwear and sneakers flew by his father working at a desk in the room below, the man barely looking up as though it had only been a bird’s shadow passing by.” Another child reported needing to make an appointment to see her father. As in Greg Bellow’s “Saul Bellow’s Heart” and Janna Malamud Smith’s “My Father is a Book,” Twice Born bears witness to an axiom of the scribbler’s vocation: all time away from the desk is stolen time.

The dominant image in this account sees Hester crouching outside the closed door of Justin’s study, wondering why she can’t enter. Yet we don’t learn whether her sisters or mother contemplated the same issue, or whether they conceived Justin’s incuriosity toward his past as a problem at all. They seldom appear in these pages. Hester wishes he had been a different sort of father, one more emotionally expressive, more engaged with her inner needs. Did he himself recognize their “lack of connection and inability to speak to and about each other”? A friend of eight decades tells Hester he never discussed his dead parents. “And I felt I shouldn’t ask,” the friend adds.

How much of our parents’ past do we deserve to know? Twice Born avoids the question by appealing to what the critic Parul Sehgal has called “the trauma plot.” The convention flattens character in order to impute a wound that explains all, exchanging mystery and uncertainty for a presumption of superiority. Hester charges her father with a failure of “courage” and “honesty” in confronting his “secret.” (What secret?) “He doesn’t know why he never looked back to discover how he weathered the deaths of his parents,” she writes. Perhaps orphanhood, prevalent in the 1930s, simply did not bear the same weight on his shoulders as Hester imagines it would have on hers. “I would not be like my father,” she swears when she becomes a writer despite herself. Whenever her children knock on her study, she assures us, she lets them in.

Reading her father’s great biographies after his death, Hester juxtaposes passages with feelings she imagines he must have inhabited as an orphaned boy. In this way, staging the conversation she never had with him, she “finds” her father “in the margins of biography,” as the subtitle claims. She offers us the origin story she wants him to have wanted. The catharsis is muted because the conflict seems one-sided, an exercise in therapeutic “acceptance” rather than increased understanding.

Twice Born is a warmhearted lament that miscarries over the central illusion of biography. No matter how much detail they amass, no matter how many witnesses they interview, no matter how many conversations they conduct or imagine with their subjects, biographers can transfigure only so much of time and character into cognizable history. Incorporate the methodological limitation, and the genre beguiles and humanizes in the same stroke. Fight the limitation, insist on penetrating to the core, and the genre deals in metaphysical conceit. Can any of us really know the inner lives of other people? Why should we even want total knowledge? “The fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other,” the anthropologist David Graeber argued. “To recognize another person as human is to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them.”

Justin Kaplan didn’t know his parents because they died when he was a boy. Hester Kaplan didn’t know her father because he didn’t care to reveal all of himself. The yearning for verification is human. So is our finitude.

(A version of this post also appears at Cambridge Day.)

Shortly after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe traveled to York Springs, a village in Pennsylvania, to visit with his deceased father’s kin. W.O. Gant, the father of the novel’s protagonist, was modeled by Wolfe on his own father William Oliver Wolfe. In a letter to his mother in North Carolina, Wolfe recounted his look homeward to the litter of hinterland villages and hamlets where his father had farmed. The pastoral prettiness of the region stirred him to extoll the “great fields and mighty stone barns, the richest, fattest farming county you ever looked at.” A second letter, composed in New York City, mused on the character of the English, Scot-Irish, and Germans pioneers who had debarked in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and hacked their way through the forests. “As I walk through the crowded and noisy streets of this immense city, and look at the dark swarthy faces of Jews, Italians, Greeks,” Wolfe wrote, “I realize more keenly than ever that I come from the old Americans—the people who settled the country, who fought in its wars, who pushed westward.”

No writer has repeated Thomas Wolfe’s lyrical infatuation with Adams County, the place that bore and bred me. After I left this borderland along the Mason-Dixon Line for Cambridge, Massachusetts, which might as well be a different country, I searched the national culture for traces of the filtered deposits of the ruddy farmers and rural bourgeoisie who raised me. Of my old Americans, however, contemporary letters evokes only dark political innuendos, such as when Charles Lindbergh circumnavigates the region’s lush valleys and corrugated ridges, surveying his blood-and-soil partisans, in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. But when I separate the years since I left, turning them over one by one, I inhabit the psychic interior of Adams County’s commoners, a guarded, undemonstrative people who go to work, try to honor the Commandments, and return home to their families. In the theater of modern volatilities, the desiccated faith of such mainline Protestants has been shunted off stage, as though nothing poetic or vital ever happens behind the veil.

The story that is about to unfold is a metaphysical high drama. The central event, told to me in the flat intonations of a country teacher’s voice, imbued my spiritual inheritance not long after my father cracked up and left our family, having been “Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” Revisiting the story of Christmas on Red Hill, I find myself a stranger roaming in a landscape I know intimately, as though seeing the event that shaped me through a picture window whose frame I cannot breach.

Belinda always began her story with a memory of the black-haired sophomore who crowded into a seat beside hers in college. When the class ended, her eye followed him as he stood and strode toward the door. He looked even taller than her. A shade darker, he wore heavy eyebrows that made him look older than twenty.

On their first date, Carmen Monterossi said he grew up in Sharpsburg, an hour’s drive south from campus, outside Pittsburgh. Belinda said she grew up in Hanover, four hours southeast across the Alleghenies. His father, like hers, made a living in the construction trades. Carmen’s welded on Pittsburgh’s bridges.

Belinda and Carmen held hands at the parties thrown by her sorority and his fraternity. They played tennis on campus and swam in Lake Arthur, and they studied cheek by jowl toward their shared ambition for a career in special education. Classes at Slippery Rock let out for the summer. One weekend, she took a plane to Pittsburgh to see him. She laughed when a giddy teenage girl stole in close and pinched Carmen’s buttocks on a downtown street, squealing as she crept away that she just touched the Steelers’ famous running back. In his beard, Carmen did look a dead-ringer for Franco Harris. She herself had large hands and feet, long thin legs, a plain, narrow face, and a body built like a licorice stick. She was a cheerleader in high school, hanging out with the jocks.

She cried hard when she broke up with him. In high school, she had read a sentimental fiction about star-crossed lovers just like them. After saying goodnight to her mother and father in Hanover, she thumbed the novel by a small light behind the closed door of her bedroom. In the mornings, she hid the novel under her bed, lest her parents discover her curiosity about forbidden men. When she first arrived at Slippery Rock and measured the footloose spirit of rebellion seizing some of the students, however, she realized that her secret cigarette habit would mark the limits of her disobedience. She was no dreamer.

Her mother was a Zartman, her father a Stonesifer. The Zartman and Stonesifer lines went far back in Hanover’s German Lutheran community. Buck and Sis, as everyone called her parents, belonged to St. Paul’s. They baptized and raised her and her younger sister in the church. Buck had been an altar boy. Carmen, however, had graduated from North Catholic High School in Pittsburgh. His father and mother were Italian immigrants and Roman Catholics. She thought of his parents as transplants from the old world.

Carmen, at length, persuaded her to consider a way out of their predicament. He wagered the knowledge they might gain together from a night class on mixed marriages. No, she felt after the final session, she could not bring herself to convert. The sacrament of confession positively offended her. But she did summon the terms of a compromise. She could agree to raise any children with Carmen in the Catholic Church. As soon as she heard herself make the pledge, a vision of the future crystallized in her imagination. Yes, she would marry Carmen after they graduated from Slippery Rock. She would teach special education for three years. After she completed her master’s degree, she would give birth to two children, and then she would resume her teaching career. That was her plan.

On August 21, 1971, she married her college sweetheart at St. Paul’s in Hanover. The wedding was traditional, the altar set with white mums, daisies, gladiolus, and palms, Belinda bedecked in a full-length gown of embroidered silk organza styled with an empire waistline, a softly gathered skirt, and billowing sleeves. Her sister, Sue Ann, served as her maid of honor. Belinda’s sorority sisters and Carmen’s fraternity brothers filled out the party. Reverend Don Stonesifer, her fire-and-brimstone uncle, came up to Hanover from his horse ranch in Virginia to officiate. A priest assisted. Carmen’s parents insisted.

Belinda and Carmen soon found teaching jobs and bought a townhouse in Carlisle, a short half-hour north of Hanover. They immersed themselves in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. He coached the parish football team and won election to the presidency of the athletic association. She joined the Junior Civic Club. But Slippery Rock had not fully prepared them for the politics of special education. Carlisle’s superintendent segregated her students. She had to rig up a classroom in the windowless, pie-shaped cement basement of the Lutheran church. She gravitated to the kids with learning disabilities, fascinated as she was by dyslexia. Privately, she concluded, she did not have enough patience to contend with the more severely afflicted.

Those students, the ones with emotional disturbances, Carmen sought out. His superintendent admired the gentle manner he displayed with the angry children of the world, so surprising for such a big man. Well liked and widely respected, he won promotion to a role in the school district’s administration. Sometimes, when defendants in the juvenile court claimed a disability to mitigate their offenses, he testified as an expert witness for the state. “I think they ought to quit giving these kids so many chances,” he said to the Carlisle Sentinel. “Leniency is not doing justice to kids or society.”

On issues of public morality Carmen and Belinda concurred. They blamed the hippies and the kooks for unraveling America’s fabric. In Hanover and Sharpsburg, the Stonesifers’ and Monterossis’ alike nodded toward their respective television screens when President Nixon came on and appealed to “the great silent majority” against the antiwar protestors.

Belinda’s plan unfolded like a private charm. One month after she ceased taking her birth-control pill, she became pregnant. Two months after she completed her master’s degree, she gave birth to Jason. A second child, Nicholas, arrived on her calendar three years later. Jason and Nicholas bore Carmen’s dark brown eyes and her blond bangs. A priest at St. Patrick’s performed the baptisms.

On the rare occasions that Carmen and Belinda argued, their bickering revolved around her bird-like panics of possessiveness. She continually found reasons to keep her loyal discharge of daughterly duties conspicuous to Buck and Sis. She felt intensely jealous of Sue Ann, who also married a special education teacher in Carlisle. Two Saturdays every month, Belinda left Carmen in the townhouse and stayed overnight at her childhood home in Hanover with Jason and Nicholas. On those evenings, Buck and Sis minded the boys while she played bridge with her high-school girlfriends. The next morning, the Stonesifers’ attended Sunday worship at St. Paul’s and lunched at The Greenskeeper, a clubhouse restaurant run by her Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry.

The spirit of compromise that had made the marriage possible in the first place held for eight years. Every other Thanksgiving and every other Christmas, Belinda and Carmen and Jason and Nicholas packed into their Ford LTD sedan and motored across the Alleghenies to Sharpsburg, where they attended holiday Mass with the Monterossi family. Jason remembered without fail which elevator button would lift them to the dinosaur exhibition in the science museum at Carnegie-Mellon University. Nicholas adored the animals in the Pittsburgh zoo.

In 1971, when the action of this story begins, she forced a change. That Thanksgiving she insisted on spending with her clan in Hanover. Her Aunt Beverly in California promised to make a rare visit. Carmen’s father, wounded by the betrayal, stopped talking to his son. She thought her father-in-law was an Italian hothead with a short-man’s complex.

On the twenty-third of that December, Belinda awoke at daybreak, donned her apron, and planted her feet in the kitchen. She cooked her homemade applesauce, her jellies, and her chicken corn soup. She baked a fresh loaf of bread, and when she finished her traditional contributions to the Stonesifers’ Christmas repast, she placed the fixings in three baskets each ringed with fresh apples. Two baskets she designated for her grandmothers. The third she put aside for her Aunt Ruth. Satisfied with her labors, she decided on the spur of the moment to deliver the provisions to her mother’s refrigerator in Hanover that very afternoon.

“Can’t we just stay home and take this stuff with us on Christmas Day?” Carmen grumbled. He was not his cheerful self. She pursed her lips. “No, I’ve got to get all these gifts to Hanover today. I need to take all this stuff down, so it’s not so crazy packing and all that on Christmas morning.” The day after Christmas, she reminded him, they would drive to Sharpsburg. “It’ll be too much. We’ve got to pack our suitcases on top of everything else.”

“But I hate that road,” Carmen remonstrated. “Let’s just stay home and relax.” The road to Hanover, a two-lane turnpike, crossed a belt of the orchard land below South Mountain, which broke into innumerable spurs and foothills. The sloping land pushed cold air down into valleys, protecting sensitive fruit trees from frost bite. The orchards yielded some of the most succulent cherries, peaches, and apples in America.

The harvest season had ended in October. Carmen, at the wheel, probably would not butt up against one of the cannery trucks that relied on the turnpike to convey crated fruit south past Hanover to the harbor in Baltimore. Even so, he could expect to trail one of the sixteen-wheelers carrying new cars to the dealership in Hanover, or one of the cement trucks that spewed rocks from its cylinder on the way from the quarry. A tractor would emerge from an unmarked access road and eke along interminably. The narrow contours had not changed since Belinda’s forebears had laid a wagon trail in 1736. How many rabbits, skunk, deer, and possum had met a violent demise on that road? During the growing season the warm scent of mellowing apples perfumed the drive through the orchards. Today the rancid smell of rotting animal flesh was sure to aggravate the queasy feeling induced by crossing twenty miles of hills like a slow-motion rollercoaster. They would have to swallow the rising bile of carsickness.

Belinda would not countenance Carmen’s objections. She would shuttle the boys to Hanover herself. After eight years of marriage, Carmen grokked the determination in her tone. “You’re not going to give me any peace until we take all this stuff, are you?,” he sighed. He buckled Jason and Nicholas into the Chevette, a subcompact they had just purchased. The best- selling car in America, manufactured in response to the energy crisis, the Chevette would zip to Hanover more easily than the lumbering Ford sedan in the garage. The warm air, moist from an overnight rain, prompted Carmen to remark that that day felt like an Indian Summer.

Sis and Buck received them warmly on McKinley Avenue. The family was at the very core and ripeness of its life together, the voluptuous energy of its conventions focused on the ritual feast of turkey and country ham to come. The festive patter of Belinda’s grandmothers seasoned the occasion with a snug sense of sufficiency. Her haven remained intact, her parents’ marital idyll steady against the torrent of divorces elsewhere in the country. Sis and Buck had graduated from Eichelberger High School. After the war, they had purchased a tract of open acreage in the tony Clearview section of Hanover, directly across from a Lutheran parsonage. The two-story house they built expressed a vernacular rhetoric of gentility, boasting a carport, flagstone steps, dormer windows, and immaculately groomed gardens, shrubs, and lawns. Buck designed and laid every inch of the structure himself, hauling the bricks from Alwine’s, the oldest manufacturer in America.

Sis furnished the domestic interior with varnished walnut tables and chairs. In the formal dining room, a Swiss clock presided over a hutch that held porcelain crockery and assorted candies and nuts. A parlor opened into a patioed backyard under a canopy of maples and elms. The plummy tone of order and satisfaction, a matured décor of religion and taste, forged the family’s claim to belong to the better sorts of people in town. The neighbors were doctors and pharmacists, accountants and bank managers.

That afternoon, Belinda and Sis took Jason and Nicholas for a meal with Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry at The Greenskeeper. The boys rolled down their windows and piped Jingle Bells at the top of their voices. After lunch, they soaked up the dazzling sight of the Christmas tree. Carmen stayed behind with Buck and watched television in the living room. When the boys burst through the door and presented their grandfather with stain-glass ornaments, he pretended to believe their own tiny fingers had crafted them.

As twilight descended, Jason started in on his brother, poking and prodding. He had reached that age. “No TV tonight!” Belinda scolded him. Carmen scooped up Nicholas and cradled him in the crooks of his lean, hairy arms. In the carport, Sis leaned through the window and dropped a couple of bags of Christmas cookies on the boys’ laps, steadying their trembling chins and wiping away their frowns. A few minutes after seven o’clock, Carmen switched on the headlamps, turned left onto McKinley Avenue, and wheeled back toward the turnpike.

As the town petered out, the landmarks notching their northward progress home loomed across the map of Belinda’s childhood memory. The quarry passed on the left. She anticipated how, after the Chevette’s engine labored over the fifth hill and reached a mile-long flatland, a corridor fringed by pine trees and tangled underbrush would darken the road. Off to the right appeared The Tropical Treat, the drive-in restaurant where she spooned down banana splits after drive-in movies with her girlfriends. Cornfields now stretched out on both sides of the road. The corners of her eyes reflected red and green colors flickering like fireflies inside the farmhouses.

Up ahead was Red Hill, the steepest on the road. Carmen prepared to round the blind spot at the crest when a yellow blaze of sodium light flashed into Belinda’s eyes. She raised her right arm above her forehead and swiveled her head toward Carmen. His face was illuminated in a bizarre clarity. She thought an airplane must be landing on top of their car.

She woke up on a gurney in the emergency ward at Hanover Hospital. She recognized Koby Klunk, a friend from high school, as the nurse standing over her. She had been in a car accident, Koby informed her. She had a broken forearm and some cracked ribs. The doctor, concerned about blood pooling around her heart, had ordered an ambulance to transport her to York Hospital, the nearest larger facility, in case she needed surgery.

Belinda caught sight of Sis exchanging inaudible words with a man who looked to be a Pennsylvania State Trooper. She lifted her uninjured arm and motioned her mother over. Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas would need to stay overnight in Hanover until her release. Her thoughts abruptly shifted when she observed her mother shrieking and pounding her fists against the trooper’s barrel chest. Sis, hysterical, came beside the gurney and looked down at her daughter.

“Mom, are they not okay?”

“No, he’s dead.”

“Are the boys okay?”

“No, they’re all gone.”

She turned to Koby and denied permission to transport her to York Hospital. Saying so, she relapsed into unconsciousness for the next day and a half.

Until this moment, a particular sense of time had held her and molded her. She had grown up in the mores of the old Protestants. Methodical and industrious, her people had taught her how to save time, to organize time, to forestall the element of chance by the habit of preparation. Her habits stemmed from a tempo of life essentially unchanged since the brickwork farmhouses and churches were wrought out of the abundant clay deposits in the soil. Great revolutions in agriculture, industry, and science had accelerated the pace of change in the big cities. Even the modern theological conflicts that divided Lutheran synods, however, had passed lightly over congregations that clung to a past older than the country itself. No spiritual awakenings had swept through these parts. No hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornados had bewildered existence. Time moved in cycles, its rhythms marked by the four seasons and the liturgical calendar as surely as day followed night.

At the limits of her imagination of novelty and contingency, Belinda had been able to picture Jason or Nicholas afflicted by some awful disease. One evening earlier in December, she had caught a television show that chronicled a girl’s suffering from leukemia and her mother’s struggle to save her. Belinda, distraught, had rushed up the stairs in tears and rustled Jason and Nicholas awake to hug them. If that manner of calamity had befallen them, she would have sought spiritual direction from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” But what transpired on Red Hill had not announced itself with a future expiration date. The collision had come on like the Apocalypse.

Ted Kotula, the Pennsylvania State Trooper in the hospital that evening, had just left a scene that resembled an execution. Under the revolving lights of ambulances, trucks, and cruisers, the firemen and paramedics saw a Mercury sedan on its roof. Two men, pinioned inside, writhed and moaned in Spanish. The driver of the sedan was dead beneath a guardrail. Half his face was torn away.

The Chevette sat higher on the gradient. The roof had been sheared off, giving a clear view of an unconscious Belinda in the passenger’s seat. Her right ear was nearly split in half. Her right leg bore a gash where the door of the glove compartment speared her. Blood seeped around shards of glass that lodged in her face and arms. Beside her, Carmen’s body reposed in the driver’s seat. The firemen shined their flashlights deeper into the Chevette. The entire back seat was missing, having popped off the chassis.

One of the firemen vomited on the macadam where he found Carmen’s head. Others dropped to their knees upon discovering Jason and Nicholas’s entrails and limbs. The father of the fire chief fell over with a heart attack. An ambulance took him away to the coronary care unit. A driver crawling through the traffic bottleneck craned her neck toward the carnage, fumbled the wheel in distress, and struck another fireman, sending him to the hospital in yet another ambulance. The atmosphere felt permeated by a sulfurous mist.

None of the three men in the Mercury carried a driver’s license, automobile insurance, or immigration papers. Trooper Katula telephoned Pappy Bross, the owner of a large turkey farm in East Berlin and one of only two businesses in the vicinity known to employ foreigners. Bross arrived at the morgue to look at the driver. An old family friend of the Stonesifer’s, he breathed a sigh of relief when he disclaimed knowledge of the man.

Trooper Katula summoned Pastor Hector Ramos from the Assembly of Pentecostal Church of Jesus. One of the surviving passengers, detained in the emergency room with a broken jaw, spoke no English. Ramos often fielded such emergency calls from the state police. Every year, several thousand Mexicans migrated northward to South Mountain’s fruit belt to work in the orchards. The phenomenon had begun during Belinda’s younger years, when teenagers began reallocating their leisure time from the family orchard to high school sports. Agricultural corporations stepped in and consolidated the land, constructing canneries where cider houses, elevated water tanks, and spray sheds had dotted the land for a century.

Pastor Ramos sang and prayed with the migrants at their camps and conducted Catholic services for them at his church. He admired their work ethic. When they finished their labors, however, they had little to do with their time. Segregated from the white community, they passed their leisure in drink. They often began drinking on Saturday mornings and then continued through Sunday evenings.

The injured man gave Ramos his name: Domingo Azuel-Najero. He was twenty-three. Ramos’s heart sank when he heard Azuel-Najero break into a giggle. He was still drunk. Azuel-Najero asked about his friend at the wheel. “You tell him his friend is dead,” Katula snapped, “and by the way, you tell him the woman he hears screaming is the only survivor from the other car.”

Azuel-Najero stopped laughing. He said nothing more, refusing to disclose how the men knew one another. Most of the migrant workers left at the end of the harvest season in October. The three men might have been working on a skeleton crew. If so, they might have picked the very apples that Belinda ringed around her Christmas baskets.

Belinda opened her eyes in the stillness of Christmas morning. The clock on the wall read three o’clock. She tapped the cast on her arm. Realizing she was alone in York Hospital, her memories began to coagulate: who she was, where she was, what her mother had said. A chill crept over her, and then the abscess burst. She heard herself howling. A nurse appeared and took her trembling hand.

“Shall I phone for a minister to come?”

“Yes, please hurry.”

The moment the door closed, a warm light poured into the room and chased away the shadows bunching in the corners. God’s caress evened her breathing. Her heart ceased hammering. The minister arrived an hour later. She was calm, savoring the stillness. He was unshaven, exhausted. She thought he looked disheveled.

At midday, a man’s silhouette drew into focus through her fogginess. Tall and square-jawed, his fists were buried in his pockets. “It’s time to go home,” Buck said in his soft-spoken manner. A high wind blew scuds of rain against the car and steamed the windows on the drive to McKinley Avenue. Buck fixed his gaze on the road ahead. She heard a husky whisper slip past his clenched jaw. He would shoot the two surviving Mexicans.

That evening, as Christmas Day drew to a mournful close, her thoughts drifted to the time at Slippery Rock when Carmen had broken up with her. He had caught her smoking. Now, as she maneuvered her battered body down into a wing chair in her mother’s living room, she ended her nine-year remission and lit a cigarette.

“I can’t live without them,” she declared to her mother. As she said so, a floor lamp beside her chair went dark. Her mother, rising, checked the bulb and rattled the stem. Ten minutes later, when Belinda regained confidence and said, “I can make it,” the lamp flickered on.

“What is wrong with that lamp?”

“Nothing is wrong with the lamp,” her mother insisted.

Six more times that evening, the lamp switched on and off by itself in concert with her will to live and her wish to die.

Mr. Kenworthy, the funeral director, visited the next day to take her instructions. She had not planned a funeral before. She asked for Carmen’s cornu. She had given the necklace to him for his birthday to replace his crucifix. “It’s an Italian talisman, a good luck charm. It looks like a horn.” Mr. Kenworthy lowered his eyes and said nothing.

Three days later, St. Patrick’s conducted a Mass of Christian Burial in Carlisle. She stepped haltingly through the front doors wearing her arm cast, a neck brace, and two black eyes. The moment her eye alighted on the three white caskets, she fainted.

After the funeral, Sis escorted her to the townhouse to pack some belongings. If she stayed in this place, the shadow of memory would suffocate her. She did not recognize her feelings as grief. To grieve would be to accept what was contrary to history and biology. Closeness to children constituted her character and occupation. She observed herself opening the door to the toolshed and reaching for an axe. On the drive to McKinley Avenue, her mother reported that she had climbed the stairs to Nicholas’s room and swung the axe against his crib until it lay in matchstick pieces.

Every night that first week, Buck eased her into her childhood bed as she negotiated the pain in her ribs. She entered sleep pining for a way back to her husband and children. Her nights, clammy and dreamless, denied her access. During the short winter days, Sis and Buck, Sue Ann, Uncle Larry and Aunt Linda, and her grandmothers took turns sitting with her, patting her hand, listening to her reveries of mothering. “Such an easy child Nicholas was, a young two, still a babe,” she simpered. “Jason! Why did I have to scold him?” Carmen was a good man, her best friend. They had a honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg and enjoyed five years together before the children came. She talked like this incessantly, compulsively. She talked to rub over the pain. She talked to fill the time. She feared that if she stopped talking, she might forget them.

The fire chief rang the doorbell. He brought findings from Trooper Kotula’s investigation. Three young Mexican men had spent the afternoon guzzling liquor inside My Ladies, a roadside bar on the edge of New Oxford, two miles north of Red Hill. A witness had spotted them stumbling in the parking lot. They had climbed into the Mercury sedan and headed south toward Hanover. The driver had crossed the center line going ninety miles per hour, more than twice the speed limit. Trooper Kotula surmised that he had passed out at the wheel with his foot on the accelerator.

The extraordinary speed had lifted the car airborne over the crest of Red Hill. The sodium light she had perceived in the moment before losing consciousness shone from the Mercury’s headlamps on its downward plunge into their windshield. Hitting head-on at a forty-five degree angle, the two-ton Mercury flipped tail over head and ripped the Chevette apart. The sedan proceeded to skid on its roof two hundred and ten feet down the hill. The weight, angle, and velocity generated a force of impact that could not have dealt Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas any pain.

That Friday, Belinda stepped gingerly into the office of the Carlisle Sentinel with photographs of Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas smiling beatifically. “This didn’t have to happen,” the reporter warned revelers in a front-page story on New Year’s Eve. Half the number of all Americans who had died in Vietnam perished every year in drunk driving crashes. The roadway pandemic was the nation’s leading cause of death in people under thirty-four. On the roads running around Hanover alone forty-three people had died this year in such crashes, another record toll.

Public health advocates urged a prevention model, blaming the alcohol industry. The previous year, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court had rescinded the Blue Laws at the behest of business interests. The Blue Laws had banned the sale of liquor on the Sabbath since William Penn’s Quakers had put the prohibition in place in1682. An alternative model, espoused by conservatives, called for longer jail sentences to deter and punish individual offenders. Belinda sided with the law-and-order conservatives. She herself drank regularly, copiously.

That same Friday, Pastor Hector Ramos conducted the funeral of Armando Merino, the twenty-three-year-old drunk driver. Just one person, a white woman, attended. She did not introduce herself. Addressing the funeral director, she asked him to open the casket. When he resisted, she insisted. Peering in, she gasped, turned on her heels, and walked out.

January brought Belinda’s thirtieth birthday. She longed to grasp a cause beyond the mechanics of the collision. The enormity overbore the word accident. A mishap implied an unforeseen contingency, inimical to her ingrained habits of thought and feeling. If the Blue Laws had been in place, no bar would have served the men that Sunday. Then again, Carmen had implored her to stay home. And she had elected to take the Chevette, the lightest car in America, rather than their gas-guzzling sedan. The dark-brown Ford they left in the garage, equal in size and weight to the Mercury, had four doors and a hardtop roof.

Stop it, Sis interceded: “We don’t do guilt. That will get you nowhere.” Her mother had been warning against guilt since she was a young girl. Guilt was a stupid emotion, a handmaiden of Catholic melodrama.

Reverend Glenn Ludwig visited from St. Paul’s. Belinda knew him from the services she attended twice a month on the mornings following her Saturday evening card club. Reverend Ludwig had honored Sis’s call to assist with the funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s in Carlisle. Now he unbuttoned his coat and jacket and sat on the edge of the sofa. He asked Belinda and Sid to dab their eyes. They bowed their heads in prayer.

If God gave sight to the blind and commanded the lame to walk, Belinda said sharply, then why had God taken her family away from her? “God did not make this happen,” Reverend Ludwig maintained. “It was an accident, a purely physical event. Two pieces of matter were at the same place at the same time, and they couldn’t be.” A look of umbrage passed between her and her mother. They were not fooled by the reverend’s attempt to provide God with an alibi. If the collision was indeed an accident, then why had God failed to intervene and prevent it? And why had God humiliated her, forcing her to live?

Nobody could explain to her why the Mercury destroyed every part of the Chevette except the one pocket of space where the firemen had discovered her with her seat belt still fastened. What were the odds? A thousand to one? A million? When she had quizzed the fire chief, he threw up his hands and declaimed what Reverend Ludwig declined to affirm: “It was a miracle.”

An awkward silence fell between them. She glared at the reverend, unappeased, until the storm inside her broke. She spat on the carpet. “That is what you could do with your God,” she cursed.

Sis invoked the spiritual counsel of a fellow parishioner at St. Paul’s, a woman with bespoke gifts not possessed by the likes of Reverend Ludwig. Hanover’s churches and business clubs frequently opened their anterooms and auditoriums to visiting astrologers and clairvoyants. Downtown, inside lavender-scented warrens honeycombing cindered alleyways, freelance mediums propitiated crystal balls, Ouija boards, and Tarot cards.

At the séance, the medium wrinkled her nose, shuddered her shoulders, and tossed her head from side to side until she finally made contact with Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas. None of Belinda’s decisions could have changed the outcome, the medium opened her quivering eyes and avowed. If Belinda had elected to stay home in their Carlisle townhouse that day, the gas furnace would have exploded.

The medium elaborated the spiritual writ behind her reading during a visit to McKinley Avenue. Belinda learned that God encoded every baptized soul with the precise date of its body’s death. When the body reached the end of its earthly tether, a new body reincarnated its soul.

The word omen crossed her mind. Two days before the catastrophe, she remembered, she had taken Jason on an errand to the butcher. She had intended to cook and freeze meatballs in advance of the New Year’s Eve party that she planned to throw at the townhouse.

“Mommy,” Jason had said when she stopped at a red light, “I’m going to smoke when I grow up.”

“You shouldn’t, smoking hurts your health, and it can make you die.”

“Well, I am going to die.”

“Yes, dear, we are all going to die one day.”

“No, you don’t understand. God knows that I’m going to die, and he could keep me from dying.”

Buck had some misgivings about the medium’s epiphanies, astonished by her claim that he had been Sis’s son in their former lives. Like Carmen, Buck had a doppelganger. He looked like Charlton Heston. (At the mall once, he posed for a photograph as if he were the actor in the flesh.) Still, the construction sites he superintended kept his feet planted firmly in the material world. Three years on the front lines in France, Belgium, and Germany ducking into foxholes, dodging the Luftwaffe’s bombs and bullets, also instilled in him a sense of death’s caprice. What he had done to survive had not escaped the vault of his private memory. Nobody talked about the violence of war.

Buck turned to his brother Don, the Lutheran pastor who had solemnized the marriage of Carmen and Belinda. Don had served as an army chaplain in the war. The Nazis had taken him prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. Don objected to the medium’s claims: Predestination was a heresy against free will. He challenged his brother: “Why not walk in front of a moving bus then?”

“Dad,” Belinda countered, “the thing is, you can walk in front of that bus if you want to tempt destiny, but if it’s not your time to die, that that bus will hit you, and then you’ll live the rest of your life as a cripple because you’re not meant to die yet.”

Her Catholic friends were bogged down in grief, still clinging to conventions honoring those who perish before their time. The eleventh of February would have marked Jason’s fifth birthday. On that day, the public library in Carlisle received honorary donations of books. The J.C. Penny Department Store sponsored a ten-thousand-meter footrace to benefit a memorial fund. “Many of the children really don’t understand what’s happened to Jason,” the director of the YMCA’s Tiny Tot program sighed to the newspaper.

In March, Belinda squirmed in a front pew at a special Mass in St. Bonaventure’s Catholic Church, the Monterrosi family parish in Sharpsburg. After the Mass in Carlisle, Carmen’s father had asked to view the Chevette. Uncle Larry had escorted him to the lot in Hanover. Peering inside the crumpled vehicle and noting the absence of blood, he stood back and shook his head. How could Belinda have survived this? Carmen must have swerved at the last moment to save her life. Now she listened to the priest in Sharpsburg repeat the lie and pronounce Carmen a martyr.

God had sacrificed Carmen for our sins, the priest intoned, just as God had sacrificed his only son. She boiled at the lugubrious incantations. She was further inflamed when she learned that Carmen’s father had been buttonholing neighbors with word of his tragedy. He had not picked up the phone to reconcile with his son after the Thanksgiving betrayal. She regarded her father-in-law’s passion play as contemptible.

A practical question, even more delicate, remained between them. Would she please exhume the bodies, so that the Monterossis’ could rebury them in the Catholic cemetery in Sharpsburg? She refused. Obsessing over the bodies was pointless, immaterial.

Their deaths were predestined. Their deaths were also illusory, the dismembered bodies of Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas insubstantial vessels for souls bound to shine again in the faces of new people. No miracle had spared her life. Her expiration date had not arrived. That was all. She had not fulfilled her purpose. God signaled as much to her on Christmas morning in her room at York Hospital, and then again that evening through the floor lamp at home. The medium feathered the metaphysical hole the Mexicans had torn in the Lutheran theodicy. The esoteric character of the claims befit the perverse extremity of the disaster.

The plan she had envisioned upon falling in love with Carmen at Slippery Rock College had come true. She had married him, taught special education for three years, earned her master’s degree, birthed two children, and returned to work. Yet God’s plan was always going to truncate hers two days before Christmas in the year nineteen seventy-nine. There was no need for her to blaspheme God or to repent her sin of hubris. The restoration of her trust in time on the astral continuum scabbed the wound. Her heart fundamentally unchanged, she cocked her ear for the quaking of her lost souls as they migrated to new bodies. To exit the liminal space she occupied, she simply needed a new plan.

The story of Christmas on Red Hill streaked across the region’s newspapers and television stations for a few days. It marked the kind of senseless tragedy that elicited tears from Oprah Winfrey, the emotional young anchor at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. The event cast a pall over whispered conversations at Adams County’s bridge clubs and church socials, hair salons and Sunday brunches, bringing the nightmare of the 1970s to a grim apotheosis. Throughout the decade of decline, amid the slaughter on the county’s roadways, hundreds of its young sons had trickled home from fighting in Vietnam, many of them privately shattered. The paramedics and firemen on Red Hill that evening counted among the veterans.

So did my father, a former U.S. Marine who witnessed and inflicted unspeakable carnage. In August 1971, the same month that Belinda and Carmen got married at St. Paul’s, my father returned from his trip halfway around the world a basket of nerves. His war demons soon chased him out of our family. He read about her disaster over the breakfast table in his childhood home in New Oxford, where my grandfather and grandmother tried without much success to rehabilitate his moral collapse.

The story of Christmas on Red Hill brushed past my own life on the first Friday. I stood beside my mother inside our empty brick home in New Oxford looking through our double-paned front windows toward the street. A long car with a purple flag rolled toward the cemetery next door. “There goes the man who killed Belinda’s family,” my mother mused. They went to high school together.

Belinda’s new plan entered my life seven months later. On the morning of July 19, 1980, I buttoned into a light blue tuxedo. Deposited at The Greenskeeper, the restaurant run by Uncle Larry and Aunt Linda, I shook hands with Buck and Sis, Sue Ann and Uncle Don. Reverend Glenn Ludwig greeted thirty-five guests on the lawn. He said the benediction, led the Lord’s Prayer, and pronounced my father and Belinda man and wife. I was nine.

Carmen’s mother and father had begged her to wait. But Belinda accepted his proposal less than three months after bumping into him, a protective cast still wrapped around her right forearm. She sold her townhouse in Carlisle and cut ties with her friends. In Abbottstown, a few miles from Hanover, she and my father built a new house atop a hill overlooking eleven acres. Reachable by gravel road, the isolated farmstead echoed with the sounds of barking dogs, tractor wheels crunching and grinding, deer hunters firing their rifles, and, overhead, an occasional medevac helicopter whisking a car crash victim to York Hospital.

That first autumn, they planted seven hundred white pines along the meadow. The interior of their Yankee Barn-style house she festooned with images of child angels embroidered on pillows and cushions. One entire wall in the living room she plastered with photographs of Jason and Nicholas. At Christmas, she brought out her German smokers and placed them on the mantle, next to Santa Claus and his retinue of elves and fairies.

The prestige of marriage restored her. The mood of the country brightened, inspired by a first lady who appealed to astrology and a president who signed the nation’s first drunk-driving legislation. “It’s morning again in America,” President Reagan intoned. Belinda gave birth to Adam eleven months after the wedding. A second son, Sheanon, arrived on her calendar eighteen months later. Adam and Sheanon bore my father’s eyes and my stepmother’s blond bangs. Visitors remarked on their uncanny resemblances to the children portrayed in the photographs. Adam and Jason and Sheanon and Nicholas even shared respective personality traits. In my half-brothers, Belinda saw the gleaming reincarnations of her deceased children.

She soon stopped taking the long route between Abbottstown and Hanover. She went right over Red Hill. She returned to work in a special education classroom in New Oxford. She never visited the three graves in Carlisle. Instead, she participated in prayer chains and stoked the glow of her celestial faith. “I can’t tell you how many times in school,” she often remarked, “that I said to my aide at the end of the day, ‘I’ve got to check the calendar, it’s got to be a full moon.’ Because when full moons hit, it’s just pandemonium. The jails and hospitals fill up too.” She continued to consult mediums, now backed by my father’s sympathetic credulity. On the third anniversary of the collision, he opened his eyes and claimed to see an apparition of a little girl staring at him from their bedroom closet. He said she wore a white dressing gown. A medium in Hanover told Belinda the girl had been her daughter in a former life. “She’s right there with you now,” the medium exclaimed.

Every twenty-third of December, Buck descended into the basement on McKinley Avenue and flipped through a file of newspaper clippings stored in beneath his work bench. Sis venerated divine emanations. On vacation at the Jersey shore, she used to get up early with Jason and stroll along the surf. The summer before the collision, Jason had waded with delight toward a school of starfish he spied in the low tide. The summer after, a starfish washed up at Sis’s feet. She pinched it out of the silt and took it home.

The sixth anniversary of the collision vindicated Belinda’s metaphysical conviction. She drove Adam home from his nursery school. “Mommy,” he blurted out from the back seat, “do you remember that time Jesus picked me up and put me in your arms?” A surge of exultation passed through her. She had repossessed the souls of Jason and Nicholas.

The child in me esteemed Belinda’s healthy-minded resilience. I admired how she resisted the flattened identity of the trauma plot. After moving to the city and finding a second home in the language of modernity, however, I bucked the sentimental view of time and circumstance prevailing on my native ground. William James, philosopher of the “multiverse,” would have recognized the old Americans of Adams County as believers in “the block universe.” In this psychic constitution, James wrote, “the frame of things is an absolute unit,” the horizon of novel possibility terminally recessive. After my fall into modernity’s self-consciousness, I realized that the block universe had enlisted me as an extra in a spiritual drama whose prewritten script floated above history’s nest of thorns, a netherworld in which “all time is simultaneously present,” as James wrote.

To my father, Belinda’s tragedy must have felt more authentic than his own. To me, the magic circle they improvised came to seem like a mutual confidence trick, a bathetic move from the sublime to the fantastic that divorced time from history and bore no more reality than the masquerade of men who converge in nearby Gettysburg every July to reenact battle scenes of mass death. “It is what it is,” my father often avowed, burying the elements of volition and chance in quicksand triggered by my questions. Death arrived, he said, “when your number comes up.” About the deaths of children in Vietnam, the precipitating cause of his crackup, he never opined. Yet the shame he tried to sublimate in Belinda’s story erupted in beastly rages. A sentence in W.G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction articulated a fragile suspicion that I eventually embraced as my own. “I had grown up,” Sebald wrote, “with the feeling that something was being kept from me: at home, at school, and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean information about the monstrous events in the background of my own life.”

Thirty-five years after Christmas on Red Hill, after my father’s “number came up,” I drove to the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg to reintroduce myself to Reverend Glenn Ludwig. A boyhood spell of brooding over souls and demons had broken during an adolescence spent crossing and recrossing my restless legs in the pews. The clangor of church bells now fallen silent, my rabbit’s foot discarded, my fear of ghosts banished, I was left to reckon with the poetic fictions that opened up the abyss in my life. I saw a father and stepmother who swaddled the past in blindfolds and hallucinated the forwarding hand of spirits. Maybe a conversation with Reverend Ludwig could jog loose some piece of the origin story I sought.

The aftermath of the collision came back to him vividly. At the Mass in Carlisle, he said, he had nearly lost his composure while standing over the two tiny white caskets on their trestles. He recalled several visits to McKinley Avenue. I asked if he had not fretted then over the medium who operated out of the anteroom of St. Paul’s. According to Deuteronomy 18: 10-11, “There shall not be found among you anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer or a medium, or a wizard or a necromancer.” Satan could have been impersonating Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas during the séance. Reincarnation, I further observed, contradicted the church’s core doctrine of resurrection.

Reverend Ludwig was nonplussed. Reincarnation could stand as a parallel belief, he averred, a consolation that did not preclude resurrection so long as one did not push the theology too far. As he knew, the German Lutherans inhabiting Adams County did not care to be pushed. He had walked with Belinda through her valley of dry bones. He had assured her that Carmen, Jason, and Nicholas went to heaven. He had not risked tut-tutting over canonical doctrine. In a crisis, the congregants of St. Paul’s called on him for the purpose of saying as little as necessary. A verbose intercession over theological scruples would offend their stoicism, embarrass their rural modesty.

We discussed the spiritual bricolage in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the timeless tales that my grandmother read to me at bedtime. They illustrated how salvation by faith, requiring no miracle of grace, invited Lutherans to turn to paganism for aesthetic solutions to existential anguish. The German tradesmen, artisans, and yeoman farmers who had settled the area must have carried pagan mysticism out of the Black Forest and into the Pennsylvania wilderness. “The Juniper Tree,” one of the fairy tales set down by the brothers Grimm, even told the grisly tale of a decapitated young boy’s metamorphosis to a reincarnated soul.

I asked Reverend Ludwig about the premarital counseling he conducted for Belinda and my father. Had he asked my father about his spiritual hangover from Vietnam? No, the reverend answered, he knew better than to broach the topic. His own father had left his faith at the Battle of Tarawa, one of the most horrific of World War II, and had returned home cold and distant. He never spoke about the war and scorned his son’s entry into the ministry.

As I departed, Reverend Ludwig mentioned a piece of news that gave me pause. The campus where we sat, the oldest Lutheran seminary in America, was scheduled to close permanently. I wondered to myself whether the church’s doctrinal reticence had not been a mistake. As Marylanders poured northward to escape their state’s income tax, Lutherans now counted half as many worshippers as Catholics in twice their number of congregations.

A final facet of December 23, 1979 nagged at me. All these years, the voices on the other side of Red Hill had remained mute. Belinda had often recounted the collision. The three strangers in the Mercury, however, she had let go, never inquiring about their identities or circumstances. Their foreignness had added social disgrace to her injuries. A respectable white Christian family snuffed out by three Mexicans was mortifying. She repeated just one symbolic detail. The men, she said erroneously, had ridden in a Cadillac.

My investigation suggested that Armando Merino, the agent of the atrocity, had left little trace in the vicinity. The Hanover police had once picked him up for disorderly conduct. A marriage certificate dated three months before the collision was signed by a justice of the peace. Merino’s father, according to the certificate, worked as a foreman in Guanajuato, Mexico, his own birthplace. The white woman who had appeared at his funeral must have been his betrothed, a local woman named Mary Ann Danner. Her mother was born in Germany. Mother and daughter worked side by side in a sewing factory in Hanover. Mary Ann’s cursive filled every part of the marriage application. Merino signed his name in block lettering.

I stopped by Feiser Funeral Home with my information and learned the name of the minister who had conducted Merino’s service. I took the turnpike into the apple orchards and turned onto a side road toward the Assembly of Pentecostal Church of Jesus. Pastor Hector Ramos said he often retold the story of the collision in his sermons. To this day, Ramos swore, he had never confronted an event so harrowing. He implored the migrants in his ministry to believe that Hispanics could become bank managers, lawyers, and doctors. “But when you hit the bottle, that changes everything,” he grimaced. “The bottle distorts all kinds of stuff. They just can’t get away from it.” Ramos himself, born in Puerto Rico, had nearly died from years of wanton consumption of beer, whisky, and vodka. When his met his wife, she introduced him to Jesus Christ. He converted from his Catholicism to her Pentecostalism and drank never more.

I asked Pastor Ramos if he entertained beliefs in predestination or reincarnation. He smiled and clapped together a palmful of air. “The reasoning is beyond us,” he said. “Trust God. God is sovereign. He has the right to do as he pleases with us. There’s a lot of whys, but it’s all in God’s hands. Our minds, our doings, are usually based on something else. God doesn’t have love. He is love. So, we just have to trust. Trust God. He knows best.”

The deaths of children prompted the most dangerous theological problems he allowed. When I pressed him, he did not turn ruminative, like Reverend Ludwig. He turned rock-ribbed and invoked the Book of Job.

I thanked Pastor Ramos and drove to the cemetery in New Oxford, pausing before my old brick house to remember the moment I had stood inside with my mother, looked out the window, and stared at the hearse conveying “the man who killed Belinda’s family” to his final destination.

I found headstones marking the graves of my father, grandfather, and grandmother above the banks of Conewago Creek. My search did not turn up Armando Merino’s plot. I knocked on the caretaker’s door. The temporary marker, he reported, was mowed over many years ago. Before me, nobody had asked about the spot. He directed me to a section where the bodies of such persons reposed in eternal anonymity.

I walked over and stood for awhile, gazing down at the grass. “Every moment is a window on all time,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, channeling the sovereign spirit of Adams County. Yet Armando Merino never went home again, and my efforts to see past the palimpsest of memory were blocked by smudges and silences, the picture window between heaven and earth fated to remain opaque. Despite myself, I glanced skyward and wondered who possessed the man’s soul now.

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[This essay first appeared in Liberties in 2025.]

Ever since ChatGPT launched in the fall of 2022, it’s been impossible to scroll through a social media feed, to listen to a podcast, or to read anything in the news without getting blitzkrieged by declarations of generative AI’s indomitable ascendance. Entire industries and governments are scrambling to implement the hottest new technology. One recognizes in the urgency a sense of panic over the possibility of missing the bullet train of progress. “If you’re an artist, a teacher, a physician, a businessperson, a technical person,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns, “if you’re not using this technology, you’re not going to be relevant compared to your peer groups and your competitors and the people who want to be successful. Adopt it, and adopt it fast.”

The tocsin call of technological paternalism insists that the dim-witted masses, namely, the rest of us, must have our technologies spoon fed to us. AI skepticism implies our ignorance of the allegedly iron laws of teleological progress. We should all just believe whatever tech companies are telling us and prostrate ourselves before Hegel’s World Spirit. As Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reminds us, “Every generation worries that the new technology will change the lives of the next generation for the worse—and yet, it’s almost always the opposite.” Futurist Ray Kurzweil, most famous for prophesizing that our consciousness will be uploaded to the cloud, like it or not, acknowledges that although AI can be abused “by superpowers that want to control people,” technological breakthroughs turn out much more positively than fear-mongers suggest. Software engineer-turned-venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in his article “Why AI Will Save the World,” assures us in the same vein that we’ve seen all this before, as in electric lighting, automobiles, radio, and the Internet. Ergo, the skeptics are “irrational,” merely captured by a “social contagion” of hysteria.

Behind this willed ignorance of complicated human consequences lies a utopian doctrine that technological solutions should be proffered for, well, everything, that the messiness of mere human affairs ought to be shoehorned into the domain of engineering. Mark Zuckerberg has been unironically floating the idea of deploying personal AI companions and therapists to stanch rising levels of loneliness. Oracle founder and multibillionaire Larry Ellison, whose views on AI surveillance wouldn’t be out of place in a Chinese Communist Party memo, claims dashcams, doorbell cams, public cameras, AI cameras, and AI-controlled drones should be deployed to stop school shootings, discourage police misconduct, and ensure citizens are “on their best behavior.”

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The doctrine that social and political problems can and should be addressed by reducing them to engineering challenges is not exactly new. In To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), written during the early days of social media and app mania, Belarusian writer Evgeny Morozov dubbed this impulse “solutionism”—the ideological compulsion to recast complex social situations as “neatly defined problems with definite, computational solutions” or as “transparent or self-evident processes that can be easily optimized.” The doctrine is even older. In 1966 nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg, in his article “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?”, introduced the concept of “Quick Technological Fixes,” namely, solutions that solve “immensely complicated social issues” via technological engineering. One “does not wait around trying to change people’s minds” when “crisp and beautiful” solutions can circumvent the need to persuade people to modify their behavior through democratic discussion.

Techno-solutions provide the technologist with the means to fix a given social problem while bypassing the need to change the behavior of the pesky people affected by that problem. According to Weinberg, “the technologist is appalled by the difficulties faced by the social engineer,” who must persuade people to behave differently. Persuasion is a “long, hard business” because “people don’t behave rationally,” at least not in terms of technological rationality. The appeal is one of scale. As Weinberg writes, technological solutions involve “many fewer individual decisions.” This point was voiced by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal at a 2014 event hosted by The Baffler. Thiel, debating anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber on the topic of stagnation, commented on why he prefers engaging in projects through tech startups and tight-knit groups of investors rather than through social and political means. “The preference I have for startups rather than large movements,” he said, “is that you have to convince a much smaller group of people…that the future can look very different.”

There is a corollary: Solutions reached by technology deliver the rest of us from the burden of thinking about the implications of our behavior. Just as the technologist doesn’t have to worry about the “frustrating business” of “forcing people to behave more rationally,” we don’t have to change our behavior. As Weinberg writes, we don’t have to “forgo immediate personal gain or pleasure…in favor of longer term social gain.” When discussing the social problem of water scarcity, he underscores why he believes the social engineer’s solution—asking “people to behave more reasonably” and improve their attitudes toward the use of water—to be inferior: “Green lawns and clean cars and swimming pools are part of the good life, American style…and what right do we have to deny this luxury if there is some alternative to cutting down the water we use?”

But what if we persist in thinking about the implications of our freedom from thinking? We might conclude that we are being conditioned to accept a certain form of escapism, a delusional retreat from reality. We might conclude that we are being asked to become nihilists, at least if we agree with the philosopher Nolan Gertz, who calls nihilism “a way to evade reality.” Gertz explains in Technology and Nihilism (2024) that as we have become accustomed to relying on technologies to resolve all of our problems, we are beginning to cultivate a faith that they will always be there for us, that some demiurge will always take over our personal and social duties and remove bothersome frictions standing in the way of our desires. About the problems we see around us, this faith “motivates us to do nothing.” This is how, according to Gertz, we manage to ignore climate change. Most of us “seem to be sitting comfortably indoors while leaving what’s happening outside their homes for governments and tech companies to sort out.”

The nihilism of our acquired will to do nothing, moreover, numbs us to the root causes of problems. Gertz points to productivity-enhancing lighting in offices. Fluorescent lighting, with its unnatural spectral composition, has been shown to disrupt circadian rhythms and to suppress melatonin production, which leads to fatigue and decreased cognitive performance in office workers. Swapping in natural lighting, businesses have increased employee alertness, productivity, and wellbeing. The nihilism operating here is that, in assuming that employee productivity, mood, and cognitive function are caused by lighting technology, and not by something else, we forfeit the will to inquire what else might be afflicting us. What if the root problem is that our jobs suck?

This same shortcircuiting of critical thinking transpires in the rush to integrate AI into nearly every domain of life. Take the case of Zuckerberg’s AI friend and therapist project. Whatever positive arguments one might concoct for using Large Language Models for these purposes (perhaps they are equitable options for those of us who can’t afford human therapists), they inevitably overbear the notion of probing more fundamental issues, such as what social dislocations may be causing the so-called “loneliness epidemic” and why mental health services from humans aren’t already more accessible to us.

Whether it’s office lighting, generative AI psychotherapists, or something else, technology, by eliminating our need to face the root causes of our ills, engenders a nihilistic mode of living, a will to do nothing about our problems, because it provides convenient mechanisms for us to avoid the difficult work of existing as moral agents who grapple with scourges for which real solutions may not be so simple, if they even exist.

This doesn’t mean technological solutions are inherently bad. What it does mean is that if we recognize the risks of nihilism engendered by overreliance on technological fixes we will be motivated to make more conscious decisions about what risks we are willing to accept. We will be in greater control of our lives. Failure to claim our right to think, conversely, encourages digital subservience. As media critic Douglas Rushkoff writes in Program or Be Programmed (2010), “In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed.” That ship has sailed in social media, where users are actually the product offered up to advertisers, who pay the companies for our attention. Uber and Lyft drivers, meanwhile, help to train the algorithms that will be used by the very self-driving cars that will replace them.

The logic is no different with AI. Consider the “humans in the loop,” the millions currently toiling to ensure that AI models learn accurately and run smoothly, labeling and categorizing images, text, and other data. These human workers perform critical grunt work for massive tech companies by providing the foundational “ground truth” that AI models require to learn accurately. Poorly paid, they are the convenience we experience when using Large Language Models. Behind each dazzling text generation from Claude or ChatGPT is a human hunched over a laptop computer who made it possible. Whether humans should be used by machines, or whether or not it’s bad that revolutionary generative AI products require the digital version of a Dickensian factory worker is a moral question requiring moral reasoning. Yet our will to engage our moral imaginations is precisely what technological solutions atrophy. Technical rationality is the efficient application of maximum means for optimal results, stripped of human meaning. The product, know-how, is an end in itself.

What’s coming is not merely digital slavery, but the planned obsolescence of the species through indifference as to whether we continue existing as humans.

A glimpse of this existential nihilism one may find in Ross Douthat’s recent New York Times interview with Peter Thiel, which covered topics of technological advancement, stagnation, even the antichrist. At one point in the conversation, which concerned life extension, transhumanism, and the “creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine,” Douthat asked Thiel if he thought such efforts were merely hype. Thiel responded this way:

Douthat: Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

Thiel: Um, yeah.

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Yeah well, I —

Douthat: Yes?

Thiel: I don’t know, I — I would — I would, um —

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many — there’s — there’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: [emphatic] Should the human race survive?

Thiel: [pause] Uh…yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel: But — but uh — I would —

That such a softball question—Should the human race survive?—evoked such equivocation is no isolated eccentricity. AI is the latest phase in a long-running effort by the powers that be to turn (some) humans into things, because things don’t care if they continue existing. The solution? It’s easy. Think for yourself.

On Wednesday, Haverford College President Wendy Raymond will testify in the U.S. House of Representatives before the Committee on Education and Workforce. In an April 21 letter, Chairman Tim Walberg of Michigan summoned President Raymond to provide testimony and documents pertaining to accusations of antisemitic discrimination at the wealthy liberal arts college. The presidents of DePaul University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, will appear before the committee as well.

In January, a federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected a Title VI lawsuit brought by three Jewish plaintiffs who alleged rampant antisemitism at Haverford: “A litany of complaints related in a general way to the same subject—in this instance the serious problem of antisemitism—is not the same thing as a legally cognizable complaint pled in accordance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” Last week, President Raymond posted her own thoughts about the upcoming hearing.

The following statement was given to us for publication by members of Haverford’s Jewish community in dissent. The members who drafted and endorsed the dissent have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The irony is rich. But the statement speaks for itself.

—John Summers

A Statement from the Haverford College Jewish Community

We are members of the Jewish community at Haverford College, and we write this letter on behalf of many Jewish faculty, staff and students at Haverford who do not feel that our college is a hotbed of antisemitism. We feel that our voices have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism at Haverford.

Our Jewish community at Haverford is diverse, if that is still a legal word to use in the United States. We come from Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist backgrounds and practices. Some of us do not support the nation state of Israel. Some of us do. Some of us support it and critique its current government and practices thoroughly, as do many Jewish people in Israel and in the diaspora. We are of different ages, we come from multiracial families, we reflect different political viewpoints. We talk about our family b’nei mitzvahs in the halls and see each other at temple or we prefer to have the right not to talk about and connect our religion to our workplace. We are not a single Twitter or X feed. Some of us are not on social media at all, which is perhaps why you are not familiar with our voices.

We do feel that our range of views, politics, and religious practices is not being represented in the name of our college on the national stage. And we can only describe this as an unacceptable way of policing, censoring, distorting and inhibiting our Jewish life and our Jewish identity, and the holy connection of our faith to humanity and justice.

We are concerned that poorly reported press accounts and public statements of the current plans for the House Committee of Education and Workforce to meet with our college’s president, Wendy Raymond, have exacerbated the flattening and silencing of our Jewish community to achieve ends that have nothing to do with our own. And we respect our college’s policy acknowledgment that any enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law passed to end segregation, institutionalized racism and the longtime violence against Black people in the United States and fought for by many Jewish people, must apply to all the students who attend our college, not only to the Jewish ones. Anything less would mean the end of equal protection under the law, and our Jewish community at Haverford fundamentally supports equal protection.

We are concerned that a longtime set of struggles within the Jewish community, between our visions of religious practice, between the old and the young, between our differing views of Israel and its state projects, between the whiteness and the transforming multiracial life of the Jewish community, between straightness and queerness, and more, are now being adjudicated in a Christian nationalist public sphere, with some of our fellow Jews at Haverford and beyond using Christians who don’t actually care about our community to win punishing victories over other members of our Jewish community. We in the Haverford Jewish community don’t accept this strategy.

We write representing the range and diversity of the Jewish community at Haverford. We reject any actions conducted in our name that misrepresent the reality of our lives and our campus. We also reject any projects or directives that work to ban the connection of our religion to its sacred work of repairing the broken world.

David Graeber: Is our educational system designed to create pointless people? Answering yes could explain why a system originally designed to train factory workers has changed so little over the last half century, despite the rapid decline of industrial employment. These jobs have not been replaced by service jobs as much as by clerical, administrative, and supervisory jobs that confer upon their occupants an overwhelming feeling of pointlessness. Some surveys estimate that as much as 40 percent of workers in wealthy countries believe their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world, either because they do nothing at work—nothing that benefits society—or because they feel the world would be better off if they weren’t doing it. Fifteen percent report they are actively trying to do their jobs badly for this reason.

For some years now, Brian Eno and I have been talking about how to make sense of the education systems in Britain and the USA. These systems don’t make a lot of sense. They are founded on an industrial model, clearly designed to train future factory workers. But they are jumbled together with the results of periodic reforms that are designed to inject freedom, creativity, democracy, or radical individualism back in—as if we can never complete make up our minds whether we want to train poets or machine tool operators—and end up trying, and largely failing, to produce both at the same time. What follows are some snippets from these conversations, as well as some of our broader conclusions.

Brian Eno: The way education works now in England, it starts within this wonderful freedom of the Montessori and learn-through-play and so on, and within, say, six or eight years it passes to “pass the exams.” So it funnels down to this terrible quicksand of the exams, which destroy all creativity. What we have as a result is a highly successful system for producing useless people.

David: Yeah, I ended up coming to much the same conclusions: it's obvious we're not really training people for factory work any more, so why all the empty ritual? And why this obsession with memorizing things to pass the exams when everyone can just look stuff up on Wikipedia anyway? Then it occurred to me: maybe the pointlessness actually is the point.

I’ve noticed how since I went to college, it's become almost taken for granted everyone has to have a “real job” while they're in college, even if they don't really need the money, which now you usually do. But what they mean by “real job” is actually a fake job. Because what you normally do in college is actually quite goal oriented: your job is to pass the exam, or to complete a project or to write a paper; you figure out the most effective way to achieve the result; you're assessed on the quality of the product, if you try to bullshit your way through a paper, you'll probably get in trouble. And the same goes for most of the things you might do with your spare time in high school or college, whether it's starting a band or growing pot plants.

So why do they insist you should get a taste of the “real world” by making you rearrange bottles behind the counter at the student union or fill a chair as an administrative assistant? Well, because real work in our society is fake work: they want you to learn how to spend time that doesn't belong to you, and that isn't goal-oriented, how to seem cheerful when you're bored and how to look busy when there's nothing to do. That's “reality.”

Brian: Do you know the musician Robert Wyatt? Did you know he was paralyzed when he was in his twenties? Fell out of a window. And one of the results was he started smoking, a lot. (Not drugs, cigarettes.) I asked him about that one day and he said:

I think the point of smoking is to reduce your health to the point to the level at which you are able to exercise.

So his idea was if you're too healthy, your body has too much energy, so you reduce your health to the level you can handle; you make yourself iller to the point you can fit in the place that society has selected for you—as a paralyzed man (who used to be a drummer by the way). He reduced his health to suit what he was now capable of doing.

I think that's what education is doing, at least to a large extent. When you look at kids, in their early years, they're so creative and so chaotic. They're learning machines. Society as it presently exists has no place for people like that, or very little, so we tamp it down, teach them to instinctively feel learning is a painful experience.

David: Yes, like the way kids are always asking follow-up questions: “well why do they do that? Well why do they do that? Well why...” Which can drive you crazy, but one day, I had this realization: a lot of adults drive you crazy in the opposite way. They never ask follow-up questions.

I noticed that in grad school when I would have conversations with my mother. I'd throw out some idea, and she'd always just say “oh okay, well I have an opinion about that too....” My mom was an extremely intelligent person but she'd only had one year of college, and I notice with people who hadn't gone through a lot of intellectual training, conversations would often feel almost like ping pong, “well I think this!” “Oh yeah well I think that!” “Oh yeah well I think this!” They'd never say, “but why do you think that?” or “but wait if that's true wouldn't that also mean...?” So at first I thought well, maybe grad school really is good for something. But then I realized, wait! 5-year-olds do that all the time. It's all they ever do! Somehow it's getting knocked out of people, and then we maybe put it just halfway back in higher education.

Brian: I always say when I'm talking about this that kids are born creative and it takes 11 years of education to completely knock it out of them. Perhaps the easiest way to diagnose the problem is imagine what education would be like if we actually did want to prepare children for a society in which most work had a purpose, and everyone felt there actually was a good reason for them to be trying to achieve it—almost exactly the opposite of what most people experience at work today. Consider this four-point program:

• First of all, I'd say we'd want to leave children alone some of the time. There's this crazy notion that someone has to be entertaining or occupying or monitoring you all the time. But most of my best memories of childhood were making up elaborate games, or hiding somewhere and reading books—it's actually quite extraordinary how many books I managed to read in my early teens. [David: yes, in the summer we used to go to the beach and there was this ground-cover then called bayberry, if you look at it from up close it's just like a forest, with hills and dells and clearings... I spent lifetimes in that stuff.]

• Second: 'starting from now.' For some reason they teach history from the earliest time onwards, so you start by memorizing things which make absolutely no sense to you. What if they were to start by asking an eight-year-old to write a history of the 1970s, ask their parents what it was like... they'd get a sense of what was actually at stake in such things.

• Third, if you're going to assign a task, assign one that actually makes a difference. Kids can tell when something's bullshit. So if you're teaching economics, why not have them try to actually organize the school lunch program, balance the books, see what that really entails, or if you're teaching about democracy, have them actually decide something about school policy and abide by their decision..

David: Actually I think this relates to what I was saying about opinion ping-pong. In the U.S. we do have the idea, it goes back to John Dewey, that we should train people not just for industry but for democracy. So they're always asking students, even fairly small children, for their opinion, which it's my impression they don't really do in, say, India, or France. But it has occurred to me that an “opinion” is what you have when you don't have any power. The Prime Minister doesn't have opinions; she has positions and policies. Opinions float around, baring teeth with nothing to bite into. So, they often take on an extreme, expressive quality—“I say let's just nuke 'em”—that no sane person would hold when expecting to trigger real-world consequence. That makes for a vicious circle. The actually powerful people say, “we can't have too much democracy because most people, their opinions are really extreme.”

In this way, a system supposedly set up to create democratic sensibilities has the opposite effect. We look over our shoulders at our neighbors and say: “Thank God that guy doesn't have any input—or we'd really be in trouble.”

Brian: We're not trained how to think together. We tend to teach a set of techniques, rather than cultivating the mind, which necessarily means cooperation, listening, deliberation,

David: In anarchist-inspired consensus training, we set up mock debates. Three or four people set forth positions, and then just when the speaker thinks she’s supposed to set out her own position, we say, “all right, now summarize what the second speaker was trying to say.”

Brian: England invented two great educational systems. One was Art School, which is all about freeing the mind. In Art School, there's never a right answer. It's always, “Think again. How might we see that from a different perspective?” Whatever the box, we try to see how many different positions there might be outside it. The other great system, I think, that came out of England was called something like “the greats”—I always forget the proper name for it, but it came out of Oxford University and it's essentially the study of the philosophy and literature of the ancient world. And it's kind of completely pointless, unless you're going to become a teacher who teaches the same thing. It has no 'real world' application.

David: I see: so it's only point is itself. But isn't that kind of the opposite of 'starting from here'?

Brian: It is, but it also comes much later. One of the interesting things about Bletchley Park during the war—you remember where all that Enigma decoding was done, the place Alan Turing worked—was that a lot of the people who worked at Bletchley Park came out that program. In either case, arts and greats, it's all about cultivating imagination. So let's say you're studying the Second World War. They randomly decide: you're Winston Churchill, he's Goebbels, that one's Hitler, this is Stalin, that is Montgomery, and the rule is you have to argue from their position where you give that person maximum credit. What would have been the best possible explanation for his decision to start a war, what had happened to him that would have made him thought that a purge was the best thing to do. And I thought: what a brilliant idea that was. That is like your example, saying “would you please present my position in the best possible light.”

David: . . . which in turn is the exact opposite of what you're taught to do as an academic...

David: The point of Brian's schema—or, the point of our presenting it—is that these are all the things one would not do if one's aim was to deaden young minds to prepare them for pointless forms of employment, under someone else's direction. The easiest way of course to do this is to actually assign children pointless tasks under someone else's direction. Of course play could be considered “pointless” in the formal sense as well: but just as being able to make up the games that one is playing, individually or collectively, is perhaps the highest expression of human freedom, being forced to play a game not of one's own making is probably the ultimate expression of lack of freedom—this seems to be a large part of why those forced to perform bullshit jobs report themselves so miserable.

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The harm of constant supervision is self-evident. But removing knowledge, both of past and future, from any sort immediate impact on a student's immediate conditions life can be seen as a subtle way of doing the same thing. It's not just to make a culture based on democratic deliberation seem impossible, or undesirable, by casting us all into the deserts of “opinion,” and ensuring we never learn the basic skills of listening and thinking that would be required to create a democratic culture. Obviously it is that. But it's also to inure us to the idea that the games imposed on them shouldn't be measured by any independent criteria at all—“I spend all day color-coding information from internal audit forms that no one will ever look at. Why are we collecting this information anyway?”

Some years ago, psychological anthropologists performed a series of experiments to try to determine whether all human beings are equally capable of basic logic. It was a bit of a silly undertaking. If someone was really incapable of performing basic logical operations, they'd probably be dead.

They gave a series of syllogisms first to a group of rural Africans who had attended primary school, then, to a group that had not. Sure enough the second group did much worse on the test. But when they analyzed the results, they found that it wasn't so much that members of the second group made errors of logic; they just wouldn't accept the framework. If the experimenter asked “the chief always gets upset when people drink cane liquor. George is drinking cane liquor. Is the chief upset?” members of the first group would tend to accept the terms and just say “yes.” Members of the second would be much likely to answer, “well, you see it all depends on what kind of drunk George is. If he's a belligerent drunk, the chief definitely won't like that. But if he's the type who just acts silly for a while and then passes out...” Or they'd assume it was a game of making up stories, and try to make it more interesting: “well, the chief might pretend it's George's drinking that makes him angry, but really this is just a ploy: really he's in love with George's wife...” What the first group had learned in school was, primarily, not to do this.

We believe this has profound implications. Above all, it suggests the main thing our current system of education teaches us is that we must accept that—when a figure of authority is present—we play no role in making up the story, and second of all, that the story doesn't have to make any kind of sense. If a man with a white coat shows up and starts asking you questions, you accept the terms as they are given to you. Even if what he's saying has nothing to do with observed reality, you know to just shut up and play along. Later perhaps you can exchange opinions about what happened. But that's about it.

This is perhaps the most important thing one learns in grade school. This is why the industrial elements in education have barely changed, despite the decline of factory work, and why more and more education in the US and UK has been oriented to passing tests. It is the perfect preparation for a life of bullshit jobs.

“I adore the United States,” the French Senator Claude Malhuret told me recently over salad and a Coke Zero in Paris’s Café de Flore. The literary watering hole made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir was packed with chic, would-be intellectuals imbibing glasses of wine or downing shots of expresso. “In France we do things because they have always been done this way. In America you do things because they have never been done this way.” Wherever he disembarks stateside, the size awes him. “In America, everything is large and it is possible; in France everything is small and it is impossible.”

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Yet Monsieur Malhuret, a former longtime mayor of the French town of Vichy and a current member of the Senate party, Les Independents, had just given a passionate speech in the senate attacking President Trump’s administration as “Nero’s court,” complete with “an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a Ketamine-fueled buffoon [Elon Musk] charged with purging the civil service.” What is happening in America, he proclaimed, is not merely “an illiberal shift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy.”

Malhuret said he was certain that in time America will respond appropriately: “I have confidence in the strength of American democracy.” Nevertheless, in short order “Trump has done more harm to the America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator [Vladimir Putin]; now we are fighting a dictator supported by a traitor [Trump].

Someone chanced on a video of Malhuret’s speech and translated it into “very good English,” thus distributing it on social media around the world. To date, only Bernie Sanders—“a perceived extremist who has recently become one of the sole sane voices in the US,” as Malhuret described him to me—has leveled comparably eloquent criticism of Trumpism. Malhuret meant to push European allies into re-arming in support of Ukraine rather than relying on its suddenly unpredictable ally in the United States. Still, the viral distribution of his speech raised in his mind a question: Why are so many American politicians, especially Democrats, so “timid?”

I wondered about Malhuret’s own motivation. Most of his senate speeches he described to me as “C’est normal.” Some others—about international topics such as Covid, the French “yellow-vest” protestors, the Ukraine—have gone viral. He sees nothing exceptional about most of them. But Malhuret’s audience seems drawn, as I was, to the deep humanity in his voice. Where does it come from?

In 1981, during Malhuret’s presidency of Doctors without Borders, an event reshaped his political temperament. His newlywed wife, the physician Christiane Malhuret, was delivering humanitarian aid to the African nation of Cameroon when her car flipped over. A United Nations medical aircraft arrived six hours later as she seemed to be taking her last breaths.

Tragically, scarring in her brain gave her a permanent disability, the Syndrome of Caravelleau, making it difficult for her to speak, to walk, and to use her hands. With his new wife 95 percent handicapped (according to official French measures), Malhuret made an unexpected life with her. Today, they have two adult daughters.

When I asked about Madame Malhuret, her husband extolled her spirits. “This is the most important thing in all handicaps,” he said. Most victims of cranial trauma fall into profound depression. But his wife kept extraordinarily good spirits. I could not help thinking that his loyalty had something to do with her emotional resilience. “She walks with a cane but she walks,” Malhuret said. “Perhaps tomorrow we will have to hire someone to take care of her 24/7”—Cavavelleau’s Syndrome is a deteriorating condition—”but today she does not need any of this.”

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Malhuret is not the only French politician whose politics have been steeled by a family member’s disability. There is much talk in France these days of returning to the staunch French independence championed by Charles de Gaulle. But not everyone knows that that the handicap of de Gaulle’s daughter, Anne—born with a severe form of Down Syndrome in 1928—shaped him profoundly. “Without Anne, I would perhaps never have done what I did,” de Gaulle once declared to biographer Jean Lacouture. He doted on his youngest daughter until she died—at age 20—in his arms. Her life gave him strength to stand up to the Nazis, who collected and killed off persons like her, and by extension informed French resistance. After the Second World War, de Gaulle and his wife established the Anne De Gaulle Foundation to support the intellectually and developmentally handicapped. When he died in 1970, he was buried next to his beloved daughter.

“The comparison to Charles de Gaulle is unexpected,” says Claude Malhuret. “I have been more forged by my decades working in 3^rd world countries than anything else, but I have also been forged by the handicap of my wife, it is true. He points out that the pathological depression—and ultimate suicide—of oldest daughter, Laurence, informed the sensibility of [Former President] Jacques Chirac as well. “Chirac’s sympathy for the weak in our society, his open heart, was due to his daughter,” commented a journalist, Pierre Hurel.

We need more politicians like Claude Malhuret. He is a man with a message for the world. Where are his American counterparts?

C. Wright Mills had a little to say about a great many subjects and a lot to say about a few subjects of great importance. The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956), his trilogy, marks a fault line in Anglo-American cultural history, not only between the Left old and new, but also between the modern and the “post-modern epoch,” as he wrote in 1959.

Modern ideologies marshaled the Enlightenment against the myth, fraud, and superstition of the medieval epoch. Liberalism and Marxism developed theories of human beings as secular, rational, peaceable creatures, then transformed these theories into collective projects. But the social structure of advanced industrial capitalism defeated the ideologies of progress. The failures, betrayals, and ambiguities of liberalism and Marxism disinherited modern man, according to Mills, who wrote as a defender of humanist aspiration as well as a witness to its eclipse.

No biography of Mills worth reading has appeared since his death in 1962. This is surprising. He was a spiritual descendant of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Turgenev’s Bazarov, and Jack London’s Martin Eden, one in a long line of “new men” born into mass society. Sons without fathers, nonparty revolutionists, they were intellectuals as well as actors, roles between which they acknowledged no need to choose. They stole into the imagination of Europe and America in the nineteenth century and played havoc ever after.

Mills, too, was an outlander. Born in Waco, Texas, in 1916, he endured a year in military school before enrolling in the University of Texas in 1935. In Austin, he studied sociology and philosophy with a group of professors trained in the Chicago School of pragmatism. At the University of Wisconsin, where he went for his doctorate in sociology and anthropology, he met German social thought in the person of Hans Gerth, the refugee scholar. Following an interlude at the University of Maryland, he joined Columbia College in 1945. He taught there until his death at age 45.

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A Texan by birth, an anarchist by temperament, a pragmatist by training, Mills made himself into a “Hemingway Man.” An autobiographical note in 1953 envisioned his breakout from Morningside Heights:

The Hemingway Man is a spectator and an experiences; he is also a world traveller, usually alone or with changing companions. When I have travelled and camped out west, when I have thought about Europe, always when I have thought about Europe, I have tried in somewhat feeble ways perhaps even ridiculous ways, to be a Hemingway Man.

Mills grew into the role he set for himself as if expanding in concentric circles, first focusing on the American Midwest, then widening to encompass the cities of the East, then radiating outward to Europe, where he went for the first time in 1956. Late though he was in going abroad, he was not long in making up the time. He arrived as the Cold War system in international politics was suffering shocks from which it was never fully to recover. Writing in 1957, after spending a weekend with the Students’ Union of the London School of Economics, he saw a possible renaissance in humanist values: “I’ve the vague feeling that ‘we’ may be coming into our own in the next five or ten years.”

If 1948 was the last year of the thirties in the United States, let 1956 stand as the first year of the sixties in England. Khrushchev’s speech against Stalin collided with the rebellions in Poland and Hungary later in the year year to burn away the last residue of faith. Belief in the need for a revolutionary Left now coincided with disbelief in the Communist Party as its organizing agent and moral tutor. E. P. Thompson and John Saville, two of 7,000 who resigned their Party memberships after the events of 1956, founded the New Reasoner to educate the disappointed and savage the culpable. Thompson assailed Stalinism as “militant philistinism” and demanded a confrontation with its crimes

Mills learned about the personalities and politics of the changing English Left from a Belgian Jewish émigré named Ralph Miliband, who had invited him to the LSE. Miliband was a perfect host. A member of the editorial board of the New Reasoner, he had joined forces with a second group of dissenters, headquartered at Oxford University. Here, it was the Suez affair, rather than the crisis of communism, that quickened pulses. Awareness that a post-ideological epoch had already dawned was the theme of the Oxford group’s magazine, Universities and Left Review.

An early contribution to the magazine by Stuart Hall, “A Sense of Classlessness” (1958), located the real significance of the Suez affair at home. A “sense of class confusion” befogged liberal and Marxist efforts to describe post-war English society and its resource-grabbing foreign policy, Hall thought. Urban housing complexes were replacing brick homes in working-class neighborhoods, where attitudes were changing in favor of automobiles, kitchen appliances, and televisions. Corporations were conquering small enterprises with the aid of bureaucracies that were reaching deeper into private life. Hall continued:

A number of interpenetrating elites or narrow oligarchies [now superintended] “a permanently exploited, permanently alienated ‘mass’ of consumers—consuming goods and culture equally. The true class picture which so skillfully conceals itself behind the bland face of contemporary capitalism is broadly speaking that which C. Wright Mills describes in The Power Elite.”

Mills visited his new friends in England as often as he could. He appeared on We Dissent, a television documentary produced by Kenneth Tynan. He headlined a speaker series in Soho at the Partisan Cafe, a forum run by Universities and Left Review. He went with Miliband to Warsaw, where he met Zygmunt Bauman, Julian Hochfeld, and Leszek Kolakowski, leaders of Poland’s 1956. In the best-selling pamphlet that grew out of the trip, The Causes of World War Three (1958), Mills asked readers to imagine “a world without passports” and argued forcefully for the political independence of Europe.

Around his academic colleagues at Columbia, Mills guarded his manner. Around his friends in England, he let out his gregarious side. “He had this enormous intellectual curiosity, a real willingness to learn,” Norman Birnbaum has said. John Saville has “very warm memories” of him: “He was an extremely lively, very intelligent, bloody interesting intellectual.” Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor, and Peter Worsley held similar impressions.

Mills arrived in London on Saturday, January 10, 1959, for a week’s visit. The next day, he appeared on a television program, “We Dissent.” On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, he delivered the University Lectures in Sociology at the London School of Economics. He found time to attend Miliband’s seminar on political theory, fielding questions from the students, and to attend a meeting of the editorial board of the New Reasoner at Doris Lessing’s flat. Dorothy Thompson, watching him on television, thought he looked like most American professors. Then she met him at Lessing’s, “and this great cowboy heaved into sight.” In Mills she perceived an example of left-wing integrity, a man of commitment in an age of collapsing faiths: “He was a good listener, and intellectually very curious and open. I was completely swept away.”

The BBC recorded Mills’s LSE lectures and broadcast them for three weeks. The Times described him as “6 ft tall, with a chest like a grizzly-bear’s and a face as tanned and craggy as a cowboy’s.” According to the Times Literary Supplement: “Mr. Wright Mills bursts among the pundits’ discussion of the American situation with the explosive force of James Cagney at a tea party of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” Michael Foot, editor of the weekly London Tribune, announced: “HERE, AT LAST, IS THE TRUE VOICE OF AMERICAN RADICALISM.” Mills was “radical, adventurous, free of jingoism and militarism, open to exciting thought and effective popular action.” Many English intellectuals believed the Cold War had snuffed out America’s revolutionary heritage, “but it is not dead. And it speaks through Wright Mills.”

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Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” summoned these special relations to a consummatory moment. Published in September 1960 in the New Left Review (the project of a merger between the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review), the letter implored English intellectuals to transform the absence of ideology into new theories of history and human nature, to take what they needed from the warring dogmas of the Cold War and leave the rest behind. Mills wrote in slangy prose and memorable wisecracks, but it was the first paragraph that endeared him to his comrades abroad:

When I settle down to you, I feel somehow ‘freer’ than usual. The reason, I suppose, is that most of the time I am writing for people whose ambiguities and values I imagine to be rather different from mine; but with you, I feel enough in common to allow us to ‘get on with it’ in more positive ways.

Getting on with it meant going to Cuba. In August 1960, Mills took two Nikon cameras and an audio recorder out of his suitcase, dropped into a jeep waiting outside the Havana Riviera, and toured the island. Everywhere he looked, he saw a society expanding under a morning sun of success. A revolution had convulsed a despotism. The military stage of the revolution was turning into reconstruction by voluntary self-education. Standing in a downpour at the edge of a former cattle ranch, Mills listened to Fidel Castro and a cadre of military officers debate the best species of tree to plant in the fields. “So the real ideological conflict under discussion is pine trees versus eucalyptus!” he exclaimed into his recorder?

“We are new men,” proclaimed Listen, Yankee (1960). “That is why we are so original and so spontaneous and so unafraid to do what must be done in Cuba.” Mills’s pamphlet, part explanation, part evocation, met with unified acrimony in the United States. The New Republic compared him to “a merger of Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Vidkun Quisling, retaining the worst features of each.” The Washington Post compared him to Wilhelm Reich, a genius gone mad. Syndicated columnists assailed him in towns and small cities from coast to coast. “Don’t Let Prof Mills Fool You on Cuba” ran one headline; “Author of Book on Cuba Thinks He Fools You” ran another. The Federal Bureau of Investigation deployed agents near his home in West Nyack, New York.

The strain was too much. The night before Mills was to debate the revolution on NBC television, he suffered a heart attack that put him into a coma. Pushed by hostility at home, pulled by the offer of a chair in sociology at the University of Sussex, he returned to England in April 1961. He took a flat in London, enrolled his daughter in school, and thought about settling.

Meanwhile, the New Left Review confronted a crisis. The magazine’s ambitious publishing arm had issued a series of pamphlets, but organizational bickering and financial difficulties had impeded progress. E. P. Thompson, broke and demoralized, arrived at editorial meetings with holes in his shoes. Both John Saville, chairman of the magazine, and Stuart Hail, editor from its inception, quit the board late in 1961. Other resignations followed.

The disarray enhanced Mills’s value as a mentor. Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, part of the second generation of student radicals to rattle through Oxford, met with him often in these months. “We were pumping him for information and advice,” recalls Blackburn, who also remembers looking on, guiltily, as Mills strained to climb the stairs to the fifth-floor flat where they held their tutorials. Cuban politics and classical social theory dominated the sessions. Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (1959) struck Anderson and Blackburn as a text at once exotic and relevant. Sociology had gained a toehold at the LSE, and the British Sociological Association (BSA) had opened in 1951. But most of the founders of the BSA did not identify themselves as sociologists. Membership still counted in the low hundreds, and only two universities had departments, neither located at Oxford or Cambridge.

“We live in a society that is essentially opaque,” wrote Anderson and Blackburn in New University, a campus extension of the New Left Review:

The origin and sense of the events in it systematically escape us. This obscurity is also a separation: it prevents us seeing one another and our common situations as they really are, and so divide us from each other.

Along came Mills, promising that sociology, classically conceived, could uncover orienting points and organizing principles, could spur “a transvaluation of values.” His radically sociological approach to power offered methodological aid as well. In 1957, a group of researchers for Universities and Left Review compiled the income, benefits, training, and social connections of the men who staffed the top posts in industry. The group titled its report The Insiders (1957) after determining that a few hundred corporations controlled the economy, and that wherever the state intervened, it became a partner in monopoly enterprise rather than its critic. “Public ownership,” the slogan of state socialism, masked oligarchy. Universities and Left Review published The Insiders as a pamphlet, which sold out quickly.

No record remains of Mills’s impressions of Anderson and Blackburn, but they must have impressed him strongly. One of the last things he did in January 1962, when he went home to die, was to nominate a new editor for the New Left Review. Anderson assumed control and Blackburn joined the editorial board in March, the month Mills succumbed to a heart attack.

E.P. Thompson compared him to William Morris. “We had come to assume his presence—definitions, provocations, exhortations—as a fixed point in the intellectual night-sky,” Thompson wrote in a two-part essay on Mills in Peace News: “His star stood above the ideological no-man’s land between the orthodox emplacements of West and East, flashing urgent humanist messages. If we couldn’t always follow it, we always stopped to take bearings.” Ralph Miliband mourned his death “bitterly and personally” in the New Left Review: “In a trapped and inhumane world, he taught what it means to be a free and humane intellect.” Miliband named his newborn son after him in 1965. “I got to feel closer to Mills than I have ever felt to any man, or shall ever feel again, I should think,” Miliband wrote to Thompson.

The editorial reconstitution of New Left Review instilled in veterans of Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner “a sense of isolation,” Thompson later wrote. Those who had come to political awareness in the thirties and forties, for whom 1956 had been a pivotal year, lost the initiative to a generation that came to awareness in the late fifties. As a Labour government assumed power in 1964 and supported the American war in Vietnam, it was Anderson and Blackburn who directed the New Left in England.

Mills’s influence persisted. Blackburn’s long essay and most important early work, “Prologue to the Cuban Revolution” (1963), offered a sociological history of the “power structure” in Cuba and a political alternative to the liberal portrait of a middle-class revolution betrayed. According to Blackburn, Cuba’s belated independence from Spain, the shocks delivered to its economic and political institutions in the decades thereafter, plus foreign manipulation of its markets: these peculiarities of Cuban history had inhibited social cohesion on the island. The middle-class had not developed any collective interests, had not grown conscious of itself as an ideological opponent of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. Rather than standing for any popular goals or social programs, Batista had ruled through a patchwork of strategic alliances, the hollowness of which was revealed by its inability to sustain a fight against the outnumbered, outgunned guerrillas. These weaknesses of ideology and social structure explained why the dictatorship had collapsed so speedily, leaving behind a vacuum. Castro’s guerrillas, once in power, expanded into it with a comprehensive program of practical assistance.

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Anderson’s “Origins of the Present Crisis” (1965) and “Components of the National Culture” (1968) worked the theoretical side of his inheritance into a paradox: England, the cradle of capitalism, had produced neither first-class Marxist theoreticians nor bourgeois sociologists equivalent to French and German exemplars. In Anderson’s struggle to see through this background of parochial complacency, in his effort to gain a total view of social structure by means of a sociological analysis that was at once historical and comparative, the hidden hand of Mills showed through.

Mills lived on as political ally, as sociological tutor, and as the author of aphorisms, epigrams, and slogans that lingered and expanded in the mind of his English readers. Labour MP Anthony Crosland complained to the BBC about the diffusion of his ideas: “Many people on the left see America as the arch-capitalist country dominated by a power elite of big industrialists, Wall Street bankers, military men and all the rest of it. And so, since they are anti-capitalist, they are inevitably anti-American. Personally, I think that this picture of America is terribly exaggerated. I do not think America is run in this crude way by a capitalistic power elite.” An essay by Denis Brogan in the Times Literary Supplement, titled “Spooks of the Power Elite,” also complained about his influence. Mills “appeals to the same conspiratorial tastes on the left as do the theories of the John Birch Society on the right. His diagnosis is fundamentally passive and pessimistic.” His admirers, however, did not fail to recognize the positive intentions behind his post-1956 work, his effort to forge from the homelessness of radical values a new beginning. They remembered, all too well, what he had said of those values in his LSE lectures in 1959:

It is time for us to try to realize them ourselves—in our own lives, in our own direct action, in the immediate context of our own work. Now, we ought to repossess our cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes.

In October 1966, the Socialist Society at the LSE published a pamphlet challenging the selection of Walter Adams as the school’s new director. The pamphlet argued that Adams, recently the Principal of University College in Rhodesia, had not proved himself liberal enough on the matter of race to enjoy the privilege of leading a student body riddled with questions about colonialism. The pamphlet struck up a furor. The leader of the LSE Students’ Union sought answers about the appointment from the official selection committee. Instead, he was arraigned by a disciplinary court for criticizing school authorities: an offense against regulations. Very soon, protest over the new director grew into the first major student strike in English history.

The rebellion at the LSE introduced sit-ins, boycotts, and marches that lasted for the remainder of the academic year. Here as elsewhere, not only the decisions of the authorities, but the authority to make the decisions stimulated the indignation of students. Officials punished them for defying the rituals of dissent. The punishments spurred bolder acts of defiance. Most English universities endured such conflicts in the sixties, but none rivaled the LSE for scale. More than 40 percent of the student population took part in at least one of the protests in 1966 and 1967; more than 60 percent of sociology students did so. And here as elsewhere, the confrontation escalated in 1968. Thousands of protesters were expected to come to London at the end of October to voice their displeasure over the war in Vietnam. Would the LSE allow some of them to stay on campus? Walter Adams would not. Eight hundred students seized a building for themselves.

Robin Blackburn, recently appointed lecturer in sociology at the LSE, co-edited a volume of essays on the occupation: Student Power (1969). The essays connected the state of production and consumption in advanced capitalism to the misshapen condition of higher education and challenged the image of universities as island communities, innocent of the violence of foreign policy. As Perry Anderson wrote in his contribution: “This is a direct attack on the reactionary and mystifying culture inculcated in universities and colleges, and which it is one of the fundamental purposes of British higher education to instil in students.”

References to Mills appeared throughout Student Power, but the essays, ironically, bore the greater influence of French, German, and Italian Marxists. The irony lay in the ideology. Mills had made his appeal in England as a critic of left-wing cant and dogma. Alone among American intellectuals, he brought none of the moral liabilities of a communist past and at the same time exemplified unbroken radical commitment. This effort to stand in no-man’s-land, taking fire from both sides, made his work uniquely available to dissenters on all sides of the Cold War. His greatest achievement was his independence. “There is now no substantial reason to believe that Marxist revolutions will come about in any foreseeable future in any major advanced capitalist country,” he wrote in 1962, completing the end-of-ideology thesis in his trilogy.

The movement for an independent Left in England had been born in its refusal to be misled by the false rivalry of communist and bourgeois. It had withdrawn from the bankrupted ideologies of the modern period so as to begin the task of rehabilitating the moral culture of humanism. Yet when the most important student strike in English history presented itself, the New Left imported its model of thinking from a knock-off edition of the same old texts.

Anderson’s paradox, bemoaning the apparent fact that England had given birth to the social system of capitalism without producing any corresponding Marxist thinkers, was an actual paradox only from the perspective of the Marxist theory of history. “The starting point here,” Anderson wrote:

will be any observed irregularities in the contours of British culture, viewed internationally. That is, any basic phenomena which are not a matter of course, but contradict elementary expectation from comparative experience and hence seem to demand a special explanation. Such irregularities may provide a privileged point of entry into the culture as a whole, and thereby furnish a key to the system.

Or in other words: Anderson slipped on X-ray glasses, which afforded him metaphysical confidence that “the system” could be rendered transparent. Then, looking through his “privileged points of entry into the system,” he identified the very asymmetries, irregularities, and disjunctions Marxism had keyed him to find in the first place. The bourgeois opposition he buried in overlapping contexts. His own model he floated above time and place: “Marx’s thought was so far in advance of its time and its society that it was unassimilable in the nineteenth century.”

Mills had called such reasoning by fiat “Sophisticated Marxism” and likened its obfuscating function to Grand Theory in liberal social thought. In both cases, he wrote, a “sophisticated” conceptual knowledge and elaboration of radical theory coincided with a radically arrant political intelligence; what appeared to be a bid for greater rationalism concealed a note of mysticism. As Anderson wrote, in a characteristic tautology: “Events that fail to happen are often more important than those which do; but they are always infinitely more difficult to see.”

If Anderson was right about “the complete mutism of the past” and the “objective vacuum at the centre of the culture,” was there nothing in society to defend? Blackburn’s contribution to Student Power, “A Brief Guide to Bourgeois Ideology,” said Anglo-American social theory was nothing more than the functions it fulfilled in “the system,” the wheels and levers, pulleys and pumps, hooks and handles of the capitalist machine. Ideas? No more than myths by which the “power elite” ruled. Blackburn hooted at “bourgeois analysts,” “the bourgeois political theorist,” “bourgeois social theory,” “bourgeois economists,” “bourgeois sociologists,” “the myths of bourgeois pluralism,” “most bourgeois theorists,” “the customary refuge of the bourgeois sociologist,” “the weak stomach of the modern bourgeois social theorist,” “the amnesia of modern bourgeois epigones,” and on and on. Subtracting the word “bourgeois” would have exposed the essay as a thin mix of phrase-mongering and finger-pointing.

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The New Left gained something more decisive than polemical firepower from its turn toward Marxism. Anderson made much of the fact that both Marxism and bourgeois sociology had produced a “theory of society as a totality,” arguing that without such a concept of totality, then “the era of revolutions is, necessarily, unthinkable.” This longing for a concept of totality, needed for the purposes of clarification and available in Marx’s metaphysics, struck Anderson and Blackburn blind when they went to judge the political significance of the occupation of the LSE.

The manifesto of the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation, adopted in November 1968 and subsequently published in the New Left Review, shunted aside political parties, trade unions, and student reform organizations. “Mass democracy,” it said, required “red bases in our colleges and universities” on the model pioneered by Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. Here was a concept of totality, armed and dangerous. Begun in 1966 under the banner “Combat Bourgeois ideas,” Mao’s program fell into the hands of Chinese students, who were burning books, closing parks, destroying paintings, and torturing their teachers. “It should not be thought that the call to make the creation of Red Bases a strategic goal of our struggle is merely a flight of rhetoric,” Blackburn explained, in the same issue of the magazine that carried the RSSF’s manifesto: “Capitalist power cannot just be drowned in a rising tide of consciousness. It must be smashed and broken up by the hard blows of popular force.”

Communications from Mao appeared in the New Left Review alongside enthusiastic reports from the Cultural Revolution. Anderson believed Mao’s theory of revolutionary practice was driving war and politics into a new unity. Recall how the Chinese students were treating their teachers. Now listen to Anderson on the occupation of the LSE:

A revolutionary culture is not for tomorrow. But a revolutionary practice within culture is possible and necessary today. The student struggle is its initial form.

On the evening of January 24, 1969, Blackburn presented a paper to a panel of the British Sociological Association. Gathered on the fourth floor of the St. Clement’s building at the LSE, the conferees heard shouting through the window. A young man bounded into the room and interrupted Blackburn’s presentation. While you are talking about the revolution, said the young man, it is happening outside. LSE officials had installed iron gates to guard against breaches of security. An emergency meeting of the Students’ Union had threatened to rip them down. Now a crowd of students tugged and whacked at the gates with a sledgehammer, crowbars, and pickaxes. They went at it for about an hour.

Later that night, in a previously scheduled speech, Blackburn celebrated the attack on the gates. Had he fallen silent then, rather than repeating his remarks on BBC television on January 30th, he might have evaded punishment. Instead, he was instructed to appear before a disciplinary tribunal, which was empowered to reconsider his future at the school. His letter of reply jeered at “the entire clique of self-appointed capitalist manipulators.”

The “capitalist manipulators” acknowledged that Blackburn had neither committed any direct actions nor incited any. He had made his remarks after the gates had fallen. They fired him anyway and closed the LSE for twenty-five days. The Maoists responded by occupying a building at the University of London and setting up an LSE-in-Exile. They greeted the reopening of the LSE a month later by boycotting classes, interrupting lectures, tossing stink bombs into meetings, and pulling fire alarms.

The LSE-in-Exile closed one day after it opened. The Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation folded. By the end of the summer of 1969, scarcely a year after Anderson made his revolutionary prophecy, the rebellion at the LSE stammered and wheezed to a halt. Thereafter, student interest in sociology fell, while the “capitalist manipulators” moved on to other enemies: inflation, shrinking support from the state, and dwindling morale. The American war in Indochina went on and on.

What would Mills have thought? In 1959 at the LSE, he recommended “direct action.” The next year, his “Letter to the New Left” exhorted the uncorrupted to consider that “the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals” might be best positioned to initiate a new beginning. He lectured on the subject in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Mexico, Poland, West Germany, and the Soviet Union. By and by, he spread his message all over the world. In September 1968, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded a classified report, “Restless Youth,” which identified Herbert Marcuse, Mills, and Frantz Fanon as the three leaders of the international Left. Between Marcuse’s abstract Marxism and Fanon’s revolutionary violence, there was his ghost, chasing both action and ideas without acknowledging the need to choose.

The New Man’s dream of creating new values out of the dialectic of thought and action must always know the difference between thinking too long and acting too soon. Mills’s American followers, no more adept at telling this vital difference than their English counterparts, met the same end. With the LSE strike about to break out, Columbia University students took over Hamilton Hall, the building where Mills had once had his office. Four additional buildings fell in quick succession. Who Rules Columbia? a pamphlet written by his former students on the model of The Insiders, justified the occupation, after which a Strike Education Committee opened a “Liberation School” that lasted not much longer than the LSE-in-Exile. Tom Hayden, an ardent admirer of Mills, presided for four days in Mathematics Hall, where he showed teams of militants how to slick the steps with soap in preparation for the police. “Columbia opened a new tactical stage in the resistance movement which began last fall,” Hayden wrote after the bust, sounding like Perry Anderson. “What is certain is that we are moving toward power—the power to stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve humane ends,” he wrote, in the same vein of misbegotten prophecy.

As Mills’s students carried his writings from 1956 into the maelstrom of 1968, the meaning of his biography changed in response to events he could not have been expected to anticipate. He may have accepted his portion of responsibility for the psychodynamics of the international Left before it reorganized into terrorist cells. Had he lived long enough to choose sides in 1968, however, his experimentalism would have seen him through many unknown contingencies, which would have altered and improved his perspective many times by then. All along, his pragmatism would have tempered his exhortations. The “Letter to the New Left” reminded readers to be “realistic in our utopianism” and asked: “Is anything more certain than that in 1970 our situation will be quite different?” Most likely, the choice of sides would not have been his to make. In his independence, he had refused to narrow the idea of radical commitment to a choice between confrontation and withdrawal. Yet these were the only terms on offer from his enemies and epigones at the end of the decade. His legacy torn apart by the very forces he unleashed, he would have been marooned on no-man’s-land.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

—W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

The October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas was morally barbarous and strategically futile. Nothing justifies the killing of innocents, not even the denial of a people's nationhood for 75 years, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them to make way for colonial settlers, or the killing of thousands of their own innocents in scandalously disproportionate 'reprisals.' And as for strategy, for the weak (and not only for them), nothing is less efficacious than such violence, which makes trust - the only reliable basis of lasting security - impossible. Better a people should suffer another 75 years of dispossession than that another such crime be committed in its name. Of course, those who would allow this people to go without justice for another 75 years, and who allowed it to go without justice for the last 75 years, share the murderers' guilt, and with far less excuse.

The loudest class of reactions - the most numerous, most anguished, most indignant - have been to the least consequential of statements: those by university students. Several dozen student organizations, probably representing several hundred individuals, issued a statement after the raid that began by holding Israel "entirely responsible" for "all the unfolding violence."

In response, academic luminaries such as Lawrence Summers, and more consequentially, billionaire donors such as Ken Griffin, Marc Rowan, and Jon Huntsman demanded that the universities in question (Harvard and University of Pennsylvania - though Penn was guilty only of hosting a Palestinian literature festival several weeks before the attack) officially disavow the students' statements. There was, of course, little debate about the substance of the letter beyond hand-wringing, and it has now been deleted, with the (desired?) result that there will apparently be little more. Is this how such matters should be handled in a healthy democratic society, or, for that matter, a self-respecting educational institution? Couldn't Summers or some other Harvard eminence responsible for the instruction of the young have descended from Parnassus and shown the deluded students the error of their ways in face-to-face debate? It might have modeled rational debate to a dangerously polarized society, which could have earned some public goodwill for institutions that had very little to draw on in the face of subsequent government assaults. And labeling students “supporters of terrorism” doubtless made it easier to target legitimate dissidents like Columbia's Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil.

What did the students mean by their first sentence holding Israel "entirely responsible" for the attack? They could not have meant what the sentence appears to mean: that Israel rather than Hamas carried out the attack. They must have been making a statement about moral responsibility for the attack. To absolve Hamas of responsibility for murder is plainly wrong; therefore "entirely responsible" is indefensible. But what if the students had written "largely responsible"?

Suppose that during the Vietnam War the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Viet Cong, had committed some atrocity comparable to Hamas's? I don't know how students then would have reacted, but surely millions of Americans would have agreed that the United States, as the aggressor, was "largely responsible for the unfolding violence", even if NLF atrocities were also morally wrong. Most of the world - though not Americans, by and large - believes that Israel is, in effect, the aggressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: for preventing the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees to their homes after the 1948 war and ever since; for continually extending its illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank; for devastating southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); for refusing to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, in which Hamas was chosen as the Palestinians' political representative; and for imposing an inhumane blockade on the two million inhabitants of Gaza, and carrying out vastly disproportionate reprisals, mostly affecting civilians, after previous Hamas attacks.

I'm pretty sure the rest of the world, having supported countless UN resolutions demanding that Israel give back the West Bank, would have ignored the students' statement or rebuked them for rhetorical ineptitude but not seen it as an existential threat to Israel or to Jews.

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Student-bashing is a species of left-bashing. If war is politics by other means, so are polemics about foreign policy. The right and the center have shown themselves determined to locate and publicise "irresponsible" formulations by the left. That would be welcome if they also deigned to take notice of the non-foolish things leftists have to say - often in the same piece - about centrists' and rightists' cherished illusions and guilty silences.

In "Notes on Nationalism" (1945), George Orwell observed:

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

The opinion and commentary I read after the attacks - in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and online sites such as Unherd, Quillette, Compact and Persuasion - has been almost wholly devoid of any mention of Israel's many crimes against the Palestinians, as though that would be to minimize the horror of Hamas's attack or deny Israel's right to lawful self-defense. On the contrary, the usual judgment about comparative criminality is implied, for example, in this entirely typical article from New York Magazine:

The Israel Defense Forces do not, as a matter of policy, aim to kill Palestinian civilians, though it is debatable how sorry they really are when they inevitably do. This differentiates them from Hamas, which glorifies the killing of innocent Israelis (because again, in their worldview, no Israeli is innocent).

In the 15 years before the Hamas attack, Palestinians suffered 6,407 fatalities and 152,560 injuries in comparison with Israel's 308 and 6,307, respectively.

Obviously, every event has both immediate and ultimate causes. In the present case, one should ask both who is responsible for the massacre and who is responsible for its context, the conflict that has generated so many past and (probably) future massacres. This is the left-wing reflex, which infuriates left-bashers, who insist that talk of root causes is merely an excuse for "revolutionary" violence. That is an evergreen fallacy: that to explain is to justify. It is doubtless, in some cases, an honest confusion; in others, an ideologically motivated dodge. In the latter case, its purpose is to deny that, beyond simply denouncing terrorism by the designated enemy, anything morally relevant remains to be said.

But some things do remain to be said.

• By the ordinary definition of terrorism - deliberate violence against civilians for political purposes - both Israel and the United States have also been guilty of terrorism: the former during its 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon, as well as many of its bombing raids in that country at other times, and its blockade and bombing of Gaza; the U.S. far more extensively, through its support, training and arms sales to many brutal regimes and insurgencies; the latter's large-scale bombing of cities in the Second World War, the Korean War and the Indochina War; and the Iraqi sanctions, which killed tens of thousands of civilians.

• The definition of terrorism should perhaps be broadened to include reprisals that can hardly fail to produce civilian casualties, like the bombing, strafing and bulldozing of inhabited areas where terrorists may be hiding; or that cause a grave deterioration in the life of an entire society, like large-scale jailings, house detonations, curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, school closings, border closings, import restrictions, destruction of cultural, administrative and agricultural resources, and more.

• Those responsible for a huge, flagrant, persistent injustice, which they could remedy without grave detriment to their own society's security, and which terrorists claim to be protesting, deserve some blame for the terrorists' crimes (an allocation that does not diminish the terrorists' responsibility). The left's critics deplore its lack of moral complexity, but their own understanding of terrorism is a virtual flight from complexity.

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Another simplicity to which Western (particularly American) intellectuals are prone is "rejectionism". According to the conventional wisdom, Israel has made many generous peace offers over the years, which Palestinians have refused, demonstrating their - and other Arabs' - fundamental unwillingness to live peacefully alongside Israel and absolving Israel of its prima facie obligations to somehow make whole the refugees of 1948 and relinquish Palestinian lands annexed since 1967. In the New York Times, under its executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, and the New Republic under Martin Peretz, probably the two most influential American vehicles of political opinion in the late 20th century, this view was unquestioned.

It was, nonetheless, false. The Egyptian Peace Plan of 1971, the PLO Peace Plan of 1988, and the Arab Peace Plan of 2002 all envisaged full diplomatic recognition of Israel. Israel rejected or ignored all of them. The reason, as with the Madrid, Oslo, and Camp David negotiations, is that Israel has never been willing to withdraw from all the occupied territories and allow a Palestinian state there. The history of the Byzantine manoeuvres with which Israeli negotiators managed to portray various schemes for partial withdrawal but continued control as generous peace offers is told in two books by Israeli writers: Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009) by the Oxford-based historian Avi Shlaim and Israel/Palestine(2002) by the academic Tanya Reinhart, as well as in Noam Chomsky's monumental and indispensable Fateful Triangle (1995).

Many have called the Hamas massacre Israel's 9/11. If so, we must not repeat that event's sequel. The response of American intellectuals to 9/11 was shameful. Only one explanation was allowed: the terrorists hated American values: democracy, progress, science, freedom. The notion that they had grievances, legitimate or fanciful, about American foreign policy was derided as "apologetics for terrorism" or "reflexive anti-Americanism", even though the George W Bush White House's chief counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, said the same thing, citing publications by al-Qaeda. Eventually, after a period of national mobilisation aided by these left-bashing intellectuals - Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, the drum-beating Project for a New American Century, the New Republic's mean-spirited "Idiocy Watch," which jeered at reservations about the war on terror - America marched off to two ruinous wars, one criminal and one of tenuous legality. Let us hope Israel is wiser and more law-abiding.

Apart from a few student revolutionaries, no one has actually welcomed the Hamas attack and called for more of the same. What, then, should Western intellectuals say to Israelis and Palestinians? We should remind the Palestinians of their own professed belief:

And the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation - his reward is [due] from Allah. Indeed, He does not like wrongdoers" (Koran 42:40).

I am pretty sure "wrongdoers" includes "terrorists". Islam, Judaism and Christianity all teach that it is better to suffer an evil than to commit one. Beyond that, we should advise them to appeal to the conscience of Israelis - and Americans, who have steadfastly enabled Israeli policy since 1967. Whether or not that advice turns out to be a cruel joke depends at least in part on us intellectuals, whose vocation it is to inform the conscience of our societies.

We should tell the Israelis that they must refuse to pretend they are blameless, whatever their politicians and their foreign cheerleaders tell them; that having suffered even the greatest of evils does not license doing evil in return, much less to those who had not done them evil in the first place; and that they have some substantial injustices to redress, and though doing so will probably not gravely threaten their security, they must do so whether or not - though of course as prudently as possible.

Finally, because power entails responsibility and preponderant power entails preponderant responsibility, Western intellectuals should not fail to address America's leaders and citizens. For the sake of a reliable and powerful ally in the region containing "one of the greatest material prizes in world history", as an American statesman described Middle Eastern oil in the 1940s, and secondly because of a ferocious domestic lobby, the U.S. has virtually conceded Israel carte blanche in its dealings with the Palestinians. The policy has been a success in its own terms: no serious threat to American dominance in the region has arisen in many decades. But it is realpolitik at its ugliest. The U.S. cannot dictate peace, of course, but its influence is immense: Israel has no other source of military and diplomatic support.

Unfortunately, no one in American politics now has the moral or intellectual stature to propose a just settlement. Israel's current political leadership is the most fanatical and bloody-minded in that country's history. And Palestinian politics have never recovered from the Israeli-American overturning of their election in 2006. In Israel/Palestine, it is midnight in the century.

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“He let his eyes run over the sea’s great expanse and set his gaze adrift till it blurred and broke in the monotonous mist of barren space.” This scene from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice came to mind when I learned of David Graeber’s death nearly four years ago. Like Mann’s protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, David decamped to Venice as a celebrated author sorely in need of a vacation. Shortly after completing the manuscript for what became his 19th book, The Dawn of Everything (co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow), he unrolled his towel on the same beach where Aschenbach expires at the end of Death in Venice. The poignancy of the moment gave him no premonition. “I’m in the midst of so many things,” he texted me the day before his heart gave out in a Venice hospital. He was 59.

I waved my way into David’s midst with a fan’s note circa 2007, a few years before his prominent role in Occupy Wall Street and the publication of Debt: The First 5,000 Years catapulted him into public-intellectual status. Back then, I was discharging the disillusioned remains of a lectureship at Harvard. Hearing that Yale had moved to purge David from its anthropology faculty, I wrote to express my unsurprised sympathy. He was a decade older and leagues more accomplished. He grew up Jewish and radical in Manhattan, a milieu foreign to my upbringing in rural Pennsylvania. Still, we met on the same wavelength. Reverse snobbery toward the Ivy League is a rare frequency.

Once I began editing The Baffler, the left-wing quarterly, I invited him to contribute from London, where he had wound up. He should write about whatever he fancied. I didn’t expect him to fancy auditioning his essays over the telephone in torrents of extemporaneous talk, interrupted by snorts of delight. Dialing into David’s giggle bewitched me into a friendship that overran and outlasted the workaday editor-writer relationship. As he talked, his ideas flowed in a companionable blend of earthiness and erudition. When the line went dead, the grief felt caducous, as though some part of myself fell away. The strangeness impelled me to wonder whether I had overlooked some larger property or principle at play in the tonic of his conversation.

I found the necessary clue in his theoretical ambitions. “What kind of social theory,” David asked in his 2004 pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “would be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs?” Any social theory that rode on the hip of democratic freedom would need to be flexible enough to nourish organic resistance to the imposition of total systems of values. But a “politics of protest,” he cautioned, would never be enough. Radical self-government also requires a regulative mechanism, some plenary dispensation to negotiate the differences that foil human understanding in the thick of social action. David could have laid down down an Olympian synthesis, a grand reconciliation of diverse points of view, and proceeded to bark strategic directions to social movements. Instead of telling others what to believe and when to act, he reached toward the terms of universal human emancipation by reconstructing social theory itself as an egalitarian conversation among equals.

Theoretical work in anthropology has long revolved around the dilemma of “incommensurability.” Societies in comparison may share common terms but value them differently, use them in contrary ways, or diverge over the creditability of evidence. The procedure of relativism seeks to deem each society in the comparison rational in the context of its own value system. But “incommensurable” perspectives are held to be incompatible, mutually exclusive, unable to be combined in any way that would settle the issue because the theorist cannot find a way to adduce equivalencies through a shared matrix of rational inquiry.

Versions of incommensurability have invigilated Western social theory ever since news filtered into European capitals of the existence of greater varieties of peoples than the precepts of medieval scholasticism could render intelligible. If the Enlightenment concept of secular rationality meant to forestall a nasty conclusion that radically different claims for being human would plunge the world into a permanent state of chaos, then the violent twentieth century left us with the specter of the incorrigibly irrational citizen. American social theorists abandoned the search for a logical justification of value a century ago.

How, then, is democracy possible? David complained in his 2001 book Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value that his colleagues had ceased to recognize the question. Chockablock with post-structural linguistics, the discipline instead announced “some giddy new ‘postmodern’ age in which no universal standards of evaluation any longer exist: that everything is endless transformation, fragmentation of previous solidarities, and incommensurable acts of creative self-fashioning.” These gestures, in his view, emulated the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, restricting all political claims to “creative consumption” and parochial assertions of “group identity.” He accused postmodernists of “bourgeois narcissism” and likened anthropologists bestriding the academic left to marketing executives.

Anthropology blinded itself to the persistence of oppression in the new world order by looking for universal principles on the wrong level of reality, according to David. Ethnographers tended to select comparative criteria from definitive texts or official versions of events, and in doing so conflated politics with parties, morality with law, magic with religion, and aesthetics with formal genres of art and literature. Granting institutions of authority the presumptive right to represent a whole people mistook culture, “nothing more than the process of its own creation,” for a static entity in possession of some official custodian. “The paradoxical result is that if one is to take a consistent position of cultural relativism,” David observed, “authority is the one thing that cannot be treated relativistically.”

He appealed to ontology to reconstruct the problem and overcome the paradox. From our genesis in families, he posited, all of us are “dialogic creatures who create ourselves through some sort of deliberative process.” Mundane conversation in the domestic sphere is a principal activity through which we form, grow, and embed ourselves in one another. The give-and-take of quotidian existence generates the basic information we need to survive by furnishing us with rough-and-ready understandings of how other people might act to influence us. The representations we make of others are laden with repertoires of judgment, carrying implicit theories of value and motivation. Out of this “ontological ground of sociality,” we grow into “sedimented beings,” palimpsests who perpetually reconfigure horizons of mutual understanding through more complex forms of perspective swapping.

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Conversation, so conceived, suggested to David the possibility of a radical humanism predicated on the experience of subordination. He cited the fact of certain universally comprehensible metaphors, such as “the sense of being stifled, crushed, ground down, overburdened, struggling under a heavy weight.” When we seek metaphors of domination across cultures, he said, we practice “dialogic relativism,” a mode that neither uncovers universal truths nor assembles the pieces of the human condition in a single coherent pattern, but penetrates more deeply into shared experience all the same.

Below the level of constituted authority, ordinary conversations perpetually recycle means and ends, wheeling into encore relations that spill across boundaries, recombine, and multiply. “Universal ideas are not ideas that everyone in the world has,” David emphasized in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. “Universal ideas are the ones that everyone in the world would be capable of understanding. Universal moral standards are not ones on which everyone in the world agrees, but ones that, through a capacity for moral reasoning and experience of forms of moral practice that we already do share, we would be able to work out together.”

The catch is that our representations are never more than provisional and fragmentary. They often turn out to be wrong as well. Imagination may be the source of language, but language neither invents nor mirrors reality. Our perception of reality, David argued, following the philosopher Roy Bhaskar, is disclosed to us piecemeal via “mechanisms of action” (institutions or structures) which interact unpredictably and simultaneously on different levels. We can never achieve clairvoyance, because “real things are precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge only of things that we have made up.” Most of us take this axiom for granted, and thus invoke “reality” when some event contradicts our expectations. In so doing, we implicitly recognize that humans are too varied and volatile for us to predict their every action. “It’s only when we start imagining that the world is somehow generated by the descriptions that we make of it that incommensurability becomes a well-nigh existential dilemma,” David wrote.

Popular belief in phenomena like dreams and gods signifies invisible sources of human motivation. David incorporated a spiritual dimension into his ideas about conversation in Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, his first, best, and least-read book. From 1989 to 1991, he lived in a rural area of the African country. With a notebook wadded in his pocket, a tape recorder in harness, and a small shelf of Dostoevsky’s novels, he spent his time listening informally to rival oral histories of a recent event that revolved around feuding ancestors. He took his subjects to be characters in a polyphonic novel, coexisting and interacting in an unmerged unity.

In the Malagasy cosmos, generic beings called “hasina” signified the indefinable and unknowable tendencies of reality. Hasina themselves had no power. But when people gave hasina particular names, associated them with material objects, and employed “the power of words” to persuade others to take oaths and to participate in rituals, spirits turned into delegated intentions imbued with the capacity to generate effects in the world. Because spirits could be realized only by social action, “persuasive words were themselves a form of hasina.” The use of words to manifest non-existent possibilities he called magic. “Magical action is the only kind that might be said to consist of a null set,” David wrote; “it does nothing in the physical context of its enactment, but only in so far as it enters a broader, more political context of narration, discussion, and report.”

David’s elegant ontological realism undermined the habits and sensibilities of social theory, whose metanarratives tend to telescope the present as if it were pre-appointed by uniform sequences, lawlike regularities, or inexorable processes. The concept of social evolution, one of his bugbears, takes non-existent possibility hostage to stages of development (“postmodernity”); unreproducible conjunctions of zeitgeist (“the Enlightenment”); or linear directions of history (“late capitalism”). Promethean fantasies in thrall to the ideology of progress extinguish the undescribed levels of reality with writs of factitiousness and legislate fugitive spiritual elements out of sight. Social theory, so conceived, creates existential distance between humans by interpolating covert dualisms—subject and object, agency and structure, past and present, truth and myth, spirit and flesh, imagination and reality, consciousness true and false. These dualisms produce the rational symmetries of causality, explanation, and prediction that serve to hypertrophy authority.

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Neoclassical economics, another bugbear, derives its theory of value by inflating fragments of reality that emerge piecemeal into schemes of total apprehension. The economists presume that the mechanism of property ownership exhausts human capacity, as though we are not deliberative beings, but isolated individuals bearing infinite desires, selfishly calculating all social intercourse for wealth and power in production and consumption. The generative level of domestic life, impossible to conceive on these terms, gets demoted to “mere reproduction of a workforce capable of producing marketable commodities.” In actual experience, history has no direction, and society is a dance of multifarious actions. Ordinary people in conversation continually surprise predictive models with irruptions of social creativity.

Not all authority is illegitimate; nor should one presume that candied words can or should efface all differences. “Within the dialogic basis for all thought there’s already the shadow of a communistic eternity,” David wrote. “To realize itself it has to pass through conflict, argument, or it’s meaningless, infantile, ultimately false. Love without at least some tiny element of hatred is just stupidity.” But when the mechanisms overlaid on society fail to gratify needs or desires, the poetry of the spoken word jumps across emerging levels of reality. Acknowledging the paradox of universal finitude allows us to make use of reality’s unexercised tendencies and to deliberate about non-existent possibilities. Dialogical imagination returns the inner motion of perception to its beginning reports in practical human needs and desires. Deliberation plays language games with perspectives, approximations, and narratives, introducing novelties and renegotiating value. All that we may expect from the magic of our words is the unexpected.

David’s philosophical anthropology tuned out the contested status of human rationality. A presumption that popular sovereignty can be redeemed within dominant institutions he regarded as another dead end, a fatal antimony between the marketplace mechanism of “public opinion” and the primary level of deliberation. “An ‘opinion’ is what you have when you don’t have any power,” he said in a dialogue with Brian Eno, the English musician and composer. “Opinions float around, baring teeth with nothing to bite into. So, they often take on an extreme, expressive quality—‘I say let’s just nuke ‘em’—that no sane person would hold when expecting to trigger real-world consequences. That makes for a vicious circle. The actually powerful people say, ‘we can’t have too much democracy because most people, their opinions are really extreme.’” The way out of the vicious circle lies in “accepting a degree of humility about what it is possible to know,” seeing that we are unseeing.

Exiting the vicious circle is one thing. But the difficulty of finding and sustaining a place to prove deliberation in political practice has dogged democratic theorists like a bad penny. “Political freedom means the right to be a participator in government or it means nothing,” Hannah Arendt wrote in On Revolution. In large part, then, it has meant nothing. The American revolutionaries, as Arendt, John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and others have lamented, invoked popular sovereignty in the U.S. Constitution while neglecting to endow local townships, councils, wards, or any other institutional spaces with the means to transmute deliberation into participation.

Jurgen Habermas removed the dilemma to a higher plane of abstraction in The Theory of Communicative Action. Like David, Habermas adopted a pragmatic theory of language, an intersubjective conception of reason, and an interpretative framework—the “moveable horizon”—that substantiates mutual understanding piecemeal. But the German philosopher neglected to give a political account of the degree to which systems are amenable to modification by “communicative action” and evaded the question of practice in a scheme of social evolution that largely blotted non-Western societies out of the story.

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In Direct Action, a participant-ethnography of the contemporary global justice movement, David supplemented his philosophical anthropology with a knockabout political sociology. He called attention to common ways of challenging the authority of transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and entities such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. He spotlighted deliberative assemblies blooming out of the soil in Argentina, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Italy, Mexico, and South Korea a decade before Occupy Wall Street took everyone by surprise.

To manifest possibility in the zone of dialogical imagination, David learned, there was no need to persuade everybody to agree on every issue. “You don’t even want to achieve ideological uniformity,” he averred. An assembly that meshes over a definition of a specific problem and a commitment to a specific course of action forms “a community of purpose without a community of definition.” The rules of discourse can support a revisable consensus. Do not blow up minor moral differences into mortal threats. Do extend the benefit of the doubt. Do not reduce perspectives to a juxtaposition of opposite extremes. Do look for zones of affinity. If such rules do not yield a creative synthesis that everybody can accept, then the rules can change. Deliberative assemblies, when properly facilitated, encompass a plurality of perspectives from a perspective that refuses to impose itself as a worldview. The crux is that everybody gets a say.

Sustaining deliberative practices on a larger scale is more difficult by orders of magnitude. Today’s behavioral sciences, a congeries of disciplines devoted to resolving incommensurability through a technocratic apprehension of value, seek to disburden us from the challenge. The predictive sciences of morality simply nullify dialogical imagination with a view of humans as passive automata, sunk in sense data. Virtually everything that policymakers in thrall to behavioral science think they know about social values comes from monological procedures—polls, surveys, focus groups—curated, codified, and quantified for behavior modification in the knowledge economies of business, government, education, medicine, and philanthropy. Those incorrigible differences that remain bear the stigma of mere subjectivity.

Early in the 1990s, it was still plausible to view digital communication as an alterative means of democratic social action, a set of unstructured, cooperative tools for influencing others with the ethics David espoused. By the end of the decade, however, a new philosophy of computer science ushered in “Web 2.0,” decking out user interfaces that locked in limits to digital representation. The design of the new software processed words as verbal behavior disconnected from narratives of intentionality. The computer scientist Jaron Lanier, writing in 2010, called the warping of information technology “black magic” and warned that social engineering had become intrinsic to instant communication.

Ever since, social media’s predictive algorithms have frustrated the practice of deliberation. The input-output logic of machine relations strangles social creativity and spreads surveillance—a traditional technique of war between states—by abolishing distinctions between public and private, near and far, and marketplace and domestic sphere. “The fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other,” David argued in Lost People. “To recognize another person as human is to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them.” The global communication monopolies have stood this postulate on its head. The illusion of universal perspicacity is now predicated on incommensurable differences.

The residual psychological legacy of the Cold War bears some of the blame for disabling our resistance to the perverse rule of the algorithm. The reciprocal paranoia that defined the conflict turned inward in the 1990s, as David was first working out his ideas about conversation. New kinds of expressive wrongness cropped out of the poisoned soil of permanent military readiness. University administrators drafted new speech codes. Publishers began expunging offensive words from textbooks. Liberal intellectuals cowered from the defense of writers exposed to the threat of violence for their representations. The censoring mentality, J.M. Coetzee wrote in observing the collapse of civil society in this period, stems from a penchant for taking offense. “The strength of being offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford doubt itself,” Coetzee said.

To paranoiacs, silence stirs ambiguity, doubt, suspicion. When censorship is prescriptive as well as proscriptive, the power that David found immanent in everyday social relations forfeits to the regnant mechanisms of law, violence, or bureaucratic coercion. The terminally offended appeal to the state as the source of their freedom of speech, incorporating its authoritarian implications into psychic life.

Through these developments, paranoia has turned us all into vulgar relativists. David insisted that we inhabit one reality and that we share a common history, not a multiplicity of “histories.” Ever since 9/11 enshrined paranoia as a basic principle of American political life, accusing opponents of inhabiting an “alternate reality” has become the default currency of political exchange.

The predicament of deliberation under these conditions occasionally exasperated David. In 2014, he spent 10 days in Cizire, one of three cantons in northern Syria controlled by Abudulla Öcalan’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Observing Kurdish guerillas experimenting with deliberative assemblies made David feel a decade younger, he said. But watching the rest of the world avert its eyes from the Kurds’ experiment in dialogic self-governance angered him. The US government classified the PKK as a left-wing terrorist group. In Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan, David lamented the state principle “that if someone is designated ‘terrorist,’ their ideas cannot be taken seriously.” That his fellow leftists tacitly concurred upset him. He blurted out to a Turkish newspaper:

I think a lot of people on the international left, and the anarchist left included, basically don’t really want to win. They can’t imagine a revolution that would really happen and secretly they don’t even want it, since it would mean sharing their cool club with ordinary people; they wouldn’t be special any more.

In 2019, he involved himself in Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign. Corbyn had turned his Labour party into a mass movement, throwing open local branches to debate and discussion. Hundreds of thousands of new members joined. When some of them uttered anti-Semitic remarks on social media, the neoliberal faction of Labour accused Corbyn of failing to discipline them. David retorted in a video: “If you really want to fight anti-Semitism, you should do exactly what the Corbyn people did do in the Labour Party: Create a forum where everybody can say whatever their want. Some people are going to say anti-Semitic stuff, because, let’s face it, this is an anti-Semitic society. This stuff is everywhere. It’s only if you bring it out that you can address it.” That this remedy stood no chance, then or now, needs little elaboration.

David’s faith, alas, counts dwindling numbers of adherents, even among critics of the new censoriousness. Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Age the Social Justice Movement, for example, rehashes complaints of direct democracy as “structureless” and asserts that hierarchy is inevitable in movements for social change. Likewise, Vincent Bevins’s autopsy of the global left in the 2010s, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, dwells on the failings of Occupy-style horizontalism and recommends a steroidal dose of Leninism as the antidote. Both books have important things to say, but the authors cling to the conceit of discerning history’s alleged ruptures and pivots. Neither analyzes the global-justice movement before 2010 or acknowledges, much less reckons with David’s stab at repairing the contemporary caesura between politics and ethics.

“Liberation in the imaginary,” his revolutionary cry, was poetic rather than strategic, vascular rather than apocalyptic. The left’s more common slogan, “liberation of the imagination,” he rebuked as a dangerous fantasy. Imagination and reality are not opposed, but mutually constitute one another. A self-appointed vanguard class that sets forth to pierce the veil of reality, presuming to conjure value out of inert matter, mirrors capitalist modes of history-making. Conflating tendencies with laws and mechanisms with totalities forgets that “every human possibility is simultaneously present” in the sinews of ordinary relationships.

I never joined David in Zuccotti Park or followed him (or anyone else) into the personality markets of social media. I asked him once how he coped with the hatred that dominates digital conversation about culture and politics. He said he found the platforms “fun.” All the same, pride of authorship made him susceptible to wars of words. So did his overbroad conception of politics, which condemned him to unrelieved struggle over every conceivable issue. “Politics,” he wrote, “is the process by which people act in the knowledge that their actions will be reported, talked about, narrated, discussed, praised, or criticized by other people.” Political authority, by contrast, “is the ability to stop people from acting in this way.” He sweated “positions” as if he were an alternative United Nations. I fielded his complaints about the heckling he suffered online. I frowned on the impertinence of his agita and urged him to abstain from returning fire.

Then again, I was raised under a conservative penumbra of reticence. A smack across the face and some soap under the tongue expiated my “smart” mouth. We reached a meridian between our temperaments in the essays David phoned in. My favorite was a trippy piece on panpsychism, a school of thought that attributes rudimentary notions of freedom to a universe enchanted in every particle. “A play principle at the basis of all physical reality,” David proposed, could resolve “the puzzle of how life might emerge from dead matter.” Not only mammals, but lobsters, fish, and even electrons engage in play outside any competition for evolutionary survival. “Obviously, there’s no way to prove it,” he said of his gambit in existential physics. He rested his appeal on an analogy to our ineffable love of wit, rhetoric, and discussion, practices that whistle from the same pleasure centers of nature.

We played together in dialogues that I conjured for him around the principle of incongruity. In New York, we kicked around Charles Peirce’s “evolutionary love” as an alternative to Darwinian biology over a Korean meal with Aaron Swartz. In San Francisco, we sat down with the libertarian financier Peter Thiel, the eco-feminist Starhawk, and the heterodox technologist Jaron Lanier to bat around neuroscience and dreaming. Later the same year, David took up my offer to put him in conversation with Thiel. The event took place at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, where David’s late brother Eric had headed up the library. “I find it interesting that Peter and I agree very strongly about 20 percent of everything, and probably disagree just as strongly on the other 80 percent,” David told the New York Times. “But the stuff we do agree on is the stuff no one else agrees with us about.”

One remarkable essay he wrote for me came out of a conversation about the shame that men like us feel when confronted with our fear of physical violence. “The Bully’s Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination” pricked a memory from his childhood. Bullies had attacked and humiliated him in grade school, he recalled, and no combination of words could placate the hierarchy of power that muscled him. One day, he punched back. The punches that I threw on the playground won rounds of atta-boys at home. Some four decades after hurting his tormentor, David still seemed mortified. He described the essay as “one of the most difficult things I ever had to write.”

He preferred the company of women and often credited feminist social theory for identifying the domestic dialectic that anchored his ideas about conversation. But I could count on his solicitude. After I climbed down from the workplace pedestal and moved into the conventionally unmanly position of solo caregiver to my daughter and (in some kind of cosmic irony) non-speaking autistic son, none of my distress calls to London went unanswered. David’s romantic realism, at once insisting on the universality of humankind and celebrating the limits of our ability to know other people, helped me to see the predicament clearly. “Alienation,” he once said, “is a sign that you understand something about the reality of the world.”

In our last conversations, he mused on an essay he was drafting about the presidency of Donald Trump—a practical joke, he conjectured, played by the working class—and lamented the spread of ennui in the five months since the pandemic had stopped the world from turning. The stagnation affronted his gregarious temperament. “If you donʼt vote, then do something else. Organize in the system or outside, just donʼt remain passive,” he wrote to me about his unease. Meanwhile, he reported a “weird assortment of symptoms” nibbling at his own stamina—a soapy taste in his mouth; nausea after meals; panting after moderate exertion. A holiday in Venice would restore the gleam of health…

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David’s bottled-lightning concept of conversation remained fragmentary, provisional, even ambiguous. In a time when faith in a collective future has collapsed, however, he disproved the old libel that anarchism is a faraway dream, disconnected from the present. Rejecting historical necessity, postmodernism, and power politics, his “anti-heroic politics” alighted on a dispensation of “revolutionary counterpower” that inhabited the world it sought to change. The sublime combination of impersonal detachment and spiritual identification in his ethics resembled Keats’s desire to make poetry “a friend to man.” The vividness and complexity of his embodiment of this desire would make him a perfect candidate for an oral biography, something synchronic rather than synoptic, in the spirit of Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s Edie, or Peter Manso’s Mailer, His Life and Times.

A collective act of remembrance would also stir a paradox that spiraled in on me in the months after his death. I would have preferred a longer goodbye. I would have talked death to death. Suddenly, though, I could not pull my voice past the lump of unuttered words in my throat to talk about David at all. Seeking to connect my peculiar sense of loss to his distinctive vision of possibility, I reread his writings. Why, I wondered, did the words on the page read like verses without their lyric?

“Every successful act of communication,” he wrote, “is an example of the spiritual principle of nonduality, where both parties become, momentarily, the same person.” In ecstatic communion lies the rub. Conversation, like sex, makes the world fruitful and multiplied. Yet the aphrodisiac intensity that fires in the twinship of merged identity tends to annihilate its traces. “Most self-aware thought takes place at exactly the moment when the boundaries of the self are least clear.”

Randolph Bourne, another possibility man, mourned these moments of self-forgetting intimacy as one of life’s “small tragedies.” Bourne died at age 32 in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. In his brief career, he too blamed the crisis of democratic theory on the desiccated rationality supreme in the state sciences of prediction and control. He envisioned a lyrical left taking wing in a transnational federation of cultures, and he pegged his hopes for a “beloved community” on a rising generation of proletarian intellectuals.

“To those of us who have not been tempted by success, or who have been so fortunate as to escape it,” Bourne wrote in “The Excitement of Friendship,” engrossing conversation propitiates our inner selves.

It is almost impossible seriously to believe in one’s bad luck or failures or incapacity while one is talking with a friend. One achieves a sort of transfiguration of personality in those moments.

The magic spell of the spoken word, alas, evaporates in the requiem of reading the final type. Across the ripple of cold letters, your gaze drifts till it blurs and breaks in a monotonous mist of barren space. “He is a brave and hardy soul who can retain his personality after his friends are gone,” Bourne sighed.

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I was standing in my living room in Cambridge with Misha, my then-8-year-old son, and Larry, his behavior analyst. Larry was leading Misha through a session of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), his treatment model.

“What do you see?” Larry asked him, displaying a card with a photo of a duck.

Misha matched the card to the correct photo among an array on the table before him.

“Good job, Misha!”

Misha grabbed a gold star and added it to his “token board.”

Six days a week, Larry tried to train Misha not only to match photos but also to brush his teeth, pull on his socks, blow his nose, speak, read, draw, and calculate. Each session worked backward from an objective chosen for him, aiming to eliminate “problem” behaviors. Through trial and error, Larry searched for the “reinforcers” that prompted Misha to perform “correct” behaviors instead. Reinforcers could be “positive” (gold stars) or “negative” (such as withholding attention). The treatment’s ultimate ambition was deducing a precisely measured “schedule of reinforcement” that would enable adults to predict and control Misha’s behavior in any environment.

The apparent versatility of the ABA treatment gave me hope. The neurologist who diagnosed Misha with autism spectrum disorder described it as a lifelong condition with no known causes or cures. Additional diagnoses ensued, none entailing a clearer protocol: mixed receptive-expressive language disorder, sensory processing disorder, cerebral vision impairment, intellectual disability, chronic constipation. Molecular sequencing revealed a pair of genetic mutations never before reported in the scientific literature.

I borrowed confidence in ABA from the policy consensus around its potency. None of Misha’s doctors or teachers recommended any equivalent model, nor did our insurance cover any. Legislatures in most states, including Massachusetts, have responded to the rapid acceleration of autism diagnoses by mandating insurance coverage of ABA. Early Intervention, a federally funded program serving children from birth to 3 years, steers children diagnosed with autism into ABA programs.

The ease of access clinched my commitment to the treatment. Misha’s neurologist practiced in Newton. His developmental pediatrician and his speech pathologist were in Lexington and Waltham, respectively. His neuro-ophthalmologist, geneticist, gastroenterologist, and physical therapist had their clinics at different Boston locations. Only the ABA specialists, the behavior analysts, came to our door.

Hope, confidence, and access led me to give the treatment a fair chance to work. As I watched Larry and Misha, however, I reflected that behavior analysts had been breaking out work tables in our living room for six years, ever since Misha had enrolled in Early Intervention at 22 months of age. The service plan back then had exhorted me, a key variable in his environment, “to learn strategies as taught by clinicians.” They trained me to become a normal parent. They instructed me how to touch Misha, when to speak to Misha, what to feed Misha, which songs to sing to Misha, and where to push Misha’s stroller. To him they “modeled” how to act like a normal son, one who displayed “appropriate” behaviors. The service plan promised to teach him to speak 10 words. A year later, he had zero. “He is very strong-willed,” the early interveners lamented of the boy at 3.

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Now Misha was 8, and his ABA treatment consumed 20 hours every week at home, plus another 25 at school. The data showed no lasting progress in any behaviors targeted by the intervention. A session dedicated to “brushing teeth” comprised 16 steps, beginning with “grab toothbrush” and ending with “spit.” He remained stuck on step two: “Turn on the faucet with free hand and rinse the toothbrush.” He employed some modified signs and verbal approximations, and even said “meatball” once. But he never repeated the word, no matter how many times his behavior analysts showed him photos of meatballs. He looked distracted, irked, or plain bored by the ABA sessions, his attention wandering from their demand to demonstrate positive powers. Prompted to “blow your nose,” he stuck out his tongue.

The pith of his personality surfaced during his leisure time, when he sought out novel experiences. Handed a screwdriver, he embarked on a self-appointed mission to remove knobs from our doors and light switch plates from the walls in our apartment. He wanted no part of a session designed to train him how to throw a ball. He preferred to balance it on his head. A sly smile often crawled across his face, hinting at a store of private jokes. Why this jocular boy, brimming with mirth and curiosity, failed the one treatment prescribed to him baffled me.

Was Misha failing ABA, or was ABA failing Misha? Oddly, I couldn’t answer the question empirically with any degree of certainty. ABA is marketed as “evidence-based,” but no state agency collects performance data, assesses outcomes, or controls quality. If no standards existed to place Misha’s scores in context, then maybe the theory behind ABA could shed some light. Where, I wondered, did ABA’s scientific principles come from?

“Skinner,” Larry replied.

“B.F. Skinner? The Harvard psychologist who trained pigeons to play Ping-Pong?”

“Yes.”

Surprised, I opened Applied Behavior Analysis, the textbook used for licensing behavior analysts. Voilà! A photograph of Skinner, with his prestigious forehead, appeared in chapter one. A hundred pages expounded the savant’s doctrine of “behaviorism,” which he derived from laboratory experiments on pigeons and rats in the 1930s and 1940s. From other reading I knew this much more: Skinner’s signature conceit, reducing behavior to systems of interlocking “reinforcers,” had ignited a roiling controversy in the midcentury decades. But the firestorm around his work had burned out long ago. Behaviorism was a fossil.

A twinge of sadness pierced me. Disabled kids have been herded into makeshift classrooms, seated before surplus desks, and outfitted in yesteryear’s clothing. Apparently, they are given the obsolete ideas, too. They are, to stretch an epigram by John Maynard Keynes, slaves to a defunct psychologist.

Behaviorism coalesced as a school of thought in revolt against the traditional subject matter and methods of psychology. The inner life of motivation and sensation, will and judgment, thought and feeling, “lack the dimensions of physical science,” Skinner wrote in Science and Human Behavior (1953), widening a trail blazed by John Watson and Ivan Pavlov. Traditional psychologists interpreted dreams and engaged in talk therapy. Behaviorists rejected introspection, contending that “antecedents” in the environment wholly determined an organism’s constitution. Careful observation could measure these environmental factors. A schedule of rewards, or, in Skinner’s parlance, “reinforcers,” could intervene to reform the patterns for the better. Despite what journalists continue to claim, Skinner never taught pigeons to play Ping-Pong. But he did get them to peck Ping-Pong balls in unnatural ways, and his success in reinforcing the behavior of hungry rats suggested the ingenuity of his technique of conditioned response.

A disregard for life “under the skin” marked behaviorism’s aspirations to be a predictive science. The same principle made Misha’s intervention appear so versatile. His behavior analysts restricted themselves to observing his physical operations, devoid of subjective or personal meaning, so that they could be measured with the same tape, as it were. Misha trying to speak and Misha trying to blow his nose fell into the same abstract category of “behavior.” A nonverbal boy who couldn’t give ready evidence of his inner life could be trained by presuming he had none. How clever! Change the environment, change the boy.

But sidestepping Misha’s sense of himself as a conscious agent diverged from my approach as a parent. His squealing and flapping I took as a kind of song and dance, fun rather than functional. His meltdowns I interpreted as frustration over his struggle to discriminate among his desires. When he cheated at the card game Uno and chortled, I caught his sense of humor and cheered his assertion of freedom. I reckoned his outward behavior, in other words, not as a domain unto itself, to be manipulated to conform to objectives imposed on him, but as a clue to his inner feelings, beliefs, and thoughts. That’s common-sense parenting.

It’s also sound reasoning. “There is no such thing as ‘behavior,’ to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs, and settings,” the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote in a critique of behaviorism’s mindless form of scientific investigation. “In a serious field,” Noam Chomsky wrote, “you wouldn’t identify the subject with the study of the data. That’s like calling physics ‘meter-readings science’ because meter readings are the data.”

Skinner boasted of his refusal to read his critics. Instead, he upped the ante, extrapolating results from the laboratory behavior of rats and pigeons to every aspect of human behavior in society. Crude analogies, underlined by peremptory assertion, marked his pronouncements. Coining the term “behavior therapy” (a.k.a. “behavior modification”), he published a novel and a series of books that discarded the distinction between scientific prediction and utopian prophesy. Mass doses of behavior therapy could solve the world’s political, ethical, and religious problems, he held. If only hidebound society shed the illusions of freedom and dignity — ghosts of “the so-called ‘democratic philosophy’ of human behavior” — then a vanguard of his disciples could get on with the job of redesigning the environment for salvation.

Skinner’s contempt for democracy appealed to governments beleaguered by dissension and fiscal crisis. In the 1960s, a national movement to shutter asylums, reformatories, and prisons coincided with mass civil disobedience. Rather than endorsing expensive, time-consuming therapies that integrated behavior into personality, governments funded behavior therapy for gamblers, homosexuals, alcoholics, child molesters, juvenile delinquents, and disabled children and adults. Behavior analysts formed their first professional associations and entered schools, families, and communities with smartly packaged, scalable interventions. In 1969, the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation blessed their objective as “the normalization principle.”

Twilight, alas, soon fell over behaviorism’s heyday. The animal science experiments on which the field staked its most ambitious claims fell apart. The dawning of cognitive science cast light on the aspect of volition intrinsic to the mind. An ethic of recognition returned to psychology as the values of agency, choice, and diversity spread through society.

In a speech in Boston to the American Psychological Association a week before he died in 1990, Skinner acknowledged that the wheel of intellectual history had turned his behaviorism to dust. But he held fast to the renunciation that distinguished it. So far as science is concerned, the “creative self or mind,” he said in his orotund manner, “simply does not exist.” He likened himself to Charles Darwin and cognitive scientists to creationists.

Not long after, state governments began investing his phantom science with near-monopoly power over the one remaining group that society still construes as less than human.

After flunking Early Intervention, Misha began preschool in a “substantially separate” ABA classroom in Cambridge. Autistic students in the district nearly tripled in number between 2010 and 2020. Given the district’s choice to use ABA exclusively for them, segregation made pedagogic sense. The fewer independent variables in the environment, the more the classroom resembles a laboratory. (Forty-five percent of Massachusetts students with autism are placed in some form of “substantially separate” setting, according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.)

Every week in school, Misha underwent two 30-minute sessions of physical therapy; three 30-minute sessions of speech therapy; and three 30-minute sessions of occupational therapy. The remainder, 1,380 minutes, belonged to behavior interventions. ABA commandeered the measurement of the lesser therapies. “By the end of the year,” his speech pathologist predicted in his Individualized Education Program (IEP), “Misha will increase his communication skills by requesting 3 needed items and identifying 5 novel targets from a 3-word description with 80 percent accuracy as averaged across 5 consecutive sessions.”

I sat in hours-long meetings squinting at bar graphs and line charts presented by a team as large as a hockey squad. Misha was never invited to attend. I served as his proxy, his voice. But behaviorism’s assumptions relegated me to a spectator. No theory of autism, philosophy of education, or conjecture of Misha’s flourishing informed his IEP. Theory and philosophy are anathema to behaviorism. Education is engineering, Skinner said. A student is a “vortex of stimuli” controlled by the environment. Only that which can be measured in metric time matters. The results of quantification are considered self-evidently true. Either Misha met his objectives, or he did not.

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He did not. Misha’s sister graduated from fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, bridges over which she crossed from elementary to middle school. Misha remained in “pre-academic” time. When he was biologically 5 years, 5 months old, he was alleged to be 1 year, 6 months old behaviorally — a stopped clock, placed in an existential penalty box. His teachers copied and pasted the same “vision statement” into his IEP for six consecutive years.

Misha could not speak up. But he did act out. He rose from his seat and moved around his classrooms, orienting his body in space. “We have created a new token board for Misha that targets ready hands and looking eyes,” read one of the “compliance strategies” devised to rope him into his prescribed place.

At age 8, he evinced an intense curiosity about hair. He picked out hair from among the wood chips on the playground, held single strands to his ear, and played them like a violin, grinning with delight. At school, he began touching the heads of his teachers and classmates. He did so 5.25 times a day when the tabulations began. His average rose to 74.75 times a day and then spiked to 116.45 times a day. Why? “Through the course of multiple observations,” his behavior analyst wrote in summarizing a half-dozen “functional analyses” undertaken in school and at home.

Misha engaged in hair pulling across staff. He has pulled hair of peers across settings. He has pulled hair during structured and unstructured activities. He has engaged in hair pulling when he has been engaged in preferred and non-preferred activities. It is hypothesized that hair pulling is a synthesis of functions, not reliably dependent on the setting, situation, or regulation.

Another possibility, namely that feeling hair enchanted Misha’s budding aesthetic imagination, fell outside behaviorism’s exclusively “functional” template of value. A behavior is either “adaptive” (correct) or “maladaptive” (problem). It either reduces or increases tension between the organism and the environment. About the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, ABA had nothing to say.

The impasse exposed a conceptual bind. Misha couldn’t learn the normal academic curriculum of math, science, history, and English until he functioned like a normal student. His physiology wouldn’t permit him to keep his hands and feet still, like a normal student. ABA misconceived his sensory wants and needs as “problem behaviors” and intervened, which only generated more “problem behaviors.” The data outputted by ABA’s fetish for measurement fed back into itself as input, reinforcing a consensus that succeeded mainly in producing a feeling of pointlessness.

At the Lurie Center for Autism, an educational consultant told me ABA couldn’t possibly be the impediment. Misha just needed a better, stricter, more comprehensive intervention plan in a private school out of the district. Off he went to Melmark New England, an ABA school 40 minutes away in Andover.

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Melmark clamped a vise grip around him. In an observation room, behind a one-way mirror, an “educational coordinator” monitored his compliance with “appropriate social interactions” in class. Rules of maneuver screwed him into meticulous formations of space and time. “Any instance that he comes within six inches of another person without permission” his teacher docketed as an “invasion of space.” “Bolting” occurred when he wandered “more than four feet away from the designated area without permission” — to touch an elevator button in the hall, for example. To extinguish his interest in hair, the behavior that prompted his transfer out of Cambridge, Melmark deployed physical intervention.

Misha responded with bouts of crying and episodes of tearing hair out of his scalp and eyebrows. I visited the observation room one day to see for myself. My eyes landed on a copy of Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior, which stood among other books and papers on the educational coordinator’s bookshelf. We watched Misha rise from his desk and move about the classroom, slapping his hands together and stomping his feet. “See that,” I implored. “His sensory wants and needs should be respected.” The coordinator, paraphrasing Skinner’s book, remonstrated that Misha’s sensory wants and needs, “if real,” constituted no useful “evidence.”

The assertion of dogma focused my concern. Twice a day, Misha’s teacher subjected him to Melmark’s school-wide “well body checks.” A “body tracker system” stored photographs on a central server. I objected to an adult woman inspecting my son’s body — sometimes in a closed bathroom stall — without his consent or my foreknowledge. Melmark appeared surprised by my objection. The possibility that Misha could harbor unarticulated feelings about compulsory inspections of his body seemed not to have occurred to them. Privacy, after all, obstructs the gaze of behaviorism. Dignity, which can’t be measured, must not exist. I gave Melmark notice of his withdrawal and began searching for his third school in less than two years.

No treatment model works for everyone. For whom does ABA work? To what degree? For how long? The absence of longitudinal data spoils our capacity to answer these questions with integrity. The natural changefulness of young children, not to mention the role of chance, are unaccounted variables. Yet refuting any treatment definitively is impossible. Parents like me need to believe something can help our children.

So, when I read in Melmark’s Family Handbook that “ABA is an objective discipline” and “there is nothing to substantiate” complaints that “behavioral programs produce robotic children,” I suspended my critical faculties. Queried for this essay about the science behind ABA, Melmark pointed to “a large body of valid scientific evidence” ascertained by fellow behavior analysts, past and present. I spent some time reading around in that “evidence.” This time, though, I also took in the growing criticism about it. Education scholars independent of the ABA industry find its published research riddled with conflicts of interest, resistant to interdisciplinary cooperation, and hampered by “rock-bottom” standards.

To my knowledge, only one large-scale outcomes analysis has been undertaken by government. That is the U.S. Department of Defense’s ongoing “Autism Care Demonstration,” a multiyear assessment of claims made in the military’s insurance program. “The Department remains very concerned,” the 2021 report concluded, as “almost half of the participants are experiencing no change or worsening symptoms after two years of ABA services.” The data showed no correlation between treatment intensity and outcomes. Of the improvements that were imputed to ABA, the Pentagon’s report questioned whether they were “clinically significant.” ABA’s own research standards, the report said, “do not meet our hierarchy of evidence standard for medical and proven care.”

In The Measure of Man (1953), the writer and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch perceived that behaviorism’s midcentury power and prestige surpassed its scientific discoveries. Behaviorism spread to the extent that individuals forfeited their presumption of free will and became automata, “conditioned to like being conditioned.” I think the same paradox explains ABA’s current expansion better than the “evidence” alleged by the industry.

Over the two decades that state legislatures have endorsed ABA for children with autism, a vanguard of behavioral technologists have been reengineering the environment of culture for everyone. Skinner’s technique of reinforcement has shaped the design of video games, dating apps, slot machines, social media, and product marketing. The digital architecture of mass behavior modification, busy with prompts, notifications, and nudges, mostly just aims to herd us into goals chosen for us.

The automation of life is plain to see in the unfolding future of ABA. Seventy ABA classrooms in New England already use robots for autism instruction. I telephoned the manufacturer in Connecticut to pose a question missing from the excited newspaper stories. No, a spokesperson avowed, the company hasn’t collected any data to justify its claims for robot-assisted ABA.

The evidence is beside the point, but the irony is rich. Trained to disregard the inner lives of their clients, behavior analysts themselves may be replaced by robots.

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At 11 years old, Misha still didn’t brush his teeth, speak, read, draw, or calculate, at least not like most children his age. But he received no ABA at home, and his educational plan no longer rubbed his nose in his impairments. In March 2021, he started at the Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, the only school in Massachusetts willing to honor my demand to scrub every trace of ABA from his IEP. Perkins manages to teach Misha without injuring his distinctive modes of building and fortifying his identity.

If not for a chance disruption to the environment, I might not have gained the confidence to gamble on such a radical departure.

The outbreak of COVID, of all things, did the trick. Melmark closed for some months. The behavior analysts stopped knocking on our door. Time and again I’d been warned that halting ABA treatment could jeopardize Misha’s well-being. According to behaviorism’s iron laws, the abrupt withdrawal of reinforcers, the collapse of hierarchies of time and space, risked regression — or even a state of vegetation.

Misha greeted the opportunity as though bounding out of the opening of a clenched fist. One warm day that summer, he charged down the street to the community swimming pool with me in tow. He drew a breath, sealed his lips, and dunked himself in the water. In swells of exuberance that lasted all afternoon, he taught himself how to swim — and set himself free.

Then something surprising happened to him. “Mothers were coming and saying, ‘my child was injured by the vaccine,’’’ Kennedy testified. “These were many hundreds of mothers of children with intellectual disabilities. And they said ‘nobody’s listening to us. The Democrats aren’t listening to us. The Republicans aren’t listening to us,’ and I felt that I should listen to them.” Kennedy listened. In 2015, he joined the World Mercury Foundation, an activist organization that rebranded itself as Children’s Health Defense, and embraced the mothers’ cause.

At the same time that Kennedy, Jr., woke up to the injury theory of autism, I also began to listen. My son was diagnosed in 2014, at age three. Over the next 18 months, I tested the possibility of recovering my son through alternative or “holistic” remedies prescribed by a trio of healers.

Defenders of conventional medicine paint such experiments as the product of an irrational transaction between the charlatan and the sucker—the former, like Kennedy, Jr., an opportunist beyond shame, the latter, like me, curable by a sober presentation of The Facts. If that were so, then why do holistic remedies fly off the shelves at pharmacies without evidence of their efficacy, alongside an array of alleged immunity-boosting, anti-inflammatory vitamins and herbal supplements? America has been awash, as it were, in “de-tox” and wellness nostrums for a half-century.

The beginning of the holistic health movement was about the time when the theory of autism as a toxin-induced chronic illness first sent up shoots in the grassroots. Did generations of Americans suddenly lose their marbles? Are the autism mothers—or, as in the story I tell in this essay, one father—simply lacking in critical intelligence?

A pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital diagnosed Misha with autism spectrum disorder at age three. At Massachusetts General Hospital, another pediatric neurologist answered my call for a second opinion, only to rebuff my hope for a different one. “I did not find him to be very receptive to testing,” the expert sighed. Both neurologists observed that Misha didn’t respond to their request to identify colors, body parts, or animals, that he averted his eyes from theirs, that he pawed their examination table when he didn’t flap his arms. Autism, the doctors said, constituted a lifelong condition. Medical science didn’t understand its causes or cures, and scarcely comprehended the limit of its woes.

I wondered how the neurologists could deduce such a bleak judgment from 90 minutes in the bell jar of their examination rooms. If they knew so little about autism, then how could they gavel down a life sentence? I remembered reading somewhere that a properly trained neurologist ought to be able to argue both for and against any single diagnosis in a stepwise process of elimination. I opened the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), leafed to the entry under autism, and plucked out of its basket several inculpating symptoms. Aggrieved, I sought out the Handbook of Differential Diagnosis, a companion volume, and underlined an admonitory passage: “Clinicians typically decide on the diagnosis within the first five minutes of meeting the patient and then spend th rest of the time during their evaluation interpreting (and often misinterpreting) elicited information through this diagnostic bias.” Now what?

As an educated citizen of liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, I felt that I could and believed that I should develop my own, independent judgment about Misha’s condition. I would do my own, alternative research. I would draw my own conclusions and plot my course of action based on what I learned.

According to “holistic” attitudes and “alternative” ideas about medicine and health, autism was neither the psychopathology listed in the DSM nor the organic twist of disease inferred by neurologists. Autism, the alternative sources taught me, was one among an epidemic of preventable chronic illnesses that American children contracted from toxins in the environment. Holistic therapy, fortunately, contained resources disregarded by credentialed experts. Vitamin therapy, homeopathy, and antifungal treatment could heal children like Misha of their injuries.

A family friend and fellow autism parent who had helped to start The Thinking Mom’s Revolution introduced me to Mary Coyle, a homeopath at the Real Child Center in New York. Coyle claimed that Misha had likely contracted autism from contaminants in the environment. Was I aware of the epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicting children like him? Some of them, Coyle explained, received diagnoses of asthma, chronic fatigue, or dermatitis. Others were diagnosed with fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, or PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal Infections).

The pathogens lying at the nexus between the body and the environment typically fooled medical specialists at places like Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Coyle urged me to abandon their dead-end query, “Is your child on the autism spectrum?” To help Misha, I needed to switch the predicate and ask a different question: “How toxic is your child?”

Why not find out? I had never heard of homeopathy or “homotoxicology,” Coyle’s specialty. But I believed that with some study I could probably draw the necessary distinction between evidence and interpretation in the test results. Coyle herself had been trained by conventional physicians before seeking out instruction in holistic medicine. She hosted a radio program, Fearless Parent, spoke at conferences, and articulated her rationale in a book that I obtained, Cutting Edge Therapies for Autism. Holism sounded harmless.

We started out with an “Energetic Assessment.” Measuring Misha’s rates of “galvanic skin response,” Coyle said, would weigh the balance of electrical vibrations conducted through his pores. She deployed an electrodermal screening device that deciphered imbalances in his “meridians,” or “pathways.” Toxic metals, alas, appeared to be obstructing his “flow” of energy.

With Coyle’s theory confirmed, she referred me to Lawrence Caprio to canvass for food and environmental allergens. Caprio, like Coyle, had defected from conventional to alternative medicine. I learned that while attending medical school at the University of Rome he had befriended a homeopath in the Italian countryside and lived “a very natural lifestyle.” The experience led him to a conversion to naturopathy.

Misha, Caprio reported, turned out to be “intolerant” of bread, butter, eggplant, oatmeal, peanuts, potatoes, and tomatoes. Misha also displayed a “sensitivity” to bananas, car exhaust, cheese, chlorine, chocolate, cow milk, dust mites, garlic, onions, oranges, soy beans, and strawberries. Caprio flagged “phenolics” such as malvin (in corn sweeteners) and piperin (in nightshade vegetables and animal proteins).

Next, I mailed urine and stool samples to the Great Plains Laboratory in Kansas. The director there, William Shaw, had worked as a researcher in biochemistry, endocrinology, and immunology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control before he quit and set up his own laboratory. Shaw suspected lithium in “the bottled water craze” and fluoridation in the public water supply as causes of autism and came to believe that government scientists woefully misunderstood such sources. He compared their dereliction to the Red Cross’s failure to intervene in the Holocaust. Shaw, to be sure, found toxic levels of yeast flooding Misha’s intestines.

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Homeopathy, naturopathy, and renegade biochemistry cast me outside the institutions of science where Misha’s neurologists practiced. But to grasp how these new realms could be objective correlates of Misha’s condition—and how toxins, foods, and yeast could be the culprits—I had only to remind myself of the progressive demonology that made the claims of alternative medicine seem plausible.

Industrial corporations, after all, have been chewing up the land, choking the air, and despoiling the water, turning the whole country into a hazardous materials zone. I’d read Silent Spring, in which ecologist Rachel Carson claimed that our bodies weren’t shields, but permeable organisms that absorbed particulates. I’d heard Ralph Nader liken air and water pollution to “domestic chemical and biological warfare.” I’d finished Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature with dread. Listening to progressive news media about “forever chemicals” evoked moods that swung between indignation and paranoia. I paid for eco-friendly cribs, de-leaded the windows in our apartment, and tried to shop organic.

As Coyle, Caprio, and Shaw whispered in my ear, my imagination boggled with an overwhelming catalogue of possible pathogens. Our food contained more pesticides, hormones, and insecticides than I had suspected. Our air is filled with methanol and carbon monoxide. Chlorine, herbicides, and parasites degraded our tap water. Mold festered in our walls, floors, and ceilings. Formaldehyde lurked in our furniture. Heavy metals hid in our lotions, shampoos, and antiperspirants. Synthetic chemical compounds—polychlorinated biphenyls, phthalates, bisphenol A, polybrominated diphenyl ethers— seeped into our toys, diapers, bottles, soaps, and appliances. Even our Wi-Fi, cell phones, refrigerator, light bulbs, and microwave oven emitted radiation through electromagnetic fields.

Had the dystopia of the contemporary world poisoned my son under my nose? Then why hadn't his pediatrician alerted me? The alternative treaters who had my ear defined autism as a preventable, “biomedical” illness, meaning, as Shaw explained, “that the therapies are directed at the underlying causes of autism rather than a pharmaceutical approach directed toward controlling symptoms.” The critique of pharmaceuticals led me to the horrifying possibility that the mechanism of harm had originated with Misha’s pediatrician.

He had received three-in-one vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) according to the recommended schedule. Coyle claimed that these vaccines contained dangerous metals, including mercury and aluminum. They could have spread from Misha’s arm to his gut and persisted long enough to perforate an intestinal wall. Mercury, a neurotoxin, could have leaked into his bloodstream and surreptitiously addled his brain.

His pediatrician’s pharmaceuticals could have set off a chain reaction that had the same effect. The antibiotics she gave him for petty infections could have reduced the diversity of natural flora that controlled yeast in his gastrointestinal tract. An overabundance of yeast could have generated enzyme that perforated his intestines even if live-virus vaccines had not done so directly.

Either way, undigested food molecules such as gluten (in wheat) and casein (in dairy) could have joined forces with environmental toxins and heavy metals and attached to Misha’s opiate receptors, disrupting his neurotransmitters and triggering allergic reactions. The ballooning inflammation would have thwarted his immune responses. If so, then his “toxic load” could be starving his cells of nutrients. Escalating levels of “oxidative stress” could be congesting his metabolism. No wonder he lacked muscle tone, coordination, and balance!

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How could I dismiss out of hand the re-diagnosis of “autism enterocolitis,” AKA “leaky gut?” In 1998, a midlevel British lab researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study warranting the diagnosis in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. National politicians echoed the implications. “The science right now is inconclusive,” Barack Obama said in 2008. Thousands of media outlets around the world reported a controversy between two legitimate sides. “Fears raised over preservative in vaccines,” a front-page headline in the Boston Globe announced. Wakefield appeared on television with articulate parents by his side. “You have to listen to the story the parents tell,” he said on CBS’s 60 Minutes. ABC’s Nightline, Good Morning America and 20/20, NBC’s Dateline, and The Oprah Winfrey Show all broadcast the gravamen of the indictment out of the mouths of weepy, well-educated parents.

The accusation against antibiotics resonated with definite misgivings that I held over the dispensation of American medicine. As Lynn Payer demonstrated to me in her Medicine and Culture, doctors in the United States order more excessive diagnostic tests, perform more needless caesarean sections, and prescribe more superfluous antibiotics than any of their counterparts around the world. A prepossessing dependence on technology encourages American medicine to treat symptoms rather than people. From this truth, Coyle, Caprio, and Shaw drew an uncommon inference that aggressive medical care had sabotaged Misha’s birthright immunity.

Misha, so endowed, could have repaired the damage done, no matter whether vaccines or antibiotics had upset his “primary pathways.” His body would have availed “secondary pathways” such as his skin and mucous membrane. Coyle said his innate capacity for adaptation had been telegraphing itself in his fevers, his eczema, his ear infections, even his runny noses. Yet his pediatrician had stood blind before the hidden meaning of these irruptions. Reaching into her chamber of magic bullets, she prescribed steroid creams for his eczema, acetaminophen for his headaches, amoxicillin for his ear an sinus infections, antihistamines for his coughs and runny noses, and ibuprofen for his fevers. This “Whac-a-Mole mentality,” Coyle despaired, had plugged his “secondary pathways” as well.

Thus, a vicious cycle set in. Vaccines and/or antibiotics had predisposed Misha’s microbiome to harbor viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Turning toxic, they invaded his cells, tissues, and fluids. The foreign occupation precipitated allergies. The allergies provoked inflammation, which arrested metabolic energy, which led to anemia, which invited recurring infections. His pediatrician perpetuated those with cascading doses of foreign chemicals. “Rather than freak out and take medication and look to suppress,” Coyle counseled, “we should celebrate that the body is working and go and look at the primary pathways and clear out the blockages.” Up to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, “the fever might be a good thing.”

If I could just accept that “allopathic” medicine did not stand apart and speak objectively, but instead reflected the sickness of American society, then the trio of virtuoso healers would help me sidestep the adulterated dialectic of science and health. A holistic treatment protocol would charm Misha’s autism out of its chronic condition and turn it into a treatable medical illness. “The body’s infinite wisdom,” Coyle said, “would take care of the rest.” As the protocol purged and flushed his toxins, the fawn of nature would close the holes in his intestines. His allergies would ebb, reducing inflammation, reviving cellular respiration, and reconnecting his neurotransmitters. The realignment of his meridians would reflow his energy. “Once you clear,” Caprio said during an interview on Fearless Parent with Coyle, “the whole thing just changes dramatically.”

The logic unfolded with Platonic beauty. Misha need not be “cured” of some dreadful disease born into him. No, I could restore his immunity and “recover” his prelapsarian state of nature. Holism’s steady hand would remove the machine from the garden.

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Autism parents began gravitating toward holistic treatments in the 1960s and 1970s, when emphatic personal testimonials, printed and distributed in underground newsletters, led to the formation of grassroots groups such as Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) and ushered in the “leaky gut” theory. DAN! grew out of the psychologist Bernard Rimland’s Autism Research Institute. Rimland’s 1964 book Infantile Autism blew up the prevailing, psychogenetic thesis of autism’s origins, which blamed mothers for failing to love their children enough.

The Today Show and The Dick Cavett Show had given psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, the chief exponent of the “refrigerator mothers” thesis, free rein to liken them to concentration camp guards. Rimland’s Infantile Autism refuted that thesis and reoriented the understanding of autism away from psychiatry and toward biological medicine. Letters poured into his Autism Research Institute from “refrigerator mothers” complaining of having been insulted by pediatricians. Pharmaceutical companies began rolling out new childhood vaccines for measles (1963), mumps (1967), and rubella (1969) and combining immunizations against pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus into one injection. Rimland began distributing an annual survey that queried parents about the baleful effects and asking about the efficacy of the holistic approach: vitamin therapy, detoxification, and elimination dieting.

The etiology variously called “leaky gut,” “autism enterocolitis,” or “toxic psychosis” awkwardly amalgamated elements from both ancient and modern medical philosophy. The old idea of disease as sign of disharmony with nature queued behind the modern concept of infection through invasion by microorganisms. But no theory needs to be complete for a treatment to work. “Help the child first,” Rimland urged, “worry later about exactly what it is that’s helping the child.”

Like anti-psychiatry activists, breast cancer patients, and AIDS activists, autism parents confronted physicians with the backlash doctrine of “consumer choice” in specialist medical care. “The parent who reads this book should assume that their family doctor, or even their neurologist or other specialist, may not know nearly as much as they do about autism,” William Shaw wrote in Biological Treatments for Autism.

The first television program to elevate parental intuitions, Vaccine Roulette, aired in 1982 on an NBC affiliate in Washington, DC. The show promoted the vaccine injury theory and won an Emmy Award. Accelerating rates of the diagnosis over the next decades brought the injury theory from a simmer to a boil. In the 1960s, one out of every 2,500 children received the diagnosis. By the first decade of the 21st century, the prevalence rose to one out of every 88, an increase of 2,500 percent. Up to three-quarters of autism parents admitted using some form of holistic treatment on their children.

A Congressional hearing in 2012 featured their cause, heaping suspicion on vaccines, speculating on gut flora, and praising the efficacy of vitamins, homeopathy, and elimination dieting. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio and one-time Presidential candidate, expressed outrage over the spectacle of“children all over the country turning up with autism.” Kucinich blamed “neurotoxic chemicals in the environment,” particularly emissions from coal-burning power plants. Kucinich did his own research and drew his own conclusions.

“There’s no such thing as ‘conventional’ or ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ or ‘integrative’ or ‘holistic’ medicine,” skeptic Paul Offit complained the next year in his book, Do You Believe in Magic? “There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.” Clever and concise, Offit’s polemic begged the relevant questions. Who decides what works? Fundamental science is one thing, therapeutic interventions quite another. “Evidence-based medicine,” introduced in 1991, supplies criteria to translate medical science into clinical medicine. Atop its hierarchy sits the “randomized control trial.” But as the philosopher of science Jacob Stegenga has painstakingly demonstrated in Medical Nihilism, the randomized control trial is loaded with social and financial biases and severe methodological limitations on its own terms. Even when a therapy works incontrovertibly, that doesn’t free its applications of ambiguity. Antibiotics work. We’ve known that since the 1930s. But which of their benefits are worth which of their costs?

In 1992, ABC’s 20/20 exposed a cluster of autism cases in Leominster, Massachusetts. A sunglasses’ manufacturer had long treated the city as a dumping ground for its chemical waste. After the company shuttered, a group of mothers counted 43 autistic children born to parents who had worked at the plant or resided near it. Commenting on the Leominster case, the neurologist Oliver Sacks voiced a curious sentiment in An Anthropologist on Mars. “The question of whether autism can be caused by exposure to toxic agents has yet to be fully studied,” Sacks wrote, three years after epidemiologists from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health determined that no unusual cluster of cases had ever existed in that city in the first place. Who gets to decide the meaning of “fully studied”?

Bernard Rimland and the autism parents in his movement answered the question for themselves. “There are thousands of children who have recovered from autism as a result of the biomedical interventions pioneered by the innovative scientists and physicians in the DAN! movement,” Rimland insisted in the group’s 2005 treatment manual, Autism: Effective Biomedical Treatments.

William Shaw and Mary Coyle, both DAN! clinicians, adapted Rimland’s manual for Misha. Coyle vouched personally for the safety and efficacy of the holistic treatment therein. She swore she used it to “recover” her own son.

Interdicting toxins marked the first step on our “healing journey.” Taking it obliged me to decline Misha’s pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (for pneumonia) and his varicella vaccine (for chickenpox). Meanwhile, I eliminated from our cupboard and refrigerator the foods for which Caprio had proved Misha sensitive and intolerant. I prepared a course of “optimal dose sub-lingual immunotherapy” to “de-sensitize” him. Coyle drew up a monthly schedule to detoxify him with homeopathic remedies from a manufacturer in Belgium. Shaw itemized vitamins and minerals to supplement Misha’s intake of nutrients, plus probiotics and anti-fungals to control his yeast and rehabilitate his intestinal tract. My kitchen turned into an ersatz pharmacy of unguents, powders, drops, and tablets.

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Every morning, I inserted two tablets of a Chinese herbal supplement, Huang Lian Su, into an apple in order to crank-start his digestion. I added half a capsule of methylfolate into his breakfast in order to juice his metabolism. Ten minutes after he finished breakfast, I stirred Nystatin powder into warm coconut water, drew two ounces into a dropper, irrigated his mouth, and ensured that he abstained from eating or drinking for ten more minutes. Fifteen minutes before his midday snack, I squeezed six drops of a B12 vitamin under his tongue. Every evening, I slipped him two more Huang Lian Su tablets.

To fortify his glucose levels, I could elect to give him two vials of raisin water every other hour. To normalize his alkaline levels, I added a quarter-cup of baking soda to his baths. The “de-sensitizing drops,” however, had to be dribbled onto his wrists twice every day. Misha also needed regular, carefully calibrated doses of boron, chromium, folic acid, glutathione, iodine, magnesium, manganese, milk thistle, selenium, vitamins A, C, D, E, and zinc.

Homotoxicology, the core modality, entailed his daily ingestion of homeopathic “drainage remedies” to purge toxins and open pathways. The bottles arrived in the mail. Coyle provided a table of equivalencies, linking particular remedies to organs. This compound for his small intestines. That one for his large intestine. This one for his kidney. That one for his mucous membrane.

Homeopathy’s whole-body scope of intervention claimed to relieve a range of other illnesses as well. William Shaw said it could cure sensory integration disorder, central auditory processing disorder, speech and language problems, fine motor and gross motor problems, oppositional defiance disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, headaches, eczema, and irritable bowel syndrome. The marketing materials that accompanied Misha’s compounds claimed to treat bloating, constipation, cramps, flatulence, nausea, night sweats, and sneezing.

I learned the shorthand rationale as part of my self-education. Homeopaths stake their claim on a manufacturing process that distinguishes their remedies from pharmaceutical medicaments. It’s called “succussion.” A label that reads “4X,” for example, indicates that the original ingredient has been diluted four times by a factor of 10—the manufacturer has succussed it 10,000 times. “12X” indicated that the original ingredient has been succussed one trillion times.

The compounds prescribed for Misha said they contained asparagus, bark, boldo leaf, goldenrod, goldenseal, horsetail, juniper, marigold, milk thistle, parsley, passionflower, Scottish pine root, and other herbs and plants of which I’d never heard. Having been succussed, though, the remedies actually contained no active ingredients. In the bottles remained “the mother tincture,” a special kind of water said to “remember” the original ingredient. The only other ingredient listed on the label was an organic compound that served as a solvent and preservative. Thirty-one percent of some of Misha’s remedies contained ethanol alcohol, a proof as strong as vodka or gin. Coyle said to “gas off the alcohol” on the stove before serving him.

Succussion confused me. Misha’s reaction worried me. He looked a fright. Black circles ringed his eyelids. Yeast blanketed his nostrils and lips. Rashes and red spots appeared all over his body. Pale and lethargic, he oscillated between diarrhea and constipation. He broke out with recurring fevers. He stopped gaining weight. Because he didn’t speak, or reliably communicate in any other manner, I couldn’t understand why his emotions seemed to be running at an unusually high pitch.

Coyle explained that different glands and organs in the body stored specific feelings. The kidneys stored fear, the pancreas frustration, the thyroid misunderstanding, the liver anger, the lungs grief, and so forth. Naturally, those emotions poured out as his body excreted toxins. I shouldn’t regard the worsening of his symptoms as a side effect, but rather as a necessary condition of his recovery—“aggravations,” in homeopathy’s parlance. A Table of Homotoxicosis charted the correspondences with the precision and predictability of biochemistry. Nor should I abandon the treatment. To do so would be to “re-toxify” him. I must allow the treatment to fully fledge. I must keep my nerve. If the treatment failed, it would be my fault.

I lost my nerve. It took 18 months of gnawing doubt and thousands of dollars out the door. Then one day I swept all the vitamins, antigens, probiotics, antifungals, and homeopathic remedies into the trash bin. I restored Misha to a regular diet and caught him up on his vaccines. When I paired my demand to Mary Coyle for a full refund with a suggestion that I might retain an attorney, she returned all my money immediately.

I had blundered into a non sequitur. The environment is toxic. Conventional medicine does reflect the sickness of our culture. Yet that doesn’t logically make holism any better. The supplement industry, I came to understand, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into thousands of clinical studies without demonstrating that vitamins, herbal products, or mineral compounds are either safe or effective, much less necessary. The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) neither tests the industry’s marketing claims nor regulates its product standards.

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Caprio and Coyle regard Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a reproach to modern, Western medicine. TCM, they pointed out, is 5,000 years old. Actually, I learned, Chairman Mao Zedong contrived TCM after 1950 as a means of controlling China’s rural population and burnishing the regime’s reputation abroad. In 1972, during Richard Nixon’s tour of Chinese hospitals, his guides stage-managed a demonstration of TCM’s miracles. American media reported the healing event at face value and launched the holistic health movement stateside. Several years later, the FDA sought to regulate the vitamin and supplement industry. Manufacturers fought back with a marketing campaign centered on “freedom of choice” and convinced Americans to stand up for their right not to know which ingredients are in their daily vitamins.

I formed my new perspective with the aid of a handful of indispensable books, including Robert Park’s Voodoo Science, Edzard Ernst’s Homeopathy: The Undiluted Facts, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst’s Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine, Rose Shapiro’s Suckers, Dan Hurly’s Natural Causes, Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets, and Alan Levinovitz’s Natural, a book whose subtitle summed up the theme: “How Faith in Nature’e Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.”

But I needed to file a public records request with the Connecticut Department of Public Health to discover that Lawrence Caprio had been censured and fined for improperly labeling medication, for practicing without a license, and for passing himself off as a medical doctor. I also learned that Caprio’s naturopathy license had been suspended for two years after the FDA determined his bogus “sensitivity tests” violated its regulations. Misha, an actual immunologist confirmed, had no food allergies in the first place.

Was Misha ever burdened by toxins? Coyle said the results of the “energetic assessments” revealed that he carried quantities of heavy metals. Degrees of dangerousness were measured against a standard range credited to “Dr. Richard L. Cowden.” I sent Misha’s results to Cowden. I stated my belated impression that meaningful ranges for heavy metals don’t exist—we all have traces— and my belief that autism cannot be reversed. “I have reversed advanced autism in many children,” Dr. Cowden snapped. “I saw reversal of more than a dozen cases of full-blown autism, including my own grandson. So I am pretty sure the parents of those dozen+ children would debate you on your IMPRESSION/BELIEF.” Cowden advised me to repeat Misha’s energetic assessment through the Internet and to place him into an “infrared sauna” to detoxify him. I declined.

Even before Misha’s first energetic assessment, the FDA had accused the manufacturer of the device of making unapproved claims. The FDA had approved it only for measuring “galvanic skin response.” But the company’s marketing materials had crossed over into unapproved diagnostic and predictive territory when they claimed that the “software indicates what is referred to as Biological Preference and Biological Aversion.” The software was recalled. “Dr. Cowden,” I also learned too late, was not the “Board Certified cardiologist and internist” that he advertises. He surrendered his medical license in 2008 after the Texas Board of Medical Examiners twice reprimanded him for endangering his patients. According to the American Board of Internal Medicine, Cowden’s certifications are “inactive.”

The “homotoxicology” that Coyle practiced had sounded to me like a branch of toxicology. But the two fields turn out to have nothing in common. An analysis of clinical trials of homotoxicology established that it is “not a method based on accepted scientific principles or biological plausibility.” Actual toxicologists pass a rigorous examination for their board certifications and adhere to a code of ethics. Homotoxicologists become so simply by declaring themselves homotoxicologists.

As for vitamins, supplements, and homeopathic remedies: an exception in federal law places them outside the FDA’s approval process. Only their manufacturers know what these dummy drugs contain. In 2022, upon fielding numerous reports of “toxic” reactions, finding “many serious violations” of manufacturing controls, and recording “significant harm” to children, the FDA warned the consuming public.

Homeopathy, of course, possesses no detectable mechanism of action, nor gives any reason to believe that “aggravating” the primary symptoms of an illness is necessary to cure it. Water does not “remember,” at least not if the laws of molecular physics hold true. The tinier the dosage, homeopaths maintain, the more potent the therapeutic effect the mother tincture will deliver. By this logic, a patient who misses a day might die of an overdose.

I came away from my encounters with Mary Coyle, William Shaw, and Lawrence Caprio convinced of their sincerity. I also realized that my liberal virtues—skepticism, independence, open-mindedness, self-help—had become constituent features of my error. A liberal education, as the French philosopher Jacques Ellul pointed out in his neglected Propaganda, is the first requisite for sophisticated credulity. In societies with high levels of formal schooling and advanced communications technology, vast quantities of second-hand, semi-digested, unverified information circulate among media consumers conditioned to give every half-baked proposition the benefit of the doubt. Society’s intellectuals, Ellul concluded, are its greatest purveyors of propaganda.

Thus, it is no surprise that autism’s cult of redemption has been led by trained researchers, practicing clinicians, and highly educated parents espousing their cause in the nation’s self-serious news programs. The internet, rather than introducing novel forms of credulity, has merely intensified the phenomenon of ersatz expertise. Some say childhood vaccines could cause autism. Others say vaccines do not cause autism. You decide. How?

As I steered Misha back toward conventional medical science, I rediscovered the disappointment that had drawn me to holism in the first place. I took him to a “neuro-biologist,” a “neuro-psychologist,” and a “neuro-immunologist. His “neuro-ophthalmologist” ordered an MRI. His “neuro-radiologist” read the images with an algorithm that implausibly measured his brain as “normal,” due to the absence of indications of damage.

That determination proved only the vacuity of scientific materialism. As Anne Harrington writes in Mind Fixers, the “biological revolution” that seized psychiatry in the 1980s aspired to network the anatomical, electrical, and chemical functions of the brain. A procession of neuroimaging technologies held out the promise of progress: electroencephalography (EEG); computerized axial tomography (CAT); positron emission tomograph (PET); magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). But the resulting studies have always fallen pitifully short of a credible evidentiary threshold and have never done anything to expand treatment options in autism. Mainly, neuro-imaging has furnished opportunities to market the autism research industry, a breakthrough culture that has never broken through.

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Holism, by contrast, purports to answer prayers in the immaterial world, bidding to restore harmony through an aesthetically elegant fusion of mind, body, and spirit. As Coyle explained on her website: “Homotoxicology utilizes complex homeopathic remedies designed to restore the child’s vital force an balance the biological flow system.” The vital force is neither a discoverable fact nor a logical inference. It’s an image of a fact superimposed on the body’s only actual conduits of energy, the cardiovascular and nervous systems. Why did Misha lack of the power of speech? His neurologists didn’t know why they didn’t know. Coyle turned the question back on me. Some autistic children, she said, possessed clairvoyance. Others cried for our help in telepathic dreams. “They’re in there,” she insisted. So why couldn’t I hear my son from behind the pane of his injury?

A part of me still craves holism’s beautiful notions. The more sensible and responsible parts of me recognize in this desiccated spiritualism the return of a repressed pagan unconscious. As Misha recovered from its false and harmful claims and grew in ways that his neurologists could not predict, I realized that I could not force myself to believe either in goblets of magic water or in neuro-radiology’s algorithm.

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Scientists have falsified the “leaky gut” theory of autism time and again since Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 paper in The Lancet, which has “entered his profession’s annals of shame as among the most unethical, dishonest, and damaging medical research to be unmasked in living memory,” according to Brian Deer’s The Doctor Who Fooled the World.

After all this time, you have to wonder who is really fooling whom. Autism parents agitated for the likes of Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to come along and validate their conclusions for decades. Nor does the cottage industry of holistic practitioners and alternative medicine gurus require a man in Donald Trump’s Cabinet to carry on their proselytizing. Many advocacy shops lost access to social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. But William Shaw managed to publish a paper in 2020 purporting to demonstrate “rapid complete recovery from autism” through anti-fungal therapy. And in 2022, Mary Coyle podcasted her claim to have healed her son’s chickenpox through “natural” remedies. Podcasts distributed by Google, Apple, and Spotify have become a preferred medium to expand the bill of indictment against autism’s causes to Tylenol, electromagnetic fields, “toxic baby food,” “geo-engineering,” and genetically modified foods. Nevertheless, vaccine skepticism, focused on COVID-19 and HPV inoculation, remains the irreducible core within the holistic circle, a goad to reject the false revelations of cold, mechanical instrumentalism.

Kennedy, Jr., merely represents another phase in the narcissism ingrained in this theodicy of misfortune, which is bound to spread. Biological facts are powerless to throttle a spiritual war against invisible enemies. The paranoid imagination elevates grievances to the status of a historical event. Re-baptized in nature’s holy immunity by ascetic protocols of abstinence and purification, the convert turns over a new leaf, as it were, and craves personal vindication above all else. “This book offers you two messages,” Bernard Rimland said of the testimonials collected in Recovering Autistic Children: “You are not alone in your fight, and you can win.”

Win? Children need love and respect for who they are, not how their parents prefer them to be. In Mirage of Health, the great French microbiologist René Dubos underscored the truth that matters: “As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as ‘Nature.’ There are only homes.”

Nietzsche denounced this recourse to “metaphysical comfort.” Our existence has no meaning, no purpose, no value, he insisted, except what we endow it with through our self-creation. This austere ideal may be a rare and beautiful form, perhaps even the ultimate form, of honesty. But the more common form of the virtue is what we might call, with a bow to the contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the ethics of communication.

Nietzsche again: “There was only one Christian, and He died on the cross.” With respect to honesty, at least, there is more than a grain of truth in this saying. The baseline for any definition of this virtue is, or should be, the almost frighteningly direct and simple injunction in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your yes be yes and your no no; anything more is from the devil.” (Matt. 5:37) Has anyone subsequently lived up to this exhortation, except perhaps for a few Quakers and other religious radicals or holy fools? On the contrary, a venerable Christian tradition, the branch of moral theology known as casuistry, was developed to blunt its force.

Casuistry has acquired a bad name over the centuries and, on the whole, deserves it. The sublimely other-worldly precepts promulgated in the Sermon on the Mount could have been uttered only by someone who believed that God was an active, watchful Father into whose presence we would all very shortly be called. The excruciatingly this-worldly clarifications of those precepts by medieval and early modern casuists could only have been fashioned by people who believed no such thing, even if they thought they did. The doctrine of “mental reservation,” according to which one might mislead people for a good purpose provided one did not lie outright, may have been justifiable in some circumstances, but it was certainly not Christ-like. That and other doubtful practices, which Cardinal Newman in Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), his great controversy with Charles Kingsley about religious honesty, delicately ascribed to “the Italian character,” profoundly shocked Protestant sensibilities and indeed contributed largely to the Reformation.

One Italian character whose reflections on (non-religious) honesty became notorious was the Florentine statesman Niccolo Machiavelli. It is not exactly that Machiavelli aspired to be a 16th-century Karl Rove to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s George W. Bush – Machiavelli was, after all, literate and fundamentally decent, and his enemies were not sheep-like Democratic politicians but wolf-like Renaissance noblemen and prelates. Still, his brief advice manual, The Prince (1513), was shocking enough. “Contemporary experience shows,” he counseled in the infamous chapter XVIII, “How Princes Should Honor Their Word,” that “princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles.” A prudent ruler, he continued, “cannot and must not honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist. If all men were good, this precept would not be good; but because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.”

To which many an upright Anglo-Saxon reader doubtless replied indignantly: “Perhaps Italians are wretched creatures, but Englishmen have too much self-respect to practice such wiles.” There is, however, a fine specimen of Machiavellianism in the writings of the English statesman Francis Bacon. “Of Cunning” in Bacon’s Essays (1625) is a mini-course in manipulation: “When you have anything urgent in hand, entertain and amuse the party with whom you deal with some other discourse, that he be not too much awake to make objections.” “If a man would thwart a business that he fears some other would persuasively argue for, let him pretend to wish it well, and propose it himself in such a way as to foil it.” “Breaking off in the midst of what you were about to say, as if you doubted yourself, breeds a greater appetite in the listener to hear more.” “Because it works better when anything seems to be gotten from you by questioning than if you offered it yourself, you should lay a bait for such questions by showing another visage and countenance than you are wont, so as to make your hearer ask what is the reason for the change.” Contemporary readers inclined to smile patronizingly at this premodern chicanery from the heights of 21st-century American democracy should bear in mind that Bacon, like Machiavelli, was after all a dedicated public servant and that it was not about either of them but about Henry Kissinger that an associate remarked: “He doesn’t lie because it’s in his interest. He lies because it’s in his nature.”

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If any literary character seems to lie because it’s in his nature, surely it’s Iago. Every stratagem Bacon recommends – feigned hesitation, pretended distress, assumed incredulity, and the rest – Iago employs to poison Othello’s mind against that most admirable (and desirable) of Shakespearean wives, Desdemona. Why? What is the motive of this near-heroic malignity? Like many others, I suspect, who had not read Othello (1604) for many years, I remembered only Iago’s resentment at being passed over for promotion in favor of Cassio. That was a motive, true, but the spite it aroused seemed disproportionate. This time I noticed his other motive, the one he keeps secret even from his co-conspirator Roderigo:

… I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets
He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true,
Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do, as if for surety …

It is an implausible suspicion, for which he has no evidence. Othello is not a rake, and Iago’s wife Emilia has repeatedly reassured him. But he cannot rest: the thought of his imaginary cuckolding “doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards.” Perhaps George Bernard Shaw had Iago in mind when he remarked: “The liar’s punishment is not that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.”

As an aphorist, Shaw has few peers. One of them is Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, whose Maxims (1678) are a milestone in the growth of the modern sensibility. The duke was a melancholy man, he tells us in the brief, poignant self-portrait that accompanies The Maxims, and his friend the Cardinal de Retz thought that perhaps he had “not enough faith in virtue.” That’s one way of putting it; another is that, enjoying exceptional opportunities for observation, and protected by his rank, temperament, and lack of political ambition, he saw unprecedentedly deep into social and individual psychology.

Many of La Rochefoucauld’s aperçus are now common coin. “We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of our friends.” “Greater strength is needed to bear good fortune than bad.” “Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love.” “The modesty that shrinks from praise is really only a desire to have it more delicately expressed.” “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring.” Two centuries before Freud, La Rochefoucauld understood how little most of us are aware of our real motives.

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The Maxims, at less than a hundred pages, are among the shortest of the Western classics, yet they are nearly a complete moral education. In a sense, all the maxims are about honesty: after reading any of them, it is a little harder to deceive ourselves in all the usual ways. And the author is not, as many readers have concluded, a bitter cynic; consider maxim 316: “The weak cannot be sincere.” A vast quantity of compassion as well as insight is distilled in those five words.

The Duke, we can all agree, was consummately civilized, which most of us would probably take for granted is a good thing to be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed. Of course La Rochefoucauld’s penetration was extraordinary; but why, Rousseau asked, was it necessary? Why was civilized life so overgrown with artifice and calculation, so lacking in wholesome simplicity; why have “our souls become corrupted in proportion as our arts and sciences have advanced toward perfection?” His answer, in his first publication, A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), was radical: because the rules of civilized life are, at bottom, a defense of the indefensible. The sophistications of manners and morals, of law and theology, exist to justify (or better, obscure) privilege, with all the comforts and pleasures privilege entails. “Where do all these abuses come from, if not from the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the degradation of virtues?” In a complexly unjust society, simple honesty decays.

Rousseau died in 1778. If he had lived to read Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), his occasionally extravagant denunciations of modern corruption would have turned apoplectic. The French word “honnête” has, along with “honest,” the sense of “plainspoken,” “unsophisticated,” “uncalculating,” and even a faint touch of “slow-witted.” Which makes it fair to say that there is not a single honest word exchanged among the characters in this deliciously witty epistolary novel, except for the pathetic victim. The inexpressibly wicked protagonists, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, collaborate in his seduction of the beautiful and innocent Madame de Tourvel. She seems impregnably virtuous at first but proves no match for the canny duo, who are longtime lovers (or perhaps just, as the kids now say, friends with benefits). The Vicomte doesn’t love or even much like Madame de Tourvel; the whole affair is merely a test of his skill and an entertainment for the Marquise. In the end, everyone is ruined; but so gratuitous – and so amusing – is all this misery, duplicity, and cruelty that the honest reader will shudder and sprinkle him/herself with holy water.

Whether scandalized or scintillated, most people at least know what they think of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Not so with Denis Diderot’s enigmatic dialogue Rameau’s Nephew. Written between 1761 and 1774, it was not published in Diderot’s lifetime. After his death, it was surreptitiously copied and privately circulated. It came into the hands of Goethe, who described its effect on him as “a bombshell” and immediately translated it. It thereupon exploded all over Europe, notably in the mind of Hegel, who devoted forty highly-wrought pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit to explicating it as a paradigmatic representation of modern consciousness.

The cause of all this fuss is a novella-length dramatic dialogue between Moi (Diderot) and Lui (the Nephew) in a Parisian café. Moi is an honest, earnest man of letters, not without wit but not bursting with it. Lui has enough wit for two, and then some. He has some musical talent, but nothing like his famous uncle, the composer Rameau. What he conspicuously lacks is character, at least in any conventional sense. He is a hanger-on; he lives by flattering, amusing and cajoling newly rich businessmen, running errands for them, arranging adulteries, and giving half-hearted music lessons to their bored children. It is not an honest living, and he is too honest to pretend otherwise. He has, it seems, too much imagination to make an honest living. The exasperated Moi proffers one bourgeois piety after another, each of which Lui deflates hilariously. Society is a “vile pantomime,” corrupt all the way down, and Lui is at home in it. Honor is a joke; the only inexcusable thing is mere coarse stupidity, which is not so much immoral as tedious. Rameau’s Nephew is honesty as nihilism.

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There was a great deal of the “vile pantomime” in Victorian England (q.v., Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Dickens passim). But let us ascend from the abyss into the daylight world of John Stuart Mill. Like generations of college students, past and (I hope) future, I was profoundly stirred by Mill’s On Liberty (1859), and it has remained a beacon of political wisdom and virtue. In the celebrated second chapter, “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” there is the finest statement I know (with perhaps one exception, below) of the requirements of intellectual honesty:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. … Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to those arguments or to bring them into contact with his own mind. He must hear them from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and resolves that difficulty.

The only equal of this passage I’ve ever encountered occurs in Matthew Arnold’s essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864). Arnold is urging “ideas” and “the free play of mind” on his fellow Englishmen. He offers the example of Burke, the furious opponent of the French Revolution, who in a calmer moment set down some second thoughts. Arnold comments:

That return of Burke on himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when your party talks this language like a steam engine and can imagine no other – still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put into your mouth. I know nothing more striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English.

One can live by ideas or one can live by media consultants. Public figures in contemporary America seem to have made their choice.

Even in the comic world of Anthony Trollope’s novels there is a murmur of the vile pantomime, like a minor-key strain in a sunny symphony. But there is also at least one portrait of a wholly good, honest, lovable man, the Reverend Septimus Harding of The Warden (1855). Mr. Harding has an ecclesiastical appointment as the warden, or superintendent, of a retirement home for poor workmen. In that age of reform, Church reform was cried up, and certain reforming busybodies questioned the Church’s allocation, among the warden and the pensioners, of the income from the bequest that established the home.

Thanks to various legal technicalities, Mr. Harding’s income is safe. But he is not satisfied; he wants to be right, not merely safe. This delicacy of conscience bewilders and exasperates his supporters, the much worldlier Archdeacon, his son-in-law, and Sir Abraham, his eminent lawyer. They are indignant; for “the intense desire which Mr. Harding felt to be assured on fit authority that he was wronging no man, that he was entitled in true equity to his income, that he might sleep at night without pangs of conscience,” they haven’t an ounce of sympathy or a glimmer of comprehension. He must be feeble-minded. After much distress and drollery, the novel ends happily, of course. But you feel that Diderot and Trollope would have understood each other perfectly.

Surely Henry James, the personification of delicacy and refinement, gives us nothing vile? In fact, he does. At the heart of his greatest novels is a betrayal: Madame Merle’s of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady; Chad Newsome’s of Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors; Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant’s of Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl. For various reasons, though, none of these is as vile, as purely self-seeking, as the betrayal of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). In that novel, Kate Croy and Merton Densher are in love but cannot afford to marry – that is, they cannot face genteel poverty. Kate’s rich aunt offers to put her in circulation if she’ll drop Densher. Kate agrees, but they remain secretly engaged. A fabulously rich American heiress, Milly Theale, arrives in London. Densher, a journalist, has met her in America, and Kate schemes to throw them together, hoping that Milly, who is gravely ill and hungry for a taste of life before she dies, will fall in love with Densher and leave him money, on which he and Kate can marry. Milly discovers the deception, but generously leaves Densher her fortune anyway.

Densher, though, has fallen in love with Milly, or rather with her memory. He cannot take the money: her love has made an honest man of him. He wants to renounce the money and marry Kate “as we were.” But something has broken, as Kate is wise enough to recognize. Her final cry, which ends the novel – “We shall never be again as we were!” – is a fearsome illumination.

From Jamesian subtlety to Stalinist hackery is a long hop. The latter was not the only thing that drove George Orwell to write “Politics and the English Language” (1946). But because he too was a leftist, it infuriated him most and furnished him with his most vivid specimens. To defend Stalinist (or fascist or capitalist) barbarism, he pointed out, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” For example, “millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” Or “people are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.” Finally, at once wry and savage:

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright: “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: “While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called on to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

“The great enemy of clear language,” Orwell concluded, “is insincerity.” Honesty is not only the best policy; it is a necessary condition of good prose style.

The Vietnam War produced its share of “euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” There was “pacification,” “internal aggression,” “human-resources control,” “forced-draft urbanization,” “graduated response,” “collateral damage,” and “credibility” – this last never to be confused with mere honesty, which only sentimentalists fretted about. Until the war turned unsuccessful, and therefore unpopular, “responsible” experts in the press and academia virtually never challenged official deceits or drew attention to the horrendous suffering they served to conceal. Only a few non-experts – “wild men in the wings,” as CIA/State Department officer and Foreign Affairs editor William Bundy labeled them – insisted that the war was not merely unwinnable but, more important, immoral. Preeminent among those truth-tellers, then and in the forty years since, was Noam Chomsky. “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1966), one of the earliest of his many invaluable essays and books, still resonates. It has helped teach two generations of Americans (and not only Americans) intellectual self-defense against states and those who own them.

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The Collected Poetry of James Agee was published a few months ago, marking the sixth of a projected nine volumes of his writings. The project, from the University of Tennessee Press, is guided by the unshakeable academic conviction that nothing must be left out. The volumes have coincided with constant drip of studies and reprints. The Library of America devoted a pair of volumes to Agee’s career as a journalist, poet, film critic, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. Chaplin and Agee told the story of a friendship between the writer and the movie star. Fordham University Press reprinted Agee’s long essay on Brooklyn as a standalone book. Cotton Tenants, edited and shepherded into print by yours truly, threw new light on the development of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s best-known book.

The publishing projects have finally put the lie to a complaint, circulating since Agee’s premature death in 1955, that he wasted his talent in drink and depression. Now that the range of his achievement has come into view, it may have been that the variousness of his genres explained his reputation as an underachiever.

Yet there is no biography in print. In fact, no biography has been published since Lawrence Bergreen’s jaundiced 1984 study. Why? Agee died at forty-five, indebted and uninsured. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his masterpiece with the photographer Walker Evans, was long out of print, along with the rest of his major writings. A Death in the Family, his novel, was incomplete and unpublished. The record of neglect and disappointment, so noticeable to his contemporary critics, somehow continues to hide away the coherence of his literary biography. Agee courted failure deliberately, until it grew into a method. He thought of himself as an anarchist, living in and through a special sensibility. The preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men set forth its first premise:

Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again.

Agee’s fury began on May 18, 1916, the day his father was killed in an automobile accident. He was six, and little in his later life suggests that he recovered from the loss. Between ages ten and fourteen, he lived at St. Andrews, an Episcopal school near Sewannee, Tennessee. The Morning Watch, a novella he composed about this period, took fatherlessness as its leitmotif, once in lamentation for Agee’s missing father, once again in yearning for a spiritual surrogate. Orphaned male writers often want to test the limits of their talent against contrived obstacles. Agee’s fury, though, did not inflame in him a will to power, nor did it nurture in him a sense of victimhood. Of sidelong flashes of anger at his mother, there were many. She had him circumcised at age eight, and, after enrolling him in St. Andrews, she hid her diffidence behind her piety. He expressed his feelings in the lines of a poem:

Mumsy you were so genteel
That you made your son a heel.
Sunnybunch must now reclaim
From the sewerpipe of his shame
Any little coin he can
To reassure him he’s a man.

After leaving St. Andrews, Agee spent one year in Knoxville High School, then went north to Philips Exeter Academy, and afterward, Harvard. Upon graduation in 1932, he went directly from Cambridge to New York to take a staff position at Fortune.

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Most writers encompass a wider range of personal experience. At sixteen, Agee traveled to England and France for a bicycle trip with Father Flye, his St. Andrews teacher and mentor. He never returned to Europe. In New York, he associated with actors and writers with temperaments and backgrounds similar to his. He described his work for the Luce publications as a “semisuicide,” but he did not quit until 1948, when he moved to California to write screenplays for John Huston. Soon after he relocated, he suffered a heart attack that foreshortened his collaboration with Huston and ruined his own desire to direct.

“I am essentially an anarchist,” Agee wrote in 1938. He professed his allegiance on numerous occasions and never contradicted himself. In an autobiographical statement in 1942, he referred to himself as an “armchair anarchist.” Two years later, in a profile for Life magazine, he portrayed Huston as “a natural-born antiauthoritarian individualistic libertarian anarchist, without portfolio.” The following year, Agee again allied himself with “the sentiments and ideas of something practically extinct—the old-fashioned, nonviolent anarchist.” This figure he imagined to have been “a warm, generous-hearted, compassionate, angry man who really did love freedom.” All these remarks have been published since 1962. Biographers and critics have made nothing of them. Why the silence?

Ignorance, for one thing. As Dwight Macdonald once pointed out, “Anarchism does not mean ‘chaos’ as the New York Times and most American editorialists think. It just means ‘without a leader.’” Anarchism cultivates political practices independent of the modern power-state and its corporate allies. Rather than vanguardism, it encourages direct, democratic participation. Rather than the formation of establishments, it encourages voluntary associations vitalized by spontaneous effusions and organized around cooperation.

Agee did not join any political party, and voted just once. In holding himself aloof from the factionalism of the midcentury years, he honored his naturally generous temperament. During Charlie Chaplin’s last, raucous press conference in New York, it was Agee, speaking from the rafters, who challenged the anticommunist newspapermen. Then again, his friend Whittaker Chambers showed up late one night at his Greenwich Village apartment, drunk and distraught, and fell asleep on his couch sobbing about the communists.

What little Agee had to say about real politics is enough to make one glad he did not say more. He characterized World War II as “a rattlesnake-skunk choice, with the skunk of course considerably less deadly yet not so desirable around the house that I could back him with any favor.” He wrote a bitter satire on the bombing of Hiroshima, followed by an apocalyptic screenplay for Chaplin on the subject of thermonuclear holocaust. It was possible to support the war and condemn the bomb, and the stance could arise from mutually supporting moral and political convictions. In 1943, Agee recorded his pessimism for the coming postwar order: “I expect the worst of us and of the English; something so little better in most respects (if we get our way) than Hitler would bring, that the death of a single man is a disgrace between the two.”

If the political content of anarchism exhausted its significance, then it might merit nothing more than a footnote in Agee’s biography. But this is not so. More than an attitude, less than a creed, anarchism was to Agee a loosely worn skirt to defend the creativity of perception against the metaphysics of the concept and its embodiment in the specialist system, by which experience was isolated, desiccated, and vitiated. As he wrote in 1950:

Allegiance to ‘the modern mind’ must have deprived countless intellectuals of most of their being. Certainly among many I have known or read, feeling and intuition are suspect, sensation is isolated, only the thinking faculty is thoroughly respected; the chances of interplay among these faculties, and of mutual discipline and fertilization, are reduced to a minimum.

A number of American writers voiced similar sentiments after the 1930s and before the 1960s, though their history remains to be written. The leading narrative follows the journey of the mid-century avant-garde from Marxism to neoconservatism and registers the prepossessing influence of European literature and philosophy. But there is another story, a return from European metaphysics to the indigenous temper of anarchism.

This story is laid away in letters, diaries, interviews, and biographies. Edward Abbey rebelled against his father’s Marxism and tried to write “A General Theory of Anarchism” throughout the 1950s before settling on “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence” for his master’s thesis in philosophy, filed at the University of New Mexico in 1959. Dwight Macdonald resigned his Marxism in the 1940s and began calling himself a “conservative anarchist.” Paul Goodman introduced himself as “an old-fashioned anarchist” while C. Wright Mills wrote, a few months after publishing The Power Elite in 1956, “What these jokers—all of them—don’t realize is that way down deep and systematically I’m a goddamn anarchist.”

Robert Lowell, writing to Flannery O’Connor in 1954, noted that “Henry Adams called himself a conservative, Catholic anarchist; I would take this for myself, only adding agnostic.” Lowell, like Agee, was packed off to an Episcopal boarding school as a youth. He, too, found himself in the grip of the “idealistic unreal morality and the insipid blackness of the Episcopalian church.”

Here is a clue to the ethical value of anarchism. “I feel bound to be an anarchist in religion as well as ‘politics,’” Agee wrote in 1938, contending that “the effort toward good in both is identical, and that a man who wants and intends good cannot afford to have the slightest respect for that which is willing to accept it as it is, or to be pleased with a ‘successful’ compromise.”

Agee discovered the “effort toward good” from Father James Harold Flye, who joined the history faculty at St. Andrews one year before he arrived and served as his moral tutor thereafter. The inheritance weighed heavily on him. At Phillips Exeter, where his desire to write awakened, then again at Harvard, he offered public displays of his piety. In 1934, when his first book of poems was published, the volume seemed to his friend Robert Fitzgerald “the work of a desperate Christian.”

Even after his despair lifted and his belief scattered, his voice retained a religious penumbra. In 1950, he participated in a Partisan Review symposium: “Religion and the Intellectuals.” How, he asked in his contribution, could secular intellectuals mock the idea of transubstantiation while they accredited the idea of penis envy? He continued:

It is fashionable to feel and to force upon others, an acute sense of social responsibility; but it is rare to find a non-religious person who recognizes what is meant by sinning against oneself, or who recognizes that, granting extenuating circumstances, every person is crucially responsible for his thoughts and actions.

Solicitude for Father Flye coincided with Agee’s scorn for churches, vestments, and hierocracies. The Reverend Harry Powell, the murdering preacher in The Night of the Hunter (1955—Agee cowrote the screenplay) bears the sublimated terror of his devotionals at St. Andrews.

The script for Chaplin, The Tramp’s New World, abounds in anticlerical attitudes. Then there is Father Jackson in A Death in the Family, Agee’s novel about the automobile crash that killed his father. Two-thirds of the way through, he juxtaposes a remarkable pair of scenes. In the first, Mary, alone in her room after news of her husband’s accident reaches her, pleads with her God to tell her why this horrible event has befallen her. In the next scene, Rufus encounters a crew of older boys from the neighborhood. They ask him to dance for their pleasure. Suspicious that they are tricking him, yet desperate to win their approval, his moral perplexity mirrors his mother’s. The juxtaposition poses the problem of theodicy, the traditional jurisdiction of priests and theologians, but Agee refused to allow Father Jackson an un-contradicted answer.

“I tell you Rufus, it’s enough to make a man puke up his soul [says Mary’s brother, Andrew, at the end of the novel]. That—that butterfly has got more of God in him than Jackson will ever see for the rest of eternity. Priggish, meanly-mouthed son of a bitch.”

The Night of the Hunter and A Death in the Family use the undivided intuitions of children to point out that ecclesiastical guardianship over morality rests on false riddles and trumped-up antagonisms. The film, written from the perspective of two children, shows the Reverend Powell (played by Robert Mitchum) with “Love” tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, and “Hate” on the other. In the novel, the last word is given to Rufus (the young Agee) as he puzzles over his uncle Andrew’s outburst. Andrew had directed the outburst toward the family as well as Father Jackson. Rufus wonders why:

He hates them just like opening a furnace door but he doesn’t want them to know it. He doesn’t want them to know it because he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. He doesn’t want them to know it because he knows they love him and think he loves them. He doesn’t want them to know it because he loves them. But how can he love them if he hates them so? How can he hate them if he loves them? Is he mad at them because they can say their prayers and he doesn’t? He could if he wanted to, why doesn’t he? Because he hates prayers. And them too for saying them. He wished he could ask his uncle, “Why do you hate Mama?” but he was afraid to.

The ethical dimension of Agee’s anarchism entailed the same double-sided consequences as his anti-politics. He cast off the superintending influence of religious dogma, and rejected its metaphysics of good and evil, on the assumption that “every person is crucially responsible for his thoughts and actions.” The liability of this utopian attitude toward personal responsibility was tumult omnipresent, a ceaseless struggle against the poison of ambivalence. An emotional life divested of the metaphysical confidence of religious morality stands undefended before passion’s caprice, as Agee demonstrated in deciding to write a love letter to his ex-wife, Alma.

He decided to write to Alma (as he explained in the letter) after Helen Levitt showed him a photograph she had taken of them when they were married, “and seeing it, fourteen years dropped out from under me, and I knew just where we were then, and where we really belong, and where we always ought to be. I am still in love with you, Alma” The background is important. Alma Mailman had fallen for Agee when he was still married to her friend Olivia Saunders, the favorite daughter of a prominent New York family. To punish Alma for the affair, the Saunders family shunned her. In her own family, only her father did not break ties. Marrying Agee washed away part of the stain. Then disaster struck. Less than one month after Alma gave birth to their child, Agee confessed that he had been sleeping with Mia Fritsch, a researcher at Fortune. Alma boarded a freighter to Mexico.

When he wrote the letter beckoning Alma to return, he was forty-three. He had a third wife (Mia) and two children under his care. Alma, forty years old, had remarried as well, also with two children. The letter proposed, in effect, that they do it all over again, that they smash up two families and begin anew. All because he got a glimpse of an old photograph.

An autobiographical statement confessed the vulnerability behind the immorality: “he is pronouncedly schizoid, and a manic-depressive as well, with an occasional twinkle of paranoia.” Others saw Agee as he saw himself: the children who chalked on the steps of his home in Brooklyn, “The Man Who Lives Here is a Loony”; and Thomas Wolfe, who reported, after a long evening of conversation, that Agee was “crazy,” that he “was always talking about things in spirals and on planes and things.” A colleague at Time, overhearing a drunken Agee cursing a telephone operator, was moved to say that “a wild yearning violence beat in his blood, certainly, as just as certainly, the steadier pulse of a saint.”

Lionel Trilling found the necessary distinctions. During the last conversation he had with Agee, they talked about the concept of ambivalence in Freud’s The Ego and the Id: loving and hating at the same time. Agee said it disgusted him. “It seemed to me then,” Trilling wrote, “that his brilliant intensities of perception and his superb rhetoric required him to affirm, if not actually to believe, that the human soul could exist in a state of radical innocence which was untouched by any contrary.”

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men bore James Agee’s most conspicuous traits: his oscillating voice, perpetually prepared for paralysis; his dislike of ordinary politics; his determination to cut his perceptions down to the bone of innocence; his struggle to find a place to stand in a ruined world.

The background is well known. In 1936, Fortune sent Agee and the photographer Walker Evans to Alabama. They were to file a report on conditions in tenant farming. Agee and Evans lived briefly with three impoverished families. The following year, Agee rented a house with Alma in Frenchtown, New Jersey, and set to work. He wrote in pencil, at night, breaking his concentration to read passages aloud to Alma and to confer with Evans and Dwight Macdonald, Robert Fitzgerald, and Delmore Schwartz. It was in Frenchtown in 1938 that he wrote the letter to Father Flye in which he first called himself an anarchist.

Concern for the plight of Southern farmers had not been so active since the 1890s. Twenty-seven years old, Agee was running strong in his talent. Yet he squandered his chance to make himself heard. The book added little, if anything, to the general stock of ideas about tenant farming. Long patches of the prose were opaque. Fortune rejected the initial essay; the publisher deferred the book after arguing with the authors. By the time it appeared, in 1941, the war held a monopoly of national concern. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold about six hundred copies in its first year, a few thousand more in remainder, and quietly went out of print. Trilling said he rarely heard anybody mention it in the 1940s and 1950s, not even in private conversation.

Agee went out of his way to fend off the sympathies of his readers. In the preamble he copied out the famous final sentences of The Communist Manifesto, but then added, in a note to “the average reader,” that “these words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them.” In fact, “neither these words nor the authors are the property of any political party, faith, or faction.” Agee knew enough about politics to understand the economic and social forces buffeting the lives of the sharecroppers. He understood, as they could not, the real calamity of their situation. Yet he rejected the meliorism of the liberal reformers as firmly as he rejected the radicalism of the communists:

This particular subject of tenantry is becoming more and more stylish as a focus of “reform,” and in view of the people who will suffer and be betrayed at the hands of such “reformers,” there could never be enough effort to pry their eyes open even a little wider.

The surrealist movement had made its way from Paris to New York in the 1930s. A decade later, the New Fiction matured in the United States, spurred by translations of Kafka and Kierkegaard. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men could have been taken up as an example of experimental writing, if Agee had not choked off an aesthetic interpretation as well. “It is funny if I am a surrealist,” he wrote in his journal in January 1938. This moment of bemusement soured in the book’s preamble. “Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art,” he admonished.

There remained the possibility that Agee would appeal to the conscience of his readers. But the preamble resembled the opening pages of Old Goriot, in which Balzac bemoaned the bourgeois turn toward spectatorship in the presence of human pain. “Their hearts are momentarily touched,” Balzac wrote, “but the impression made on them is fleeting, it vanishes as quickly as a delicious fruit melts in the mouth.” Agee likewise supposed that his “average reader” would be edified, nothing more, by his portraits of suffering. Scorning “your safe world,” he borrowed the title of his book fromEcclesiasticus. The irony came at the expense of his readers.

The failing of the book was the main condition of its achievement. Agee intended it as “an effort in human actuality.” Only by antagonizing ready-made techniques of observation did he believe that he could hope to respect, understand, contemplate, and love the sharecroppers as human beings. These were the positive dimensions of his mistrust of inherited forms of cultural authority. He went to Alabama to tell what it was like to be in the presence of a group of undefended, unfamiliar people located on the margins of society. Rather than delineating a problem or an issue, rather than shading his observations into a logic of narrative, he wove a mosaic of braided perceptions, luminous and radiant. In describing a bed, or a pair of trousers, he illuminated the image as if he was bringing it forth for the first time as it had existed always.

To grasp the complexity of this aspiration, consider the conventions dishonored in the execution. Agee did not try to discover new knowledge about his subjects, like a social scientist. He did not present himself as spokesman, overflowing with humanitarian concern, or as a psychologist, building up case histories, or as an ideologist, advancing a science of concepts, or as an artist, falsifying reality in order to reenter selected aspects, or as a professional writer, extracting from his subject a set of techniques. These refusals, and the integrity and responsibility upon which they rested, released a flow of emotional and imaginative energy that transcended the impersonal networks of communication dominating Serious Literature in the United States. Few writers anywhere have applied a greater intensity or sophistication to the involutions of thought and feeling disarmed. Few have been so overwhelmed in the task. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men never found an encompassing vision. Agee presented his struggle to see with a grace and fury all his own.

To forge a Concept out of this impulse to fail, then, would rob anarchism of its essential qualities. For a long time now, the human sciences and their philosophical allies have emphasized the sovereignty of language over experience, have made thought and feeling intelligible as the interplay of text and context. But language may meet an impulse it reflects or constructs only by injuring. Silence dissolves when words bespeak it. Privacy scrutinized in public is no longer privacy. The meaning of dreaming lies in the forgetting. No genuine history of dreaming is possible, for its remembered experience, its forms, interpretations, and stigmata, constitute a loss of its reality.

So it goes with anarchism, whose first principle acknowledges no first principles and whose success depends on consciousness of its inadequacies. It entails a receding horizon, a failing struggle against the trappings of institutions and ideologies. Not demonstration, explanation, and justification, but illumination lies at its center of its aspiration. Absurdity has been its recurring conclusion; satire its method, not merely for criticizing but profaning authority. The “zoological types” exemplified in Balzac’s Human Comedy have shaped many of its impressions and images.

Typically, anarchist poets and writers do not agree on the name of its special source of energy. Agee named it “being” and “fury.” E.E. Cummings named it “Is.” Laura Riding named it “individual-unreal” and warned, in Anarchism is Not Enough, not to dilute it by analogy. That anarchism’s source is hived in a preconscious region of the psyche, undiscoverable by language and hence ungovernable by reflective intelligence; on this essential point, they seem to agree. Standing for the limits of knowing in an Age of Information, anarchism reports itself in maxims, epigrams, and aphorisms, by way of pamphlets and manifestos, when it reports itself at all. (“If I weren’t an anarchist I would probably be a left-wing conservative,” Agee wrote to Father Flye, “though I write even the words with superstitious dread.”) Provocative and enigmatic, exiled and omnipresent, it is the tramp in the ghetto of mass culture.

Anarchism hides in history, while ideologies cotton to institutions. The origins of the modern ideologies lie in a counter-intuitive discovery: man-made institutions may acquire an independent logic, which may turn to confront its makers. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith put this discovery to work for liberalism, much as Karl Marx, in Capital, made communism answer “a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers.” Smith’s mystical appeal to an “invisible hand,” like Marx’s attempt to master the “anarchy of production,” whipped history and human nature into a logic of relations. As liberalism and Marxism developed, their ideological vanguards transformed the logic of relations into the science of concepts, built institutions to anchor the Enlightenment, and thereby reproduced themselves in the Association, Bureau, Center, Department, Institute, Office, Party, and University. Therein the intellectuals accumulate conceptual knowledge, score points against the adversary, diagnose crises, uncover scandals, and chronicle their own changing role in the Progress of History

Agee wrote often about the power of film and photography to transcend inherited vocabularies of representation. He reported his fidelity to anarchism fitfully, in fragments and outlines which may give the impression that it is chaotic, or merely eccentric. One such fragment, “Now as Awareness,” ruminated on the necessity of “valuing life above art.” The preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, setting the furies of creativity against the authority of art, religion, history, and society, bore a silent debt to Rousseau, whose “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts” (1750) voiced the same idea in very nearly the same words: “Our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection.” William Blake, another of the “unpaid agitators” accompanying Agee to Alabama, echoed the idea in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

Anarchism, so understood, substitutes for the process theory of history the ancient aphorism, “History is philosophy by example.” It entrusts itself to a genealogy of spiritual striving. Not invisible processes, but feats of virtuosity renew it. Not a vanguard of intellectuals, but the annals of biography transmit it between the lines of history. Not ideology, but filiopiety. “Those works which I most deeply respect have about them a firm quality of the superhuman,” Agee wrote, “in part because they refuse to define and limit and crutch, or admit themselves as human.”

Marxists and liberals apply ideological and political tests to police their communities. Anarchists appear as isolated stars in a common constellation. Of Jesus Christ, William Blake, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig von Beethoven, Agee said:

Some you ‘study’ and learn from; some corroborate you; some ‘stimulate’ you; some are gods; some are brothers, much closer than colleagues or gods; some choke the heart out of you and make you dubious of ever reading or looking at work again: but in general, you know yourself to be at least by knowledge and feeling, of and among these, a member in a race which is much superior to any organization or Group or Movement or Affiliation, and the bloody enemy of all such, no matter what their ‘sincerity,’ ‘honesty,’ or ‘good intentions.’

By such examples and encounters, he laid up ethical and aesthetic equivalents to the anarchist’s characteristic political gesture in the “propaganda of the deed.”

The critical and commercial failure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Agee accepted without protest. No missives to his publisher; no carping about the critics who misunderstood his meaning; no bitterness toward the public who ignored his book. To his failing health he applied another kind of diffidence In the spring of 1955, he was enduring five or six minor heart attacks every day, swallowing nitroglycerine tablets one after another. On May 11, he mailed his last letter to Father Flye: “Nothing much to report. I feel, in general, as if I were dying: a terrible slowing-down, in all ways, above all in relation to work.” Five days later he died in a taxicab on his way to the doctor’s office.

Agee’s success began soon afterward. A Death in the Family won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Two years later, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was republished to universal acclaim. Film critics, civil rights activists, and bohemian poets avidly read Agee on Film (1958), Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962), The Collected Short Prose of James Agee (1968), The Collected Poems of James Agee (1968), and Remembering James Agee (1974). The introduction to the republication of The Morning Watch compared him to Shelley. He became a legend, a cultural hero for a generation in love with cultural heroes.

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All along Agee’s distinction rested with a fraternity of sympathetic writers, “members,” he might have agreed, “of a race which is much superior to any organization or Group or Movement.” C. Wright Mills praised Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for “the enormity of the self-chosen task” and dubbed it “sociological poetry.” Paul Goodman thought “many of the items are presented with extraordinary beauty and power and a kind of isolated truth” and lauded Agee for his “misgivings at being a spy and a stranger, his refusal to submit to the categories of sociology or the devices of drama.” “I feel sure this is a great book,” said Lionel Trilling; “nine out of every ten pages are superb. Agee has a sensibility so precise, so unremitting, that it is sometimes appalling.” Alfred Kazin called A Death in the Family “an utterly individual and original book, and it is the work of a writer whose power with English words can make you gasp.” Robert Lowell said, “I add Agee’s death to his hero’s and can’t forget the epitaph.” But Dwight Macdonald left the finest comment on the whole man:

Yes, I was very fond of Agee and I think he was fond of me, too. We liked each other very much and we respected each other, which is perhaps equally important, you know. He was pretty much of a bum in many ways. He didn’t wash very much, his clothes were filthy, and he was very bad sexually, to say the least—you know, a loose liver. And he drank too much and had a lot of faults. But I must say, he’s one of the few people that I’ve ever met that I would consider, without any question, a genius. Like Auden, Eliot, people like that, without any question.

Agee demanded more freedom than most of his contemporaries while expecting to accomplish less than any of them. Measured against the breed of writers who emerged in the 1950s, his prose seems static, as if caught between equally valid perceptions, or immobilized in the bereaved perspective of his boyhood. Unlike the new narcissists, however, he did not exploit his subjects, or betray his ex-wives or his parents for the sake of Art and Ambition. He never forced the grief of his subjects to undergo the brutalities of action or the humiliations of analysis. His oscillating style managed to be realistic and tender at the same time, to get love and death into view rather than sex and violence. As he wrote in his introduction to Walker Evans’s collection of subway photographs, Many Are Called:

Each individual existence is as matchless as a thumbprint or a snowflake. Each wears garments which of themselves are exquisitely subtle uniforms and badges of their being. Each carries in the postures of his body, in his hands, in his face, in the eyes, the signatures of a time and a place in the world upon a creature for whom the name immortal soul is one mild and vulgar metaphor.

Agee confides the dignity of human emotion, and teaches us to detect the false notes in posterity’s trumpets. In this spirit may we remember him; by our furies, rather than by any successes that may be born by them.

The study was in full swing by June 1945. C. Wright Mills, the field supervisor, was barking assignments to a staff of fifteen interviewers, assistants, and stenographers. Mills had $20,000 to spend, and he did not plan to bring any of it back to New York. He had installed himself and his staff in the Hotel Orlando, in downtown Decatur, Illinois.

A slew of advertisements in the newspapers and on the radio announced the reason. The Bureau of Applied Social Research, from Columbia University, wanted to know how ordinary women made decisions in their everyday lives. Decatur was happy to oblige. About eight hundred volunteers, chosen from a cross-section of the population, sat for thirty-minute interviews. Everybody answered three questions:

Has anybody recently solicited your opinion concerning international, national, or community affairs or news events?

Have you changed your opinion recently about any such events?

Do you know anybody who keeps up with the news, anybody you trust to help you decide your opinion?

The three questions asked—in the same sequence and with varying follow-up questions—covered not only public affairs but also fashions, movies, and brands. The intention was straightforward. Who were the “opinion leaders” in Decatur? The first question yielded a list of self-declared opinion leaders. Here were people who claimed they had been consulted. Answers to the second question yielded another list. Here were people who had influenced the opinions of the women interviewed. The staff took down their names and addresses and went to find them for follow-up interviews.

Answers to question number three yielded a third list, a general list of esteemed people in Decatur. Mills sought out these people himself. He went to see the mayor, visited the bankers, the clergymen, the newspaper publisher, the businessmen big and small. The Bureau’s staff interviewed the eight hundred women in June, again in August, and again in December, each time asking about changes of mind in the interval. At each step, the women, the questions, the subjects, and the answers were broken down into indices of age, sex, income, and occupation and dutifully recorded onto checkbook-sized cards.

Complex in its design, ingenious in its procedures, laborious in its execution, the Decatur study excited a feeling of camaraderie that carried Mills and his staff through the arranging, recording, and coding of approximately 2,000 interviews, all in all. The staff ate dinners together in the Hotel Orlando and enjoyed drinks late into the evening. During the daylight they took opportunities where they found them. As it happened, public opinion in Decatur appeared to be changing over a proposal to build a new section of U.S. highway 36. The staff interviewed 718 women about the proposal, and Mills published the results in a Sunday edition of the Decatur Herald. In eight dramatic days in August, the government dropped two atomic bombs, the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War, and Japan surrendered. Mills wrote and revised questions in a frantic effort to discern the flow of opinion about these events as well. At the end of the month, he reported his progress. “I worry a lot about the whole thing flopping because figures can go screwy, but sometimes it looks like a damn nice little study.”

The plan of the Decatur study originated with the founder and director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Paul Lazarsfeld. For an earlier book, The People’s Choice, Lazarsfeld and his collaborators had interviewed a cross-section of voters in Erie County, Ohio, every month for the six months that led up to the 1940 presidential election, and then once more after the election. Those interviews had suggested something Lazarsfeld found intriguing enough to pursue for years afterward. Those voters who had changed their political opinion over the course of the election attributed the change to casual conversations among family and friends to face-to-face interactions, rather than to formal media. Upon this insight, Lazarsfeld mounted his “two-step flow of information” hypothesis. Step one: information came from the formal media. Step two: informal groups or individuals mediated the information for other groups or individuals. Perhaps the technologies of mass communication were not as powerful as the intellectuals believed.

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Paul Lazarsfeld held a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Vienna, and he thought of himself as a psychologist.⁵These two dimensions of his biography converged in the approach he made when he went to design his study of opinion leadership in Decatur. Select a sample of ordinary people. Ask a standard set of questions. Codify the answers. Classify the variables. Make the tables. Build an index structure from the tables. Now make the indexes talk to you. In a time before computers, the procedure could be maddeningly complex. But Lazarsfeld believed a well-designed study that employed the correct statistical procedure could pry insights from everyday psychology. If the idea sounded a little like psychoanalysis, that was not a coincidence. Back in Vienna, Lazarsfeld’s mother was trained in individual psychology by Alfred Adler.

The quantitative procedure often raised objections on the part of social theorists. That opinions could be represented by putting a standardized set of questions to a cross-section of a community, that they could be measured on scales of magnitude, and then converted into statistical summations—these assumptions were by no means evident, wrote Robert Merton, a young sociologist at Tulane University, in an essay published in 1940 in the American Sociological Review. Merton’s essay did not mention Lazarsfeld, but it challenged the synonym linking opinion and action as assumed by the style of research toward which Lazarsfeld was moving.

There was another kind of resistance. Lazarsfeld’s “empirical analysis of action” needed manifold resources, not only teams of interviewers, stenographers, and analysts, but offices, data-processing machines, travel and communication equipment, plus a large infusion of money to keep the whole operation going. To organize these tasks, in brief, a new kind of research institute need to be hooked up to a money pump. Foundations, state agencies, and corporations would have to play a role. This Lazarsfeld had known from the beginning. The Vienna Institute, the first of several organizations he founded, had signed as its first client a major chocolate corporation in Germany.

In 1934, while Lazarsfeld visited the United States on a fellowship, the swift political turn in Austria made him a refugee. He had a stint with the National Youth Administration, and another one as director of a research institute at the University of Newark. Then he won a job as director of the Office of Radio Research at Princeton University. When its funder transferred the radio project to Columbia University in 1939, he found himself in New York. The sociology department at Columbia offered him a courtesy appointment, but not much more. Not many officials or professors wanted to be associated with a style of research that relied so heavily on commercial money.

But the success of The People’s Choice and other such studies gained Lazarsfeld growing notice in the United States. During the early 1940s, the radio project analyzed propaganda for the Office of War Information, and began to draw more and more contract work from American corporations. Lazarsfeld renamed the project the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Most important, he hired an associate director, the newly converted Robert Merton, who had joined the Columbia sociology department in 1940.

By 1944, Lazarsfeld was ready to try to go beyond The People’s Choice. If certain people mediated information between media and its consumers, what psychological dynamics might the “two-step flow” hypothesis disclose? In Macfadden Publications, the owner of True Story magazine, he found a client willing to entrust him with $20,000. Because most of the subscribers of True Story were women, Macfadden’s sponsorship would limit the study accordingly. Nonetheless, Lazarsfeld could use the money to trace the actual flow of opinion in politics, fashion, movies, and marketing. He looked at each midwestern city with a population between fifty and eighty thousand. From the sample, he derived thirty-six statistical indicators. He made the number one hundred stand for “most typical.” Decatur, Illinois, scored ninety-nine. All that remained was to find a field supervisor

One day in January 1945, Robert Merton surprised C. Wright Mills with a telephone call. Would he come up from Washington and pay a visit to the new Bureau of Applied Social Research? So far as professional interests went, Merton and Mills had more in common with each other than either man shared with Lazarsfeld. For several years they had engaged in a vigorous correspondence about the sociology of knowledge, crossing pens over matters technical, but agreeing wholeheartedly about the need to develop in the United States what had been a European preoccupation. Merton, having studied with Talcott Parsons, came to the field from reading Emile Durkheim. Mills, having studied with Chicago-trained sociologists at the University of Texas, came to it from John Dewey and George Mead. For the theoretical acuity of their early essays in this emerging field, Merton and Mills were widely considered two of the most promising young sociologists in the country.

There was another, more personal affinity. Unlike Lazarsfeld, who came from a politically prominent, highly educated family in Austria, Merton and Mills were on their own. Merton was born in Philadelphia to immigrant parents—his father worked as a carpenter and storekeeper—and attended Temple University on scholarship. After graduate school at Harvard, and after a brief tenure at Tulane University, he joined Columbia at the age of thirty-one, already considered a leader in the field. Mills was born in Waco, Texas, into a middle-class home. His father was a traveling salesman. When he graduated from high school in Dallas, his father sent him to military school. He transferred to the University of Texas the next year. Like Merton, Mills proved himself in state school, caught the attention of older men in graduate school, and looked upon the expanding field of sociology as a way up and out. Such were the expectations laid up around him, the sociology department at the University of Maryland gave him his first job in 1941 as associate professor, allowing him to leap over the assistant rank completely. And this was before he had finished his dissertation, a sociological history of pragmatism.

On a Friday night in January 1945, Lazarsfeld, Merton, and Mills, three men whose combined work would transform American sociology, met in Manhattan for seven hours. Everything about the evening gave off the scent of possibility. Over a big meal in an expensive restaurant the conversation passed easily over the study, over the city of Decatur, over the moral problems involved in commercial research. Now and then several young women from Smith and Vassar (invited to the table by Lazarsfeld to seduce Mills into joining the team) spoke in sugary voices. After the women departed, Lazarsfeld set forth the terms. Mills was to have the title of research associate at the Bureau. He was to go to Decatur in the summer and direct the opinion study. He could publish under his own name. If all went well, he might expect to join the sociology faculty of Columbia University on a permanent basis. Mills reported the evening in a starry-eyed letter to his parents:

After they had laid out the job and said: “Well that’s it; we want you. Will you come?” I said (holding myself in with bursting joy at the whole idea: christ I’d go for food and shelter) anyway I kept the face immobile and just said: “for how much?” They wouldn’t say, but replied: “You know what you’re worth, name it.” To which little charlie said very quietly, “I won’t charge you that much, but I cdnt think of it in terms less than 4500.” Immediately the guys said “Then your beginning salary will be 5000.” To which the appropriate reply was “That is closer to what I’m worth.” and everybody laughed and felt good.

On January 26, 1945, having secured a leave of absence from Maryland, Mills wrote to Lazarsfeld to accept the offer. Each week that spring, he rode the train from Washington to Manhattan and spent one day at the Bureau, feeling his way around its cavernous offices on 59th and Amsterdam Avenue, getting to know his colleagues, paying visits to friends in the city. Meanwhile, a fight raged uptown. Those opposing the hiring of Mills at Columbia feared that Lazarsfeld and Merton were using him to drive the Bureau closer to the university and its plentiful resources. In this, they were correct. At the end of May, as Mills set out for Decatur, the Bureau signed its first formal agreement with the university.

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To detect the “opinion leaders,” the analysis of the data needed to yield clues to three main problems. Could the actual flow of interpersonal influence in Decatur be isolated? Could “opinion leaders” be isolated as a social type? And could the influence be isolated in relation to the class structure of a community? Did the influence flow vertically, up and down class lines, or horizontally, within classes?

Lazarsfeld and his team had not had the chance to interview opinion leaders for The People’s Choice. If there was a singular methodological imperative in the Decatur study, here it rested. To find and talk to the opinion leaders was to isolate the structure and the flow of decision all at once. To isolate the structure and the flow of decision in a typical community would make Macfadden’s advertising department happy, no question. But the implications could not fail to strike up interest among scholars too. Inasmuch as the opinion leader could be isolated at the crossroads of structure and flow, it disclosed the how and the why of decision making. Nobody had attained quite this much insight into the psychology of everyday decision. And no wonder. When Mills went to analyze the data, more than six thousand tables holding as many as ten variables at once spread before him in a river of numbers and symbols. His initial worry about “the whole thing flopping” tightened into acute anxiety.

Could the flow of influence be isolated? Answers to question two (have you recently changed your opinion?) should have yielded the relevant data. Here, the women in the cross-section attested that an opinion flowed from one person to another. Did their testimony mean that the first person could be called an opinion leader, and the second, an opinion follower? The actual answers seemed to require a third category, so that the “opinion leaders” could be said to have given advice; “opinion followers” could be said to have gotten advice; and a third, “opinion relayers,” could be said to have given and gotten. But the design of the study had not anticipated the need for this third category.

Could “opinion leaders” be isolated as a social type? Answers to question one (has anybody recently solicited your opinion?) did give a list of self-elected opinion leaders; whether they could be believed was an open question. The bigger problem was that Mills’s staff had not been able to track down all the people named in questions two and three. And when they did conduct follow-up interviews, they could not always confirm that the influence had transpired.

Could the direction of the influence be isolated in the class structure of the community? Answers to question three (do you know anybody whom you trust to help you decide your opinion?) showed the chain of opinion leadership on politics to be stratified vertically; most of the named people belonged to the top class, with a steady graduation downward. But while the data on politics yielded the best chain of opinion leaders, the data on fashion yielded the best flow of opinion. Mills could not connect opinion leaders in the chain to the same kind of opinion transaction. There appeared to be no way to get them to coincide.

Lazarsfeld flew to Chicago now and then to meet him. There the two men talked about the progress of the study, discussed what they could accomplish with the data. Mills’s ongoing success in other fields, plus Lazarsfeld’s ongoing success in establishing the Bureau, plus the fertility of fresh data, all this, in combination, must have made it easy to hope for the best.

At the end of December 1945, Mills finished the third and final round of interviewing in Decatur. Good news awaited him when he arrived back in New York. Columbia College wanted to keep him on the sociology faculty. In the spring, Lazarsfeld opened up a division of labor research in the Bureau. He hired Mills to run it. Inside of three months Mills made contact with every major union in every major city in the United States and won a contract from the Office of Naval Research besides.

The deadline for the Decatur manuscript came and went. Lazarsfeld paid regular visits to Mills’s apartment in Greenwich Village in 1946. They made some progress. Mills produced approximately three hundred pages of text and put the interviews at the center of a widely noticed article, “The Middle-Classes in Middle-Sized Cities,” published in the American Sociological Review. Lazarsfeld, too, published a widely noticed article based on the interviews, “Audience Research in the Movie Field,” which appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Of the Decatur study, he boasted that it offered “probably the most detailed approach to the movie audience yet undertaken.” Mills’s article relied on data from question three (chain of local political elites) to present a picture of class awareness in Decatur’s social structure. Lazarsfeld, in his article, asked how moviegoers decided, from the fantastic volume of information available in the mass media, which movies to see. “There are people, distributed all over the population” who mediated a “horizontal flow of influence” from person to person, Lazarsfeld wrote. “Actually, it is not too difficult to spot these opinion leaders.”

Mills went to Boston that December to present the dilemmas of the Decatur study to an audience of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He gave a copy of his address to Lazarsfeld, and added two memoranda, in which he explained the “technical tragedy” of the thing. Soon after, he gave another talk about the study, this time at a seminar at Columbia. After he finished, Lazarsfeld rose and remarked, “So that’s what you spent all my money on.”

In the summer 1947, the study was sixteen months overdue. Mills was residing in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He wrote to Lazarsfeld to say that he had decided, once and for all, that the tables and equations and figures made no sense. He had the files with him right there in his cabin. He was going to set aside the tabulation machinery and he was going to write the goddamned book then and there. He promised to be back in New York in two months with a completed manuscript in hand. Lazarsfeld fired him.

The author interviewed for The Long Road to Decatur: A History of Personal Influence.

For a brief time, Mills’s career at Columbia looked like it might not survive the blow. Since he had been hired to teach in the college in December 1945, he had been prolific. He had a steady stream of material appearing in the magazines and periodicals; he performed contract research for the government; he expanded the labor division of the Bureau; and From Max Weber, the book of translations he published with Hans Gerth, was transforming American social science. In December 1946, Robert Merton warned an inquirer to stay away from his hotshot sociologist. “I can best summarize my opinion of Mills by saying that I regard him as the outstanding sociologist of his age in the country. The tenacity with which I hold this view is indicated by my hope that he will remain at Columbia. It is only fair to say that should be he offered an appointment by the New School, I, for one, shall recommend to Columbia that it do whatever it can to keep him within our Department.” Three months after Lazarsfeld’s action, however, Merton joined with the rest of the department in declining to support Mills’s promotion, citing “deep disappointment over the Decatur episode.”

Mills tried to make amends. When the governor of Puerto Rico asked the Bureau for a study of immigration, he volunteered for the job and carried it out well. He made some headway toward a saving compromise as well. The Decatur manuscript would be divided into two parts, he reported in 1948. Lazarsfeld and two assistants would be responsible for writing one part, and he would be responsible for “theory unburdened by the silly figures.” Given everything, he thought this made “a fine solution and [I] am very pleased with it.” In a second edition of The People’s Choice, published in 1948, Lazarsfeld told readers the Decatur study “will soon appear.” Two years later, however, the project languished. “Paul is giving me a lot of trouble on [the] Decatur manuscript, and the guy who talks for one of us, to the other, has goofed off,” Mills wrote. “God, will I ever get that crap off my desk? It is continually in my hair. I just hate to work on it.”

The Columbia sociology department had hired Merton with the idea that he might mediate such disputes between theorists and empiricists. But the complexities of this dispute defeated even his skills. As he wrote to Mills:

I’ve read every bit of correspondence that’s passed between NY and Reno, and I’m convinced that there’s been a break in communication. Paul hasn’t been able to put what he has to say in a letter, that I know. Perhaps you haven’t either. I know I couldn’t. Having started four or five letters to you, I gave up the thing up as an impossible job.

History has not made the job a whole lot easier. Mills’s manuscript seems not to have survived, so it is difficult to judge how Lazarsfeld and Katz, in publishing the Decatur study as Personal Influence may have solved or ignored the technical dimensions of the dispute as it stood in 1950. It would be foolish for a historian untrained in quantitative research, working with limited evidence, to attempt to adjudicate. Many talented scholars struggled to make sense of the data before Lazarsfeld and Katz made a book of it.

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The political dimension of the dispute set another trap. Certainly, it is possible to set Mills’s views on public opinion against the conclusions in Lazarsfeld and Katz. This procedure might expect to find Lazarsfeld and Mills squaring off, the one bemoaning the omnipotence of the mass media, the other proving the sovereignty of the primary group. But Mills’s views on this subject defy paraphrase. In an essay from 1950, for example, he used the Decatur interviews to make the same point made later in Lazarsfeld and Katz. “No view of American public life is realistic that assumes public opinion to be merely the puppet of the mass media. There are strong forces at work among the public that are independent of these media of communication, forces that can and do at times go directly against the opinions promulgated by them.”

How could two men, joined to study the resilience of personal communication, fail so miserably to communicate? One thing is certain. The dispute that started during those first meetings in Chicago, which tangled and deepened in Greenwich Village in 1946, which stole into seminars in Boston and New York, did not end with the publication of Personal Influence. Mills did not get the Decatur material off his desk or out of his hair. He folded away the interviews into the book that made him famous outside professional sociology, White Collar. Later, he made them the basis of “local society” chapter of the book that made him yet more famous outside sociology, The Power Elite. Lazarsfeld thought Mills, in using the Decatur material for these books, was repaying his debts to the Bureau in scorn and contempt. In retrospect, the originating dinner in New York, that seven-hour marathon discussion in January 1945, was the best time they had together. For the dispute twisted into ugly personal shapes, produced volumes of emotion and ideas as each man pressed his claim.

Mills lost little time striking back. In a stream of essays written as he made his exit from the Bureau (and indeed from collaborative work altogether) he criticized the kind of administrative research he had undertaken in Decatur. “IBM plus Reality plus Humanism = Sociology,” the title of an essay published in The Saturday Review, more or less summed up the point. That he had Lazarsfeld in his sights nobody could question. Another of his essays was a rewrite of the address he had given in Boston in 1946; this time, it made Lazarsfeld’s book The People’s Choice the villain. One can catch the tone of these essays shifting from extenuation, to criticism, then breaking into competitive action. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” a primer on social research Mills composed in 1952, advocated sociology as a way of life, as a means of transcending the split between science and poetry. By the time Mills handed out his primer to his students at Columbia, White Collar had become a bestseller. He wished for the book to be read as a set of “prose poems.”

Lazarsfeld thought it was “a very dumb book.” As Mills pursued his independent public, Lazarsfeld pursued his style of research at Columbia. What progress he made! Although the Bureau of Applied Social Research never received more than 10 percent of its funding from the university, Lazarsfeld won virtually every moral and intellectual battle he waged. The Bureau moved to 117th Street, near the campus, and employed approximately one hundred staff members. Even its critics knew it was the most important center of quantitative social research in the country. They knew it because Lazarsfeld was busily teaching a whole generation of sociology graduate students how to reproduce the methods featured in The People’s Choice and Personal Influence.

Either Lazarsfeld or Merton held the title of “executive officer” of the Columbia graduate department since 1949. Either way, a strict professional ethos set in place. Sociology at Columbia was not a way of life or a means of transcending science and poetry. It was a technical discipline. Lazarsfeld thought White Collar was “a very dumb book” because it mixed up the analytic and the impressionistic. Merton was more flexible and searching than Lazarsfeld in his vision of sociology, yet he too expected it to evolve into a science. When an assistant professor of sociology published a film review in a New York newspaper, he was summoned to the office. Did he wish to continue teaching in the department? “Well, both Merton and I hope that this movie review you wrote is the last one; that it is not the kind of sociology you plan to practice,” Lazarsfeld said, adding under his breath, “The last thing we need is another C. Wright Mills.”

Young intellectuals in every industrial society in the world did what Columbia’s graduate students and assistant professors were not permitted to do, namely, discuss and debate Mills’s books. By the end of the decade, translations appeared in Argentina, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the Soviet Union. Lazarsfeld found that whenever he went to Europe to lecture, somebody in the audience asked him about the author of The Power Elite. Why didn’t more sociologists write such interesting books? Asked this in Warsaw, Lazarsfeld exploded with a denunciation so caustic it embarrassed his hosts. Zygmunt Bauman witnessed the occasion: “Mills baiting was a favorite pastime among the most distinguished members of American academe: there were no expedients, however dishonest, which the ringleaders of the hue-and-cry would consider below their dignity and to which they would not stoop.”

Mills did not exactly elevate the tone of the dispute. The Sociological Imagination (1959) renewed the criticisms he had laid away in his essays of the early 1950s, now elaborated into a sustained attack against the schools and sects of academic sociology. The profession, Mills charged, was in the grip of “grand theory” and “abstracted empiricism”; the first tendency he charged to Talcott Parsons, the second, to Lazarsfeld. “As practices, they may be understood as insuring that we do not learn too much about man and society—the first by formal and cloudy obscurantism, the second by formal and empty ingenuity.”

No single set of propositions or problems could be said to characterize Lazarsfeld’s “abstracted empiricism,” Mills said. Although Lazarsfeld had carried out a great number of studies of public opinion since the publication of The People’s Choice, the results of these studies added no new ideas to the field. Their real subject was the perfection of method and the production of sociologists as technicians. If Lazarsfeld managed to institutionalize his administrative style over the long haul, sociologists would become state functionaries, their capital-intensive projects dependent upon corporate monopolies to introduce their questions and problems, their mental life given over to measurement at the expense of thinking. “The details, no matter how numerous, do not convince us of anything worth having convictions about.”

These observations and criticisms Mills drew directly out of his experience in Decatur. A casual reader would not have known this, for although he made Lazarsfeld the central figure in the chapter, he did not mention Personal Influence by name. Surely, he kept the project at the front of his mind. After all, he criticized authors who added a “literature of the problem” section to empirical data. This practice, he said, allowed casual readers to assume that the data had been shaped by theory, even when the data had come first and the “literature of the problem” had been added at the end to emboss the known results. Then there was the passage where he said the trouble with Lazarsfeld’s method was not only that it generated a great number of trivial truths.

If you have ever seriously studied, for a year or two, some thousand hour-long interviews, carefully coded and punched, you will have begun to see how very malleable the realm of ‘fact’ may really be.

The Sociological Imagination envisioned a social inquiry ranged around shared ethical convictions, rather than around a special set of techniques or a science of concepts. For Mills, these convictions bespoke freedom and reason as paramount values in human affairs. What is most important to grasp, though, is that his interpretation of social inquiry did not forsake fact-consciousness; Mills called for “a much broader style of empiricism.” Nor did it necessarily entail any particular political position. Mills’s list of forerunners and exemplars included John Kenneth Galbraith, Johan Huizinga, Harold Lasswell, Robert Lynd, Karl Mannheim, Gunnar Myrdal, David Riesman, Joseph Schumpeter, George Simmel, Arnold Toynbee, Max Weber, and William H. Whyte.

Nor was Mills alone in his distaste for Lazarsfeld’s methodology. In Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology, Pitirim Sorokin blamed Lazarsfeld for an “epidemic of quantophrenia,” and earned for his effort a letter of commendation from Mills. Of the Bureau’s influence in sociology, the German émigré Hans Speier said, “certain analytical methods were refined, but the substantive questions that were being asked became shallower. Interest in the structure of modern society faded along with the interest in the fate of man in that society. As the techniques of interviewing became increasingly standardized, the art of conversation, which also provides civilized access to the life of the mind, deteriorated.”

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In Western freethinking there has been a consistent tendency to charge concept-mongering and fact-grubbing as twin villains in the crime of unreality. There has been, moreover, a tendency to view methodology as a science of mental estrangement, a form of ascetic self-annihilation. “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” In the United States, Mills’s protest against “methodological inhibition” goes at least as far back as the nineteenth-century academies and their bids for ecclesiastical guardianship over social knowledge. Emerson wrote:

It is plain that there are two classes in our educated community: first, those who confine themselves to the facts in their consciousness; and secondly, those who superadd sundry propositions. The aim of a true teacher now would be to bring men back to a true trust in God and destroy before their eyes these idolatrous propositions: to teach the doctrine of the perpetual revelation.

Substitute “sociological imagination” for God in Emerson’s commandment and you have the leitmotif of Mills’s dissent.

The stricter the technical establishment of mind, the more elaborate the bureaucracy, the greater the seduction of anti-politics, the better the chance for misuse and exploitation. In Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson has produced some evidence that appears to warrant the chain of logic. Simpson’s evidence patches in the gap between December 1950, the last month Mills mentioned the Decatur project in his correspondence, and the publication five years later of Personal Influence.

According to Simpson, the Bureau of Applied Social Research received as much as 75 percent of its funding in this period from military and government propaganda agencies. The bare fact of state patronage, of course, says little in itself about the dispute between Mills and Lazarsfeld. They agreed that the Bureau’s empirical methodology could aid in the study of propaganda. (Mills himself had won one of the Bureau’s largest government contracts, from the Office of Naval Research.) Mostly, they differed on the ethical responsibilities of the inquirer. Here the matter grows curiouser. As Simpson observes, the State Department put the Bureau’s “personal influence” methods at center of its “psychological warfare” operations campaigns in the Middle East and Philippines. Lazarsfeld wrote the questions himself.

Mills opposed the American attempt to prop up the decaying British and French empires, and said so in his books. Lazarsfeld did not oppose the attempt, or if he did oppose it, he did not say so publicly, which amounted to the same thing. If this difference seems to be a mere historical fact, consider what the American attempt managed to accomplish. In 1953, military intelligence toppled the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. The CIA controlled the “opinion leaders” in the Tehran press almost completely.

What was the connection between “personal influence,” psychological warfare, opinion management, and the Middle East? Before Mills, these kinds of questions were taboo in academic sociology. For graduate students and assistant professors on the margins of the profession, The Sociological Imagination was a source of wonder and liberation. But the official organs and leading representatives of sociology angrily rejected the book and the author. Edward Shils, whose writings on the “primary-group” supplied a theoretical armature for Personal Influence, rapped Mills on the knuckles in a nasty pair of essays. Lewis Coser reproached him in Partisan Review. Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Smelser issued a declaration of his nonexistence in the British Journal of Sociology. In a speech in Stresa, Italy, Robert Merton referred to (but did not name) a “little book by C. Wright Mills” as one of the “violent attacks” strafing sociology.

The only public response Paul Lazarsfeld made to the book showed up at the end of a forward to a monograph about college students. There he claimed (apparently without intending any irony) that Mills promoted “a kind of sophisticated commercialism.” In truth, Lazarsfeld did not know what to make of The Sociological Imagination, and he could not avoid thinking about it either. In an interview he disburdened himself of his feeling of agitated confusion. “I find what Mills writes, you see, just ridiculous. There is nothing in the world he can, as a research man, contribute to anything, by what he’s writing about, power or whatever it is and how bad the world is and so on. Why does he mix it up? I mean, why doesn’t he leave us alone?”

In the spring 1961, the International Sociological Association (ISA) was planning for its next World Congress. The Congress was coming to Washington, D.C., which meant that a joint meeting was going to be held with the American Sociological Association (ASA). Lazarsfeld, as president of the ASA, was going to chair the keynote panel, which was going to feature two American speakers. Probably nothing unusual would have happened if he had answered his mail. For the chair of the ISA’s program committee sent him several letters asking for candidates for the keynote panel. The chair did not receive an answer, and as there was already some confusion concerning jurisdiction over the joint session, he went ahead and found a speaker on his own.

Mills accepted right away. Lazarsfeld was flabbergasted. “I obviously don’t want to bring such matters up with the International Organization,” he wrote to Talcott Parsons. “This letter is addressed to you as the ranking permanent officer of the American Association. I am sure you will find a way to cope with the problem.” Parsons concurred that the invitation to Mills was “extremely unfortunate.” He would make some inquiries. “If it seems clear that this invitation was issued without any real clearing from the Association, I shall write a strong letter of protest.”

Parsons raised “the problem” during a meeting of the ASA’s Committee on Organization and Plans in New York and enlisted the aid of Seymour Martin Lipset. Lipset and Lazarsfeld met in London with the chair of the ISA’s program committee. They exerted the academic equivalent of diplomatic pressure.

The letters exchanged on “the problem” conveyed no speculations as to what Mills might talk about, should the invitation stand. Nor did they betray any qualms in conspiring against the world’s most widely read American sociologist at the world’s most prominent sociology congress. So far as the letters showed, Lazarsfeld, Parsons, and Lipset were unanimous in their desire to deprive Mills of his right to speak. They wished only to do so “without embarrassment” to the ASA, as Lipset stipulated. This they achieved. The ISA rescinded the invitation. Because the ISA explained its decision to Mills on a false pretext suggested by Lipset, there was a chance the stratagem could collapse. “If Mills should insist on coming, I do not know what we can do,” Lipset wrote. But by the middle of July 1961, with no sign of trouble in view, Parsons relaxed. “I gather that the whole thing is now worked out and it will be one of the senior American ‘organization men’ who will do it.”

Mills died the next year of a heart attack at age forty-five. Lazarsfeld and Merton, the men who urged him to New York in 1945, declined an invitation to attend his campus memorial service. Lazarsfeld refused even to write his widow a note of sympathy. It was not that he overlooked these gestures. “I absolutely refused even after his death to have anything to do with him,” he said. “That is to say, I never regretted whatever harm I might have done. You see, I had the absolutely opposite feeling. Not only did I not regret … but I made it an external point not to take the slightest notice of whether he was dead or not.”

At least Lazarsfeld did not indulge any facile talk about the tragedy of it all. Perhaps he knew that without a genuine possibility of success, there can be no tragedy. Perhaps someone had finally told him that, back in graduate school, Mills had flunked statistics.

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Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology was one of the Times Literary Supplement’s “100 most influential non-fiction books published since the Second World War.” Bell, who died in 2011 at the age of 91, never dishonored the intellectual’s motto: when you meet a problem, make a distinction. But the TLS’s distinction was peculiarly apt. After ideology, we compile lists, observe anniversaries, and invent rankings to disguise our disagreeable confusion over how to value our inheritance. Once upon a time, ideologies told us what mattered. “A total ideology,” Bell explained in his famous book, “is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole of a way of life. This commitment to ideology—the yearning for a ‘cause,’ or the satisfaction of deep moral feelings—is not necessarily the reflection of interests in the shape of ideas. Ideology, in this sense, and in the sense that we use it here, is a secular religion.”

It was this large conception, and not “the particular conception of ideology” behind particular issues and groups, that Bell addressed. And it was Marxian socialism, not any other ideology, that his book eulogized.

Nobody could doubt the acuity of Bell’s mind. But what explains the long influence of a loosely organized collection of essays arguing a narrowly conceived thesis on the death of an ideology that has never been very important in the United States?

Timing, for one thing. The End of Ideology announced the end of a 30-year nightmare dark with fanatics, apostles, and messiahs whom history had exposed as demagogues and monsters. The phrase, “end of ideology,” first entered into English circulation in 1955, between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing him. That year the Congress for Cultural Freedom met in Milan, Italy, in a conference that featured Bell, Raymond Aron, Seymour Martin Lipset, and other end-of-ideologists. Edward Shils, also attending, reported a mood proud with vindication. “Have the Communists come to appear so preposterous to our Western intellectuals that it is no longer conceivable that they could be effectively subversive?” Shils wondered. “Is it now thought that there is no longer any danger of the working classes in the advanced Western countries falling for their propaganda?”

The danger lying in the past, Bell exorcised the ghost. He confirmed the generation of the 1930s in its repudiation of youthful idealism by baring “the ambiguities of theory,” “the complexities of life,” and “the exhaustion of utopia,” as he titled his book’s three sections. In the 1970s and 1980s, another generation of disenchanted radicals cottoned to the book’s skepticism. By 1995, when the TLS memorialized it alongside Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, the Soviet Union had failed in fact as well as in spirit. Events seemed to have proven Bell correct.

The “end of ideology” thesis has figured in American social thought from Lewis Mumford’s The Story of Utopias to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man to Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven, whose first premise was “that old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.” Bell, too, trained attention on the surrogates emerging in place of the declining nineteenth-century ideologies: bureaucracies that ensured social integration by administrative fiat; technologies that aborted political conflicts before they fully formed; consumer goods that satisfied and stoked appetites for personal transformation.

Unlike Mumford and Lasch, Bell did not greet the end of ideology as an opportunity for reconstruction, or address the fragility of popular belief in progress, or fret over the artificial limits imposed by the structure of the new society. “There is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some manner of fusing passion with intelligence,” he conceded. But he maintained “that a utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for the determination of who is to pay.” In this case, it would no longer be a utopia, if utopia still means—as it meant to the Greeks—no place. Bell’s version sounded like public policy.

That was the point. As a labor journalist for Fortune magazine, then as professor of sociology at Columbia University, Bell moved deftly between social trends and social theory. He submitted his conclusions in a disinterested spirit, for the purpose of guiding civic discourse on such topics as the myth of crime waves; the achievements and limitations of the labor movement; the economic thought of Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, and John Kenneth Galbraith; and, in an essay that demonstrated his extraordinary talent for cutting through cant and dogma, on the prediction of Soviet behavior.

This latter essay he delivered at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, in the aftermath of the 1956 rebellions in Hungary and Poland. As director of international seminars for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Bell organized a seminar that split between those who believed Soviet political society was evolving in a rational, legal direction in spite of its leaders and those who thought it betrayed an ancient despotism incapable of enlightened reform. His contribution, reprinted in The End of Ideology as “Ten Theories in Search of Reality,” staked out a sensible, middling position, suggesting, in the light of the new facts from Eastern Europe, the obsolescence of the concept of totalitarianism as a guide to communism and urging intellectuals to stay open to new developments. “Hegel once said that what was reasonable was real,” he wrote in the essay’s preface. “Each of the theories to be discussed seems reasonable, yet not wholly real. Something may be wrong with Hegel, the theories, or both. The reader will have to be the judge.”

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

Ideology simplified, whereas the post-ideological intellectual afforded a clear view of complexity, ambiguity, and difficulty. Bell wore his learning obtrusively, his flow of argument interrupted by gratuitous references, his footnotes crowded with I-told-you-sos, his prose studded with evidence of his erudition. A look past his heroic style, though, catches him blurring the normative and descriptive modes of analysis by sleights-of-hand that, in sociology as well as in politics, are typical of those who claim to address the present from beyond.

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Consider “Work and its Discontents: The Cult of Efficiency in America,” the strongest, most useful essay in the book. Bell showed how the metric conception of time conceived by Jeremy Bentham and developed by utilitarian rationalists had come to regulate the experience of factory-work. Shifting between management theory and wage contracts at major U.S. corporations, he turned out a brilliant piece of writing on a necessary subject. Everything in the essay, including the “cult” in the subtitle, suggested that the reader should oppose the engineering effort to manipulate the production process, should challenge, with Bell, its narrow concept of efficiency. “The worker, like the mythical figure of Ixion, is chained forward to the endlessly revolving wheel,” he wrote with a flourish. And yet he went out of his way to divest his essay of a point of view. “I seek not to be the ideologue or the moralist,” he wrote lamely, the odd syntax betraying his eagerness to retreat from any commitments such that his facts might imply.

In other essays, Bell’s point of view was concealed by the a priori judgments he smuggled into his many-sidedness. “The Failure of American Socialism,” an essay on political psychology whose central arguments he had featured in his first book, Marxian Socialism in the United States, joined the large literature on the absence of radical alternatives in the age of industrialism. “How did the socialist see the world, and, because of that vision, why did the movement fail to adapt to the American scene?”

A very good question, very incompletely answered. Concerned with the relations of politics and ethics, Bell’s essay did not satisfy the first criterion of moral argument, as he never took the necessary step of reconstructing what those irrational socialists, riddled with utopian delusion, could have expected to achieve had they adapted “to the American scene.” Nor did he acknowledge—even in passing—that the U.S. government and the corporations had subjected them to a decades-long campaign of repression, fraud, and violence, a campaign that prefigured much of the cold war security state. The essay miscarried into an excuse for blaming the losers.

Sometimes it seemed that Bell refused to take a clear stand on any issue other than the danger of taking a clear stand. Chapter three, a long critique of C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956), he introduced as “an exercise in hermeneutics.” Were the nation’s elected leaders truly representative men? Was the cold war security apparatus damaging democratic institutions? With the arms race in high gear, was the military gaining new or dangerous powers? These were a few of the large questions that Mills’s “power elite” thesis raised (and raised from an anti-Marxist position, no less) and that made his book indispensable reading for an aroused citizenry. Bell’s hermeneutical exercise scored many worthy points—indeed, I would rate it the most penetrating textual analysis of The Power Elite, ever—but about the large questions the book stimulated, about the feeling of powerlessness creeping over democratic publics, he fell silent. President Eisenhower was more eloquent

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And when history threw Bell a curveball, he whiffed. “There is not a single page devoted to any phase of the Negro movement, past or present,” Harold Cruse, a former Marxist, complained in 1967.

It seems almost incredible that in the face of a social movement of such dimensions that some people even call it a revolution, a sociologist could write such a book and not even mention the existence of this movement or its impact. What does one conclude from this? Evidently, Bell does not consider Negroes as an integral sociological quantity within Western society. Hence, being outside the Western pale, Negroes could not possibly have anything to do with the ‘exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties’—which just happened to be the very decade when Negroes became most insistent on being integrated within Western society.

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Did these examples add up to something greater than the sum of their parts? “Never have I read a sociologist whose mind grasped so much data but whose eyes could look past so much objective reality,” Cruse wrote bitterly. “One is forced to suspect that there is a method to Bell’s blindness.” Was there? Was the “end of ideology” thesis itself an ideology?

Mills thought so. In his “Letter to the New Left,” he argued that the pose of standing beyond depended on Bell’s failure to drive his thesis to its logical conclusion, and analyze liberalism in the same critical terms. Mills did not challenge his conclusion that socialism had lost political significance in the United States. On the contrary, Mills’s own books warranted the end of ideology—“the big fact about our intellectual community as a whole, both East and West,” as he wrote in 1959—and he himself was worrying about the “post-modern era” years before Bell turned attention to the “post-industrial society.” Bell had not offered a panegyric to capitalism, but neither had he presented an independent defense of the immanent values and ideals that informed his stance. “Ultimately, the end-of-ideology is based upon a disillusionment with any real commitment to socialism in any recognizable form,” Mills wrote. “That is the only ‘ideology’ that has really ended for these writers.”

Mills and Bell, the representative men of the “end-of-ideology” debates of the 1960s, had been close friends and roommates, came to teach in the same academic department, shared major conclusions about postwar social structure, and in Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, traced their conception of ideology to the same source. But now the one was prospective, leading the party of hope, while the other was retrospective, standing with the party of memory. “If there is any lesson which emerges from the experiences of the last forty years,” Bell wrote in his reply, “it is the realization of the recklessness of social movements which sought to change the social ‘structure’ without specifying the ‘costs’ involved other than claiming that History would erase the bill.”

Mills died in 1962, but the tumult of the decade ahead warranted both his criticism of complacent liberalism and his suggestion that the end-of-ideology school would be un-prepared to meet the consequences of its partiality. The upheavals surrounding free speech, poverty, civil rights, and foreign policy collected toward a new consensus on the need to replace “the system” with a new vision of the future. Christopher Lasch, heir to the problems and aspirations that Mills had identified and embodied, resurrected his argument that Bell had mistaken the obsolescence of particular issues for the more general obsolescence of political ideas. “Postindustrial society generates new tensions peculiar to itself,” Lasch wrote in 1969.

It contains certain sources of conflict which cannot be divorced from the nature of the system; and these in turn give rise to a revival of ideology—that is, to political arguments in which both sides do not agree on the same premises.

Mills might have been disappointed by the failure of his epigones to develop out of the revival a new ideology to redeem the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. But he would have sympathized with their struggle. By contrast, when the student movement came to occupy Columbia University in 1968, the event not only put the lie to Bell’s expectation of moderation in action, orderliness in society, reconciliation in politics, and civil discourse in public language, but it betrayed the ambiguities of his conception of the post-ideological intellectual. He had promised to “transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.”

Now, with his efforts to mediate the dispute between students and administrators falling to pieces, he could not transcend the debate at his own university. As with his essay on socialism, he delivered his verdict on the students as if the tendencies he derided had nothing to do with the pathologies of liberalism in power. On this occasion, though, his uncertainty was unmistakable. As I have studied this history, and reflected on my own participation in it, I find the ‘outbreak,’ ‘uprising,’ ‘revolution’—none of these words is adequate—extremely puzzling,” he wrote soon after the Columbia administration, also puzzled, called in the police. Eight years earlier, his response to the “Letter to the New Left” had stumbled on the same note. “A first reading of the article, and a second, leaves one a bit bewildered.”

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I raised many of these criticisms with Bell during a series of interviews conducted at his Cambridge home in the several years before his death. He rejected my contentions, one and all, and he did so at considerable length. I listened attentively and admiringly, and waited for the moments when he paused for breath, for at those moments I tried to interject a bold thought, with the hope of regaining a little of the lost ground, or, even better, earning a riposte. He relished disputation, and, although he was then well into his eighties, he had stamina.

Every time I returned, I found new reasons to appreciate his capacity for stating general ideas that cut through the symbols and myths manufactured by the organs of serious thought in the country. He was a stout defender of science and against superstition, and of politics from the mythic shapes it takes in mass democracies. Even the utopia he envisioned, meager though it seemed to his critics in 1960, would be heaven on earth today.

“Optimism of the will, and pessimism of the heart, are the unresolved tensions in my temperament,” he wrote in The End of Ideology. For leaving us so many instructive tensions he should be praised and criticized for as long as we have the heart to honor public intellectuals and the will to face up to the uncertainties of the future.

Unless we have reached the end point of humankind's moral development, it is pretty certain that the average educated human of the 23rd century will look back at the average educated human of the 21st century and ask incredulously about a considerable number of our most cherished moral and political axioms, "How could they have believed that?" We do it every time a movie like “Twelve Years a Slave” or a novel like The Handmaid's Tale or a play like Angels in America or a work of history like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or of journalism like Michael Harrington's The Other America prompts us to ask, "How could decent, intelligent people have believed they were entitled to treat other human beings like that?"

So let's interrogate some of our beliefs about political morality with the eyes of our descendants. Two four-letter words lie at the heart of contemporary America's public morality: "free" and "fair." "It's a free country" is every American's boast; "I only want a fair shake" is every American's plea. I doubt I need to remind you of the more flagrant forms of unfairness in our national life - that one American child in five lives below or near the poverty line; that somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of our economy's productivity gains since 1980 have gone to the top ten percent of the income distribution; that the top 25 hedge-fund managers earn more than all the nation's kindergarten teachers combined; that 100,000 Americans will die for lack of health care over the next ten years in order to give a large tax cut to Americans with incomes above a half-million dollars; and so on and on, down the long and shameful catalogue. You read the newspapers. Our 23rd-century descendants may ask - they will ask - how we could have tolerated such unfairness; but they won't ask how we could have believed such inequalities to be fair, because we don't, most of us, believe them to be fair. Let's instead consider a different question: whether our present-day ideals of fairness and freedom, even if we lived up to them, would satisfy our descendants.

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The average CEO earns around 300 times as much as his or her average employee. Many people are dismayed at the contrast with the good old days of the Eisenhower administration, when CEOs earned only 30 times as much as their average employees and paid a far higher tax rate, and yet the country didn't exactly seem to be going to the dogs. But let's put aside our reaction to this striking change and ask more generally whether and why some people ought to earn more than others.

The usual answer, I suppose, is that people deserve whatever they get through the operation of supply and demand. The competitive marketplace quantifies the value that one's efforts have for others. Some people (like doctors) employ vital skills; some people (like baseball players) give exceptional enjoyment; some people (like corporate executives) assume extra responsibilities; some people (like investors) forego luxury consumption. All such people are rewarded in proportion to the satisfaction they furnish others, as measured by others' willingness to pay, directly or indirectly, for those satisfactions. No payment, no service. As Adam Smith wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Of course it's not that simple. Consider those doctors, baseball players, and executives I used as examples of economic agents who exchange services for money. In fact, they - like you, like me - live with only one foot in a market economy and the other in a gift economy. Any doctor or scientist or athlete or nurse or teacher or carpenter worth her salt feels at least occasionally that she is making a gift of her best efforts; and as with all such gifts, the chief reward is internal: the pleasures of giving and of exercising one's faculties at their highest pitch.

Nowadays, the gift economy leads a precarious existence, appearing mostly in commencement-day addresses in which graduates are exhorted to follow their dreams, while most of the poor things are worrying frantically about how to pay their debts. The family is a gift economy, and so is culture, including both the arts and the sciences, as well as the shrinking public and non-profit spheres. Ever since that most fateful of innovations, industrial mass production, has become virtually universal, the market economy has progressively squeezed out the gift economy. In a mature capitalist society, competition grows in both extent and intensity, that is, both between and within economic units. Creativity and generosity are not forbidden but they are no longer self-justifying; they are, on the contrary, subordinated, like all activity in the non-public sphere, to the goal of increasing shareholder value. In the private economy, you can do whatever you like - create beauty, pursue truth, help others - as long as what you like to do makes someone a profit.

I said earlier that people in a market economy are rewarded in proportion to others' willingness to pay. That willingness to pay is the measure of value in a market economy; and so, to say that a person deserves what she earns is to say that there is at least a rough correspondence between the value of what she produces and the value of what she receives. As Milton Friedman, the high priest of American capitalism, put it: "The ethical principle [underlying] the distribution of income in a free-market society is, 'To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces.'"

This notion of desert rests on the assumption that two distinctions can be made rigorously: first, that one person's input - to any output or outcome at all - can be sharply distinguished from all other inputs; and second, that merit can be distinguished from luck: that is, that diligence, good judgment, and other productive qualities and character traits, as well as talent, are not fully attributable to biological endowment, early environment, education, and other contingent and therefore morally arbitrary sources. I don't believe those distinctions hold up.

Let's take that CEO, and let's assume we know somehow that she produces thirty or 300 times as much as her average employee. Causation is a transitive relation, and production is a kind of causation. If A is a cause of B, and B is a cause of C, then A is a cause of C. If A contributes to the production of B, and B contributes to the production of C, then A has contributed to the production of C. Now, who has contributed to the production of our CEO, and therefore to the production of whatever she produces? Clearly, her parents, spouse, teachers, fellow students, predecessors, colleagues, rivals, and friends, along with all theirparents, spouses, teachers, fellow students, predecessors, colleagues, rivals, and friends, along with all those who created the physical, organizational, and cultural resources employed in the production of whatever our CEO produces, along with all their parents, spouses, teachers, fellow students, predecessors, colleagues, rivals, and friends, and, it goes without saying, all their parents, spouses, teachers, and so on through what is, if one wants to insist on the point, an infinite chain of causes.

I do want to insist on the point. Einstein famously wrote: "I have all along been standing on the shoulders of giants." So has our CEO. Exceptional contributions, whether to art, science, or the Gross National Product, are prepared for by the whole previous development of the field. People who make brilliant, courageous, and illuminating mistakes, which may be indispensable to the ultimate success of a rich and famous artist, scientist, or entrepreneur, are not, in a competitive market system, retrospectively and proportionately rewarded for their contributions, even though Friedman's definition of justice would seem to require it.

My point is that all production is social production. The productive assets of every age are the joint product of all preceding ages, and all those born into the present are legitimately joint heirs of those assets. And the same arguments for joint rather than individual inheritance of wealth created in the past apply to the distribution of income in the present. If this seems counter-intuitive, it is perhaps because there persists a deep and ancient distinction between luck and merit, according to which we deserve praise and reward for our good actions, though not for our good fortune. But what if our good actions are the results of our good fortune?

Philosophy assimilates scientific discoveries slowly. As a result, it is always riddled with archaic concepts and images, survivals from an earlier scientific epoch. One such survival, it seems to me, is the concept of merit. It has always been partly recognized (it is, indeed, implicit in the word "gifted") that talents and aptitudes come under the heading of luck rather than merit. But the inescapable implication of modern genetics, neurobiology, and psychiatry is that character, no less than talent, is inherited or else formed by very early experiences. Diligence, decisiveness, initiative, coolness under pressure - all these entrepreneurial virtues are, no less than intellectual or manual abilities, part of one's natural endowment. And from a strictly moral point of view, no one deserves a reward for being born luckier than someone else. I imagine the 23rd century will ask: "Why did you make talent and character the measure of an individual's desert rather than of her obligations? How could you have overlooked what is to us the obvious and elementary principle of fairness: from each according to her abilities, to each according to her need?"

I suggested earlier that causation is potentially an infinite regress. If that's true, does anyone deserve anything? Actually, potentially infinite regressions are perfectly commonplace and don't normally defeat us. We call a halt to them wherever seems appropriate. Every parent has to decide when a child is genuinely curious and when it keeps asking "Why?" just to put off going to sleep. Every conscientious judge has to decide when to stop applying the maxim "To understand all is to forgive all," even though it's undoubtedly true. The point about these decisions is that they are arbitrary and fallible - in making them we rely on prudence rather than principle. So that when we decide to ignore the infinite chain of causes that produced the output of the CEO and pay her the whole market value of it, our decision is not a matter of justice, as Milton Friedman claimed it was.

I said "our decision," but of course you and I don't have anything to say about the just distribution of income and wealth. Indeed, the purpose of definitions like Milton Friedman's is precisely to prevent such distributions from becoming a matter of public decision. In the 1940s, an influential senator, trying to stifle criticism of Harry Truman's Cold War policies, demanded that "politics should stop at the water's edge." It worked then, and the proponents of the economic class war have had a similar success in preaching that democracy should stop at the economy's edge. In principle, the state is governed according to the rule of one person, one vote. Economic enterprises such as corporations are not even democratic in principle: there the rule is, one dollar of shareholder value, one vote. In both areas, it hardly needs pointing out, principles count for very little. None but the largest investors have any influence with corporate management; while in politics, rich donors in effect have many votes, the rest of us none.

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The case of politics is particularly egregious. Two political scientists, Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, recently summarized years of detailed statistical research into the relation between what voters want and what we get:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule--at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover ... even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ... For Americans below the top of the income distribution, any association between preferences and policy outcomes is likely to reflect the extent to which their preferences [happen to] coincide with those of the affluent. Although responsiveness to the preferences of the affluent is [not] perfect, responsiveness to less-well-off Americans is virtually nonexistent.

If democracy means one-person-one-vote, in what situations is it morally requisite? Here is an answer from Robert Dahl, perhaps the most eminent American political scientist of the twentieth century. According to Dahl, members of any association are entitled to insist that it be governed democratically when the following conditions hold: the group must reach some decisions that are binding on all members; discussion and collective decision-making are feasible; membership is stable, i.e., those who make the decisions will be subject to the consequences; and there is a rough equality of competence, i.e., members are capable of judging their own interests and also of judging which decisions they must delegate to experts.

Now, why don't these conditions hold for corporations as well as for political communities? One possible objection might be that, unlike laws, management decisions are not binding - employees can quit. The answer to this objection is that in the real world, unlike the world of smoothly clearing labor markets and other fantasies of neoclassical economics, the costs of renouncing employment are frequently as great as the costs of renouncing citizenship. Another possible objection is that management requires special skills, which workers may not possess. But surely workers are no less capable of hiring and supervising managers than shareholders are, and probably more so.

Still another objection is based on the notorious "iron law of oligarchy," according to which any sizable association tends to be dominated by those with the most aptitude and ambition. But the same holds of political democracy, which no one proposes abandoning on that account. Finally, there is the moral objection: aren't shareholders entitled to control the firms they invest in? For the same reasons that entitlement theories fail to justify large inequalities in income - namely, that wealth is a social product and that differences in ability and character are morally arbitrary - they fail to justify large differences in the power to control our common economic destiny. And more: since one requirement of fair political competition is that all group members have equal access to relevant information about group decisions and equal opportunity to place items on the agenda for decision, it follows that in a society like ours, where economic resources translate into political resources, economic inequality must result in political inequality, a conclusion that is obvious to everyone except the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. Political democracy requires economic democracy; indeed, the distinction between the political and the economic is altogether artificial. How, our 23rd-century descendants will ask us politely, but perhaps with a tinge of exasperation, did you manage to overlook that?

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If you have the misfortune to be a left-wing social critic, the most galling part of each day is encountering the ubiquitous self-designation of apologists for capitalism as champions of freedom. One day a Tea Party Congressman introduces the Economic Freedom Act, which would free the 4,000 or so people who pay it from the estate tax and liberate the rest of us from Social Security and the minimum wage. The next day some foundation with "freedom" in its name gives an award to Charles Koch for his stalwart defense of Koch Industries' freedom to render sizable areas of West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana uninhabitable. And every day the Congressional Freedom Caucus warns sternly that it will not rest until the tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford proper health care without assistance from the rest of us are finally free to go without it.

Where there is ideological smoke there is sometimes philosophical fire. The primitive intuitions about freedom to which defenders of laissez-faire capitalism appeal are widespread and at least superficially plausible. No one makes you shop at Wal-Mart, after all, or work there either. If you don't like it where you live, you're free to move. If you don't like what you're hearing, change the channel. If you don't like Fords, buy a Chevy. This model of life as a series of discrete purchases and of citizens as sovereign consumers seems to lie in the background of many Americans' conviction that, whatever its other virtues or defects, capitalism relies exclusively or primarily on free choice and that regulations or taxes or public provision, even if sometimes justified, necessarily diminish freedom.

This everyday, rough-and-ready understanding of freedom was more or less adequate once, back when America was, uniquely in its time, neither a feudal nor a capitalist society. For a couple of centuries, because the land was so rich and was empty of any inhabitants whose rights a white man was obliged to respect, economic autonomy - the ability to make a living without selling one's labor - was very widely, almost universally possible. Those two centuries formed the American imagination, which has not yet adjusted to the traumatic fact that the possibility of individual self-reliance, and therefore of economic autonomy in the sense presupposed by laissez-faire ideology, is gone forever. When the means of making a living were largely unowned and available to all, economic agents could confront one another as equals, capable of entering into genuinely voluntary agreements and morally binding contracts.

Today, by contrast, employment contracts typically involve members of two groups that are radically unequal, since one group has control over something the other must have access to in order to survive, but not vice versa. That is just another way of saying that we live in a class society. Our individualistic political rhetoric, appropriate to the frontier period but now a century and a half out of date, serves only to conceal the one-sided class warfare that its victims stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.

Those victims have some excuse; they are daily bombarded by laissez-faire ideology. Intellectuals, on the other hand, really ought to know better. The structural unfreedom inherent in class relations was authoritatively described by an early critic of capitalism and champion of labor unions. I'm referring to Adam Smith, who wrote in Book 1 of The Wealth of Nations:

[In disputes between masters and workmen,] it is not difficult to foresee which of the two parties must [ordinarily] have the advantage ... and force the other into compliance. The employers, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits [or strictly regulates] those of the workmen. ...

We rarely hear ... about employers combining, though frequently about workmen. But whoever imagines, on this account, that employers rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Employers are always and everywhere in a tacit but constant and uniform combination [to keep down wages].

Smith, a true friend of the working-man, added this:

[Moreover,] in [general,] the employers can hold out much longer. [A master], even if he did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two on [his accumulated capital]. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarcely any a year without wages. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his employer as his employer is to him; but the necessity is not so [pressing].

If we could speak with our nineteenth-century counterparts we might ask questions like: "Why did you believe it legitimate for one person to own another? Why did women seem to you incapable of self-determination? Why did you consider that political authority could be inherited, for example by monarchs or aristocrats?" If our imaginary 19th-century interlocutors defended their morality against ours, we might learn a good deal by trying to rebut them and vindicate our own moral intuitions.

Similarly, we should try to imagine which of our current beliefs might seem benighted to our 23rd-century descendants. I suspect they will want to ask us questions like: "Why did you base desert on performance, which can't be measured and is in any case a function of one's endowments? After all, no one deserves her endowments. Why did you make that strangely artificial distinction between the political and the economic? It looks as though your only purpose was to prevent economic democracy. Why did you define freedom so narrowly, as the absence of constraints on one person's right to employ her capital but not on another person's right to realize her capacities? Why did you assume that contracts between parties with radically unequal resources could be free?"

“We have for the last few years the most diverse Sepac board that has ever existed in the city of Cambridge, and to have somebody come in and pull a power play that feels very white supremacist …”

This malediction rocked a January 22 public meeting of the Cambridge Special Education Parents Advisory Council (Sepac). Me, a white supremacist? I had merely filed an Open Meeting Law complaint against the Cambridge Sepac’s board, accusing its members of neglecting to give notice of their meetings and to hold elections for more than a year. The meeting, convened to discuss my complaint, started off with the malediction.

Since its passage in 2010, the Open Meeting Law has become an important, if modest, mechanism available to anyone in Massachusetts — even a moneyless single father of a severely disabled son — who asks for greater democracy in representative associations. I didn’t expect the Sepac’s current board to embrace me, especially since I had called for their resignation in a December letter in the Cambridge Day, a local rag. Still, I expected the process could facilitate a discussion of my two-page complaint, one of many received every month by the attorney general against municipal zoning boards, city councils, conservation commissions, school committees, and other “public bodies” suspected of deliberating in secret.

I thought about the history of American white supremacy, which emerged as a conscious identity in 1866, when ex-Confederates in Tennessee formed the Ku Klux Klan to crusade against Reconstruction. In the 1920s, the KKK rally three million members to the cause of “native, white, Protestant supremacy.” White Citizen’s Councils blighted the South after “Brown versus Board of Education,” the Supreme Court’s 1954 school integration ruling. “Unite the Right,” the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, proved the abomination is not nearly done with us.

After I heaved a defensive belly laugh, I asked my accuser what in the world white supremacy’s long reign of murder, arson, hatred, and nihilism had to do with me. “I didn’t call you that,” she said, interrupting my objection. “I said the action was that.”

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This casuistry deepened the mystery. My accuser seemed to imply that a nonwhite person wouldn’t have incurred the slur because no nonwhite person would have dared to complain about “the most diverse Sepac board that has ever existed in the city of Cambridge” in the first place. The reasoning slipped into syllogism. All whites are supremacists. I am white. All whites are supremacists. Therefore, my request for greater democracy in Sepac makes me complicit in an ideology I’ve always despised. My guilt was a simple matter of deduction.

I waited for someone to speak up against the logic of guilt by association. Sepac is a small group of parent volunteers brought together to advocate for special education, but the 20 or so participants in this meeting also included the district’s lead attorney, the executive director of special education, and two members of the Cambridge School Committee. None breathed a word in my defense.

I can see why, since collective white guilt is a core doctrine in the Cambridge Public Schools. Back in 2011, when Silicon Valley was liberal, our administration and the school committee sought to close the “racial achievement gap” by adopting an Innovation Agenda that did not mention diversity. But the language and prominence of race soon inflated dramatically, as liberal media turned America’s heterogeneous composition into a dichotomy between “whites” and “communities of color.” Instances of the term “white supremacy” in The Washington Post and The New York Times multiplied by 1,800 percent between 2014 and 2019.

That year, graduates of the Harvard School of Education introduced critical race theory to Cambridge through a new strategic initiative. Building Equity Bridges located “a culture of white supremacy” at the root of “barriers to equity” in the district. Suddenly discovering the specter of tiki torches lurking from the classrooms to the broom closets, the administration instituted mandatory DEI staff training, created an office for racial equity, circulated guidelines “to counter the dominant narrative of straight, white men as the makers of history,” and overhauled the curriculum. The Cambridge teachers’ union distributed a questionnaire to candidates in the school committee election: “How will you address racial inequities and white supremacy culture in our schools and district?”

How indeed? Collective guilt is a superstition, a secular analogue of original sin. The doctrine dangles the possibility of vicarious redemption to “good whites” such as my accuser — the only white member of the Sepac board — willing to “do the work” of atonement. Rather than saving Black people, the good white person saves herself. The district promoted the salvation gospel in Robin DeAngelo’s “White Fragility,” Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning.” Building Equity Bridges took a quotation from Kendi as its motto: “Even inaction (simply being ‘not racist’) in the face of racism is, in fact, a form of racism.”

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The doctrine, so conceived, shifts the predicate from a testable notion that racist attitudes are held by culture to a non-falsifiable assertion that racism originates there. When acting racist is conflated with being racist or having racism, the phenomenon resists contingency, volition, and perspective, the normal features of inquiry. Evacuated of skepticism, the tribal conception of racial belonging may lead adherents to embrace their fate rather than atone for it. “The fact is that we are all responsible, as individuals, for the morals and the behavior of our race as a whole. There is no avoiding that responsibility, and each of us individually must be prepared to be called to account for that responsibility at any time.” That’s from “The Turner Diaries,” the 1978 novel of racial apocalypse popular with (actual) white supremacists. If white supremacy is both ubiquitous and ineradicable, then individuals have no meaningful choice. If all whites are guilty, then no whites are guilty.

“This work will never be ‘complete,’” promised the architects of Building Equity Bridges in 2019. A project that by definition cannot be completed is one that cannot succeed, either. Cambridge today spends on its students twice the state’s average and yet has a “racial achievement gap” that is worse than the state average.

Inevitably, the compulsory practice of a dogma, whether it claims to represent The One True Church, American Patriotism, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, congeals into orthodoxy. An orthodoxy that combines self-righteousness with self-pity loses the capacity to know the difference between criticism and persecution.

Thus, if I had loosed so much as a syllable with the faintest racial overtones, the meeting’s participants would have rent their garments and raised a cry to heaven. As it happened, my disobliging posture toward the Sepac board’s attempt to change the subject made a discussion of my complaint inconceivable. A minor grievance over democratic procedure magically transformed into a supposed attack on diversity itself.

When I exclaimed, “You’re supposed to have elections, for God’s sake,” a board member quailed that I “took the Lord’s name in vain.” When I said “disabled child,” another spoke of “a child of different abilities.” When I said the white supremacy accusation sounded “dumb,” the chair scolded: “The language you are using can be quite harmful.” Nobody said so, but my maleness must have redoubled the malignancy of my whiteness. “The most diverse Sepac board that has ever existed in the city of Cambridge” had no men.

My Open Meeting Law complaint is still pending. President Trump, meanwhile, has evinced neither the slowness of bureaucratic procedure nor the inhibition that silenced my witnesses. His Jan. 29 executive order repealed federal support for education policies predicated on collective guilt: No individual “should feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of . . . actions committed in the past by other members of the same race.” Progressives who spent the last decade drumming up scapegoats, invigilating speech, and proving the malleability of institutional norms have themselves to blame for holding open the door.

The historian Russell Jacoby, one of many commentators who predicted the “self-immolation” of progressives, in 2022 summed up their penchant for demagogy this way: “If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of adolescents.” Now we are all paying the price of bullying by buzzword.

“The strength of being offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself,” J.M. Coetzee wrote in “Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship.” “Its weakness lies in not being able to afford doubt itself.” Everyone deserves an equal benefit of the doubt. No one utterance contains a total system of values. Rather than forestalling the anxieties of difference with brittle racial certainties, progressives should relearn how to risk democratic conversation.

The alternative is a future of isolation and mistrust. “We’re very happy to work with you,” my accuser offered at the end of the meeting. No, thank you.

One spring I spent two weeks in Italy. According to guidebooks and friends, April was ideal: after the rains, before the summer heat and the tourist season. That sounded plausible; but in the event, it rained every day, and the churches, museums, markets, gardens, ruins, and temples were thronged with tourists. Disappointment makes one philosophical. Since it's hard to philosophize for very long about the weather, I soon began to reflect on the crowds.

I had prepared for the trip by reading Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia by D. H. Lawrence and Old Calabria by Norman Douglas. Lovely books all and written, apparently, just before the Flood. Trains and boats were crowded in these books, but with Italians (the authors traveled second or third class), not tourists. Cultural sites and picturesque scenery were not, as now, overrun. Only artists and the upper or upper-middle classes either wanted to or could afford to visit, and as a result, those who came found what they were looking for. Unlike me.

In 1930, Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses, whose opening pages announced a momentous phenomenon, which he called "plenitude" but might have called "crowdedness." For the first time in Europe, Ortega wrote:

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

Ortega was ambivalent about all this. No one, he admitted, could begrudge the people more pleasures or better medical care. But culture was another matter. He thought that while formerly most travelers were prepared, by training or inheritance, to appreciate art and historic places, the new crowds were not. The latter had come to assert themselves rather than submit themselves, or else - most often, in fact - for no definite purpose. The masses "have decided to advance to the foreground of social life, to occupy the places, to use the instruments, and to enjoy the pleasures hitherto reserved for the few." Though this sounds unexceptionable, "it is evident that these places were never intended for the multitude, for their dimensions are too limited, and the crowd is continuously overflowing ... "

I must confess to similar retrograde feelings, especially about tour groups. Swarms of Spanish and Swedish high-school students pinned my companion and me against the wall at the summit of St. Peter's. Everywhere we turned in the Boboli Gardens, we encountered chattering clumps of Italian junior-high-school students. We dashed from room to room in the Pitti Palace, trying to stay ahead of a German group with a very loud (and very pedestrian) guide. The mosaics at Sicily's Piazza Armerina were splendid even in the rain - but only because the many groups present were mostly sheltering in the gift shop and cafeteria. And so on, everywhere.

All this may sound so commonplace, so predictable, so taken-for-granted a travel hazard that there's not much point complaining about it. Actually, I'm not sure, on reflection, that I want to complain. Perhaps the crowd is even a cause for - guarded - celebration, for a muffled cheer. In theory, after all, the cultural landmarks of Europe are everyone's heritage. Better a single confused, brief, distant glimpse of them than yet another generation of ignorance for half the population or more. Many of the crowd will have come for no reason they can articulate; but for others, out of a daily round of routine labor and consumption, the trip may be a shy, wistful homage to the higher life. And even if barren for the traveler, the trip may have a residual effect, may water a seed, blow on a spark, transmit a message to a child, neighbor, co-worker.

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In any case, isn't the increasing activity of the masses - even if painfully inept at first - virtually the definition of political progress? To a democrat and egalitarian, can this publicizing of culture, this subversion of elite privilege, be anything but good? And isn't this large-scale economic and cultural democratization what has made possible my own pilgrimage, the child and grandchild of poor, uneducated southern Italian immigrants?

True ... and yet. Something's not right. It's not a happy match; the places themselves are, in a sense, frustrated. A half-empty theater or sports stadium is a waste; when they're full, both performers and audience are exhilarated. But the Farnese Gardens, the Cappella Palatina, the Greek temples of Sicily can only work their magic on a few visitors at a time. And no doubt they would prefer some visitors to others: erudite old friends and ardent neophytes rather than the dutiful, the acquisitive, the ignorant, or the naively curious.

It doesn't matter, I tell myself; such distinctions are politically invidious, even when made by great monuments (or their imagined spirits). The well-prepared are disproportionately the socio-economically advantaged. Even if it were feasible, as of course it's not, would I really want to penalize the disadvantaged, to compound injustice by restricting their access to "the best places, the relatively refined creations of human culture" (Ortega)?

Well no, I guess not. Anyway, my purpose here is not to propose a policy, which is a complicated and detailed matter, but merely to sort out my feelings. Am I glad or not that those crowds were there; or better, why am I ambivalent about them? I'm glad that - to put it crudely - the masses are being made aware of culture. But I'm sorry that this awareness is first awakened through the medium of advertising and therefore perceives culture, at least at first, as an object of consumption. Whether active (i.e., reading their guidebook) or passive, few tourists seemed to recognize (I'm speculating, I admit) that there might be any other qualification for being where they were - in the holy places of European culture - than having paid.

I've quoted Ortega's complaint that the "places hitherto reserved for the few" are now being occupied by "the multitude." Ortega was a Nietzschean conservative and had his own, non-partisan idea of who such places ought to be reserved for:

"The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort toward perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves."

This seems to me a valid, indeed a crucial, distinction. Ortega's mistake - what made him a conservative - was his assumption that this distinction between high-quality and low-quality human beings, between creative and critical people on the one hand and passive consumers and conformists on the other, was a metaphysical distinction, was just a fact of human nature. He never considered that increasing the number of the responsible, the cultivated, the noble from generation to generation might be possible through a supreme effort of democratic pedagogy. He went, that is, only part of the way with William Morris and Oscar Wilde toward the loftiest conception of socialism yet devised.

If such a pedagogy is feasible - alas, not in our lifetime the experiment, gentle readers, and probably not in our grandchildren's - there may be just as many visitors on an average day then as now to the great artistic shrines and historic places, or even more. But they won't be crowds.