Our Times

Yet, smartphones are much more than an accumulation of improvements in hardware and software into a pocket-sized device that we spend too much time looking at. They represent something entirely new. When we pick up our phones, our taps and swipes engage not only a system of hardware and software, but also something much bigger—a set of

In Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.” The myth of Russian humiliation at Western, especially American, hands fits the victimhood model perfectly. The

The dawn of the third millennium is characterized by an enormous difficulty in imagining the future. We fear the worst. There is no longer expectation, or an opening to the future. Rather, the future seems closed: in the best-case scenario, it is destined to reproduce the past, reiterating it in a present that appears in the trappings of a future

Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug

This is the era of no good choices. Take schooling, for example. Keeping children home robs them of education and socialization. It scars their futures, steals their joys. It makes it impossible for their parents to work, or even to rest. But sending them to school endangers their health, and that of their teachers and their families. The argument

Narratives may not be adequate for understanding the complex reality that confronts us, but they may nonetheless be necessary to get us to do act responsibly in the face of that reality. In other words, we’re now operating at a scale for which our most basic cognitive tool may no longer be adequate.