He compared an African mask,4 leaving its country of origin on the continent unspecified, with the Apollo Belvedere at the Vatican, concluding with characteristic assuredness that “the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask.”

As Manuel Castells Oliván,2 a Spanish sociologist, has written, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.

We have begun to privilege the symbolism of victory, the more theatrical elements and outward displays that constitute expression of our own moral superiority, over actual, and often less than visible, advances and improvements in standards of living and quality of life. And yet it is the zealous pursuit of those advances and outcomes that forms

As Vannevar Bush observed, writing in 1949, the failure of the Nazis to develop a sufficiently effective proximity fuse, which allowed bombs to detonate just prior to hitting their targets, was a consequence of their arrogance, not their incompetence. The Germans, he wrote,32 were incredulous that “the verdammter Amerikaner” had succeeded “where

It is rather a sort of stewardship, of the temporary and conditional ownership of an asset, that allows one to preserve its value over the long term.

The rise of trigger warnings and other forms of acquiescence behind which the left has zealously rallied for more than a decade has backfired spectacularly, by fostering a sense of harm that often does not exist. Richard Alan Friedman, a professor5 of clinical psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College, said in an interview that, beginning in 2016

Our argument is that the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.

Freud wrote that the “formation of a religion,” with its oscillating focus on guilt and atonement from sin, itself “seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses.” It is perhaps that same hostility, often flagrant, to religion in elite culture that holds back the development of belief in the current