What we've been up to

From the new issue's theme: Many of us—especially young people, zoomers and millennials—seem to share a mood of apathy and pessimism, if not despair. We're caught, it seems, between a sense of stagnation, in which everything stays the same but slowly gets worse, or outright catastrophism, in which ecological, nuclear, or political disaster is right around the corner. How can we begin to see through this gloom? In "Deep Down Things in a Time of Panic," writer and philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin argues that we still have access to sources of meaning and understanding, even if they are often neglected today.

"A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men's cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture."

From the new issue's books section: The rise of political propaganda and misinformation, abusive rhetoric and harassment, and the experience of loneliness—all of these problems are amplified and intensified by social media. They feel intractable in part because the vast majority of our online experiences is shaped and controlled by just a few big corporations that are "profoundly, criminally uncreative." So argues Jonathan D. Teubner, THR contributing editor and Institute associate fellow, in his review of media studies scholar Kevin Driscoll's The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media. This history of the Internet—of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) and other proto-web forums—might provide some lessons, Teubner writes, for how to build a "happier Internet."

"Driscoll presses the point that in today's social media crisis we often blame the people on the platform. People's basic desire to connect is, according to Driscoll, pathologized, 'as if we should take the blame for our own subjugation.' From his perspective, the blame should squarely rest on the platforms. As his history of social media shows us, there was another path—a different kind of interactive web could exist. He is in one respect entirely right: There is nothing historically necessary about today's commercial social media."

Web Features: Sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour died a few weeks ago. A profoundly influential theorist of modernity, Latour was preoccupied throughout his career with the continued relevance, if not the practical unavoidability, of religion in contemporary life—and especially of religious language. In "A Funeral for Bruno Latour," Eric Luckey, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, imagines a priest given the challenging job of presiding over those final rites. It is a task perhaps made all the more difficult by Latour's insistence that only properly religious words can do the vital work of transforming a people—and of ushering someone from this life to the after-life.

"How can the faithful recover the meaning of religious speech and learn to speak it again? It is not to purify religion, Latour writes in Rejoicing; nor is it to rationalize it. The goal is not to uncover some symbolic meaning or to merely aestheticize religion. Rather, in order to recover religious speech, we must perpetually renew the message, revive it, translate it from one era to the next, to 'say the same things' that religious speech has always said but 'in a completely different idiom.' What is required is a perpetual Pentecost of sorts, the words translated into our own language, calling on us 'to be part once again of the same people, to be faithful once again to the same tradition, to be trustees of the same message,' but only after the words meant to convey this message have been refashioned and thereby revived, again and again."

Read more from the fall issue:

"The Impotence of Being Clever" by Alexander Stern.

David Stromberg writes about the Jewish yearning for Zion.

"The Right to Care" by Adin Lears.

Alan Jacobs considers the strange appeal of believing lies.

"On Hope and Holy Fools" by Tara Isabella Burton.

Charles Mathewes reviews Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Over the last ten years or so, many once obscure critical concepts have become familiar features of public discourse and personal conversation. The term privilege might be the most recognizable of them. In his essay on the topic for the summer 2018 issue, Institute senior fellow and writer Matthew B. Crawford argued that the proliferation of this concept has been propelled by the diversity mandates of the modern university system.

"The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial."

From further afield:

For the New York Review of Books, Lynn Hunt reviews The Man Who Understood Democracy by Institute senior fellow and THR friend Olivier Zunz (who recently won the Grand prix de la biographie politique).

At Quillette, Robin Ashenden writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and about the author's evolving literary reputation.

At Slate, Jason Bailey considers two new books, one by Bob Dylan and the other by Quentin Tarantino.