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Today, one can no longer really be a Nazi, a communist, or an Islamist in anything like the twentieth-century sense of those words. One can hardly even be a liberal. We are too postmodern to believe so completely, too fragmented to inhabit a system, too suspicious of grand explanations to surrender ourselves to an ideology.

And yet one can still be an antisemite. As a matter of fact, an antisemite is one of the last remaining things one can be.

Why should antisemitism survive the death of the ideological worlds that once gave it structure, explanation, and purpose? I try to explore that question in my latest on Tikvah Ideas, which you can read here.

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Did Gaza radicalize the Democratic Party? The real chronology suggests that the question is backward. Gaza did not produce the ideology now remaking the party; it revealed an ideology produced much earlier and that finally came to its moment of power. But that answer only raises an even stranger question: why had American intellectual culture spent half a century constructing so elaborate a theology around this tiny patch of the eastern Mediterranean in the first place? This essay attempts to open the real questions, even if it fails to answer some of them.

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There was a great deal of death in my childhood, almost all of which came by way of Palestine. As a matter of fact, death and Palestine were synonyms. Well, I’m not speaking of actual deaths, of these there were very few, but death at large, death as a specter, as an ever-present image, death as ecstasy, death ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized — a death that wills itself as the apotheosis of time, place, and man. Death and Palestine were indeed synonyms.

News of death and the dead was carried almost daily, especially during the years of the Second Intifada, on television and on every front page of every newspaper my father brought home. One of my earliest memories of this kind of death was a close-up on the corpse of a Palestinian child on the screen as it was being pulled out of the rubbles of a collapsed building. As the men lifted it, the body turned out to be torn at the torso, and it flapped in the middle as if it were empty, eviscerated of content. I may have been ten at the time, and to say the image was horrifying is an understatement. I recoiled in panic backward, and my mother, who was sitting next to me on the couch, immediately wrapped her arms around me and pressed my head into her chest, saying ma’alesh, habibi, da shahid. It’s okay, habibi. He’s a martyr. She used her words to try to provide protection from my first encounter with the abyss of senseless destruction by placing the image in a frame that made it okay; a teleological frame that closed death to interpretation and domesticated it to the understanding of even a child. Horror domesticated and subdued. A martyr is a hero, a good thing, an eternal winner of life. Her love and her protection of me were thus inseparable from the transmission of what is quintessentially — and unbeknownst to my loving mother — an ideology. In other words, her profound love required the falsification of reality.

Palestine never ceased to supply martyrs, a supply that never failed to generate ever higher demand. A few years later, as I reached the troubled years of puberty and adolescence, Palestinian death and its visuals took on a whole new meaning. The martyrs, as part of their eternal winning, are promised to be surely rewarded with an eternity of virgins for their every sexual pleasure and whim after death — a promise which supplied a fertile sexual aperture for the budding, unwieldy erotic imagination of young boys. It made for a private erotic theater that was religiously sanctioned, approved, not to say encouraged, an imaginative world whose deathliness and eroticism reinforce one another. It was often the case, especially in those troubled years of Intifada and suicide terrorism, that the imams’ Friday sermons would alternate between lamentations of death and the massacres of the innocent in Palestine and sensuous descriptions of the joys awaiting the martyrs in heaven; the breasts hanging like ripe pomegranates, the skin as soft as water, and the ecstasy of a million unions. The mosque, thus, helped produce an eschatological erotic theater around death. Palestine was the eternal score of the human condition, alternating between the two tunes of death and sex. To a Western reader, these memories might have seemed oriental mysteries only a few years ago. No longer. The sirens of Palestine, singing of death and sex, can now be heard from everywhere. This essay is an attempt to help you understand your new world.

This essay, which will be published in two installments, will attempt to show, not just that Palestinian political culture is heavily dependent on the aestheticization of death which I believe is not a exactly a new observation, but that modern atrocity spectatorship has developed into an aesthetic economy of voyeurism in which real death is converted into reproducible affect and that the Palestinian martyr aesthetics is an unusually perfected instance of a larger post-Christian structure who originates in the secular devouring of Christian sacred representation. In the second installment, the delicate relationship between aesthetized death, death kitsch, and the erotic, especially homosexual erotics, will be discussed.

Note: This essay is not intended as another intervention in the culture war or the information war surrounding Israel and Palestine. It is written against the degradation of death itself. Whatever one’s politics, one should be able to recognize the catastrophe in a world that can no longer grant death its singularity and dignity. This is an attempt to help myself and you to resist that condition, and perhaps, in doing so, to once again feel human.

Part I: Death

My mother’s fundamental desire to domesticate the intolerable is by no means unique. It is an enduring human instinct that transcends time and geography. It is entirely expected, then, that Palestinians, existing as they do within a long and punishing conflict, would seek to do the very same with their own atrocities and their dead. But what begins as a universal mechanism for psychological survival undergoes a radical mutation when it meets the machinery of mass reproduction and the needs of mass ideology: there is a critical distinction between the private act of a mother comforting her child and the structural function of a society mass-producing that comfort as a mobilizing political aesthetic.

Palestinian death footage and visuals have never lacked for transmitters. The front page of newspapers carried them in the morning and TV carried them in the evening, and the cutting-edge Al-Jazeera satellite channel, which dissolved the fixed hour of the evening news broadcast into a continuous stream, carried them at every hour into every Arabic speaking living room, until the phone completed the dissolution and delivered them into the individual hand, no longer at the family’s appointed viewing time, no longer within the communal world of the living room, but privately, continuously, and unbidden, supplied by an algorithmic logic that constantly learns what holds the eye and returns it in increasing concentrations.

Each media carrying the image imposed its own rules. The newspaper photograph was studied at the reader’s pace and set aside by his decision; the televised footage arrives at its own pace and as a managed sequence of images, narrated in the voice of the anchor and the context of the news segment, and could be escaped only by leaving the room; the image in the algorithmic feed arrives without context, anchor, warning, wedged between an advertisement and a personal post, and the hand that scrolls past it has already, in the instant of passing, received it. The voyeuristic consumption of the Palestinian dead has been transformed, over decades of endless production and transmissions from an event to a condition.

The visual culture of Palestinian death—that is, the recurring images, footage, and graphic designs through which Palestinian death is publicly represented and circuilated—gradually consolidated into a recognizable visual repertoire, governed by an accumulated and increasingly codified set of conventions of framing, composition, color, gesture, presentation of the corpse, disposition of mourners, and deployment of political and religious symbolism.

This repertoire is familiar to anyone who has lived within reach of these images, which by now means almost anyone at all: the child’s body pulled from rubble; the mother bent over the body of her son; the funeral procession, with the dead carried aloft on a stretcher or upon outstretched hands; the shrouded body, sometimes very small, laid on a hospital floor; the rescuer running toward the camera with a child in his arms; the row of wrapped bodies awaiting burial; the posthumously composed portrait of the martyr, assembled from photographs taken in life and set against al-Aqsa Mosque, a celestial landscape, or some lurid, Disney-like garden of paradise. Almost every reader will recognize these images immediately. He has seen each of them many times, across decades and cities, produced by different hands and under radically different circumstances; yet, more importantly, he has learned to see them as iterations of the same image, instances of the same form. Their repetition suppresses what death ought most forcefully to disclose: the irreducible singularity of the person who has died and the singularity of the event itself.

For all practical purposes, this has become an established genre of photographic composition, complete with templates, conventions, recurrent poses, and expected objects, no less formally recognizable than the wedding album or the graduation portrait, with its gown, cap, rolled diploma, fixed smile, and standardized backdrop. The difference, of course, is that here the object being subjected to generic form is death itself.

One of the typical photographic compositions of Palestinian death-kitsch goes like this: a woman, usually a mother, leans over the body of a young man and kisses his forehead. The keffiyeh is wrapped around his head, arranged so that the black-and-white pattern frames the face and closes beneath the chin; sometimes white flowers lie across his chest; the covering beneath him is green or white. His face is composed and occupies the center of the frame, lit and clear, while the faces of the living around him are partial, cropped, or turned away. The main event, the kiss, occurs at the point of maximum focus. A viewer formed by the European pictorial tradition will recognize immediately the arrangement of a grieving woman and a dead young man at the image’s center. Nothing appears disordered. Whether this order was produced before the shutter or by the photographer’s selection of angle, moment, and crop scarcely matters for the resulting image, which reaches the viewer as a completed composition.

Another typical visual is the body of a young man, wrapped in the Palestinian flag or the flag of one of the Islamic movements, carried on a stretcher above a dense crowd. The keffiyeh is again wrapped, or alternatively, an Islamic headband, framing a face that is composed, tilted slightly backward, eyes closed, centered in the frame, and catching the light. The flag converts the body’s outline into its own geometry. The visual object at the image’s center is no longer a corpse in any ordinary sense but an emblem with a face. The crowd is young and male almost without exception; the faces nearest the stretcher are grave and turned either toward the body or toward the camera; hands reach from every direction to touch the stretcher’s rails until the rails themselves disappear beneath them; rifles sometimes rise vertically from the crowd, carried as ceremonial objects, their barrels composing the upper register of the image.

At the bottom of such a frame one sometimes finds another figure: a man holding a camera above his head, its lens directed toward the body. The image therefore casually contains representation of its own production. The camera has become as conventional an element of the public funeral as the flag. Photography has entered into the ritual form of the event itself. The funeral presupposes spectators beyond those physically present; its elevation of the body, its gestures, its objects, its lines of sight, and its symbolic arrangements belong simultaneously to mourning and to their future existence as images. The composition presupposes the position from which it will be seen.

A third example is no longer a photograph at all. It is a designed graphic issued by an institution, and it demonstrates that the conventions obeyed by the first two images have become explicit enough to be reproduced digitally and deliberately. A photograph of a flag-wrapped body carried on outstretched hands has been desaturated and darkened around the edges until it reads less as an actual photograph than as texture or atmosphere. Above it, ornamental typography announces the total number of martyrs since the beginning of the war: 71,391. The outrageous number, an attempt at maximum escalation of affect, is the composition’s true visual subject, printed in the largest type and in red. Its performance of precision, down to the final digit, has a function that is not informational, since no viewer retains such a random number, but liturgical, since the figure is merely one sequence in an ever-changing and rising count. The escalatory effect of the rising itself is the content and the rising number itself becomes an affective form.

Here the development of the repertoire reaches a decisive stage. Palestinian death imagery has become a set of specifications that can be fulfilled even in the absence of an identifiable corpse and what began as the representation of particular deaths has matured into a transmissible visual syntax.

Convention by itself, of course, is not kitsch. Funeral rites have always been conventional; religious art is often more rigorously codified than any modern photograph. The Pieta, the Christian icon, the military funeral, and the various forms of funerary monuments all depend upon inherited conventional forms. The decisive question is therefore not whether Palestinian death imagery possesses conventions, but what those conventions do to the singular event they represent. Kitsch appears when the form ceases to submit itself to the particularity of the thing before it and instead receives that thing into an already completed affective structure. The image no longer waits upon this death to discover what this death might mean. The meaning precedes the dead person. The repertoire is already prepared with martyrdom, sacrifice, grief, innocence, nation, defiance, redemption, and the emotions appropriate to each. The individual supplies an instance; the form supplies the meaning and, increasingly, the emotion through which that meaning is to be experienced.

This is why the extraordinary stability of the genre matters. As with a highly conventionalized school of painting, the individual image can become difficult to locate once the identifying insignia have been removed. Gaza or Nablus, 2002 or 2026, Hamas or Fatah may require the flag, the caption, or some incidental marker to distinguish them. The underlying composition survives these differences because it has become refined and stable and possesses reliable conventions.

The final achievement of the repertoire is therefore more radical than the mere aestheticization of death. Death, in reality, resists substitution absolutely. My death cannot be yours; this dead child cannot be another child; this person disappears once, and no other person can occupy that event. Yet the visual form renders death substitutable. One corpse can occupy the place previously occupied by another because the form precedes them both. Complete aestheticization does not merely beautify death or make it emotionally legible. It supplies death in advance with the image through which it is to appear. It turns death itself into kitsch.

The Pseudo-Event

If Palestinian deaths became merely instances in the circulation of highly conventionalized form, does this mean that a Palestinian death is a non-event?

In 1962, surveying what American media had done to public life, Daniel Boorstin gave the name pseudo-event to a class of happening that the age of graphic reproduction had brought into being. The pseudo-event, in Boorstin’s analysis, is identifiable by four marks. It is planned, planted, or incited; someone arranged for it to occur. It is arranged primarily for the convenience of its own reporting, so that the question of its success is the question of how widely it circulates. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous at best. And it tends toward self-fulfillment, since the report of the thing produces the condition the report describes. Boorstin’s inaugural example was a hotel, wishing to be thought distinguished, stages a thirtieth-anniversary celebration; the celebration is covered; the coverage makes the hotel distinguished; the event has manufactured the reality it purported to report. The press conference, the ribbon-cutting, the photo opportunity, the leak timed for the Sunday editions and the whole repertoire of managed publicity belong to the class. (Sadly, Boorstin didn’t live to see the age of social media.) The pseudo-event is hollow at the center. Its being is exhausted in its being-reported; it realizes, in the historical domain, Berkeley’s principle that to be is to be perceived. Subtract the media coverage and nothing remains. The unreported anniversary banquet is a dinner. The unattended press conference is a room with chairs.

“The only weapon we have with which to face the modern machinery of the enemy is jihad and the love of death. The spirit is enriched by the love of death [...] Mutilated bodies, skeletons, terrorism [...] words so beautiful.” –Abu Musab al-Suri

At first, the Palestinian death visual seems to satisfy every part in this definition. The event is arranged — often the confirmation is incited and planned, and the press is called in, etc. Success is measured in circulation of footage. The relation to underlying reality is ambiguous since what the viewer receives as a spontaneous event is the execution of a template. And the whole thing is self-fulfilling in a way that Boorstin’s innocuous examples never approached: the photographed funeral recruits the next funeral’s corpse, the image of the martyr produces more martyrs, the report generates the condition it reports.

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I have wanted to avoid commenting entirely on the sad story of Jason Arday. The reasons run from temperamental disinclinations — I don’t like to participate in mass events or contribute fodder for punditry — through an attempt at principled epistemology of silence, since the obligation to have an opinion on everything is, as a matter of fact, precisely inverted, to the sheer nauseating character of the case itself, which condenses in a single instance so much of the most revolting developments ongoing in Western societies that exposition feels like complicity. It is, in short, painful. But, since one cannot help but be exposed to the torrent of commentaries and opinions, I found them to be deeply unsatisfactory, often necrophilic and opportunistic, many trying to take advantage of the voyeurism of the moment to retail under fresh cover the views they already held.

Thus, and as it is my habit when I’m dissatisfied, I resolved to throw my ring in the hat — I have been informed previously by some authority that I’m confusing the idiom throwing the hat in the ring, which I then decided was a fortuitous accident, since the original idiom must rely on some metaphor about fighting which I believe beneath the dignity of serious discourse; however, one could imagine some dignified occasion in which people participate in, say, a debate club through throwing their rings in a hat, and so I resolved to use my own formulation which I trust should impress the reader — and write, briefly, my thoughts about the whole sad business.

First, and anyone who does not say this first has already failed: no one, absolutely no one, should kill themselves. Even Judas would have been redeemed had he repented. The movement away from our Biblical world is eroding what were once the distinctly Western ideas of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. Life precedes the adjudication of merit. Period. Over. Non-adjudicable. A human being may lie, disgrace himself, lose his reputation and office, become ridiculous, be exposed, repent, rebuild his life, and remain a person for whom the possibility of redemption has not been foreclosed nor lost. We are moving further and further into a pagan, perverse world of honor, shame, the love of death, and erotic annihilation. We dig up offenses people committed decades ago so we may shame them, to socially murder them, forever. Arday converted his certain social death into a real one. No matter how bad the fall, you should not kill yourself, you should continue living: I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

Second, this story is particularly bad, so bad it feels epochal, the end of something, exactly because there are no heroes in it. Already people are splitting into two teams: the woke 2.0, who accuse the media, Cambridge — which ironically appointed him — and race realist activist Nathan Cofnas of murdering Arday through their deep racism; and on the other side, those who defend the right to say “the truth” and expose the corrupt and corrupting wokeness and malfeasance of the proliferating class of fake scholars in the academy. One is either with Arday or with Cofnas.

And there is, of course, the liberal enlightened centrist who tries to say much without saying anything — aside from perhaps passionately trying to dissuade people from their suicidal empathy — while ultimately praising his own wisdom and enlightenment.

All is necrophilia, using a corpse to masturbate.

The reality is that there are no heroes here. No one cared about the truth or about Jason Arday’s life, including, most sadly, Jason Arday himself.

Truth without mercy is accusation; mercy without truth is indulgence; justice without redemption is annihilation.

The Use and Abuse of Jason Arday

Many things could be, and are, true at the same time. Arday clearly was a troubled man. You can see it in his photos and hear it in his fantastical stories. He had very powerful fantasies about himself that he decided to treat as real, which is a complete degradation of his life, his family, and others. Arday subordinated truth to preserving an obsessive self-narrative. We all have fantasies about ourselves, but once we decide these fantasies are real, we become liars, pathological liars, and that is what he did. And even that doesn’t really matter. He has a wife and children, and his ultimate act of dismissal and disregard of himself and them is his worst act, and all pales next to it. (This is, obviously, the inverse of the learned opinion of Transylvania native Richard Hanania, who thinks it’s a good thing he killed himself.)

the Cambridge sociology department cared neither about the truth nor about Arday’s life. Their lack of care was so thorough that no one even bothered to read the man’s work. What they cared about was cultivating a progressive and woke public image that portrays them as agents of historical rectification, reversing the long history of British colonialism. The institution needed the exemplary victim-survivor and therefore built incentives to know as little as possible about the particular person carrying the symbol. This was a conspiracy in which all parties consented, conducted in the name of compassion abstracted from truth — recognizably Christian moral residues, but severed from truthfulness and judgment — thus becoming tyranny and falsehood. Truth subordinated to an institutional self-narrative.

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When opening a work of historical fiction—whether it’s A Tale of Two Cities or the latest paperback—the reader immediately understands the basic parameters of the genre and its assumptions about mankind and reality. The same is true of other forms, including the political essay, which emerged in the 18th century as the basic means of addressing the problems of government and society.

Historical fiction came to the Middle East thanks to Jurji Zaydan, a Beirut-born Christian who settled in Cairo. In 1892, he founded the magazine The Crescent, in which he serialized his literary efforts. Altogether, he wrote 22 historical novels from the material of Islamic history with the devices Walter Scott had invented some 80 years earlier for portraying the Scottish past: private lives caught up in public events, a hero of modest rank rather than a prince, a period depicted with its distinct manners and forms of speech. Zaydan sought to enliven history, making it vivid and compelling to the general reader. He succeeded: generations of Arab readers learned their early Islamic history from his novels. But his work did more than that: it also conveyed a new understanding of history itself.

Read my full essay here on Tikvah Ideas

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“For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound…”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Both the Arday saga and the EU AI Act are episodes of the same apocalypse: for some time now, the principal function of text has ceased to be any meaning and has become merely its own production. Poststructuralism destroyed the innocence of reading by insisting that interpretation does not really recover meaning but produces it as an exercise of power. Texts survived this catastrophic collapse of our confidence in their meaning because they acquired other institutional and political functions that were increasingly independent of whether anybody actually found any meaning in them. The mere generation of text itself—the capacity to produce an authorized sequence of signs—has become the post-poststructuralist form of power. Thus we had an ironic moment in which poststructuralism annihilated the metaphysical privilege of the text to carry a determinate meaning recoverable by authoritative reading, while the institutions in which poststructuralism itself flourished radically expanded the material production of texts (publish-or-perish, metric-driven, jargon-saturated). The production of signs fully usurped the meaning of signs. We can’t decide meaning, but we can count output after all.

And now, we have lost the innocence of writing and the production of text.

As the Arday saga showed, the production of the text of a doctoral thesis, even if plagiarized, mediocre, inscrutable, and effectively unread, was nevertheless sufficient to perform the act by which academic authority and power were constituted (as Spiderman once said, with great power comes great funding). In other words, the mere production of text and documents is the instrument through which modern institutions of the mass-bourgeois society of the knowledge economy authenticate themselves. Credential textuality turned out to be the real constitutive core of academic authority, which then flows down to bureaucratic and professional authority. The production of text becomes the means by which power is acquired. Meaning had nothing to do with texts anymore. The institutional efficacy of text had become fully separated from its semantic efficacy, so that meaning stood to the textual credential roughly as the gold standard stands to a paper currency—remembered but irrelevant.

As a logical consequence of this, what mattered increasingly was not that the text be read, understood, or even be capable of sustaining any meaning. Most academic writing is unread, unchallenged, and unreadable meaningless jargon. Bureaucratic corporate writing is pure performative boilerplate of mind-numbing Davos talk. What mattered about the text was that it existed, that the doc had the proper format, and that its production certified the position of the person authorized to produce it.

AI’s mechanization of this process separates textual production from intellectual production, automates it and lowers its cost, at an unprecedented industrial scale. It thus threatens less the activity of real writing, which necessarily required real thinking, and I must insist, was rare anyway and much rarer than institutions pretended, than the monopoly over textual production, which was used as an official proxy of cognition and from which the considerable authorizing power of the cognitive elite of modern society is derived. AI very simply demystifies writing and text production by removing the need to pretend that the median output was the product of scarce intellectual labor.

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On August 7, 2026, in Mecca, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a trilateral mutual defense agreement declaring that an armed attack on any one of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan would be treated as an attack on all three. The joint statement framed the agreement as collective deterrence against aggression; a Turkish official clarified that the treaty is purely defensive, not directed at any specific actor, and open to other regional states; a Saudi official denied that it constituted a military axis or carried any nuclear dimension. The text has not been released. It was signed within hours of a senior Saudi official telling Reuters that the kingdom was bracing for attacks from Iranian proxies in Yemen and Iraq, which supplies the occasion for the agreement.

The argument of this brief is twofold. First, the pact is theater: a declaration of collective defense unsupported by the capacity or the intention to provide it. Second, there is a reason why states nonetheless keep staging such declarations. A mutual-defense pact in the Middle East operates as an instrument of signaling rather than of warfighting, a message addressed to Washington, to Tehran, and to domestic and pan-Islamic audiences.

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is the third iteration of a single Saudi effort, opened by the American non-response to the 2019 Iranian strike on the Abqaiq oil facilities, driven forward by the Gaza war, and sharpened by Israeli strikes on Doha and the war with Iran, to assemble a deterrence substitute for a diminished American security umbrella. Each iteration has publicly promised more while, operationally, committing to less. That effort has now produced a NATO-style clause among three states that are unlikely to fight one another’s wars, which is to say the quadrilateral discussed in the spring minus its fourth member, Egypt—though Egypt’s absence is not what empties this agreement of collective-defense substance, since the three remaining states would not amount to a functioning alliance even with Cairo present. Most importantly, this is just the latest expression of a regional pattern rather than a departure from it. The modern Middle East has generated many collective-defense agreements, and they have generated pomp and circumstance rather than defense. In the region’s security politics, the vocabulary of collective defense is often detached from the activity of defending, and the announcement has repeatedly turned out to be the whole of the content.

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When the war began at the end of February, in a sequence of opening strikes that suggested that someone, somewhere, had finally thought the problem of Iran through to its end, I shared in a celebration that I now, sadly, recognize as premature. The judgment behind the celebration, however, was, I must insist, sound. The Islamic Republic is not merely a bad Islamic government but the criminal Islamic regime of the age. It is the proof of concept of Islamist revolutionary tyranny and criminality, standing since 1979, and a standing proposal that Islamism could seize a state, hold it for decades, and convert its resources into a machine for exporting terror globally.

Every militia, every doctrine of Islamic armed vanguardism from Beirut to Baghdad, traced its material chains, and much of its intellectual genealogy, to Tehran. Its proxies broke Lebanon, hollowed Iraq, starved Yemen, and helped Assad turn Syria into a mass graveyard. Its nuclear program suspended over an already fractured region the promise of horrors that would make the preceding forty years look like an interlude of calm. A region that has been organized for two generations around the containment of this criminal enterprise could begin to reorganize itself only upon its total collapse. That was my judgment then, and it remains so today. What I did not sufficiently weigh, and only half intuited, was the possibility that a war would destroy the regime’s theological character while leaving its strategic criminality intact if not intensified. Five months in, that is what has happened.

The war has been conducted, on the American side, through a commitment to improvisation so thorough that one is tempted to think of it as methodical: objectives announced and abandoned, escalations undertaken without sequels prepared, thunderous declarations retracted as soon as they are made, pauses granted at the moments when pressure was compounding. Under this intermittent yet inconsistent hammering, the Islamic Republic has collapsed into the body of the Revolutionary Guard. The result resembles Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, with an organization standing where the one man once stood. A garrison state run by a military-terrorist syndicate whose wealth, survival, and identity are one thing and calculates nothing but its own continuity and expansion. It has also drawn the correct inference from its circumstances: its adversaries have reached their ceiling while it is still standing. Following this, the regime that was supposed to be dying has struck the Arab Gulf states, hit American bases across the region, closed the world’s most important oil artery, and shows no sign of exhaustion. Iran has not won, not yet, but even such a statement can’t be made without trying to define winning and losing, which already says much.

To understand the present Iranian counteroffensive, one must begin from the objective it serves, which has been constant across every phase of Iranian policy since 1979: the expulsion of the United States from the Middle East. The reasoning behind the objective is elementary and, on its own premises, correct. American power is the single fact that stands between Iran and domination of the Gulf. It is the American guarantee that permits small, immensely wealthy monarchies to exist unmolested alongside a neighbor ten times their size that regards their wealth as a geological accident and their sovereignty as a colonial artifact. (Iranian officials are explicit that their project of hegemony is, unironically, a decolonization of the region.) Remove the guarantee, and the Gulf’s riches stand to Iranian power roughly as Kuwait’s stood to Saddam’s in the summer of 1990, with the crucial difference that no coalition would be coming. A Middle East without America is an Iranian empire in the waiting, and everything Tehran has built for two decades constitutes the gradually assembled infrastructure of this project. None of these instruments is decisive alone, but each is a cog assembled for their imperial machinery.

The Iranians are gradualists by formation and by conviction. A strategic culture annealed in eight years of war with Iraq, in which they absorbed casualties on an apocalyptic scale and emerged convinced that the capacity to endure is itself a weapon, does not think in terms of campaigns; it thinks in epochs. Its characteristic instrument is what is known in the international relations literature as salami tactics — the accumulation of faits accomplis, each individually beneath the threshold at which a status quo power will accept the costs of reversal, whose sum is a transformed strategic map. Soleimani’s arc from Iraq to the Mediterranean was built this way, one militia, one arms shipment, and one buried missile factory at a time. A creeping empire. The Iranians believe, on the evidence of forty years, that the creeping side defeats the sprinting side, an ancient lesson that was once taught by a tortoise.

The same method governed the nuclear program, in which Iranian statecraft approached the level of masterpiece artistry. The program was the terminal object of the whole architecture — the acquisition that would place the empire under a roof, after which the reversal of any of its gains would be impossible. But the program’s principal enemy was Israel, the one military power in the region with both the capability and the declared will to destroy it, and that is also nuclear. Against this threat Iran deployed the technique of the skilled magician, who performs his secret transaction by commanding where the audience’s attention must rest. The encirclement of Israel, through Hezbollah above all, with its stockpile of well over a hundred thousand rockets held as a standing mortgage on Tel Aviv and Haifa, was the misdirection. For a generation, every Israeli planner who gamed a strike on Natanz or Fordow was compelled to price it against the ruin of his own cities, and to calculate not twice but thrice. What Jewish leader would accept such a cost?

The run ended on October 7, 2023, through a miscalculation that was, likely, Hamas’s alone. The gambit demolished the Israeli security conception at a stroke, and in demolishing it released Israel from the paralysis the conception had imposed, setting in motion the sequence of Gaza, the decapitation of Hezbollah, the collapse of Assad’s Syria, and the direct exchanges that stripped Iran’s air defenses that ran up the chain of patronage until it arrived in Tehran this February, drawing the United States along with it.

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Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary is the kind of headline that, were it not entirely predictable, would have required some explanation. A former local health official, endorsed by the DSA and who campaigns at college rallies alongside Hasan Piker — the vile streamer who openly believes America deserved 9/11 and that he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every single time,” and that China’s Mao was “one of the great leaders of this world,” not to mention electrocuting his dog on camera — has just won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in a battleground state that the party must carry in November if it hopes to flip the Senate.

He won by spending $7.5 million against $64.7 million, which means, among other things, that AIPAC just flushed $32 million down a toilet. The establishment’s preferred candidate, Haley Stevens, a four-term congresswoman backed by Schumer, funded by Emily’s List and every pro-Israel organization with a checkbook, lost to the guy who was sad about the killing of Khamenei.

The response of the Dem establishment to this outcome has been characteristically invertebrate. Schumer praised El-Sayed for “an energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders.” Stevens congratulated him and offered her support. Senate Majority PAC called him “a real fighter who shows up for working families.” This is how a party behaves when it has already decided, at some cellular level beneath the reach of its own spokespersons, that resistance is no longer worth the cost. Simply, succumbing to progressive demands now has less than the cost of facing progressive anger.

The same evening, in the adjacent congressional district, a DSA-backed state legislator named Donavan McKinney unseated Shri Thanedar, a two-term Dem incumbent in Detroit’s 13th District, with keffiyeh-wearing supporters celebrating alongside Rashida Tlaib. This makes El-Sayed’s victory the latest data point in a national pattern that started with Mamdani’s conquest of New York, more DSA displacements of establishment incumbents in New York congressional races, Melat Kiros’s toppling of DeGette in Colorado after thirty years in office, and the DSA’s march into mayoralties in Washington and Los Angeles. Over thirty DSA-backed candidates have won primaries this cycle. The RNC’s comparison of El-Sayed to Mamdani was, for once, accurate, which is rare.

This latest victory of Queer-Palestine-anti-Americanism tells us about the changes in the structure of power inside the Democratic Party, and how completely the structural analysis I have been offering in these pages has been vindicated by events. The Democratic establishment’s decision to concede Israel to its radical wing was never going to remain confined to the Israel question, because anti-Zionism is a whole worldview, Palestine is a complete Idea, a way of organizing political reality that generates conclusions far beyond the particular case of Israel. The centrists are the authors of their own demise.

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After the Great War, Arab societies, like many others, for the first time came to know politics as a modern mass phenomenon in which modern communication technologies are used for mass political mobilization. For the first time, intellectuals, journalists, poets, and men of letters of all sorts replaced the old classes of religious scholars by becoming the source of moral knowledge and ethical education for the public. The new trend of inspiring people with a total philosophical “vision,” the conversion of artistic sensibilities into populist political symbols, and the pooling of mass support into a demand, symbol, or figure that could be converted to power became the mainstays of Levantine and Egyptian politics. At the heart of this new trend were the two most transformative revolutionary ideologies German philosophy has produced: romantic nationalism and Marxism, and their struggle against the common postwar enemy of Western imperialism.

Nationalism as a romanticist literary and artistic phenomenon could be discerned in late-19th-century Arabic writing and art, yet it was not until the interwar years that nationalism mattered as a mobilizing revolutionary impulse around which political movements could form and as a literary genre of romantic imagination. The revolutionary impulse that started to ferment during the Great War and accelerated after its end was a generally anti-imperialist fervor without ideological content or clear direction. It is best to imagine it as a primordial pool to which intellectual and political developments in Europe, such as Marxist-Leninism, fascism, Nazism, and antisemitism constantly flowed, and from which the political movements that shaped the region today emerged.

Arab nationalism was the first and earliest idea which articulated a cohesive ideology for the region in the works of its intellectual father, Sati Al-Husri (1880-1968). A former Ottoman officer, Husri became one of the first modern Arab educators for whom education meant the mission of preparing and producing nationalist youth and endowing it with a Prussian militant sense of historical mission. The idea that the Hegelian conception of the political community as a historical protagonist whose members form an organic unity with a transcendent salvific mission inside history could find its inevitable realization only in the establishment of a state. The outright rejection and delegitimation of current reality in favor of a supposedly historically inevitable future which is the only legitimate reality possible is a prerequisite of Hegelian revolutionary action. Those who defend the present naturally become an obstacle and enemies of history itself.

Constricting the idea of natural political legitimacy, in itself a modern philosophical concept, to a political reality that must be identical to an abstract and ideal notion of a great Arab or Islamic nation, embodying a certain mystical essence, naturally led to complete delegitimation of any political reality short of such ideal while establishing legitimacy, and not sovereignty, as the criterion of political truth. Actual, lesser nation-states were delegitimated as “artificial” products of European colonialism, a view enshrined in the fictitious and ideological treatment of historical episodes such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Such philosophical conception can be clearly grasped in all modern Middle Eastern political ideologies; it can be discerned, for instance, in the Baathist slogan, “One Arab nation with an eternal mission,” or in that of the Muslim Brotherhood, “Islam is the solution,” or in the propaganda of ISIS which named the video of its deceleration as “The End of Sykes-Picot.”

As Hegelianism and its ideologies were shaping Arab thought, a new generation of men of letters emerged, primarily in Egypt and the Levant, whose work valorized self-expression, the quest for authenticity, romantic ideals, and artistic subjectivity as a sense of mystical duty toward some absolute spirit. The sense of romantic struggle provided a literary fantastic view of a heroic self, encircled by a world of hostile forces; seeking to overcome such a world by unlocking the authenticity of one’s most inner self naturally intersected with a new kind of political activism centered on deeply mystical notions of nature, blood, soil, liberation, death, regenerative violence, and armed struggle. European phenomena such as cultural salons, secret societies, and militant youth groups led by intellectuals, self-identifying as vanguards, with unique colored shirts and carrying slogans referring to death, iron, and fire proliferated.

It was therefore inevitable that such intellectual and psychological conditions would lead to consequences not too dissimilar from the consequences of such conditions in Europe; the appearance of popular political movements carrying devotional romantic symbols founded by self-styled fuehrers who embodied the potent Leninist mix of intellectual-politicians leading a vanguard in the final phase of a historical struggle toward an inevitable salvific future in which all contradictions will be resolved. In the interwar years in Egypt and the Levant, communist, Arabist, Egyptianist, Syrianist, and Islamist groups proliferated and created an ideologically competitive mimetic contagion. Together, those groups formed a common space where the abstract ideas of German philosophy, nationalism, socialism, unification and European revolutionary thought combined and recombined along with the local symbols of Islam and Arab culture and altered the entire substructure of Arab thought.

If the arrival of the Arabic printing press in the 19th century allowed literary nationalism and romanticist ideas to proliferate among the new educated classes, the shortwave radio brought a new phase of possibilities carrying on its waves the thunderous voices of mass mobilization. The new possibilities of the new technologies were first fully realized in the Middle East by the two protagonists of the global European revolution known as WWII, Italy and Germany. The former established its Arabic Radio Bari station in 1934 and the latter, the Voice of Berlin in Arabic, in 1939. Together, they filled the airwaves with Arabic propaganda of the most sensationalist kind mixing Islamic motifs and symbols with anti-Westernism, antisemitism, and incitement to mass violence. Radio Bari and the Voice of Berlin championed the national liberation of all the Arab and Muslim peoples and warned against the conspiracies of imperialist powers and the “Jewish States of America,” and called for a revolution against the West.

Many of the antisemitic catchphrases and conspiracy theories still found in Arabic culture today can indeed be traced to the legacy of the Voice of Berlin and its Iraqi anchor, Yunis Bahri. According to the British propaganda official, Nevill Barbour, “The Nazis had the skill or luck to find and employ an Iraqi, Yunus al-Bahri, who had a remarkable talent for the sensational type of broadcasting which they favored. Berlin Radio was bound by no scruples and cared nothing for factual accuracy … it, therefore, used every device to inflame Arab resentment against Britain for favoring Zionism, to exploit every conceivable suspicion regarding British actions, and to sneer at Arabs who publicly declared their support of the British connection. The Berlin Radio announcer, for instance, used regularly to refer to Prince Abdallah as ‘Rabbi Abdallah.’”

Nazism and fascism served as an inspiration and a prototype to many aspiring movements such as the Syrian Socialist National Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. The excitement in the prospects of a German victory brought, along with Arab intellectual affections to German philosophy, can be clearly read in almost all the memoirs of those who came to political age during the period including Presidents Nasser and Sadat in Egypt and Antun Saadah in Syria. More significant than politicians, in my opinion, are those who would become the founders of Arab and Muslim modern thought, such as the Egyptian thinker Abdulrahman Badawi, the first modern Arab philosopher, a figure of utmost importance, whose memoirs show deep sympathies with Germany and Nazism and a near-pathological obsession with Jews. Or the most prominent Algerian thinker of the era of national liberation, Malek Bennabi, who was accused later by France of having been a Nazi collaborator.

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In 1898, the thirty-three-year-old Syrian religious scholar Rashid Rida (1865–1935) launched the first issue of his Cairo-based journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse). His declared aim was “religious and social reform for our Muslim nation and all those who live in our midst and share our interests, and to demonstrate the agreement between Islam and reason.” The inaugural editorial set a tone of measured reformism: “Our primary purpose is to advocate for the education of boys and girls, not to criticize rulers, and to promote the sciences and arts.” Over the next four decades—until Rida’s death—al-Manar would evolve into one of the most influential intellectual platforms for Arab Muslims with a traditionalist outlook, shaping the ideas of an entire generation. Many of its readers would become major figures in the political and religious life of the 20th-century Arab world.

In the second issue, Rida turned his attention to events in France. Reporting on the Dreyfus Affair, he wrote:

“We received news of domestic issues in France, particularly the Dreyfus and Zola affairs, and the persecution, mistreatment, and discrimination faced by Jews. Readers should not assume that this stems from the religious fanaticism of the French nation, for it [France] is closer to irreligion than to zealous fundamentalism. This virulent intolerance is rooted in racial bias and envious disdain propagated by journalists who hold animosity towards Jews and covet their wealth.”

Shifting to local concerns, Rida observed with unease that the same currents were seeping into Arab public life:

“It is perplexing to witness the infection of the Egyptian press with the ailment afflicting the French press. They belittle Jews and accuse them of achieving success through lucrative ventures and business acumen. True civility and justice compel us to embrace absolute freedom in public discourse. Productive work and legitimate money-making are social virtues.”

He closed his report with what may be the earliest reference in modern Arab letters to antisemitism as a distinct pathological phenomenon:

“Some of their prominent [French] philosophers labeled this [hatred] as a disease and hoped that progress in civilization and universal ethics would eradicate it.”

That an Islamic scholar in 1898 would defend Alfred Dreyfus against the antisemitic hysteria of the French press might seem, to later generations, almost paradoxical—particularly given the mutations of Islamic political and religious discourse in the century that followed, when much of the Muslim world became fertile ground for antisemitic myths, with regimes such as Baʿathist Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran enshrining them as state doctrine. Rida, moreover, was not blind to the double standards of the very press whose prejudice he condemned:

“If such vile incidents occurred among us, the Orientals, those [French] newspapers would have unleashed vitriol upon us and derided the Orientals with acerbic language and pens sharp as arrows. Were these newspapers in a weakened position akin to that of the Jews, they would have clamored for liberty and complete justice.”

It would be tempting to read Rida’s defense of Dreyfus as motivated less by sympathy for Jews than by a desire to expose the hypocrisy of the French press and to puncture the moral authority of Western journalism. Such an interpretation is plausible, given the trajectory of his later career. In his final decade, Rida moved away from his early reformist modernism toward a rigorously traditionalist politics, aligning himself with Wahhabi doctrines and calling for the restoration of the Caliphate. This later phase would exert a decisive influence on the young Hassan al-Banna and his movement that became the Muslim Brotherhood—the seedbed of modern Islamism. Rida also published a number of anti-Zionist articles during his lifetime, vowing resistance should Jews attempt to establish a state in Palestine.

Yet whatever his motives in 1898, the vocabulary Rida employed in al-Manar was unmistakably modern. “Freedom,” “virtue,” “progress”—terms now so naturalized in Arabic political discourse as to pass without comment—were, in Rida’s day, recent imports from French, and their philosophical freight was immense. In European thought, freedom lay at the heart of Enlightenment political theory; virtue was the organizing principle of its moral philosophy; progress was the keystone of its philosophy of history. A century earlier, these words—and the conceptual worlds they opened—would have been largely unintelligible to an Arabic-reading public.

A philosophical concept is not a word but a compressed argument, a node in a network of mutually sustaining propositions about the nature of man, law, knowledge, and the cosmos, which acquires its specific meaning only from its position inside the system in which it was forged; to translate such a concept into a language whose own language was organized around fundamentally different questions is not to add a new item to the existing inventory of thought but to introduce a foreign structure that, once admitted, exerts its own gravitational pull on everything around it, bending minds toward problems they never sought to address. When Rida wrote “freedom,” he was not simply translating a French word; he was, whether he knew it or not, placing into Arabic circulation the conclusion of a centuries-long European argument about the relationship between the individual and the state—an argument that began with the collapse of medieval Christendom’s unity, passed through the Wars of Religion, the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, and the revolutionary politics of Rousseau, and arrived, by the late eighteenth century, at a conception of human autonomy that presupposed the entire trajectory behind it, even when that trajectory was forgotten. The Arabic word ḥurriyya could be made to carry this conclusion, but not the premises from which it was derived.

This matters because such concepts do not enter a language without altering the mental habits of those who use them. Once adopted, they reframe how political, moral, and historical questions are posed—and those changes are, in a deep sense, irreversible. Even after Rida repudiated much of his youthful modernism, his thinking could not be wholly de-modernized; the categories through which he interpreted the classical Islamic tradition had been shaped by concepts he first encountered in the context of modern reformism. Indeed, the very “return” to medieval Islamic political literature in the 20th century—including the revival of Ibn Taymiyyah’s anti-Jewish writings—was made possible by modern philology and the historicist impulse of modern scholarship. Before these methods and concepts entered Arab intellectual life, many of those classical texts lay in obscurity. The tradition to which later Islamists claimed to return was, in no small part, a modern construction.

In European intellectual history, the concepts that Rida absorbed had been produced by a long series of institutional crises—the Reformation, the rise of the sovereign state, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment’s assault on ecclesiastical power—each generating new categories of thought in response to specific conflict, each category bearing within it the scar, sometimes still bleeding, of the struggle that produced it. The European experience of modernity was, as a consequence, simultaneously conceptual and institutional: the ideas and the social forms that gave rise to them developed together, in a relationship of mutual determination, over roughly three centuries. In the Arab world, these concepts arrived as finished products, detached from the crises that had generated them, and were absorbed in a matter of decades by a society whose institutions had undergone no analogous transformation.

Rida was far from being unconscious of the novelty he was introducing into Arabic intellectual life. Some European philosophical concepts, once adopted, needed no explanation; others required deliberate unpacking for readers unaccustomed to their meanings. To this end, he included in the inaugural issue of al-Manar a section entitled “Terminology of Today’s Authors,” in which he observed:

“The tongues and pens of this age are using words with different meanings than they originally had in the original forms of language and for previous generations. They also now have words for new arts and things that Arabs never used, so we explained some of them to our unfamiliar readers.”

In this section, Rida chose to clarify two terms in particular: nature (ṭabīʿa) and atheism (kufr).

The term ṭabīʿa, he explained, had in earlier usage been confined largely to physicians, Sufis, and philosophers, denoting the healthy condition of a body or the innate properties of things—planets, trees, animals. In contemporary discourse, however, it had acquired a different register, referring to self-evident knowledge that was intuitive and required no proof. This was a significant shift: from a physical or empirical category to one rooted in epistemology, signaling the influence of modern philosophical reasoning.

For kufr, Rida offered a narrower definition than the classical Islamic sense of unbelief. He aligned it specifically with ilḥād—atheism—distinguishing it from the broader range of non-Muslim belief systems. This redefinition was not a mere semantic tidying; it reflected his recognition of a novel form of atheism that had emerged in the 19th century, a “radical” atheism that denied not only the existence of God but the validity of all transcendental values.

That Rida chose nature and atheism for special attention in the very first issue is telling. His interest in ṭabīʿa not as a category of natural science but as a form of self-evident knowledge suggests his awareness that the new atheism was grounded less in empirical discovery than in philosophical speculation, rationalist systems, and epistemological critique. In identifying and explaining these terms for his readers, Rida was not merely translating European concepts into Arabic; he was preparing his audience to think in categories that had no real precedent in the premodern Islamic lexicon.

A decade after his early essays in al-Manar, Rida turned his attention to the growing influence of revolutionary nationalism. In an article titled “How Could the Nation Obtain Its Rights?”, he began with a concise summary of its central premise: “Nations have both legal and natural rights,” and when those rights are usurped, they can be restored only through revolutionary violence. He then advanced his own counterargument—one grounded in the concept of revolution itself—insisting that the surest path to regaining lost rights was not upheaval but gradual, deliberate reform.

Strikingly, Rida did not question the language of “rights” or “natural rights” themselves. On the contrary, he affirmed them, adopting a framework more reminiscent of Burke’s defense of measured, rational change than of a wholesale rejection of modern political ideas. This was not new territory for him; in earlier articles, he had explored the question of rights at length, including those of women.

The point here is that by the opening years of the twentieth century, even traditionalist Arab intellectuals were thinking, writing, and arguing within a vocabulary structured by modern concepts. Freedom, rights, and progress were no longer alien terms; they had become the common currency of political and religious debate. How did these notions—entirely absent from the classical Islamic lexicon—so suddenly enter the Arabic intellectual sphere? What were the consequences of their arrival?

The answer lies in the 19th-century global diffusion of European culture, accelerated by colonial expansion and the parallel Arab drive for modernization. Translation projects on an unprecedented scale, educational missions to European capitals, and the employment of European experts in law, science, and education opened a broad conduit for new ideas.

What made the Arab encounter with these concepts distinctive was the speed of adoption. In Europe, the ideas of rights, freedom, and progress had taken shape over two centuries of philosophical contestation, institutional change, and cultural negotiation. In the Arab world, they were absorbed in decades—often without the gradual accumulation of supporting philosophical traditions that had originally given them coherence. The result was a compressed and often uncritical adoption, importing not only the language but the implicit assumptions of the modern project. This pattern, once set, would recur repeatedly in modern Arab intellectual history.

The interpretive range of these concepts remains as broad today as it was transformative then. In Western societies, debates over issues as divisive as abortion are rooted in competing definitions of rights, freedom, and progress. The concepts themselves are not empty; rather, their enduring potency lies in their openness to rival interpretations. For Rida and his contemporaries, the most influential frame for these notions came through the French intellectual world. French positivism, in particular, provided a primary gateway into modern political thought for generations of Arab intellectuals—Rida among them—offering a vision of progress as the inevitable product of rational order, scientific method, and social reform.

By the late 19th century, several Middle Eastern states had adopted French legal positivism as the basis for their civil codes, part of broader administrative modernization efforts. Rida’s own view of “freedom,” especially as expressed during the Dreyfus Affair—where he treated it as the liberty to conduct business and pursue financial gain—was notably more liberal than many subsequent interpretations in Arabic political discourse. In the premodern Islamic legal tradition, ḥurriyya (”freedom”) was understood almost exclusively as a legal status opposed to slavery, not as a political principle. The semantic shift in Rida’s usage likely owed much to the interplay between Islamic legal categories and the vocabulary of French positivist thought, which made it natural to see “freedom” as the right of individuals to engage in specifically legitimate economic activity.

This linkage between commerce and moral virtue has, of course, deep roots in European moral philosophy. As Albert Hirschman shows in The Passions and the Interests, Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu elevated the rational pursuit of material interest as a stabilizing force against the destructive impulses of political passion. Rida’s writings on freedom, interest, society, progress, and virtue clearly bear the imprint of such ideas.

The transformation was even more consequential in the case of “rights.” Classical Arabic possessed no equivalent to the modern concept. The term ḥaqq, later chosen as its translation, had two primary premodern senses: “absolute truth” (a Qurʾanic name of God) and, in legal usage, a concrete entitlement defined within the divine law—such as a share of an inheritance or a contractual claim. In neither sense did ḥaqq imply an inherent, pre-political entitlement existing prior to law. The modern use of ḥaqq to denote such a claim represented an epistemic reversal: the shift of moral authority from the external, transcendent source of divine command to the self-evidence of individual or collective claims.

The depth of this reversal recapitulates in compressed form what European political philosophy required centuries to accomplish: the transition from objective natural law, in which right is derived from the structure of creation and mediated through institutional authority, to subjective natural right, in which the individual is the bearer of pre-political claims that no authority may abrogate. In European intellectual history, this arc runs from Aquinas through Ockham, Suárez, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, each figure building upon and revising the work of predecessors, each responding to specific institutional crises—the conciliar movement, the Wars of Religion, the English Civil War—that demanded new accounts of the relationship between the person and the polity. The Arabic adoption of “rights” language compressed this entire arc into a single terminological substitution and thereby acquiring a concept whose internal tensions (between individual and collective right, between natural and positive law, between the right of resistance and the obligation of obedience) remained philosophically unresolved because they had never been philosophically engaged.

By the end of the 19th century, “rights” discourse had entered both elite debates and codified law in the Middle East. The nationalist and “natural rights” language that Rida occasionally adopted—especially in its collectivist, supra-individual form—became a corner claim for the emerging nationalist movements. Yet in this new Arab context, this adoption took place without any sustained attempt to build a systematic theory of rights, or even to distinguish rigorously between individual and collective claims. That work would only begin in the 1940s, under the influence of Arab nationalism and Palestinian political thought, and even then it drew heavily on German theories of the state rather than on indigenous jurisprudential resources.

Rida, a scholar whose formation was in the interpretive sciences of Islamic law, and whose stated mission was the defense of the divine law, did not perceive a structural conflict between that law and the philosophical premises of rights discourse. This was not because the two systems were secretly compatible, but because to engage with the modern idea of rights at all required accepting its foundational assumptions. There was no indigenous conceptual toolkit with which to recast or resist those assumptions on Islamic terms. The adoption of the vocabulary entailed the importation of the moral ontology beneath it.

The shift was profound, quick, and likely irreversible. In the Islamic legal tradition—as in Jewish law—the central category is the prohibition. Law flows from above, from divine command, through juristic interpretation; only within that framework do specific entitlements arise, and these entitlements are contingent, context-bound, and ultimately modifiable by the ruler or the jurists. In the modern rights paradigm, the order is reversed: rights are anterior to law, self-evident, and inviolable; law exists to preserve them, and they may be defended by revolt if denied.

Such an inversion has had paradoxical and unintended effects. The modernization of Sharia has, in many cases, fossilized what was once flexible. A Qurʾanic allowance—such as a husband’s physical discipline of a wife—was historically subject to restriction or suspension without doctrinal rupture. Once reframed as a “right” in the modern sense, it becomes fixed and politically untouchable, a human entitlement of men rather than a revocable provision of law. What was formerly negotiable within the tradition is now defended as absolute within the imported paradigm.

The proliferation of apologetic works with titles such as Women’s Rights in Sharia Law, and the political difficulty Muslim governments face in curbing certain male “rights” once modernized, testify to the depth of the epistemic change. The moral architecture of divine law, once centered on a dynamic interplay between prohibition, entitlement, and circumstance, has been replaced by a rigid architecture of self-evident claims. In adopting the language of rights, modern Muslim thought did not simply borrow a term; it accepted a redefinition of law’s purpose and of the source from which moral authority flows.

Classical Islamic thought asks “What does God command?”—a question that looks upward, to a transcendent source, and backward, to the foundational texts whose authority is given once and for all. The modern vocabulary in which Rida was already thinking asks a different question: “What are my rights?”—which looks outward, to the comparative position of one’s community in a universal scale of development, and forward, to a future that provides the standard by which the present is judged. These two questions are not merely different inquiries that might coexist in a single mind; they are structurally incompatible orientations. The first presupposes a fixed and eternal standard against which all temporal phenomena are measured; the second presupposes that standards themselves develop historically. To ask both at once is to make one of them subordinate to the other, and in practice it was the historical question that absorbed and neutralized the theological one—not by refuting it, which would have required an argument, but by rendering it otiose, which required only a change of vocabulary.

When Rida wrote of “the progress of civilization and general ethics,” he was importing into Arabic discourse one of the most powerful and least questioned assumptions of the post-Christian world—the philosophy of History itself. To speak of “progress” was already to accept a vision of time as a forward-moving current, measured by the achievements of human development and governed by a hidden moral teleology.

Rida was hardly alone in this. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the word “progress” had entered the Arabic intellectual lexicon with remarkable speed and frequency. In al-Manar alone, at least six articles appeared over the years under the title Why Did the West Progress and Why Did Muslims Go Backward?—many authored by Shakib Arslan, the same man who would later work with the Nazi Voice of Berlin and collaborate with Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. To pose the question in those terms was already to have surrendered to post-Christian philosophy of History, in which the standard of the most advanced power of the age was both the destination and the judge.

This question has, since the mid-19th century, served as the axis around which virtually all modern Arab and Muslim intellectual life has revolved. In the West, “progress” became the central organizing principle of historical thought; in the Muslim world, the problem of backwardness became its counterpart. For more than a century, any young Muslim with intellectual ambitions—whether secularist, atheist, Islamist, or jihadist—has found himself entering the same grim arena: trying to explain why “we” are behind and “they” are ahead.

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All that is solid melts into air. The line has been quoted so often that it has itself melted, dissolved into the very atmosphere it was meant to describe. Dissolution and liquefaction are perhaps the two most common sociological terms used today. Marriages dissolve at the first tremor of dissatisfaction, and those that survive are haunted by the suspicion that they persist out of cowardice rather than conviction. Children are raised by parents who cannot articulate what they are raising them for, in schools that cannot articulate what they are teaching them toward, in a world that has replaced the question “what is a good life?” with the question “what do you want?” as though mere wanting were self-justifying. Nations that fifty years ago could still invoke a shared inheritance now find the mere suggestion to be deeply embarrassing and contested: whose inheritance, defined by whom, imposed on whom, and in any case, probably a fiction constructed to serve interests that must now be named and shamed. Even the body — that last stronghold of the given, the irreducible fact that was supposed to outlast every deconstruction — has been absorbed into the general liquefaction. The flesh itself is now a text, and texts can be rewritten and edited infinitely.

American sociologist Philip Rieff was one of the secular prophets who foresaw much of this. He understood that culture is not a decorative overlay on the real business of economics and power but the deepest structure of collective life, the system of commanding truths that tells a people what is permitted and what is forbidden and why. When those truths command, order arises from them as naturally as grammar arises from a living language. Surely, much effort and the discipline of learning are still needed, but they are much more easily given to the authority of something received rather than invented. When those truths cease to command, the order they sustained becomes implausible. The prohibitions remain on the books, but no one can say why they are there. The permissions multiply because in the absence of a commanding truth, there is no ground on which to deny anything to anyone. Thus, the noise increases — the perpetual, frantic, exhausting noise of man trying to generate through sheer volume of speech, through endless kitschification, the authority and meaning that once arose from a source no one had to argue for.

What were these commanding truths, and how did they lose their command? The answer is at once obvious and strangely difficult to state, because the loss has been so thorough that the language in which one might describe what was lost has itself been degraded. But let us try. We once drew our understanding of the true, the good, and the eternal from Jewish texts as received, modified, enlarged, and elaborated by Christianity. One may admire this fact or despise it, but one cannot honestly deny it. It supplied the metaphysics that grounded the natural sciences before there were natural sciences. It supplied the moral vocabulary in which justice, mercy, dignity, and obligation were articulated and debated. It supplied the eschatology that gave suffering a meaning and history a direction. It supplied the anthropology that made every man, however wretched, the bearer of an infinite worth not conferred by society and not revocable by the state. It was, in Rieff’s terms, the commanding truth of the West, and from it descended the entire architecture of permissions and prohibitions, of sacred and profane, of the ordered and the disordered, that made Western culture a culture rather than a mere aggregation of preferences.

Western culture has undergone not merely secularization but a much deeper process: the devaluation of the Biblical sources of meaning, value, and order. This devaluation (distinct from mere loss of belief) has produced the characteristic instabilities of late modernity; dissolution of institutions, families, education, nations, and even the body, eroding every boundary and erasing every certainty. Our once commanding truths were not merely lost — that would have been survivable — but, much worse, they have been thoroughly devalued.

This essay is about how to refuse the judgment by which absence becomes unreality and human construction becomes the only remaining source of meaning and value. It is about how to restore value and meaning in a world of exile.

The Solitude of Reason

The exit from this Biblical world — gradual and never quite completed — is the central event of the modern period, and everything else that passes under the name of modernity is a consequence of it or a response to it. What matters for our purposes is not the history of the exit but its logic, which unfolds in three stages that are not strictly chronological but are nonetheless distinct.

The first stage is confidence. The Enlightenment men who left the Bible did not, for the most part, believe they were abandoning the true, the good, and the eternal. They believed they were liberating these things from the distortions of priestcraft and superstition and establishing them on firmer, more rational, more universal foundations. Reason would ground the true more securely than revelation had. Nature would ground the good more honestly than theology had. History, understood as progress, would deliver the eternal in the form of a future perfection toward which mankind was advancing. This confidence was not foolish; some of the men who held it were among the finest minds the world has produced. But it rested on the fatal assumption that the fruits of the Biblical tradition could be preserved after the roots had been severed, that concepts like truth, goodness, human dignity, and moral obligation could survive indefinitely on soil that had been salted against the only crop that had ever grown there.

The second stage is crisis. One by one, the secular substitutes revealed their insufficiency. Reason, untethered from any account of what reason is for, devoured its own foundations and ended in the critique of reason itself. Nature, interrogated without reverence, yielded facts but not values, mechanisms but not meanings, a universe of stunning regularity and total indifference. History proved the most treacherous substitute of all, because it did not merely fail to deliver the eternal but destroyed the very concept. Historicism, the great method of the nineteenth century, taught the world to see every truth as the product of its moment, every value as the expression of its age, every absolute as a local custom wearing a universal mask. What was supposed to be the science of human progress became the universal solvent of human conviction: if every idea is the child of its time, then no idea transcends its time, and the quest for the true and the eternal is revealed as one more historically conditioned illusion, no different in kind from the superstitions it replaced. The great crimes of the twentieth century were downstream of this dissolution. Once no truth could claim authority beyond its historical moment, no moral conviction could stand in the way of a political will determined to remake the world in its own image.

The third stage is devaluation, and it is here that the real and final damage is done. Loss, however painful, may preserve the value of what is lost. A man who has lost something precious knows the worth of what he no longer holds; his grief is itself a form of testimony to the reality of what is gone. Devaluation is something else. It is the conclusion that what was lost never had value in the first place. The true becomes “truth,” in skeptical quotation marks, a word that now refers not to the structure of reality but to a claim made by someone with an interest in making it. The good becomes a preference, one among many, defensible only so long as it does not inconvenience another preference. The eternal is quietly retired from serious conversation, because nothing is eternal, everything is contingent, and the man who says otherwise is either naive or dangerous. This is the transvaluation that begins with Nietzsche and completes itself in the postmodern academy, and its product is the gradual erasure of the very categories in which meaning was once articulated.

But the human animal is not built for such a void, and when the commanding truths collapse, what follows is not the quiet nihilism of men who have made their peace with meaninglessness but a frantic, inexhaustible effort to produce, through human means alone, the meaning that was once received from beyond. This is our endles kitsch, and its scope extends far beyond aesthetics. Kitsch is the attempt to generate the feeling of contact with meaning through the systematic manufacture of that feeling’s signs — more sentiment, more spectacle, more moral urgency, more therapeutic profundity, more inspirational content, more of everything that looks and sounds and moves like meaning.

The more sophisticated response is no less trapped and trapping. The modernist who makes the void his subject, the postmodernist who deconstructs every claim to meaning, the cultural critic who diagnoses the falseness of the age with exquisite cruelty — all of them are engaged in a second-order version of the same activity: the production of meaning out of the recognition that meaning is gone, the conversion of emptiness itself into content, the husk generating a literature about its own huskness that is itself more husk. Commentary upon commentary, each layer thinner than the last, each claiming to see through the layer beneath it, none of them able to touch the ground; ever more refined acts of description merely intensifies the problem.

This is the loop from which no method internal to the post-Christian world has managed to escape. The kitsch producers and the kitsch diagnosticians, the sentimentalists and the ironists, the dreamers and the debunkers, all of them are working the same depleted mine, extracting ever smaller and smaller quantities of ore from a vein that was exhausted long ago, and the noise of their machinery is the characteristic sound of our moment: loud, constant, confident, ugly, and empty.

But the loop, however fascinating as a remarkable spectacle of intellectual and cultural self-consumption, is not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is what the loop does to the material world and not just culture. The instability of the social and political order is not a separate phenomenon from the collapse of meaning but its direct consequence. Order depends on meaning the way a body depends on a skeleton: remove the skeleton and the body does not become free but formless, and formlessness is death. Strip the meaning away, and the order becomes implausible, and implausible institutions do not command allegiance; they provoke contempt, and the contempt accelerates the dissolution, and the dissolution confirms the contempt, and the spiral has no bottom.

To understand why this spiral is so difficult to reverse, one must examine what kind of loss is at work. There is, first, the loss of meaning itself — the loss of the lived experience of truth and goodness as realities organizing individual and collective life. This is what happened when Biblical meaning ceased to command, when the secular substitutes proved insufficient, when the knowledge of God recorded in Torah was no longer available as a living contact with the real.

This loss is enormous and its consequences are severe, but it is, in principle, survivable, because the loss of an experience does not entail the loss of the judgment that the experience was real. A man who has gone blind knows what sight was. His blindness is a deprivation, not a refutation of sight; it does not lead him to conclude that color was a hallucination or that the visible world was a collective fiction. He has lost the capacity, not the knowledge, and the knowledge that there is something real that he can no longer perceive continues to orient him even in the dark. He walks by faith rather than by sight, and the faith is not a lesser form of knowledge but the only form of orientation adequate to his condition.

What is not survivable is the second kind of loss, which is not the deepening of the first but its transmutation into the judgment that what was lost never had value to begin with — that the pearls we cast before the swine were always glass, that truth was always a mask for power, that goodness was always a disguise for interest, that the eternal was a fairy tale told by priests to keep the credulous in line. This is devaluation, and it strikes not at the experience alone but at the standard by which the experience could be recognized as real and its absence recognized as loss. The blind man who concludes that sight was always an illusion has not merely lost his sight; he has lost the memory and the very idea of sight, and with it the capacity to know what he is missing, and with that the capacity to orient himself toward its recovery. Emptiness is not a deficiency in his world but the truth of his world. Huskness, it turns out, has always been the real kernel of the husk.

And the tragedy does not stop at the primary loss. Once the highest value has been devalued, every subordinate value that derived its authority from it is left without ground. The hierarchy of values that once organized an entire way of life unravels from the top down, because every lower rung depended on the higher for its legitimacy, and when the highest is removed, the rest do not stand on their own but fall in sequence. If the eternal is a fiction, then the sacred is a fiction, and if the sacred is a fiction, then the distinction between the sacred and the profane is a fiction, and every boundary that was drawn on the basis of that distinction, between the permitted and the forbidden, the noble and the base, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the ordered and the disordered, loses its force.

If the good is a preference, then moral hierarchy is an imposition, and if moral hierarchy is an imposition, then every claim that one way of living is better than another is an act of power rather than an act of discernment, and the authority of every institution that rested on such claims — the family, the school, the court, the church — is retroactively delegitimized. The dissolution and the liquefaction are not a collection of separate crises with separate causes. They are a single unraveling, proceeding with remorseless logical consistency from the devaluation of the highest to the dissolution of everything that once hung from it. The man who denied the eternal did not know, perhaps, that he was also dissolving the family; but the family was suspended from the eternal by a chain of intermediate values, and when the topmost link was cut, the whole chain fell, and it is still falling, and it will continue to fall until it reaches the ground, which is to say, until there is nothing left to dissolve.

This is what postmodern atheism really is — not the early modern variety, which was, from Voltaire through Marx, a quarrel with the church conducted, for the most part, in the vocabulary of the church, a rebellion against ecclesiastical authority and superstition that still breathed the air of the tradition it rejected and retained, often without knowing it, the essential structure of Biblical conviction in secularized form.

The early modern atheist denied God while affirming truth, denied revelation while affirming reason, denied the church while affirming the dignity of man, and every one of these affirmations was a shadow of the God he thought he had buried, still exerting gravitational force from beneath the soil. This residual gravity is not a minor observation. The devaluation aims to be total, but the man who recognizes the dissolution as a wound rather than a correction has not completed it. Something in him continues to assign value to what his categories have declared valueless — meaning sensed but unrealized, absent from his intellectual framework but present in the pain that framework cannot explain.

It is to this residue, and not to any prior commitment of faith, that the discipline of sacrifice we will describe is addressed. Real atheism, the atheism that arrives with Nietzsche and achieves cultural dominance in the twenty-first century, denies not God alone but the entire order of reality that the word God was once used to name. Nothing is true, nothing is real, nothing is eternal, nothing is given, everything is constructed, and construction is power, and power is all there is. This is the comprehensive devaluation carried to its conclusion; the cutting of the topmost link performed with full awareness that the chain will fall, and its consequences are not only intellectual but civilizational. Once you have denied the reality of the true and the good and the eternal, you have not merely made a claim about metaphysics; you have destroyed the only soil in which order can grow.

The problem of value, the question of how value can be reestablished after its comprehensive devaluation, has been the central agony of post-Enlightenment thought. Max Weber spent his career tracing the consequences of a disenchantment he could diagnose but not reverse, and Ernst Troeltsch, perhaps more honestly than anyone in his generation, confronted the impossibility of grounding the absolute in the historical and found no way through. Friedrich Nietzsche understood the stakes more clearly than either of them, which is why his work carries its characteristic atmosphere of exhilaration and dread that no subsequent thinker has been able to replicate. Nietzsche saw that the death of God did not liberate value but annihilated the conditions under which value, in any serious sense, had ever been possible, and his attempt to re-found it through the sheer force of the will was the last desperate wager.

Their question remains ours: how can value be established after the comprehensive devaluation of everything that once gave value its ground? And the honest answer is that it cannot — not through reason, which can analyze value but not create it, not through politics, which can enforce compliance but not command allegiance, not through art, which can evoke the feeling of value but not supply its substance, not through the will, which can assert value but not ground it. If meaning is to be restored, and without the restoration of meaning, the restoration of order is simply impossible, then the restoration cannot be accomplished by any of the methods that the post-Christian world has at its disposal, because every one of those methods operates within the devalued framework and is therefore subject to the very devaluation it is trying to reverse.

The remedies appropriate to the two kinds of loss are entirely different. The first kind of loss — the loss of experience while the judgment of reality is preserved, calls for patience, for discipline, for the maintenance of forms that keep the memory of the experience alive even when the experience itself is unavailable. A man who has lost his sight but knows that sight is real can learn to navigate by other means; he can organize his life around the absence in a way that honors what is absent and keeps open the possibility of its return. This is, in essence, the discipline that the tradition of Torah prescribes, and we will return to it. But the second kind of loss, that of devaluation, calls for something prior to any discipline and without which discipline itself becomes impossible: the restoration of the judgment that what was lost was, indeed, real. Before the blind man can learn to navigate in the dark, he must first be disabused of the conclusion that sight was always a fiction but real, real in its absence, real in the sense that its absence is a wound and not a correction, a deprivation and not an enlightenment.

Honesty is the one thing that must govern what follows, because there is always the temptation to pretend that we possess what we do not possess, to perform the confidence of faith without its substance, to cover the void with the vocabulary of religion. This temptation must be rejected because it is the mirror image of devaluation and it is no less destructive

There exists, within the religious traditions of the West and particularly within the world of the Bible, a received account of a historical condition in which human beings lived in sustained contact with God, a contact so intimate and so direct that the Bible describes it as knowledge of God in the strongest sense of the word, the kind of knowledge a man has of his closest friend, knowledge born of encounter so real that the one who possesses it can speak on behalf of the one he knows and be understood. For biblical Israel, the prophetic knowledge is the foundation of everything else, of law, of worship, of communal order, of the relationship between God and man that gives all other relationships their meaning and their shape.

Those of us who believe in the Bible hold it to be true. We hold that the Bible itself — its depth, its coherence, its capacity to illuminate what no other word of man illuminates, its sheer weight as an achievement that no merely human effort could have produced — is its own best evidence. We hold that prophetic knowledge was real, it must have been real, that men and women once lived in the kind of contact with the divine that the texts describe, and that the texts are not literary constructions imposed on experience but faithful records of an experience that was as real as anything we know.

But we also must recognize the tradition of Israel itself records this knowledge but records equally its withdrawal. The prophets speak, and then they fall silent, and the silence has lasted a very long time indeed. Whatever it was that the prophets knew, it is not available to us in the form in which it was available to them. We do not hear what they heard. We do not know what they knew. We stand at a very great distance from the condition they describe, and the distance is not merely historical but experiential: the knowledge they possessed is not something we can recover by reading their words more carefully or performing their rituals more punctiliously, because it was never a product of reading or ritual but of a gift that was given and then withdrawn, for reasons the Bible does not fully explain.

On this point, and on this point alone, we agree with the atheist. He looks at the world and sees no evidence of the kind of knowledge the Prophets describe. So do we. He concludes that it was never real. We do not draw that conclusion, but we do not dispute his observation. The prophetic knowledge is not present in the world today and hasn’t been for a long time. The contact is not available. The communion has been interrupted. Where we differ from the atheist is not in our assessment of the present condition but in the judgment we draw from it: he concludes that what is absent was always absent, that the Bible is a monument to human credulity; we conclude that what is absent was once present and that its absence is itself a fact of enormous consequence, demanding not devaluation but understanding.

And there is a third position, no less damaging than the devaluation it opposes, which refuses to acknowledge the absence at all. Religious fetishism treats the Bible not as the record of a living contact with God that has been withdrawn but as a self-sufficient inheritance requiring nothing beyond its own perpetuation; texts studied without the expectation that they will open onto the reality they describe, rituals performed without the awareness that they were designed as vessels for a presence that is no longer felt, commandments observed as ancestral customs rather than as responses to a commanding voice. This is not faith but its most plausible counterfeit. The fetishist does not worship God; he worships the artifacts that once mediated the worship of God. The atheist, who at least has the honesty to report what he sees when he looks at the world, might be closer to the truth about the present condition than the fetishist who does not know he is blind because he has redefined sight to match his blindness.

Honesty requires us to hold three things at once: that the Bible records reality, that what it records is not available to us in the form in which it was once available, and that the absence must be neither denied nor devalued. Atheism denies the reality. Fetishism denies the absence. The post-Christian culture in which both of them operate has denied the value altogether. Against all three denials, the position we want to defend in what follows is that the value of what we do not have can be preserved without pretending that we have it — and that this preservation, far from being a merely private consolation, is the only honest ground from which an order adequate to our condition might be drawn. Not a restoration of prophetic knowledge, which is not ours to power, but something more modest and more durable: an order that draws its authority from a meaning that is absent but not devalued, remembered but not falsified, honored in the form of its absence rather than simulated in a performance of its presence.

The Psalmist asked, long before the question became ours:

“If the foundations are overthrown, what can the righteous do?”
— Psalm 11:3

What indeed can he do — the man who has not consented to the overthrow and who refuses to see the rubble of the destroyed foundations liberation, who insists that what was devalued was real and that its absence is a wound? Where does he stand, and on what, when the ground itself has been declared a fiction?

A Flying Prescription from Exile

The righteous man of the Psalm has at his disposal a body of instruction that well stood the test of the vicissitude of time. It lies in a tradition the Enlightenment declared obsolete and that the devaluation has since declared fraudulent, a tradition whose very dismissal is, for many secular readers, one of the foundational certainties of his education. To ask him to look there is to ask him to suspend, at least provisionally, the operation that his entire formation has prepared him to perform: the preemptive devaluation of any claim issuing from a religious source. We ask it nonetheless, because what that tradition contains, on the specific question of how to live after the collapse of commanding truths, might not be what he expects to find.

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The texts and traditions through which this essay will now move belong to Israel, but the condition they address is widely shared. Christianity received Israel’s scriptures as the ground of its own revelation, built its understanding of exile and prayer and sacrifice and providence upon categories that were already ancient when the Church adopted them, and carried those categories into the world whose dissolution we are witnessing — so that the rabbinic account of life after the withdrawal of prophecy, however remote it may appear from the concerns of a secular or post-Christian reader, is in fact an account of the foundations on which his own world was built. What the rabbis articulated in the centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, when prophecy had ceased and the worshipper stood before God without the assurance that his words were received, is the oldest account available to the Western mind of how meaning may be preserved when divine presence is hidden and political life has passed into the hands of powers whose peace is not the peace of God. Biblical peace, God’s peace, denotes not merely the absence of conflict but the condition of completion, wholeness that obtains when the world is rightly ordered in relation to its source — a condition so fundamental that the Bible identifies peace as one of the names of God Himself.

The Mishnah, the earliest stratum of rabbinic legal and ethical teaching, compiled in the second century, preserves a statement attributed to Rabbi Hanina, the deputy high priest, that will serve as our point of departure:

Pray for the peace of the kingdom, for were it not for the fear of it, each man would swallow his fellow alive.

— Mishnah, Avot 3:2

Three features of this sentence should arrest the attention. The first is the brutality of its anthropology. This is not a text that begins from the premise of innate human goodness easily cultivated but corrupted by institutions or alienated by history; it begins from the premise that the default condition of human beings, absent the coercive restraint and force of political order, is mutual devouring. The peace it recommends is not the peace of harmony or reconciliation or the brotherhood of man, but the peace of a kingdom — of organized, enforced, imperfect authority whose primary achievement is the negative one of preventing the worst. Anyone who has watched the speed with which civil order collapses into predation whenever the enforcing power is withdrawn — whether in war or in natural disaster and not unlike events unfolding after the Arab Spring — will recognize the wisdom of the observation. The text is by no means cynical. It is realist in a way that many modern minds, trained to regard realism about human nature as a relic of theological pessimism, have largely forgotten how to be.

The second feature is the prescription: prayer. And prayer directed not to God’s own peace, not to the redemption of the world, not to the coming of the kingdom of God, but to the peace of the kingdom, the political order as it actually exists, unredeemed and fallen and better than the alternative. The Jewish text prescribes prayer because it understands something about the nature of political order that no purely secular account has been able to explain: that order cannot be maintained by force alone, that the force which prevents mutual devouring is itself sustained by something the political order does not generate and cannot replace, and that the name for the act by which a human being reaches toward that sustaining source, however hidden it may be, is prayer.

The third feature, and the most difficult to understand, is the relation the sentence establishes between prayer and the kingdom. Prayer, which is directed to God, is made for the city. The one who prays does not worship the kingdom, does not sacralize it, does not confuse its peace with the peace of God. But neither does he despise it, withdraw from it, or refuse engagement with it in the name of a higher allegiance. He inhabits the kingdom fully, seeks its welfare sincerely, and prays for it — but he prays to God, and the distinction between the object of his prayer and the addressee of his prayer is the narrow space to which we turn.

The Prophetic Prescription for the Post-Prophetic Condition

It was to a generation in this condition of exile that the prophet Jeremiah addressed some of the most remarkable instructions in all of scripture. The year was 597 BCE, the first deportation to Babylon had been accomplished, and the Hebrew exiles were besieged on every side by false prophets and dreamers, activists and radical thinkers, assuring them that the captivity would be brief, that God’s deliverance was near, that the restoration was at hand. Against all of this, Jeremiah sent a letter, speaking in God’s name:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not diminish. Seek the peace of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its peace you shall have peace. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets who are among you and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for they prophesy falsely to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the LORD.

— Jeremiah 29:4–9

The exiles have lost everything. The false prophets offer them precisely what the human heart demands in such circumstances: an opium, a myth of imminent redemption, a narrative in which their suffering is the prelude to triumph. And God, through Jeremiah, tells them to ignore all of it because in the meantime their task is not mythic but domestic, not spectacular but ordinary, not heroic but patient. Build. Plant. Marry. Multiply. Pray for the foreign city in which you find yourselves. And above all: do not listen to dreamers.

The warning against the dreamers is as important as the practical instructions themselves, and it bears directly on their and our condition. The false prophets Jeremiah addresses are not charlatans in the obvious sense — they are not men who know they are lying and lie for profit or power, though such men exist in every generation as they do exist today. They are men who genuinely feel something, who genuinely believe themselves to be in possession of redemption, who stand before the people with real tears and real conviction and announce that deliverance is at hand. They could be sincere, and thus dangerous, because a liar can be exposed, but a sincere man speaking from his own heart in the belief that he speaks from the mouth of God is almost impossible to refute. He has all the marks of authenticity, to use our bedeviled modern term, all the emotional signatures of the real thing, and the only thing he lacks is the one thing that cannot be directly verified from the outside: authorization. He was not sent. The word he speaks is his own. And yet the absence of authorization, though it cannot be seen, can be experienced in the sedative effects. The word of God awakens; the soothsayer’s puts one to sleep. Jeremiah described the operation lucidly: They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace, peace’ — but there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14). The false word does not heal the wound; it drugs it. It is the opium of the people — not religion, as Marx thought, but its counterfeit.

Elsewhere in his oracles against the false prophets, Jeremiah draws the distinction:

The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; but he who has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is straw to the grain? declares the LORD. Is not my word like fire, declares the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?

— Jeremiah 23:28–29

The real word of God, when it comes, is not an opium. It does not always comfort, does not flatter, and does not tell the listener what he already wanted to hear. It burns. It shatters. It breaks open what was closed. The false word does none of these things; it soothes, it reassures, it confirms, it wraps the listener in the warm feeling of having been addressed by the divine without any of the disturbance that actual contact with the divine invariably produces. The false prophet can be recognized not by the poverty of his performance but by its smoothness, by the very fact that it goes down easily, that it produces the feeling of meaning without the death that real meaning demands.

This is as exact a description of our modern kitsch and its producers, its thinkers and intellectuals, as anything written in the twenty-first century. The therapeutic guru who offers transcendence as a lifestyle product, the political leader who performs prophetic denunciation without prophetic authority, the activist who wields the language of justice and compassion as instruments of tyranny, the artist who manufactures the sensation of depth through the systematic arrangement of surfaces, all of them are speaking from their own hearts in the genuine belief, or at least the genuine performance of the belief, that they are speaking something true.

The moral dignity of the ordinary

The post-Christian world is not a world that has lost its prophets and suffers in honest silence. It is a world so overwhelmed by its false prophets that it can’t even experience the silence — by men and women and increasingly by machines speaking with enormous confidence and enormous fluency about the true and the good and the just and the compassionate and the transformative, all of it generated from within rather than received from beyond, all of it straw, all of it self-commentary, all of it smooth where the real word would shatter. Never before in human history has so much energy, so much talent, so much institutional power been devoted to the production and consumption of mythic narratives that promise transformation, liberation, justice, healing, and every other form of redemptive consummation, all of it available now, all of it demanding total commitment, all of it generating the intense feeling of participating in something of ultimate significance. Never before was so much said and so little meant.

Moreover, the post-Christian world has managed to produce something very close to the perfect inverse of Jeremiah’s instructions by its very inner logic. Jeremiah told the exiles to build, to plant, to marry, to multiply, and to seek the peace of the city. The secular world has made every one of these acts not merely difficult but faintly suspect. ​​False prophecy, by its nature, directs the soul toward the mythic and away from the domestic. It promises transformation, redemption, a climactic resolution to the suffering of the present — and in doing so it empties the ordinary of its weight and dignity, because the ordinary, measured against the drama of imminent redemption, can only ever appear as a distraction from the real business of salvation. Why build a house when the world is about to be transfigured whether by climate change or the AI revolution? Why plant a garden when justice demands your attention? Why marry, why multiply, why commit yourself to the long, unspectacular labor of sustaining life across generations, when the dreams on offer are so much grander, so much more vivid, so much more flattering to the dreamer’s sense of his own significance?

Therefore, false prophecy does not merely tell untruths; it destroys the temporal conditions of responsible life. It abolishes waiting, continuity, transmission, and incremental labor by making every ordinary obligation look insignificant beside imminent transformation. Why get married and have children when you can vote for radical transformation of society?

The displacement of meaning from the ordinary to the mythic follows necessarily from the dominance of false prophetic speech, because false prophecy can only produce meaning in the gestures of the spectacular. It cannot sanctify the ordinary, because the sanctification of the ordinary requires a source of meaning that exceeds the ordinary without annihilating it, a source that makes the building of a house an act of obedience rather than merely an act of construction, that makes the raising of children an act of transmission rather than merely an act of reproduction. Only genuine contact with meaning, and where that contact has been withdrawn, the ordinary is left naked, stripped of its significance, unable to compete with the gaudy intensities of the mythic, and gradually abandoned by a culture that can no longer remember why anyone would waste a life on something so unremarkable as building and planting and raising children. The much feared decline in birth rates across every post-Christian society is not an economic problem amenable to economic solutions. It is the demographic signature of a world that has lost the capacity to find meaning in the ordinary and can no longer transmit what it no longer values.

Jeremiah’s instructions assume the opposite: that the ordinary is not a consolation for those denied the mythic but the actual substance of faithfulness in exile, the work that sustains the world while the false prophets chase their dreams. The house built in Babylon is not a concession to captivity. It is an act of faith that the meaning of building has not been annihilated by the destruction of the temple, that the value of what was lost survives in the patient labor of those who refuse to let the loss become a devaluation. To build in exile from meaning, to plant in exile, to marry and multiply in exile, is to insist, against every pressure of the moment, that the ordinary retains its dignity even when the ground of that dignity is hidden is to know that the hiddenness is not permanent.

The return of value

But Jeremiah’s letter does not end with the domestic instructions. It continues:

For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill my good word to you, to bring you back to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, declares the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

— Jeremiah 29:10–11

Jeremiah’s disclosure that God knows the thoughts He thinks toward the exiles — machshavos, not devarim; hidden thoughts, not public speech — thoughts of peace and not of evil, draws on a vocabulary the Psalms had already established. The same Psalm that declares “the counsel of the LORD stands forever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations” opens by grounding the world in davar: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). Davar is the mode of creation and command — public, audible, returnable by the prophet who hears it. Machshavah is the mode of hidden governance — patient, silent, enduring across generations, operating behind the political order of the nations whose own counsel it frustrates. When Jeremiah uses machshavos rather than devarim, thoughts rather than word, to describe God’s orientation toward the exiles, the shift marks a change in mode: God is no longer sending a word the exiles can hear and return. He is holding an intention directed toward peace that governs without disclosing itself.

It is the distinction between a God who speaks and a God who thinks: between a divine presence that discloses itself to the world through a word that can be heard, received, and returned, and a divine presence that governs the world through an intention held in silence, present but unspoken, working but hidden.

The darkness, the complete absence of prophetic vision, is not the absence of governance but the condition under which governance, in this age, operates. The difference is not one of degree but of kind, and the condition determines the entire character of the age in which one finds oneself — not only the possibilities of knowledge and the conditions of faith, but the very nature of prayer.

And the letter itself enacts what it announces. Jeremiah’s letter is a prophetic davar — a word spoken with full authority in the old mode of divine speech – and a farewell to davar. The content of that davar is the declaration that the age of prophetic words is yielding to the age of divine thought. The prophet employs his word one final time to announce that the word is being withdrawn and the thought is beginning. After this letter, no further prophetic letters reached the exiles — only the machshavos of a God who governs in silence. The letter is both a davar and a farewell to davar: the last prophetic utterance, whose content is the cessation of prophetic utterance, and whose very existence as a spoken word testifies that what replaces speech is not absence but a divine governance too deep for speech to carry.

The question of prayer, at its root, is a problem of speech. It is the question of whether human speech can reach beyond itself — whether words spoken by a finite creature in a finite room can make contact with whatever it is that exceeds the room, or whether they merely echo off the walls and return to the speaker carrying nothing but the sound of his own voice. The Bible, in the accounts it gives of its own origins, records a time when this question did not arise, because the contact was realized and the communication was complete. The prophets did not speculate but knew that they were in the presence of the one they addressed — and more than this, that the words they spoke were not, in the deepest sense, their own. They were returning to God what God had first given to them: His own word, His own peace (shalom), received in the intimacy of prophetic knowledge and offered back in the act of prayer. The circuit, if one may use so mechanical a term for something the Bible describes as the most intimate of all encounters, was complete. God spoke. The prophet heard. The prophet spoke. God heard. And through this exchange, the divine peace entered the world, carried on the breath of a man who knew whom he was addressing and what he was authorized to say.

This is what prayer was. And Torah, maximally defined in a rabbinical sense that includes nearly all classical Jewish texts, is equally clear that this is not what prayer is now. The prophets fell silent as though a door had been closed from the other side. God withdrew His word from the world, and with it He withdrew the conditions under which the kind of knowledge the prophets possessed was possible. The intimate communion that had made prayer an exchange between God and man was interrupted, suspended, and placed beyond reach for reasons Torah honors by not fully explaining. And in the wake of this withdrawal, the fundamental problem of prayer presented itself with a problem it had never possessed before: how does one speak to a God who is no longer speaking? What happens to the word when the Word has been withheld? What does prayer become when the one who prays can no longer be certain — can no longer know, in the prophetic sense of knowing — that his words reach anyone at all?

How shall Israel speak when the prophetic word has fallen silent? We do not hear what the prophets heard, and no fidelity worthy of the name may pretend that we do. The Word has gone silent. It remains silent.

The withdrawal is not, however, the end of the story — or rather, it would not be, were the withdrawal the only thing that had happened. We, as mentioned in the first half of this essay, went on to completely devalue the Word. This devaluation naturally short-circuits the very mechanism by which the loss could be recognized, mourned, and thereby preserved as a live question rather than a settled answer. The modern man does not merely lack the prophetic experience of prayer; the devaluation has taught him to dismiss the experience before he encounters it, to regard the desire for it as a symptom of credulity rather than a signal of deprivation, to devalue the thing before he has valued it. The modern loop we described earlier, the production of meaning out of the recognition that meaning is gone, commentary on commentary, each layer thinner than the last, operates here with great ferocity, because prayer is the point at which the loop is most completely sealed: the man who suspects that his words reach no one will not exert himself to speak, and the man who does not exert himself to speak will never discover whether his suspicion was warranted, and his undiscovered ignorance will harden into certainty, and the certainty will present itself as sophistication, and the sophistication will be indistinguishable from despair.

And yet the short circuit is not total, or this essay would have no readers. The man who recognizes himself in the previous description has already, in that recognition, conceded that something is missing in the way a dimension is missing from a flattened world, missing in a way that reorganizes everything once it is acknowledged. The lack the reader feels, if he feels it, is not a deficiency in him but a fact about the world and Torah has a name for it and a set of instructions for what to do with it — instructions that will sound, at first, like more alienation.

The easy answer, and the false one, is that prayer becomes unnecessary, a relic of a more credulous age, to be preserved as cultural heritage or discarded as superstition, depending on one’s temperament. This is the answer of the devaluation, and we have already seen where it leads, to meaninglessness and the breakdown of order.

The harder answer is that prayer continues but that it changes its nature so profoundly that the change amounts to a kind of inversion. Where the prophet’s prayer was an act of communication, an exchange of speech between persons who knew each other, prayer after the withdrawal of prophecy becomes, according to Talmud, a sacrifice (korban) — an offering made to one who does not answer, by one who does not know whether his offering has been received, sustained by nothing but the discipline of continuing to offer.

By sacrifice, here we do not mean the grim endurance of an absence or an alienation. It is not the stoic acceptance of silence, the stiff upper lip of the devout man who keeps going through the motions because he has nothing better to do. Sacrifice begins with the positive, with the richest and fattest of the flock, with the thing most valued and most alive. One fattens the bull before one slaughters it, and the fattening is not a mere enhancement to the offering but constitutive of it. A thin and sickly animal dragged to the altar is no sacrifice at all, because sacrifice consists precisely in the giving away of what is really possessed, really cultivated, really valued, the relinquishing before God of the most valuable thing one has precisely because its value is so real that only God is worthy of receiving it.

Take with you words, and turn to the LORD: say unto him, “Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so will we render the bulls of our lips.”— Hosea 14:2

Prayer after the end of prophecy is such a sacrifice. The worshipper who prays in the absence of prophecy does not pray as a man resigned to silence. He prays as the prophets prayed — cultivating, through the full exertion of his intellect and imagination, a genuine apprehension of what it would mean to know God (da’as Hashem). He enters the prayer as one enters a world: the world of God in its fullness, where the true and the good and the eternal are not abstractions but presence, where the order described by the prophets is real and immediate, where the knowledge of God is not a concept but an encounter. This cultivation can not be pretense. It is the most serious intellectual and spiritual labor available to a human being, the fattening of the bull, the building up of the very thing that will be offered. And the offering occurs at the threshold: the moment the prayer ends and the worshipper steps back into the post-Christian desert where none of what he has cultivated is there, where the communion does not extend, where the peace does not descend.

The walking away back into the desert and not the silence that follows is the sacrifice. The silence is merely the condition. The sacrifice is the giving away of the apprehension itself, the relinquishing of the knowledge one has built, at the point where it meets the world’s inability to receive it. The unanswered prayer is the sacrifice. And this act, this giving away of the most valuable thing one possesses to a God who does not return it, accomplishes the one thing that neither possession nor devaluation can accomplish. It preserves the value of what is absent without converting the absence into either false presence or confirmed emptiness. The worshipper who has genuinely built and genuinely surrendered stands in a relation to the God who is available nowhere else: not the relation of possession, which belongs to the prophet and is no longer given; not the relation of denial, which belongs to the atheist and produces the devaluation; but the relation of proximity through offering — as close to the mystery as a finite being can come, precisely because he has given away his closest approach rather than clutching it.

This sacrificial prayer affirms the value of what one lost for one gives to God the most valuable thing one has.

The entire argument, of course, assumes a God to whom the offering is made and by whom the value of the offering is secured, and the reader who has not already concluded that such a God exists will find in the argument no proof that He does — because the argument offers no such proof, and cannot, because proof of the kind the modern mind demands stands within the very epistemology the argument is trying to escape. Reason can analyze value but cannot create it; reason can evaluate evidence for God’s existence but cannot supply the conditions under which such evidence would be recognizable as evidence. There is, without a doubt, a circularity. But it is not the circularity of a logical fallacy; it is the circularity of every practice that produces, in the doing, the conditions of its own intelligibility.

A man does not first comprehend music theoretically and then learn to hear it; he hears, and the hearing opens the comprehension, and the comprehension deepens the hearing, and at no point in the process is there a moment of pure foundation on which the rest is built. He begins in the middle, as we all begin in the middle, and the beginning is an act — not a conclusion, not a proof, not a preliminary securing of the ground, but an act undertaken without the guarantee that it will succeed and validated, if it is validated, only from within. The tradition calls this act prayer, and the sacrifice it prescribes is the specific form the act takes in a time when the ground has been withdrawn: the cultivation, through all the resources available to him, of an apprehension whose truth and authority those resources cannot supply, followed by the giving back of that apprehension to the source from which it came — and it is the giving back that completes the act, because the giving back forms the worshipper into one who receives rather than produces, placing the apprehension under the category of gift rather than construction, within a relation to a source that concealment prevents him from possessing as knowledge but that the discipline of offering refuses to deny. It is this refusal, enacted in the body of the prayer rather than secured by any argument, that preserves value against the devaluation by sustaining the posture of reception the devaluation would seal shut.

The post-Christian condition is not merely the problem to which Torah offers a remedy. It is the material of the remedy; it supplies the historical material upon which the discipline of sacrificial prayer must act. The comprehensive devaluation of meaning is not a catastrophe that happened to the modern world from outside but it is the form in which our sacrificial prayer becomes necessary: the withdrawal of prophetic knowledge, the silencing of the divine word, the handing over of the world to the governance of nations whose peace is not God’s peace. The Bible does not call this withdrawal a tragedy alone. It calls it an exile, and exile, however painful, is not punishment alone but the condition under which a specific and irreplaceable form of faithfulness becomes possible — the faithfulness of the one who cultivates meaning in prayer and offers it to God under the discipline of gift — enacting a relation to meaning that the devaluation forecloses: meaning received rather than produced, always incomplete and never total, meaning to which the will submits rather than meaning the will asserts. The devaluation declared meaning illusory because it was merely human. The sacrifice refuses this: it forms the worshipper into one who receives, who stands before the absent source bearing witness to what concealment prevents him from possessing as knowledge.

The reader who has recognized in the opening description of dissolution the contours of his own life has already, in that recognition, performed the first movement of the sacrifice: the identification of the loss, the refusal to treat the emptiness as the natural condition of things. The second step is harder, because it asks him to cultivate, through attention, a genuine apprehension of what the Bible describes as the knowledge of God, an apprehension vivid and substantive enough to cost something when it is given back. The third step is the giving back itself: the placing of the apprehension under the form of offering. The act renounces the worshipper’s claim to possess what he has cultivated as his own production and returns it to the order of gift. In doing so, prayer forms him into a receiver: one who lives from the conviction that meaning precedes the will, even though concealment prevents that conviction from becoming prophetic knowledge. The man who offers what he has cultivated has placed himself, in that act, within a relation to meaning that no assertion of the will could establish and no devaluation can reach.

This is the complete inverse of the Nietzschean transvaluation. Nietzsche saw that the death of God had annihilated the conditions of value and concluded that value must henceforth be created by the will, willed into existence by the strong man who refuses the void. The sacrificial tradition reaches the opposite conclusion: value is not created but received, and when the conditions of its direct reception are withdrawn, it is preserved not by the assertion of the will but by the offering of the will, by the willingness to cultivate what one cannot keep and to give away what one most needs. The will that creates value out of nothing produces, in the end, nothing — because value created by the will is answerable to nothing beyond the will, and a value answerable to nothing is indistinguishable from a preference. The will that offers value to God preserves it by placing it under the sign of gift rather than creation, bearing witness, in the only language the time of concealment permits, to a source beyond the will that cannot be possessed as knowledge but must not therefore be denied.

Peace of the Kingdom

But sacrifice, however profound, does not yet answer the question of how one lives. The worshipper walks away from the prayer into an unredeemed world. He has preserved, through his offering, the value of what is absent. He has refused the devaluation. But the world he walks into still requires him to act — to earn, to build, to govern, to negotiate the powers and structures that organize collective life — and these structures do not run on the knowledge of God. They run on politics, propaganda, law, custom, force, interest, and the ever thinner residue of inherited habit. Their order is real in the sense that it prevents the alternative, which is disintegration, the condition that Rabbi Hanina’s teaching described as each man swallowing his fellow alive. But it is not the order that would obtain if the true and the good and the eternal were known and operative in the world. It is the order of managed necessity, and the distance between managed necessity and genuine peace is the distance between a ceasefire and a true peace.

The temptation, for anyone who has tasted within the prayer something higher than managed necessity, is to despise the lesser order, to regard it as unworthy of serious engagement, a mere holding pattern beneath the dignity of one who has glimpsed the real thing. This is the temptation of every form of religious and political utopianism: the conviction that because the existing order falls short of the ideal, the existing order deserves to be incinerated, or at minimum ignored, in favor of the transformative vision that will replace it. The entire history of revolutionary politics, from the Jacobins through the Marxists through the liberation theologians through the contemporary movements that promise justice and deliver destruction, is the history of this temptation yielding to itself — the impatience of men who could not tolerate the gap between the order they had and the order they wanted, and who destroyed the first in pursuit of the second, and got neither.

The opposite temptation is no less dangerous: to sacralize the existing order, to invest the structures of managed necessity with the authority that belongs only to the knowledge of God, to treat the state or the nation or the civilization as though its peace were the true peace and its survival were the ultimate good. This is idolatry in its most politically consequential form — the confusion of the kingdom with the Kingdom — and its product is not order but the weaponization of order, the deployment of sacred language in the service of profane power, the transformation of civic loyalty into religious obligation, order that oppresses, dominates, and falsifies. Every nationalism that has deified itself, every empire that has claimed divine sanction, every political movement that has demanded the unconditional allegiance that belongs only to God, has committed this error, and the consequences have been uniformly catastrophic.

Jeremiah’s instructions navigate between these two errors with a wisdom that is much more than mere moderation. Seek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray for it to God—not to its gods, not in its name, not on its terms, but to God, whose word has been withdrawn and whose thoughts are peace. The exile is told to engage with the political order fully and sincerely while directing his prayer for the city to the God who placed him there. He neither sacralizes the city nor despises it. He inhabits it as one inhabits a house that is not one’s own: with gratitude for the shelter, with care for its maintenance, and without the delusion that it is home. He can serve an order he does not worship without collapsing into cynicism or inflating it into religion because he knows something the city does not know about itself: that it exists within a larger intention, a hidden governance, a purpose that its own terms cannot reach but that is, for all its hiddenness, directed toward peace.

There is a further difficulty that the Mishnah candidly acknowledges and it concerns not the substance of the worshipper’s engagement with the kingdom but its appearance. The man who prays for the peace of the kingdom while directing his prayer to God, who serves the political order sincerely without investing it with ultimate authority, occupies a formal position that is, from the standpoint of any external observation, indistinguishable from that of the man who has simply made his peace with the state, no matter how imperfect, on its own terms. No visible criterion separates the faithful exile who seeks the city’s welfare in obedience to a hidden God from the pragmatist who seeks it because welfare is what reasonable men pursue when redemption is unavailable, or from the loyalist who seeks it because the kingdom has earned his unqualified devotion.

The distinction between these three men — radically different men, living from entirely different sources, oriented toward entirely different ultimates — is wholly internal, a matter of the direction of prayer and not the content of action, and therefore inaccessible to political analysis, institutional verification, or any form of public audit. The Mishnah, with candor without sentimentality understands that the posture of the exile who prays for the kingdom’s peace is, in the eyes of the city, indistinguishable from the worship of its gods. A person is, thus, asked to participate in what the Talmud labeled “as if” idolatry.

The “as if” is not compromise. It is what faithfulness looks like when the authority it serves governs in concealment — an authority that operates through hidden intention cannot furnish its servants with public credentials. The prophet carried a word and could be identified; the exile carries no word, only an orientation the city has no instrument to understand. His engagement will be read by the utopian as capitulation and by the state-worshipper as insufficient worship, and both readings will be plausible, because what distinguishes his service from theirs, the address of his prayer, is the one thing concealment renders invisible.

The structure of the exile’s concealment is not accidental, and its stakes are not only personal. Jeremiah’s disclosure that God knows the thoughts He thinks toward the exiles — machshavos, not devarim; hidden intention, not public utterance — carried a claim about the nature of political order itself: that the states of the world, which appear to operate on their own logic of force, law, and managed interest, exist within a divine intention they did not generate and cannot perceive. The machshavah — thought directed toward peace — operates behind and through the man-made political structure of the world, sustaining it in ways the kingdom’s own categories cannot describe. The exile who prays for the kingdom’s peace places himself within this structure. His davar — his visible engagement — is directed toward the city. His machshavah — his hidden orientation — passes through the city to the God whose own machshavah sustains it. The exile’s prayer is not a private devotion performed alongside his civic life. It confesses the political order to the hidden source the political order does not know it has. The kingdom cannot recognize this service because it cannot recognize the source, and the exile cannot make the service visible without claiming a prophetic authority that has been withdrawn. He serves in concealment because God governs in concealment.

The sacrifice is the human acknowledgment of what Jeremiah disclosed as God’s mode of governance in exile: thought held in silence, intention directed toward peace but not spoken as speech. The worshipper who offers his apprehension back to God has aligned himself with this hidden governance, he has recognized, in the act of giving away what he cannot keep, that what sustains the world exceeds what the world can see. And it is this recognition that allows him to engage with the ordinary structures of the kingdom without either sacralizing them or despising them, because he knows they are sustained by something they do not know they carry.

Value preserved in prayer returns the worshipper to the ordinary world without allowing that world to become either meaningless or divine. The worshipper can raise children without treating parenthood as self-actualization or dismissing it as a biological accident. He can participate in politics without treating the vote as sacrament or the state as savior. He can build an institution knowing it will be imperfect and serving it anyway, without the utopianism that would destroy it or the cynicism that would abandon it. The house remains a house, the city a city, the kingdom a kingdom; none is the final home of man, but none is therefore contemptible. Each becomes the site of a limited and serious fidelity. To build and seek the peace of the city is to inhabit the order of necessity without confusing it with redemption. This is the political consequence of prayer under concealment: the ability to serve what is imperfect without worshipping it, and to await what is higher without destroying what presently stands between human beings and mutual devouring.

Restored value therefore flows into the ordinary. The ordinary, so grounded, becomes faithfulness in exile; and this faithfulness—not redemption, not the abolition of exile, but its dignified inhabitation—is what Jeremiah prescribed and what Rabbi Hanina’s teaching describes as prayer for the peace of the kingdom.

The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations.

— Psalm 33:10–11

We began with dissolution and liquefaction and we have arrived at an account of that dissolution that is older than the dissolution itself. The account does not promise to reverse what has been dissolved and does not offer a program for the civilizational restoration of the institutions that have collapsed or the bonds that have been severed or the commanding truths that have ceased to command. What it offers is sacrifice and prayer.

The sacrifice is the act that preserves, against the devaluation, the conditions under which value can still be received — refusing both available falsehoods: that the absent source never existed, and that inherited forms amount to its continued possession. From this preservation everything else follows, not as another modern program derived from theory but as the natural consequence of a discipline of reception sustained against the void. The woman or man who has been formed, through the discipline of sacrifice, into one who receives meaning rather than constructs it does not need to be told to build; she builds because building, for one shaped by that discipline, is no longer an arbitrary act in an indifferent universe but a response to something received that asks to be continued. She does not need to be told to marry, or to raise children, or to transmit to them what she has received; these acts, emptied of their weight by the devaluation, recover their dignity when the one who performs them has been formed into the conviction that what he transmits was not invented by him and does not depend on him for its reality. He does not need to be told to seek the peace of the city; he seeks it because he lives from the conviction that its imperfect order, its managed necessity, its fragile peace maintained by the fear that prevents men from devouring one another exists within a higher governance that can not be seen and is directed by thoughts of peace we cannot hear.

The act of praying for peace, directed to God and not to the kingdom’s own gods, is the act by which the one who prays sustains, in a world that has forgotten its source, the trust that the source has not forgotten the world. The thoughts God thinks toward the exiles are thoughts of peace, and the exile who prays for the peace of the kingdom is the one through whom those thoughts, hidden from every other form of knowledge, enter the world as the quiet fidelity of a man who builds and plants and marries and multiplies in a city that is not his home, for the sake of a peace he cannot see but has not ceased to seek. The kingdom’s peace, for all its insufficiency, is not merely the absence of the higher peace. It is its vessel — the instrument through which God’s withdrawn word continues to operate, preserved in orders foreign to itself, sustaining a world that does not know what sustains it.

The post-Christian desert will not be exited by manufacturing or willing a new foundation, new myth, recovering prophetic certainty, or forcing redemption into history, but by refusing to let absence become devaluation. Prayer preserves this refusal as a lived discipline of reception; the ordinary becomes its field of faithfulness, and the kingdom its necessary but unredeemed political form.

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Near the end of Othello, after the murder has been done and discovered, and before the Venetian officers can carry him away, the Moor asks leave to speak a word or two before they go. In his speech, a man who has just strangled his wife on fabricated evidence secures from his auditors, in the space of only nineteen lines, three distinct concessions: the presumption of his own honesty, obtained by the demand for severity against himself (”nothing extenuate”); the reclassification of the murder as an excess of devotion (”loved not wisely but too well”); and the transfer of the office of mourning from the victim to her killer.

An excess of goodness, not a defect of prudence, is the sin Othello elects to confess. We are here only a short step away from the pure lachrymosity of Lear’s “more sinned against than sinning,” which no longer aestheticizes guilt but establishes pure innocence.

T.S. Eliot identified the narcissistic maneuver in his 1927 essay on Shakespeare; Othello, he wrote, is cheering himself up. He has ceased to think about Desdemona and begun to think about himself. He is endeavoring to escape reality, adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude toward his own act, dramatizing himself against his surroundings. Moreover, the deception of the audience is downstream of a prior and more necessary deception of the speaker by himself, because the composure that carries the speech would collapse if he did not believe it. The speech succeeds because it is sincere, and sincerity is the medium of self-deception rather than its opposite. I wonder if we don’t find here an adequate description of current Western liberal politics as well as the failure of the critics who believe they are attacking it.

The past decade completed a transformation of liberal society and its institutions more radical than any the West has undergone without a war: mass migration sustained at unmanagable volumes; the installation of the DEI clergy in every institution that certifies or employs; the elevation of postcoloniality into the governing doctrine of Western culture, with its attendant inversion, by which hostility toward the historic cultures and religions of the West became the official attitude of the West’s own institutions; the toleration, shading at intervals into subsidy, of Islamism, Third Worldism, and of antisemitism, foreign and domestic alike, wherever either could be classified as the voice of the marginalized brown volksgeist; and, summing these, a process that has no better word than denationalization — the deliberate uncoupling of the state from the historical people whose name it bears.

The instability these measures produced is now the standing condition of every Western democracy, and it runs the full vertical of political life. At the municipal level, local elections in cities such as London and New York are contested, and won, on the votes and the grievances the migrations imported.

At the ceiling of national security and foreign policy, the same demographic fact has become an instrument of statecraft for others: Middle Eastern regimes discovered in the new migrant populations of Europe and North America a lever to use against Western governments, and the antisemitism that erupted in Western cities after October 2023 — peasant-grade, imported intact, of a kind the West had spent eighty years outgrowing — was not merely tolerated by those regimes but cultivated by them. Western institutions are being operated to prevent the Jewish state from taking the measures any state takes against the mass murder of its citizens, and to hold the gates of Europe open to further migration. These operations succeed because the international moral and legal architecture the West built for itself after 1945 has been, for the most part, captured whole, its instruments now serving clients like the Islamic Republic. “International law” is invoked to mean that anti-Western belligerents are entitled to recoup their losses. “Human rights” is invoked to mean that every Western use of force must be described in terms of war crimes, even where the conduct in question is the standard practice of democracies at war, and even when the states pressing the accusation administer, at home and as a matter of routine, violence beside which the accused conduct pales.

The reader may stand at ease: this is not another culture-war essay. Its occasion is, in fact, the end of the culture war’s first phase — the phase of denial — for almost nothing in the list above is any longer seriously contested. The decade in which describing these policies accurately was itself treated as a crime against humanity is, thank God and his mercy, over; the shoe has dropped, and even the institutions that administered the transformation now discuss it in the past tense, as something that occurred. What remains is the meaning. Whether and how any of it will be undone is a question for others. The question here is prior and harder: why did we choose this? Why did societies possessed of functioning governments, free presses, and regular elections elect, over decades and against repeated objections, to do this to themselves? Did we act or were we acted upon?

There are answers which should not be taken seriously. Those who regard the past decade as progress — justice beginning, the West's long-deferred payment on the sins of whiteness — are not serious interlocutors, just constituencies invested in the decay and the ideological fantasy that dignifies it. Those worth engaging concede two facts: this occurred, and it was self-destructive.

Within that camp — still loyal to secular modernity, whatever is now meant by those words — the most common answer is not an answer at all but a diagnosis, demonological in structure and epidemiological in idiom. Western societies were healthy, democratic, and prosperous; they were invaded by hostile, illiberal forces, Muslims principally, who imported hate, bigotry, and radicalism into venerable institutions. We are more sinned against — contaminated by foreign pathogens — than sinning.

The view is very elegant, and indeed it touches reality at many points. But its power lies in the fact it preserves liberal self-regard intact at the price of one painless adjustment — the extension to Islam of the hostility and suspicion liberalism had always reserved for Christianity. No self-examination was required. The enlightened subject remained enlightened, merely adding a second clerical enemy to a file already open, and for a decade — the reign of the New Atheists, when Islam could be filed under religion and religion under poison — this was the line.

But it could not explain our own decisions. An invasion accounts for the invader; it does not account for the host who opened the door. When the diagnosis met this limit, a second view, innovative and more clever than the first, emerged, which restored to the liberal subject precisely as much agency as could be absorbed without damage to his or her moral self-regard. Our sin was an excess of virtue. We assumed the others were as good as we are, and we let them in. The reader will recognize the confession; it has been done before.

Gad Saad, Canadian online personality, has had the distinction of popularizing both views in sequence.

The book that made Saad’s name, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, gave the first view its full pathological lexicon — mind parasites, idea pathogens, hijacked cognition. By the time Saad was writing, the principal infection was wokeness that was killing the host — the host was healthy; the disease came from outside.

The sequel did not abandon the Shakespearean franchise; it turned it inward. Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind is marketed in the same clinical idiom — empathy misfiring is "the disease," the West "may be terminally infected," a "mind parasite" has hijacked the empathy of the progressive elite, their pathological kindness, their refusal to discriminate — but then establishes the sin as “loving too well.” So that the second view arrives with the first view's e martyrology and the epidemiology are one gesture, the confession of excessive virtue folded into the story of involuntary infection, which is to say a confession in which the confessing subject is the site of an event rather than the author of an act.

What emerged was that the liberal subject’s sin is an excess of love, suffered rather than chosen, terminal but ennobling. The phrase, admittedly elegant and catchy, and carried by Musk like a totemic chant for a year before Saad exercised his characteristic genius and monetized it through a book, went to number one in its first week, which tells us something about the market for innocence.

In original theodicy, the one axiom that cannot be surrendered is the goodness of God; the evil of the world must be explained in whatever way leaves that axiom standing, and the classical solution is that God permits evil because He made man free, and freedom is the greater good. Suicidal Empathy is theodicy performed on the liberal subject in which we discover that he permits evil not because of a lack but an excess of goodness. The axiom that cannot be surrendered is his goodness; the catastrophe must be explained in whatever way leaves the axiom standing.

The phrase is built masterfully for this function. “Suicidal” appears to grant what the first view withheld — agency; the act, at last, was ours. But suicide is the one act in which agent and victim are the same person, so the agency granted in the word is consumed, within the same word, by the victimhood it confers: whoever confesses to suicide confesses to a crime whose only injured party is himself, and against such a criminal no one else has standing to press charges.

The word also misplaces the real site of injury. The costs of the decade did not fall, in the main, on the class that made the decisions; they fell on the neighborhoods that absorbed the migrations, on the Jews who are absorbing the imported hatred, on young European underclass women, on the citizens of the cities where the new politics is now dominant. To call the outcome suicide is to mystify a whole complex of relations. And “Empathy” completes the maneuver. Of all the faculties that might have been indicted — acquisitiveness, vanity, power hunger, the appetite for moral rank — the one selected is the only one whose excess still flatters, and the only one that is, in the strict sense, a passion rather than an action: empathy is being affected, feeling-with, Mitleid, suffering the state of another. It is a supreme Christian virtue due to the fact that it is a Christological quality: “When [Jesus] saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them.” The sin confessed is not sin at all. It is the mystery of pure innocence.

The liberal subject is a being whose actions are always already motivated by commitments rather than appetites, by principles rather than calculations, by concern for others rather than advantage for himself.

It is worth noting that pathogen, pathology, empathy, sympathy, passion, patient, and compassion are all built on the same root — Greek pathos, Latin passio, suffering, being-acted-upon. The lexicon of the diagnosis and the lexicon of the virtue are, as a matter of linguistic fact, cognates; Saad's entire vocabulary, from the pathogen to the empathy it infects, is conjugations of a single word meaning to undergo.

Saad’s success, then, was a meeting of supply and demand. The politics of the past decade did not merely discredit a set of policies; it threatened to bankrupt the moral holdings of everyone invested in them — the millions whose self-description, whose entire public identity, was the kind people, and who suddenly faced the choice between abandoning that identity and finding an account of the disaster that preserved it. Innocence, in such a market, is the one commodity for which demand is inelastic, and where demand is inelastic, suppliers multiply.

The other products are on every shelf. One vendor explains the capture of the elite universities entirely by Qatari money as though it amounted to a causal theory; as though the Bedouin sheik, conspiring in his tent against liberal democracy, had forced the university to open its hand. But a bribe explains the briber. It does not explain why the university was for sale or why its price was so low. The Qatar theory is another invasion theory.

The Qatar explanation asserts that the capture of the elite universities was accomplished by Gulf money. The funding is a matter of recorded fact, and I wrote on the matter. But to move from the fact of funding to a causal theory of capture requires proving that the radical ideas in question were external to the university until money brought them in. The opposite is the case. Postcoloniality, the critique of the West as constitutively criminal, anti-Zionism, the reclassification of hostility toward one’s own society as the highest form of thought — these were conceived in Western universities, by Western academics, elaborated over two generations, credentialed, tenured, and taught, before any Gulf donor had reason to notice them. Qatar did not create this asset. It invested in an asset it found already mature — and an investor, whatever else may be said of him, is evidence of the asset’s prior existence, since one cannot buy shares in a company that has not been founded.

Another supply line I regard with some guilt, because I helped build it. Some time ago, in a series of long essays explaining the origins of the American radical turn, I resurrected the concept of Third Worldism — out of frustration with a then-new genre of literature that explained wokeness entirely from domestic materials, the Civil Rights Act or American Puritanism, parochialism so complete it could not imagine that modern culture had been formed anywhere but at home. American intellectuals are clueless about what their country has actively become since the late 1960s.

But the Third Worldism I meant was something entirely different than how sadly the term gained currency now. The original Third Worldism — the mid-century Marxian developmentalism of the decolonizing elites, allied to the Eastern bloc against America — collapsed in the late 1960s. I want to repeat this again: the Third Worldism that innocent liberals now blame for their troubles collapsed in the late 1960s. Then, its own leading intellectuals discovered it to be fiction. This is how ideologies collapse, when their elites lose belief in their own premise.

What that discovery produced was a new human type — the post-Third-Worldist intellectual, stripped of every membership at once, neither of his traditional society nor of any modern nation, too atheist to be a Muslim but too failed to have a modern nation-state. Thus, liberated from premodern religion, from modern nationalism, from every system of loyalty and every morality that presupposed one. This figure, identity-less and truth-less, was the political birth of postmodernism; and from the 1970s onward, he became, in the American elite university, the very idol of emancipation. Around him a second Third Worldism formed — not an import but a domestic manufacture, an American elite ideology assembled from the academic theories of postcoloniality — so thoroughly domestic that the actual immigrant from the actual Third World must adopt it to assimilate into an American institution, his admission conditional on learning to perform rootlessness and subalterity.

Originally, and before it became a dominant occult theoretical perspective in the humanities, the term postcolonial was reserved to describe authors who themselves came from the Third World such as Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Bhabha, etc. It was a matter of perspective rather than identity, before both converged, that means the active vocation of the continuous dismantling and disarticulation of Western knowledge and society. In many ways, the Third World postcolonial intellectuals and author, who were understood as the voice of the subaltern “talking-back” to the West, were always a matter of false advertising, for they were always figures that were thoroughly Western in their mental constitution, identity structure, and writing. Their obsessive theme of exile is a long-dead trope for modernism and the British novel of empire, and its immediate substitute, migrancy, does little to reinvigorate the original. All of the postcolonial intellectuals’ rhetorical currency is a limited set of literary tropes, including migrancy, deconstruction, identity, exile, decentering, nomadism, and hybridity, a free-flowing subject to compliment the free-flowing global power and capital. Hence, their function is actually and primarily assimilative, which helped to create a space for Third World highly educated elites in Western upper middle class society and building bridges between English speaking Third World middle and upper class readership, often in close contact with the West through business and education, and the educated reading public in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The reason this ideology succeeded is the multiple functions it was able to serve. For liberal elites, it served as a moral justification of economic and political denationalization, building the global economy and managerial internationalism. Highly educated Arab, Indian, and Latin American intellectuals became the ground troops of the NGO world. For the intellectual migrant, the new Third Worldism became an ideology for economic and political mobility inside Western institutions themselves, allowing them to displace, often, the Jewish intellectuals who used to fill many of these roles as licensed critics of the West, while receiving donations from the same foundations.

That was the analysis. The dealers in innocence had other uses for the term. Popularized by imitators, “Third Worldism” now circulates in a sense nearly opposite to the one intended — the name of yet another foreign pathogen, another proof that we are being invaded — my own instrument, forged to establish that the ideology was ours, converted into one more certificate of our innocence.

The claim of innocence, then, mystifies a large web of interests. It does not address politics; it evades politics entirely. What applies to Third Worldism applies to the open borders, which were not a weather event but a policy, actively chosen and continuously defended, for reasons many of which, ironically, the left itself had analyzed long before: wage suppression, and the management of the electorate at both of its ends. At one end, dilution — the acquisition of a new voting constituency beholden to the liberal establishment for its survival. These were not new voters but deliverable voters, populations arriving pre-organized for wholesale purchase through their communal brokers, where the native working class, individualized by two centuries, could no longer be bought in bulk.

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Before October 7, 2023, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) was actively negotiating normalization with Israel. The deal architecture with Washington—a bilateral defense pact, a civilian nuclear program, and formal recognition of Israel—was coming together, and MbS had signaled privately that he viewed normalization as strategically worthwhile regardless of the Palestinian cause. He told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024 that he did not care personally about the Palestinian issue, but that his people did, and that he needed any agreement to be “meaningful” enough to manage domestic opinion. The assumption in Washington and Jerusalem was that Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords remained a matter of timing and terms. That assumption has been significantly undermined by regional developments since then. Over the course of the years since the Hamas October 7 attacks, which actively sought to derail normalization, Saudi Arabia has arrived at a strategic assessment of the regional order that treats both Iran and Israel as equally revisionist actors whose conflict dynamics destabilize the Gulf at the expense of states that sought no part in their conflict. That assessment now dominates Saudi policy, and the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed on June 17 between the United States and Iran has given it the force of demonstrated fact.

This Saudi assessment of Israel and Iran as equally destabilizing forces is politically powerful, but it rests on a false equivalence. Iran is revisionist in its regional purpose: it seeks to reorder the Arab world through proxies, missiles, nuclear threat, and coercive control of maritime chokepoints. Israel, after October 7, became revisionist in its operational method: it no longer accepts prior constraints on the use of force against threats it judges existential. The Saudi strategy rests on collapsing these into a single category…

Click here to read the rest of my latest JINSA report.

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Rahm Emanuel delivered his much-anticipated address at Tel Aviv University in what was staged, very explicitly, as the centerpiece of a 2028 presidential campaign seeking to address what has become the defining litmus test of Democratic politics — the Israel question. The speech, delivered to a packed auditorium hosted by the university’s Center for the Study of the United States (already tells you who the real audience is), contained the following proposals: sanctions on Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and on companies and banks supporting settlements; an end to U.S. subsidies of Israel’s defense budget, with Israel purchasing arms under the same financial terms as every other ally; a denunciation of Netanyahu for driving Israel to a “dead end” through military recklessness and indifference to Palestinian suffering; and a replacement of the “now-discredited” two-state solution with a “23-state solution” in which twenty-one Arab nations would stand up a governing authority capable of accepting the historic Jewish connection to the land. He told Israelis that they have turned from the start-up nation into a “territorial pariah.” He said the U.S.-Israel alliance is at a crossroads. He was, by all accounts, fiery, personal, and direct — a man with an Israeli warrior father and a middle name of Israel, returning to deliver hard truths. The speech was called “blistering” and “landmark” and “unprecedented,” and a major step towards his presidential campaign rollout, having workshopped the ideas for weeks with his old boss Bill Clinton, who still talks constantly about his frustration at not closing a deal at Camp David twenty-six years ago.

The question, for anyone who has followed Democratic Israel policy over the last decade, is: what here is new? The Biden administration sanctioned settlers. The $3.8 billion MOU expires in 2028, and we had known it might be the last of its kind long before Netanyahu announced his intent to make it so. Every Democratic administration since Oslo has pushed some version of a peace process, and the critique of unconditional support was the public rhetoric of the Obama White House when Emanuel himself was chief of staff and clashed directly with Netanyahu over settlements in 2009, an episode which he took much pride in recounting. The “23-state solution” is really just the Abraham Accords vision — regional normalization as substitute for bilateral resolution — reframed in language that flatters the Arab states, particularly the Saudis. This assumes that twenty-one Arab governments, most of which have spent decades using the Palestinians in the most nefarious ways, will now reverse course and perform the institutional state-building work that the Palestinian Authority, with billions in international aid and direct American relations, could not accomplish.

We can say without exaggeration that, apart from the self-announcement, the speech brought nothing new to the table, a fact that will not be lost on the radical wing of the Democratic Party and that will be deployed, efficiently and without mercy, to put to rest whatever presidential ambitions Emanuel harbors. The question worth pressing, then, is what and whom the speech was actually for.

Emanuel is addressing Israelis as his putative audience while in fact speaking to a sliver of the American electorate that still wants to believe you can criticize Netanyahu and keep settlements in check and maintain the alliance and have it all work out, the Clinton-era fantasy of a peace process managed by American stewardship of the dying breed of enlightened centrists, the normie Dems who are simply sick of the conflict, sick of Netanyahu, sick of the discourse, and who want someone to offer them continued support for Israel alongside badly needed de-polarization and credible red lines against Greater Israel (whatever that means). The problem is that this constituency does not control the Democratic Party’s nominating process, and the people who increasingly do are not interested in de-polarization.

Eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. DSA-backed candidates, anti-Zionist, anti-American, self-declared commies or fellow-traveling Third Worldists, are winning House primaries — three of them in New York City alone last month, propelled by Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement, including one radical who participated in the Columbia encampment.

The Michigan Senate primary has become, in effect, a referendum on whether AIPAC funding is disqualifying in Dem politics. Democratic candidates eyeing 2028 presidential runs have pledged not to take AIPAC money, including some who previously did so. The functional center of the party on Israel has shifted so far that restricting military aid is now the moderate position and the old center — Emanuel’s center — has no floor beneath it. As progressive Jewish Currents, the most hateful Jewish publication since the Korah rebellion, put it: ending U.S. support for Israel is no longer politically perilous but politically expedient, and centrists like Emanuel and Newsom, who [only] now suggest ending military aid, are far behind the curve of what the “bold” position already is.

In a TV interview after the speech, Emanuel said that “Israel does not have a problem in the Democratic Party — Israel has a problem in America,” a sentence whose function is to deny that anything specific has happened inside the Democratic coalition, to reframe the collapse of support as a general national phenomenon rather than what it is: the logical terminus of a specific ideological trajectory internal to his party. In the same interview, he mispronounced Mamdani’s name — “Mandani,” he said — which tells you all you need to know about how well he has mapped the forces arrayed against him. The man is fifteen years behind. The AP-NORC poll released the same day, which he cited during the interview, showed that Mamdani, a self-declared pro-Palestine anti-Zionist socialist who once called AIPAC “monsters,” is now more popular among American Jews than Netanyahu, with 44 percent favorability against Netanyahu’s 32 percent, in a Jewish sample that is 59 percent Democratic and 42 percent self-identified liberal. Thirty percent of American Jews in the same poll said they believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Things are not well with the liberal kids.

It is shocking, then, and revealing that the most conspicuous absence in Emanuel’s speech is its complete silence on the rising antisemitism that has accompanied, and in significant part driven, the collapse of Democratic support for Israel.

In 2025, a shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington by a leftwing radical killed two Israeli embassy staffers. A Molotov cocktail attack in Colorado injured many elderly Jews. In January 2026, Mississippi's largest synagogue was burned to the ground by an arsonist. In March, a man rammed a truck loaded with explosives into a synagogue and preschool in suburban Detroit while over a hundred children were inside. On campuses, the Columbia encampments and their progeny have become permanent features of university life. In the streets, DSA in New York has published maps of 'Zionist networks' naming synagogues and encouraged followers to disrupt events at the venues. DSA candidates, Israel-hating Third Worldists, are on the rise. Emanuel himself endorsed Graham Platner, the far-left Senate candidate in Maine who has called to block U.S. military aid to Israel while carrying a Nazi tattoo.

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Contemporary Western moral-political conscience is organized around a negative canon. It is made of a trinity of sacred crimes: Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism. They are taught, memorialized, litigated, aestheticized, theorized, and endlessly returned to as the trinity that makes up the singular historical identity of the modern West. Each belongs to history, but none of them remains merely historical. Each has become a site of moral interpretation and re-interpretation, a privileged scene in which the West reads its own promises against the revelatory record of its own acts.

This theological centrality is why their place in Western moral life cannot be explained only by scale, cruelty, or novelty. Human beings conquered before Europe conquered. People enslaved before the Atlantic system. They massacred, expelled, burned, starved, deported, and humiliated long before the twentieth century furnished murder with rail schedules, offices, files, industrial scalability, and the administrative rigor of the modern state. To say this is not to diminish the three crimes but to clarify them.

Atlantic slavery came to be read as the secret wound beneath modern liberty. The Shoah came to be read as the abyss beneath Enlightenment’s reason. European imperialism came to be read as the theft beneath material prosperity. Each crime was attached to one of modernity’s noblest words and made to darken it from within. The crimes are not merely treated as events but as revelations, each made to appear as an apocalypse disclosing the concealed truth of the modern West and judging it. In this sense, they exited the realm of history and entered the realm of myth. And if we see them as myth, we discover that their singularity is a function of narrative rather than of the events themselves. Their canonical singularity lies in the form of historical consciousness into which they were and are received. They became epochal because they were incorporated into modernity’s own literature of self-narration.

A crime committed in history can be made to serve as a myth about history. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are drawn out of the density and particularity of their own worlds and made to appear inside a drama whose real protagonist remains the West. Even guilt becomes a form of possession. Modernity places itself in the dock, but, like Milton’s Satan, it also appoints itself witness, prosecutor, historian, penitent, and priest; its abasement becomes another mode of centrality. The victims are invoked, often with solemnity, but they are invoked as figures in modernity’s endless self-commentary.

Only a provincial mind could say that these crimes exhaust evil, or that the West possesses a monopoly on sin. But the West did not merely remember these crimes; it learned to narrate itself through them. The modern university, the museum, the human-rights NGO, the postcolonial literature, the DEI bureaucracy, the foundation world, the literary canon wars, the pedagogy of historical guilt, and the politics of recognition all draw, in one form or another, upon the authority of this negative canon. It supplies the moral atmosphere in which whole vocabularies now breathe: race, genocide, coloniality, trauma, restitution, representation, decolonization, structural violence, and historical repair.

There is a reason for this institutional explosion. Each of the three events generated a category that outgrew itself. Atlantic slavery became the foundation for race as a modern moral ontology. The Shoah became the foundation of genocide, crimes against humanity, Holocaust memory, and the postwar world order of human rights. European imperialism became coloniality, decolonization, postcoloniality, the Global South, and the entire suspicion that the West’s wealth and prosperity, its liberty and happiness, were all acquired through murder and plunder, and even its claim to knowledge was itself a continuation of power.

The negative canon of modernity is therefore not merely a memory of evil but a self-reflexive machinery of moral transformation. It takes real crimes and turns them into myths of self-interpretation; it takes those myths and turns them into categories; it takes those categories and turns them into credit; it takes that credit and places it in the hands of those who know how to exchange it, transfer it, spend it, and accumulate it.

This essay is concerned with that passage: from crime to abstraction, from abstraction to value, from value to credit, and finally from credit to fraud. For the sacralization of these three events has produced a system, and systems can be defrauded. What follows is an attempt to describe a three-step accounting fraud: the conversion of real history into abstract moral value, the conversion of that value into transferable credit, and the reassignment of that credit to parties whose relationship to the original suffering is remote, selective, or outright fictive. The fraud does not require that the crimes be unreal. It requires only that they be singular — and that the singularity itself be mythic.

The Singularity of Modern Self-Narration

“Modernity” is already a fiction before it becomes a philosophical problem. It does not name a people, a regime, or even an epoch in any substantive sense; it names a vast literature of self-commentary, a way of arranging historical experience so that certain societies may appear to themselves as having entered a new relation to time, consciousness, freedom, reason, technique, and moral universality. To speak of modernity is to enter a discourse, a particular literary genre about itself. Its unity is literary before it is temporal. It exists because it is narrated, periodized, and endlessly self-commenting.

The familiar accounts of modernity are always less descriptions than plots. Enlightenment, disenchantment, progress, emancipation, secularization, alienation, revolution, development, catastrophe: each term proposes not only a historical claim but a narrative form, an arrangement of beginnings and endings, innocence and knowledge, oppression and liberation, promise and betrayal. The so-called modern age is inseparable from the prose that makes it appear as an age — the strange period that discovered, or imagined, itself as a period; the historical condition that generated an enormous secondary literature explaining why it was no longer merely historical.

Its singularity lies precisely here. Not in moral superiority, nor in uniquely monstrous guilt, nor in the claim that its crimes exceed the whole previous record of human cruelty, but in the density of mediation by which experience becomes commentary and commentary becomes reality’s authorized form. Conquest, slavery, massacre, law, commerce, science, empire, revolution, and bureaucracy existed as events and institutions, but under the sign of modernity they also became signs within an ever-expanding literature about Man, history, freedom, domination, and the meaning of the age. The event was never left alone but had to be pressed for totalizing disclosure. It had to reveal a structure, and the structure had to reveal a world.

Guilt enters this literature late, though not accidentally. The older mythology of modernity was largely affirmative. It had a positive canon. It spoke of emancipation, reason, mastery, humanity, and historical progress. Even its darker idioms — alienation, disenchantment — retained the prestige of depth; they made suffering into consciousness and loss into insight. The negative canon belongs to a later turn, when the literature of self-congratulation gave way, without relinquishing its narcissism, to a literature of self-accusation. The same fiction that once made modernity the bearer of universal emancipation could now make it the bearer of universal guilt.

This is where Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism acquire their peculiar authority. They are not merely placed among the crimes of history but received into an already existing literary machine and made to serve as privileged scenes of self-disclosure. Their function is not so much commemorative as it is interpretive: to disclose what the fiction of modernity had concealed from itself.

Other cultures committed horrors without turning those horrors into a universal theory of themselves. Other peoples remembered defeat, captivity, humiliation, and slaughter without producing from them a global consciousness. Modernity does precisely this because, as literature, it is nothing apart from the will to self-narrate. It cannot simply suffer an event, commit an act, inherit a memory, or endure a contradiction; it must translate each into the language of self-knowledge.

The result is endless narration under the sign of guilt. The crime becomes a text; the victim becomes a figure; the historical wound becomes a method of reading. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are made to pass into the symbolic economy of modernity’s self-description, where their suffering is preserved only by being made to signify more than itself. The preservation is also an appropriation. The words remain; the persons recede.

This is why the negative canon is a literary achievement unique to the post-Christian condition. The old affirmative myth had said: here is man come into his freedom. The new negative myth answers: here is man exposed in his domination. But both myths belong to the same literature of self-enclosure. The more guilty the drama becomes, the more it confirms the centrality of the consciousness that stages it.

The three crimes matter not because they prove the essence of modernity, as the pieties of the age insist, but because they have been made to perform that claim. They are real historical events installed as metaphysical evidence. Their authority comes from the fusion of fact and myth: enough fact to prevent dismissal, enough myth to permit endless expansion. Once this fusion occurs, the crimes no longer remain tethered to the people who suffered them. They become transferable scenes in a larger literature of guilt, and it is from this literary transformation that the later moral economy of category, value, credit, and fraud becomes possible.

Three Category-Generating Crimes

Human history has never wanted for acts of conquest, enslavement, and mass murder. All three existed wherever large groups of men interacted with others. Each of the three canonical crimes possessed distinctive historical features — the Shoah’s non-pragmatic totality, Atlantic slavery’s hereditary racial structure and oceanic scale, European imperialism’s global administrative reach and epistemic penetration. But distinctive features are not the same as extra-categorical singularity. The Mongol conquests possessed distinctive features too: speed, geographic range, and demographic annihilation that dwarfed the Shoah in absolute numbers. The Arab slave trade possessed distinctive features: a duration exceeding a millennium, systematic castration, and the near-total elimination of descendant populations. Every great crime in history possesses distinctive features. The question is why these particular features were elevated into markers of cosmic singularity while those of other atrocities were not.

The answer is authorship. The negative canon is a confessional, and you can only confess your own sins. These are the crimes the narrator committed. The selection principle that governs the canon is not severity, nor scale, nor the presence of features that exceed prior categories, but narrative identity — the fact that the self-narrating consciousness that processes crimes into myths belongs to the same civilization that committed them. The Mongol conquests are not in the canon because the Mongols did not build the confessional booth. The Arab slave trade is absent because the Arabs did not produce a literature of self-accusation. The Ottoman devshirme, the Comanche empire, the Rwandan genocide — none enter the sacred register because the sacred register belongs to the narrator, and the narrator is talking about himself.

The literary singularity of the negative canon has a political and institutional counterpart. Each crime becomes singular in a second and more technical sense: it produces the moral-political category by which its meaning is subsequently administered. Myth gives the crime its aura; category gives it its institutional career. The crime is first elevated into a revelation of modernity, then translated into a concept that can travel through law, pedagogy, scholarship, activism, bureaucracy, and international politics. The crime seems singular because it required a new name; the new name then confirms the singularity of the crime. Historical judgment and conceptual invention become inseparable.

Atlantic slavery is the clearest case. Its moral afterlife did not merely enlarge the older condemnation of slavery; it produced racism as a distinct domain of modern moral reality. Earlier societies knew slavery, captivity, caste, servitude, subordination, and conquest, but the Atlantic system fused body, ancestry, labor, property, law, reproduction, and geography into an order that later became intelligible as racial domination.

From this emerged the first great category of the negative canon: racial injustice. In its narrower and more historically disciplined form, the category refers to the concrete afterlife of Atlantic slavery, above all in the United States, where emancipation did not abolish the civil, economic, and symbolic consequences of bondage. The language of civil rights drew its power from this specificity. It did not arise as a generalized vocabulary for all exclusion or all difference; it arose from the unresolved contradiction between a republic of liberty and a legal-historical order that had made black slavery one of its constitutive facts.

The later abstraction begins when that precision is loosened. The black American descendant of slavery becomes an abstract “racialized subject.” The category is not false in itself; it is dangerous because of its mobility. It can gather under one moral sign persons whose histories are not the same: the descendant of American slaves, the Caribbean heir of plantation society, the African immigrant, the Arab or Muslim minority in Europe, the Latin American migrant, the indigenous activist, the elite postcolonial scholar. Race, which arose from a specific historical experience, becomes a general ontology of injury, capable of carrying the moral charge of slavery into domains where the relation to slavery may be distant, partial, analogical, or completely imaginary.

The Shoah generates another category, and one even more unstable because its universalization begins almost immediately. The German extermination of European Jewry became the event through which the twentieth century produced a juridical and moral vocabulary for the organized destruction of a people. Genocide, crimes against humanity, Holocaust memory, and the postwar institutional order of human rights were born in its shadow. The murdered Jew becomes central to the postwar moral imagination because Jewish death is made to bear a universal warning about man, state, ideology, bureaucracy, and extermination.

Here, too, the category begins by honoring particularity and then imperils it. The Shoah is irreducibly Jewish: a crime directed at Jews as Jews, by a regime that imagined Jewish existence as a metaphysical contamination requiring total removal from the earth. Yet the language generated from the Shoah tends toward universalization. The Jew becomes the victim, the persecuted, the stateless, the vulnerable, the Other; the destruction of European Jewry becomes the myth through which humanity learns to speak about absolute evil. Nothing in this movement is simply illegitimate. A crime of such magnitude inevitably exceeds the people to whom it was done. But the danger is already present. Once the murdered Jew becomes the universal victim, the symbolic value produced by Jewish suffering can be separated from the concrete Jew.

This separation will later become decisive. Holocaust memory may remain morally authoritative while the Jews themselves, especially when encountered as a sovereign people, are recoded as power. The Jew who supplied the category can be displaced by the abstraction that category produced. The moral authority of the Shoah can migrate toward other claimants who appear to embody vulnerability more purely, while Jews are made to appear as having betrayed the universal meaning extracted from their own dead, in a kind of moral supersessionism whose deeply Christian themes are thinly adapted for a post-Christian age. The Holocaust brought a new moral annunciation to the world by first revealing itself to the Jewish people. From within that people, some apostles went on to formulate our new universalist understandings of human rights, international law, and cosmopolitan justice. But the Jews themselves, by turning to Zionism and American power, rejected this prophecy and learned all the wrong lessons from their privileged status, rendering them permanent bearers of inherited sin. The conditions for fraud are already established at the level of category.

European imperialism produces the third category, though its path is less juridical than political and epistemic. The concept of empire helped produce national self-determination as a universal right, decolonization as a moral-political imperative, and later coloniality as a theory of domination after formal empire. All that had once been described through the older language of sovereignty, conquest, trade, mission, tutelage, civilization, and administration was transformed into a single moral structure. Once imperialism becomes coloniality, the category expands beyond the history that authorized it. The colonized subject becomes the Global South; a geopolitical identity becomes a moral position; political independence gives way to an open-ended demand for epistemic, cultural, economic, and psychological emancipation. At its limit, every asymmetry can be redescribed as empire’s afterlife.

The consequence is a new form of innocence. Under the category of coloniality, the non-Western claimant may enter history chiefly as injured, even when his own world contains empires, slave systems, caste orders, religious supremacies, tribal hierarchies, racial dominations, and authoritarian traditions that cannot be explained away as Western residues. The category does not need to deny these facts explicitly. It only needs to subordinate them to the master narrative of injury, which is nothing but a reflection of modernity’s self-narration of Western guilt.

This is the technical importance of the category-generating — and instantly category-transcending — crime. It produces a vocabulary that cannot easily be challenged because the vocabulary appears to carry the authority of the crime itself. To question the inflation of racialization appears to weaken the memory of slavery. To question the abstraction of Holocaust memory appears to dishonor the Shoah. To question coloniality appears to excuse empire. The category’s power lies precisely in this borrowed invulnerability.

At this stage the fraud has not yet occurred, but its conditions have been established. A crime bound to particular persons and histories has generated a category capable of movement. The category retains the moral force of the crime while escaping the limits that historical judgment would impose. The event supplies gravity; the category supplies circulation. Only after this passage can moral experience be converted into value, and value into credit.

From Category to Value

The categories described above do not merely classify but acquire an abstract social form. And abstraction, in any system of exchange, is the precondition for commensurability — the operation by which unlike things are made comparable, and comparable things are made exchangeable.

Consider what happens when a concrete historical injury is absorbed into one of the three canonical categories. A black American whose family has carried the afterlife of chattel slavery across ten generations in the Deep South, and a Nigerian physician who immigrated to Houston in 2003 and whose relationship to American history began the day he cleared customs, and the daughter of Indian engineers who arrived in New Jersey in 1987 and whose experience of American racialism bears no genealogical relation to the Atlantic system whatever — these three inhabit historical worlds so remote from one another that only an act of considerable intellectual violence could render them commensurable. Yet under the category of “racialization,” their radically distinct histories become instances of a single condition, because the category, having been abstracted from the specific history of Atlantic slavery into a universal ontology of bodily difference and power, makes non-whiteness itself the sufficient credential of membership. The particulars are dissolved into a single, self-narrating moral substance. The category does not describe what they have in common; it produces what they have in common by suppressing everything that distinguishes them.

The same operation applies across the other two domains. A Polish Jew murdered at Treblinka and a Cambodian killed under the Khmer Rouge and a Tutsi slaughtered in Rwanda do not inhabit the same historical world. The political, cultural, and theological conditions that produced each catastrophe are incommensurable in every relevant particular. But under the category of “genocide,” their deaths become comparable — scaled against one another, ranked, debated as to whether they qualify for the designation or fall short of it. The category does not illuminate the specificity of each crime; it subordinates specificity to commensurability. And commensurability is never neutral. It always serves a subsequent operation.

That subsequent operation is the production of exchangeable moral value. Once abstraction has made unlike injuries comparable, the moral weight attached to them becomes detachable from the concrete circumstances that produced it. The authority generated by the specific history of black Americans descended from chattel slavery can now circulate under the heading of “racial justice” — available, in principle, to anyone who can credibly position themselves within the category. The moral seriousness earned by the specific catastrophe of European Jewry can now circulate under the heading of “genocide” or “human rights” — available to any claimant who can map their situation onto the abstraction even if they were antisemitic themselves. The grievance generated by the specific experience of people subjected to European colonial rule can now circulate under the heading of “decolonization” — available to movements, regimes, and intellectuals whose actual relationship to the history of European imperialism ranges from direct to tangential to beneficiary to nonexistent, not to mention many of whom are worse offenders of imperialism and colonialism themselves.

This is how moral authority actually moves through institutions. The mechanism follows a logic that is, in its formal structure, identical to the logic of commodity form. A commodity is a concrete useful thing — a coat, a bolt of linen — that enters the market and is thereby stripped of its particular qualities and reduced to an abstract quantity of value, expressible in money and exchangeable for any other commodity of equivalent value. The coat ceases to matter as a coat; what matters is its exchange value. The useful thing becomes a bearer of abstract value and abstract value is what circulates according to laws of supply and demand.

The moral economy of the negative canon operates by the same formal logic. In this moral fetishism, a concrete historical injury enters the categorical system and is stripped of its particularity. What remains is abstract moral value: a quantum of grievance, suffering, or victimhood expressible in the universal currency of the relevant category and exchangeable, in principle, for the moral value attached to any other injury subsumed under the same abstraction. The concrete victim ceases to matter as a concrete victim; what matters is the exchange value of their suffering within the system.

Three consequences follow. First, the system generates a strong incentive to maximize abstraction, because the more abstract the category, the more claimants it can accommodate, and the more widely the moral value can circulate. “Racism” admits more claimants than “Atlantic chattel slavery.” “Genocide” admits more claimants than “the German extermination of European Jewry.” “Coloniality” admits more claimants than “the British Raj” or the “Scramble for Africa.” At every level, the pressure is toward greater abstraction because it expands the market.

Second, the system structurally disadvantages the original victims. The more the category expands, the more the moral value generated by their specific suffering is diluted. Black Americans descended from slaves now share the category of “racialized people” with recent immigrants from societies that were themselves participants in the slave trade. Jews now share the category of “genocide victims” with political actors whose relationship to the Shoah is, at best, one of appropriation and, at worst, complicity. Colonized peoples now share the category of “the Global South” with Third World elites whose own domestic power structures replicate or exceed the coercions of European imperialism — to say nothing of those whose peoples were never colonized or who themselves did a lot of colonizing, or both.

Third, and most consequentially, the system creates a distinction between those who produce moral value and those who trade in it. The producers are the concrete victims, those whose suffering generated the moral weight that the categories now carry. The traders are those who have positioned themselves within the categories without bearing the original injury, and who possess the institutional access, the theoretical vocabulary, and the professional incentive to exchange moral value for authority, prestige, appointment, immunity, and power.

The actual victims are consigned to a precarious place by the traders’ economy. As the only generators of the most prized currency, they quickly become targets of resentment by those who see themselves as performing a free trade for a more efficient allocation. And as their own victimization mutates into a cosmic category, they themselves can never live up to its demands for purity. Meaning is the new cotton.

The producer class has endowed the trader class with its surplus moral value. And it is to the trader class, and to the operations by which they effect the transfer, that we now turn.

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From Value to Credit

Value describes; credit authorizes. The passage from one to the other is the passage from a system of moral classification to a system of moral entitlement, and it occurs at the moment when association with a canonical category begins to confer not merely recognition but standing — the presumption that one’s speech carries greater weight, one’s grievances demand prior attention, and one’s conduct deserves more generous interpretation than others.

There is a respectable intellectual lineage behind this presumption. The idea that the sufferer sees what the comfortable do not is neither modern nor frivolous. It runs through the Prophets, through Pascal’s insistence that misery is the proper vantage of truth. To dismiss this entirely is philistinism.

But the tradition in question grants privilege to testimony — to the voice that speaks from within a particular suffering. What the modern categorical system grants is privilege attached not to experience but to position within an abstraction. Testimony cannot be transferred. It belongs to the person who lived it, dies with the generation that bore it, and diminishes with each degree of removal from the original wound. Credit, by contrast, is inheritable, assignable, and inexhaustible, because it is attached not to what one has suffered but to where one is located within the categorical grid. It accrues not to pain but to legibility.

Once credit rather than testimony is the operative currency, the system necessarily privileges those who are most fluent in the institutional language of injury over those who are most proximate to injury itself. The sharecropper’s grandson who carries slavery’s material aftermath in his daily life and the postcolonial theorist who carries it in his bibliography enter the same categorical space, but they do not enter it with the same resources. The theorist commands the vocabulary in which credit is recognized; the grandson may not. The theorist can translate his position into institutional standing — appointments, publications, grants. The grandson’s inheritance is more likely to manifest as poverty, diminished opportunity, and the compounding disadvantages that slavery’s afterlife actually looks like when it is not being theorized from an Ivy League office. Credit flows upward, toward articulacy and institutional access, not downward.

Credit begins to reshape the very standards by which moral judgment operates. The creditor enters every dispute with a prior surplus of moral consideration — a deposit that must be spent down before ordinary evaluation can begin. His violence is received as reaction; his resentment is heard as critique; his failures are interpreted as the still-unfolding consequences of historical injury rather than as failures. The practical effect is a sliding scale on which the same act is weighed differently depending on the categorical position of the actor.

The system thereby acquires a partial immunity that no merely intellectual position could possess. The strong version of this immunity — that the moral credit of historical victimhood is license for acts otherwise deemed immoral — is easy to reject and anyway impossible to transfer. The weak version presents a subtler problem. It makes no explicit claims and draws no explicit boundaries, which is precisely what makes it so amenable to abstraction. The victims’ credit, in this weak and abstract form, preserves and sanctifies the status hierarchy of the crime. The immunity itself maintains the lower status: the moral equivalent of looking the other way at the minor infractions of a child. This very limited credit is hardly indefeasible, and it can have perverse effects, turning contemporary political disputes into competitive positioning rather than a weighing of ideas.

An argument can be refuted. A factual claim can be falsified. But credit does not operate in the register of argument or evidence; it operates in the register of moral presumption — the pre-argumentative disposition that determines which voices will be heard with sympathy and which with suspicion before a single claim has been evaluated on its merits. To question the distribution of credit is, within the logic of the system, to question the suffering that authorized it.

From Credit to Fraud

Credit requires management, and management produces a class. Between the concrete victims whose suffering generated the moral value and the institutions that now trade in it, there has emerged a professional class whose function is neither to suffer nor to remember but to broker — to control the mint by which injuries are certified and made legible within the economy where credit is honored. The postcolonial intellectual, the DEI administrator, the NGO employee, the activist-scholar, the institutional consultant, the curator of approved grievance: none of these figures typically possesses the original wound in any direct sense. What they possess is jurisdiction over the system of recognition through which wounds are converted into standing. They have the power to sell modern indulgences.

Their authority is interpretive before it is political. They determine which suffering counts as structural and which as incidental, which analogies between disparate histories are permitted and which are impermissible, which claimants may speak as victims and which must answer as agents. They do not create the moral value; they administer its circulation, and administration, in any economy, is where the real power accumulates.

This is a form of secondary accumulation, and it follows the logic of the first with an almost parodic fidelity. The original accumulation was material. The secondary accumulation is symbolic: the moral value generated by the original crimes is extracted and concentrated in the hands of a professional class. In both cases, the producers of value and its beneficiaries are different classes. In both cases, the transfer is obscured by a legitimating narrative — civilization in the first instance, justice in the second.

No one can easily inherit the specific experience of the black American descended from chattel slavery, or the murdered Jew of Europe, or the colonized subject of a particular imperial administration. But one can inherit racialization, otherness, coloniality, displacement. The more abstract the category, the wider the class of eligible claimants, and the more distant those claimants may be from the historical event that underwrites their authority. The fraud does not require that the new claimants have suffered nothing but the inflation of partial, historically mixed, or analogical injury into total moral innocence.

The most audacious case of such fraud is the passage of moral credit from the West’s negative canon of cosmic crime to the Arab Middle East, and occasionally more broadly to Islam taken as a whole, the moral foil to the West’s triumphs and guilts in the twenty-five years since September 11.

It was around then, in the years following the massacre in Lower Manhattan, that a trope of academic writing on terrorism and the Middle East started making inroads on the mainstream consciousness. The September 11 attacks and the wars that America and its allies fought in the Middle East solidified the turn of radical Islam, and especially the Middle Eastern form, into the repository of Western fears and thus guilt. Conceived thus, jihadism was just blowback from the sins of colonialism and imperialism. The transition here was not that jihad had assumed a new form or a new rationale. It was that the West was now seemingly mobilized against it. So, in the ultimate act of self-narration, the explanations for terrorism in Western cities were to be found not in the belief systems of those who carry out the attacks or support them, but in ourselves. Musings that were fringe before 2001 and edgy perhaps immediately after were firmly established in respectability by the 2015 terrorist attacks in France. By then September 11 had already informally turned into, among other things, a National Day of Reflection on the Sins of Islamophobia.

Three days after the Charlie Hebdo attack and less than twenty-four hours after the massacre at the Hypercacher supermarket, a widely shared New Yorker essay blithely suggested that the act of mourning the writers and artists of the French satirical magazine was itself an act of racism. The article maligns the murdered staffers as bigots, most notoriously by not getting a joke the magazine poked at actual racists. Nearly a decade before the October 7 War, it still has the by-then mandatory reference to “hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year,” and of course historical reference to antisemitism in a discussion of Voltaire. But curiously, though the article references the full death toll of both the magazine and kosher supermarket shootings, it cannot bring itself to even mention the latter — ironically enough, under the social media-optimized headline “Unmentionable Bodies.”

But the idea that jihadist terrorism is just payback for the cosmic Western crimes of the negative canon falls short even as self-narration. Nowhere in the non-European world experienced less penetration by European imperialism than the Arab Middle East. With the exception of Algeria, no Arab majority country saw extraction, settlement, or domination on the scale of what the Spanish and Portuguese achieved in the Americas or the British in the Raj or the Dutch in the East Indies or the Belgians in Congo. If anything, the rapid spread of Islam and the Arabic language in the Middle East is itself a massive imperial endeavor, exceeded in the last five hundred years only by the imperialism of a few European sea powers.

The “lessons of the Holocaust” are routinely invoked either to condemn any action the Jewish state might take to protect its citizens from mass murder or to demand that European countries open their gates to mass migration from the Middle East. It goes without saying, or should at the very least, that neither Arabs nor Muslims were victims of the Holocaust, and the Arab world is one of the few places today where open admiration of Hitler and the Nazis as well as Holocaust denial are not entirely out of the bounds of public discourse. The international moral and legal architecture established in the shadow of the Holocaust was, by the 1970s, entirely hijacked for the cause of reversing repeated Arab military defeats against Israel. “International law” meant that Israel’s attackers were entitled to recoup their losses, though no such law had ever existed. “Human rights” meant that every Israeli action was conceived in terms that explicitly recalled the crimes of the Third Reich, even when those actions were standard practice for democracies at war and paled in comparison to the violence meted out by the world’s more repressive states, including those making the accusations against Israel. And the web of international organizations, most especially the UN, would devote inordinate portions of budgets and manpower to traducing the Jewish state, entrenching the conflict around it, and extending a line of political insurance to all actors, state and non-state, targeting it.

African slavery existed in the Arab world well before Europeans “discovered” it, and it persisted there much longer than anywhere else, with human property trafficked overland across the Sahara and by sea in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea well into the twentieth century. Abolition would only come in 1962 in Saudi Arabia, 1970 in Oman, and 1981 in Mauritania. And the modern form of transcontinental indentured servitude was pioneered in the Gulf oil sheikdoms, the excess value of its labor, together with resource extraction, sustaining some of the highest per capita GDPs in the world — and funding, directly or indirectly, the IOs, NGOs, research institutes, academic departments, and slick media outlets of the global human rights community.

In the United States, the accrued credit of slavery, Jim Crow, and all the subsequent abuses meted out to black people dominates historical memory, and it looms large internationally because of the centrality of American domestic politics and culture to the global discussion. The mechanisms of redress are a tempting target of credit fraud. Mechanisms such as DEI, racial and ethnic studies departments, and social justice organizations embarked, in the last generation, on the same credit shift that the international human rights community had already made in the one before. Throughout the twentieth century, Arab-Americans had been seen as white and were classified as such for immigration purposes as well as for securing voting rights where these were still denied on racial grounds. Nor did they stand out, unlike other white minorities, for their efforts to end those discriminatory practices during the Civil Rights era. This has been entirely upturned in the moral universe of DEI, with Arab and Muslim minorities now conceived as “brown” and reimagined as racial victims nearly on par with black Americans and victims of discrimination no different from the experience of Latinos, interned Japanese-Americans of the 1940s, or the Chinese laborers of westward expansion.

A notable personage in all three credit transfers is, probably not coincidentally, also one of its dominant intellectual accountants. Edward Said’s life in the American academy was essentially that of the WASP elite whose power was just being eclipsed at the very time he was getting his start. No one in America of the 1960s would have seen him as anything other than white. By the time he died in 2003, he could plausibly see himself as a victim of European imperialism, and people with the same background as him could plausibly claim to be “brown” victims of American racism.

Most hilariously, Said styled himself “the last Jewish intellectual,” a claim of inheritance that is in reality intellectual identity theft. An implied exaltation of an extinct Jewish form is supposed to subtly highlight the fallen nature of the one in abundance here and now — in Israel of course, but most especially in the United States. This is the same little practical joke that the recent fetishization of the Bund in some progressive circles plays.

Sociologically, there is something considerably more subtle going on. In the innermost courts of American civilization, the guardians of the canon have undergone at least two major social transformations in the last century. Leading public intellectuals and especially humanities professors at elite universities once hailed overwhelmingly from the upper classes of the WASP establishment. Postwar, they were rapidly deposed by middle-class Jews — some German transplants, but most American-born of American Jewish parents. Beginning in Said’s time and in a torrent in the last decade, these were replaced by a new elite cast in the image of postcolonialism. The politics of the academy has moved with each social transfer, at times leaning into it, and at other times dragged against its will in an ecstatic purge.

Said is the bridge from the first generation to the third. From the WASP-y elite to the privileged tier-mondistes, almost none of whom hail from countries that were ever actually colonized (though the starring role of far-left Indian and Indian-descent intellectuals merits its own study in this context), full of rage at America and the Jews, who by some unspoken rule of etiquette are never to be asked why exactly their own families are so obviously wealthy. His claim to belong to the second of the three generations is, in joke form, a miniature version of the transfer of credit writ large.

Said’s authority was, thus, the authority of a type — a late Central European literary-intellectual type that had once been the exclusive property of the radical Jewish thinker: exilic, cosmopolitan, adversarial, incapable of reconciliation with nation or settled form, morally universal in precisely the register that Mitteleuropa had made prestigious. The appropriated, and only semi-serious, Jewishness of Said’s claim was not Jewish in any religious, cultural, ethnic, historical, or national sense — he had no relationship to Judaism or to Jewish life — but Jewish in the way that Deutscher and Steiner and the whole tradition of the non-Jewish Jew had made the word function: as a synonym for the rootless critic whose homelessness is his credential and whose displacement is his moral authority.

Said’s achievement was to take this symbolic inheritance — the credit of Jewish exile, the moral capital of Jewish homelessness, the epistemological authority of the outsider who sees what the insider cannot — and transfer it wholesale to himself, while simultaneously recoding Jewish sovereignty as the betrayal of the very meaning that Jewish suffering had produced. The Jew was morally legible so long as he remained homeless, vulnerable, textual, diasporic. The sovereign Jew — the Israeli who refused exile as destiny and built a state — became, within Said’s transvaluations, not merely a political opponent but a moral traitor: one who had abandoned the universal meaning extracted from his own dead. The symbolic Jew remained useful; the concrete Jew became an obstacle. Holocaust memory could be preserved as moral instruction while the people whose destruction had generated it were reclassified as settlers, colonizers, agents of Western power. The abstract credit produced by Jewish suffering remained in circulation. Only its ownership had changed.

Every subsequent transfer follows Said’s original template. The moral authority generated by Atlantic slavery migrates, under the sign of “racialization,” to populations whose relationship to the event is wholly nonexistent. The moral authority generated by the Shoah migrates, under the sign of “genocide” and “otherness,” to political movements that are themselves antisemitic. The moral authority generated by European imperialism migrates, under the sign of “coloniality,” to elites and regimes whose own histories include empire, slavery, sectarian domination, and the violent suppression of minorities.

This is the accounting fraud in its mature form. Real crimes generate categories. Categories produce abstract moral value. Value is converted into transferable credit. Credit is brokered by a professional class. And the brokered credit is reassigned to parties who did not suffer the original injury — or who suffered one kind of injury while concealing, minimizing, or laundering their own implication in others.

Conclusion

The accounting fraud is the most consequential engine of cultural and ideological transformation in Western nations since the Second World War. Its first and most complete victory was the destruction of the positive canon by means of the negative one. The Western literary and historical inheritance — the literary tradition that ran from Homer through Dante through Shakespeare through the novel and into the modern university — was subjected to a systematic re-reading in which every text became evidence, every author a suspect, and every tradition an indictment. The negative canon supplied the hermeneutic by which the positive canon was convicted: each great work was made to disclose its complicity in one or more of the three sacred crimes, and the act of reading was transformed from an encounter with meaning into a tribunal of guilt. To study English or History at a serious university today is, for all practical purposes, a radically different undertaking than it would have been fifty years ago. The student enters a crime scene to be processed. Literature is read for what it conceals about domination. History is studied as the genealogy of who is owed and by whom.

The humanities, in the sense that the word possessed from the Renaissance through the mid-twentieth century — as the disciplines charged with the cultivation and transmission of civilizational memory — are, in all likelihood, irreversibly destroyed. What operates under their name is a professional mechanism for the production and certification of moral credit. The professoriat administers a ledger. This is the erasure of the institutional space in which the West conducted its ongoing argument with itself about what it had been, what it was, and what it owed to its own highest aspirations. That space has been replaced by a machinery of accusation incapable of the argument it displaced, because the argument required the possibility that the tradition might contain something worth defending, and the machinery requires that it not.

The consequences have long since passed beyond the university gates. The moral worldview of the negative canon has moved through every major institution of Western public and it was carried there, for the most part, by Westerners. White liberal administrators adopted it because it answered to their own institutions’ need for legitimation in an age of eroded authority. Jewish intellectuals, working through their own fraught history — children and grandchildren of the catastrophe that had supplied the system with one of its three founding crimes — furnished much of its theoretical architecture. Women entering institutions that had historically excluded them reached, understandably, for the most powerful available critique of those institutions and found the negative canon ready to hand. We must remember the system of moral credit was built by the West, out of the West’s own materials, to serve the West’s own post-Christian need for confession without absolution. It is endogenous. It is not an invasion.

What the system generated, having established itself, was a demand. The negative canon required interpreters who could supply the appearance of exteriority — voices that seemed to come from outside the confessional booth, or that could at least perform outsideness with conviction. This is where the professional Third World intellectual enters the story: the postcolonial scholar, the activist-theorist, the institutional broker drawn from Arab, Muslim, Indian, Latin American, and other non-Western elites, installed at the commanding heights of Western academic and cultural life and charged with lending the entire enterprise the credibility of the outside.

The geopolitical consequences of the fraud are by now unmistakable. Western nations find themselves paralyzed — morally, not materially — from acting in defense of their own interests and their own citizens when such action can be redescribed, however fraudulently, as a repetition of the canonical crimes. The accusation of colonialism, racism, or genocide, however detached from historical reality, functions as a strategic weapon capable of deterring, delaying, or delegitimizing the exercise of sovereign power by democratic states. The negative canon has become an instrument of war wielded by the very actors to whom the fraudulent credit has been transferred, while the Western nations whose self-narration produced it find themselves disarmed by their own mythology. What separates the reallocation of institutional power from the inevitable reallocation of geostrategic power may turn out to be measured in decades, not generations.

The fraud enriches the self-appointed spokesmen of the wretched of the earth while leaving the wretched themselves exactly where they were. It converts the suffering that generated the credit into a currency spent by those who never bore the original cost. And the West, which invented the mechanism of self-accusation, discovers too late that the mechanism has no off switch — that a confession which can never be completed is a sentence, and that the sentence is being served by the inheritors of the guilty, who are left with the debt, the guilt, and the endless, voluntary, and catastrophic performance of their own undoing.

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“America is Different.” So begins the opening chapter of Ben Halpern’s The American Jew, written in 1956 in the afterglow of the American Jewish tercentenary celebrations held two years earlier — three hundred years since the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam aboard the Ste. Catherine, a span of time that amounted to something between an episode and a beginning. The commemorations carried a buoyancy, a confidence in the permanence of the American condition.

Halpern, a Brandeis scholar of the old Labor Zionist world, understood the singularity of American Jewish life in a way that the sentimentalists of the tercentenary could not have matched and the despisers of the subsequent decades do not wish to. American Jews, in his analysis, constituted a post-Emancipation Jewry, a community that had never undergone the struggle for civic inclusion that defined Jewish modernity in France, Germany, Austria, and Russia, because the struggle had been unnecessary. The constitutional order of America had extended to Jews, from the founding, the full rights of citizenship without special legislation, without negotiation, without the theological and philosophical agonies of the Judenfrage that consumed a century of European intellectual life and whose final resolution, in the smoke of the crematoria, vindicated none of the parties who had debated it.

There had been no Jewish Question in America because there had been no question. The Atlantic crossing was itself the emancipation; the Americanness of American Jews was born simultaneously with the republic. The antisemitism that did exist on American soil was so anemic, so devoid of the political energy and the metaphysical hatred that had made European antisemitism a civilizational force, that it could not be spoken of in the same sentence as the movements that had convulsed Russia, Germany, France, and Poland without committing a category error whose offensiveness consisted less in what it attributed to America than in what it trivialized about Europe.

Halpern was writing at the midpoint of what has since come to be called the American Century, and the sense of “special destiny” he attributed to American Jews was, as he was careful to note, derivative of a larger American sense of special destiny whose sources were older than the republic itself.

In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Harvey Mansfield — America’s oldest conservative political philosopher, ninety-four years of age, emeritus of a Harvard that has since done everything in its considerable institutional power to ensure that no successor to his kind of thought will ever again occupy one of its endowed chairs — offered what amounts to a genial restatement of the thesis of American singularity for the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. America, Mansfield observed, is a nation of paradox: the oldest continuous democracy on earth and, at the same time, the most dynamic, mobile, restless, and culturally vital, a society that feels young to its inhabitants because its capacity for self-reinvention conceals from them the remarkable age of the political order under which they live. We think we are young and new, but in reality, we are ancient.

But the paradox Mansfield describes with such equanimity is felt by many Americans less a paradox and more as an elegy. The old confidence that America is different has given way to a suspicion that the country has become different no longer from the world but from its different self. National politics in chaos, third-worldism and anti-Americanism on the rise in the country’s own institutions, antisemitism flooding both the left and the right with a speed that Halpern’s generation would have found unthinkable on American soil — all of it producing, in the Americans who still care enough to notice, the uneasy sense that they are becoming strangers to their own country, different from the Americans who came before them in some way that they can feel but cannot adequately define. What is happening?

The inability to diagnose is itself the diagnosis. Orwell argued in “Politics and the English Language” that the degradation of a political vocabulary is not merely the symptom of a deeper political corruption but its very enabling mechanism — that prefabricated, euphemistic, and vague language does not simply reflect a society’s unwillingness to face what it is doing but actively forecloses the confrontation by making certain thoughts unavailable to the minds that might otherwise have formed them. The argument is powerful and correct, but its wider implications are more consequential than many recognize. The corruptions Orwell cataloged — jargon, euphemism, dying metaphor, the substitution of ready-made phrases for the effort of honest formulation — are all corruptions within a functioning language, degrading its precision while leaving its range intact. A language can, however, be degraded in a way that Orwell did not consider, and this deeper degradation is not a matter of precision at all but of amputation — the removal of an entire horizon of meaning from the range of what can be publicly spoken, so that the thoughts the lost language once made possible do not become distorted or euphemized but simply cease to be thinkable within the vocabulary that remains.

This is the corruption we should turn our attention to. What America has lost is a specific hermeneutic structure: a language in which historical events are read as acts within a narrative whose author is not identical with any of the agents within the narrative. The distinction is logical before it is theological. A nation that interprets its history within a story it did not compose — a story whose meaning is received from an author who transcends the nation’s own consciousness — stands in a fundamentally different relation to its own experience than a nation that must produce the meaning of its history from within the resources of that history itself. The first operation is interpretation; the second is self-narration. And the difference between them is not a difference of mood or piety but of logical structure: interpretation requires an external referent to which the interpreted event is answerable, whereas self-narration, by definition, can produce no verdict on itself that is not already contained in the premises of the narrator.

I do not mean language in the thin aesthetic sense of “rhetoric” or “discourse” but something closer to what a theologian means when he speaks of a scriptural language in which certain realities are constituted by the speaking and cease to be accessible when the speaking stops. That language was biblical, and its disappearance from American public life has been so gradual and so thoroughgoing that the country has arrived at its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary unable to recognize the nature of what it has lost — not a set of beliefs but a logical capacity: the capacity to stand under a judgment whose origin is external to the consciousness upon which the judgment falls.

America’s singularity consisted in the remarkable and historically anomalous fact that it possessed, far later than any European nation, a public language in which the biblical substance of political meaning had not yet been translated entirely into the secular boilerplate — a language in which a president could still read a national catastrophe the way a Hebrew prophet reads a covenantal failure, as an event whose meaning belongs to God and not to the subject upon which it has fallen. The loss of that language is what has made America normal, which is to say, European, which is to say, post-Christian: trapped inside its own self-narration, cycling between pride and guilt with the compulsiveness of a mind that cannot rest because it has nowhere outside itself to rest. Halpern’s generation could still observe this European disease from across an ocean, with the detachment of a people who had been spared it. Their grandchildren inhabit it from within.

One of the greatest instances in which the biblical language was spoken in the American public square with its full theological force took place on March 4, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address to a nation five weeks from the end of a war that had killed more than seven hundred thousand of its citizens and whose meaning was about to become the most consequential interpretive question in America’s history. Lincoln’s address foreclosed that question by refusing to let any party possess the answer. He subordinates the war, both its factions, and the nation entirely to the judgment of the biblical God, and in doing so, he accomplishes the one thing that could make reunification possible on terms deeper than victory, defeat, or reconciliation: he deprives America of authorship over itself.

Across the Atlantic, in those same months, Richard Wagner was returning to sketches for what would become his final work, Parsifal — a sacred stage drama whose subject is also redemption, also the wound that will not heal, also the question of how a fallen community is restored to wholeness, but whose answer is the complete inversion of Lincoln’s. Where Lincoln’s redemption comes through the surrender of self-narration to divine judgment, Wagner’s comes through its apotheosis — the purified will narrating its own aesthetic-metaphysical salvation in a sacred theater whose God is the aesthetic experience of self-narration itself.

Between these two works — the seven hundred and one words spoken on the Capitol portico and the four-and-a-half-hour ritual consecrated at Bayreuth seventeen years later — the two paths that lay open to the post-Christian West in the matter of redemption are defined with an irony that neither work’s creator could have intended, since neither knew of the other’s existence. America, for one extraordinary and unrepeatable moment, took the first path. It has since, by slow cultural catastrophe, arrived at a vulgarized and degraded version of the second — and the distance between Lincoln’s address and the present condition of American public speech is the measure of what the singularity meant and of what its progressive loss is costing us.

The comparison is not between a president and an artist, still less between a statesman acting under the burden of history and a composer consecrating his own theater. It is between two forms of redemption. Lincoln and Wagner stand here because each gives, in the highest language available to him, an answer to the central theological problem of the modern West: how a community wounded from within can be restored without merely turning the wound into the material of its own self-exculpating story.

Malice Toward None

The Civil War was, by the time Abraham Lincoln rose to speak on March 4, 1865, almost over as a military fact and only beginning as a struggle over meaning. Grant was besieging Petersburg, Sherman had taken Savannah and was burning his way north through the Carolinas, and the Confederate government was preparing to abandon Richmond. Everyone in Washington knew the war was ending. What America needed in March 1865 was not a plan but a redemption, and the difficulty was that a nation torn in two by civil war cannot redeem itself, because every act of self-redemption becomes the property of the faction that performs it and therefore perpetuates the division it claims to heal.

The Second Inaugural is not a victory speech, nor even a speech about the end of the war in any ordinary sense. Lincoln was speaking at the threshold between war as action and war as memory, between the battlefield, where men kill and die under conditions that retain, for all their horror, the terrible vision of immediate necessity, and the afterlife of battle, where communities take the dead into their custody and teach them to speak on behalf of whatever the living need most urgently to believe. A civil war is especially treacherous at this threshold because the enemy has not been foreign enough to be dismissed and not intimate enough to be forgiven without some transformation of meaning; he has been brother, countryman, rival claimant to the same world, reader of the same Bible, speaker of the same language. The North had every reason and every temptation to read the war as its vindication: the Union preserved, slavery destroyed, the righteous cause confirmed by arms — a narrative of redemption through victory. The South, once the shock of defeat subsided, would begin the long work of converting loss into martyrdom, dignity of resolve into Lost Cause — a narrative of redemption through suffering. Each of these is a narrative of self-redemption — the nation redeeming itself through its own story about itself — and Lincoln understood that neither could produce a genuine redemption because both left the narrator in possession of the meaning.

Lincoln turned to the only source that could supply a narrative of redemption whose authority did not originate in the narrator — the Hebrew Bible, whose God authors the story in which nations find their meaning rather than permitting nations to author stories about themselves. The address he delivered is seven hundred and one words long, the shortest inaugural since Washington’s second, and its brevity is itself a theological act. The occasion demanded amplification — the long survey of the war’s causes, the celebration of the Union’s endurance, the vision of the peace to come, presidential self-enlargement. Lincoln supplies almost none of this. The war came. Both sides deprecated it. Both accepted it rather than let the nation survive or perish on the other’s terms. Neither expected the magnitude nor the duration it attained. These opening sentences are acts of subtraction, a dismantling of agency so quiet that the modern reader can almost miss what is happening: the combatants are being emptied of mastery over the event they enacted. Men fought, but they did not govern the meaning of their fighting. Both sides are displaced from the center of the war before Lincoln names the God who will occupy it — and the displacement is itself the first movement of the redemption the address will accomplish, because the precondition of being redeemed is the surrender of the conviction that one can redeem oneself.

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.“ I suspect that the modern ear, trained by a century and a half of liberal irony, might hear in this sentence a wry observation about the futility of religious partisanship — each side claiming God, therefore God belongs to neither, therefore religion is a projection of interest. That is not what the sixteenth President is doing. He is establishing that neither party has received what it asked for, that the prayers of both could not be answered, that the prayers of neither have been answered fully, and that the God to whom both prayed has retained His own purposes — purposes that are not the North’s and not the South’s and not available to either as material for the stories they will wish to tell about themselves when the killing is over. “The Almighty has His own purposes.“ Seven words, and they remove the meaning of the war from the custody of every human institution that may attempt to repossess it. The war is not a chapter of America’s story about America. It is an event in God’s story, and God is not narrating through either army.

“It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.“ The sentence contains Genesis 3:19 and Matthew 7:1, and what Lincoln accomplishes by placing them together could only be explained through the recovery of a biblical literacy that made redemption possible. Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” The curse pronounced upon Adam after the Fall, the decree by which God established the permanent conditions of human life outside Eden — man shall eat by his own labor, and the decree falls upon the entire species and admits of no exemption. Lincoln transposes the verse from the universal to the political with a single substitution: “other men’s” for “thy.” The slaveholder eats bread, but not by his own sweat; he eats by the sweat wrung from the faces of other men, extracting from the body of another the substance that God decreed each man should produce from his own. Slavery, read through this verse, is the construction of an entire social and economic order whose deepest purpose, beneath the cotton and the revenue and the political power, is the exemption of one class of men from the human condition by compelling another class to bear a double portion of it. The slaveholder has not merely stolen labor but has arranged for another man to be Adam in his place.

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The question of what Islamism is has produced a library of answers. It is a political movement seeking state power. It is a reaction to colonialism and its aftermath. It is a theology of revolutionary purification. It is a utopian project for the reorganization of Muslim societies along lines derived from a selectively reconstructed past. Each of these descriptions is accurate as far as it goes, and what they share is a willingness to take Islamism’s self-presentation — as an indigenous Islamic phenomenon, arising from within Islam, speaking its language, pursuing its aims, continuous with its history — more or less at face value, differing only in their assessment of whether the pursuit is admirable, lamentable, or dangerous. The Western liberal sees a pre-modern atavism resisting the inevitable march of progress. The Western conservative sees a civilizational enemy whose theological seriousness shames a West that has lost its own. The postcolonial sympathizer sees an authentic subaltern resistance to Western hegemony. All of them accept that the “Islam” in Islamism is Islam — Islam reinterpreted, Islam politicized, Islam radicalized, Islam distorted, but Islam.

This essay argues that the premise is false, and it argues by way of tracing, through the career of a single thinker whose philosophical ambitions were unusually explicit and whose debts to the German Idealist tradition were unusually visible, showing the operation by which Islamism produced the “Islam” it claims to represent.

The thinker is Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (1921–1986), a Palestinian-born philosopher trained in German Idealism, who spent thirty years constructing a total civilizational system and who, through his institutional network within the Muslim Brotherhood’s Western diaspora, provided Islamism with the comprehensive philosophical architecture it had always sought and never possessed.

—

Constantin Zureiq, who in 1939 was a young professor of history at the American University of Beirut — the institution that in those years served as the preeminent center of political and philosophical ferment in the Arab East, and from whose small, intensely politicized student body would emerge the founders of the Baʿath Party, the Arab Nationalist Movement, and the ideological forerunners of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — opened his short treatise Nationalist Consciousness, the work that ignited the ideological self-consciousness of Arab nationalism, with a diagnosis whose interest lies less in what it names than in what it takes for granted:

“It is no longer hidden for anyone contemplating the conditions of the Arab nation that today it is passing a phase that is the most delicate and dangerous, and it is muddled in profound and crippling intellectual confusion. We all feel the different [intellectual] currents throwing us around and the conflicts pulling our lives in every direction, and we all feel this intellectual and emotional upheaval dominating us, separating us into warring factions and parties, none without a clear goal or purpose.”

What Zureiq feared was fragmentation — the experience of being pulled between competing intellectual currents, none of which had achieved the authority to organize the whole. What he took for granted, and what requires explanation, is the specific form in which he and his generation experienced that fragmentation as an emergency demanding a total response — a single and final answer comprehensive enough to resolve every question the collapsing order had left open. Another contemporary, looking back on the same years from a greater distance, made the underlying force of this demand explicit in terms that Zureiq’s more sober political language had left unspoken:

“we were existentially searching for a cosmic adventure. We had an inner battle for the whole cosmos, for civilization, and we were looking for final answers. Some of us aspired to build the civilization of science and socialism, others aspired to build the new magical civilization which Oswald Spengler declared.”

The vocabulary here — “existentially,” “cosmic,” “final answers,” the invocation of Spengler’s prophetic civilizational morphology — belongs entirely to the European discourse of civilizational crisis that had been gathering force since the late nineteenth century, and what it reveals is not merely the unsurprising fact that the political ferment of the Arab East was suffused with imported European intellectual categories but that the specific form of the crisis as these young men experienced it — the conviction that the emergency comprehended not merely this or that political arrangement but the cosmos itself, that the stakes were civilizational and indeed metaphysical, that what was demanded was not reform but “final answers” — was itself a transmitted condition, a fragment of the post-Christian collapse of the West reimported into the post-Ottoman collapse of the East, where it found in a population already living through its own experience of theological-political disintegration a social body perfectly predisposed to receive it.

What Zureiq described as confusion was, from the perspective of the young men who lived through it a promissory condition: the very completeness of the fragmentation seemed to guarantee that the eventual synthesis, when it came, would have to be correspondingly total, comprehending everything that the competing partial systems had each grasped only in part. The boundaries between these competing visions were, in the event, radically porous — a student at AUB in 1938 could move from the orbit of Antoun Saʿadeh’s openly Nazi-modeled Syrian Social Nationalist Party, with its myth of an eternal Greater Syrian nation, to the embryonic Baʿathism of Michel Aflaq, with its mystical invocation of the Arab spirit, to the disciplined cadres of Soviet-sponsored Arab communism, without experiencing any fundamental discontinuity of intellectual ambition, because the ambition in each case was identical: the construction of a total civilizational vision, a system complete enough to serve as the foundation of a new order, bearing within itself the answers to every question — historical, moral, aesthetic, political.

This atmosphere was further compressed, in the years between 1936 and 1945, by the convergence of forces that brought civilizational abstraction into immediate and combustible contact with the violence of lived politics: the escalation of the conflict in British Palestine, which the 1936–39 Arab Revolt had inscribed into the political consciousness of the Levantine generation as the visible front of a larger civilizational confrontation; the transmission of Nazi antisemitic propaganda through Berlin Arabic Radio and sympathetic local presses, whose tropes — now embedded in a transnational narrative of anti-imperial revolution — found ready audiences among those whose political imagination was already shaped by resentment toward Britain and France; and the cataclysm of the Second World War itself, which was read in Levantine cafes as an eschatological drama, the collapse of the post-Versailles order opening the way for the founding of a new world. The messianic expectancy was palpable, and its philosophical character — the conviction that the end of one epoch would bring not merely political change but a total reconstitution of human meaning — stamped itself indelibly on the generation that would carry it, in various forms and under various names, into the second half of the century.

It was in this atmosphere that Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, born in Jaffa to a prominent Arab family, educated first at a traditional Muslim school and then at a French Dominican missionary institution before entering AUB in the late 1930s, received the formation that would determine the shape, though not yet the name, of his life’s work.

What Faruqi absorbed at AUB, during those years of ideological ferment and eschatological expectation, was not any particular ideology but the underlying form that each of these ideologies shared: the conviction that the crisis demanded a total response, a unified system encompassing knowledge, value, and political form, capable of reconstituting the order of the world from first principles, and that the construction of such a system was the supreme intellectual task of the age. The marks of these years — the attraction to totalitarian systems of thought, the instinct for disciplined organization, the deepening hostility toward the West, the antisemitism that circulated freely through the political atmosphere of the late 1930s, and above all the turn toward German philosophy as the instrument adequate to the scale of the crisis — would shape Faruqi for the rest of his life, and the arc of his later career can be read as a sustained effort to devise solutions to the very problems that first took shape in his generation’s minds at AUB.

—

The philosophical tools adequate to the construction of such a system he found in the graduate programs of Indiana University and Harvard, where between 1949 and 1952, after the catastrophe of 1948 had left him without a position or a country, he completed a doctorate in philosophy whose intellectual coordinates were, without exception, German.

His dissertation, Justifying the Good: Metaphysics and Epistemology of Value, submitted to Indiana in September 1952, drew on the phenomenological axiology of Max Scheler and the ontological ethics of Nicolai Hartmann to construct a theory of moral knowledge that rejected both utilitarian consequentialism and empiricist naturalism in favor of a transcendent axiology apprehended through what Faruqi termed “emotional intuition” — a mode of rational-affective apprehension through which values, understood not as social conventions or historical contingencies but as self-existent realities occupying a hierarchical order independent of any particular culture or epoch, could be directly grasped by the philosophically trained subject.

From Scheler, Faruqi took the conviction that values possess an objective hierarchical order accessible to a formed sensibility — a conviction that would later reappear, almost without modification, in his Islamic writings, where the hierarchical ordering of values derived from the Qurʾan would occupy exactly the same structural position that Scheler’s value-hierarchy had occupied in the dissertation; from Hartmann, he took the architectonic ambition to classify and systematize the entire domain of the ethical within a single comprehensive framework, what Hartmann had called an “ontology of morals” as rigorous and complete as any system of natural philosophy; and from the broader atmosphere of the German Idealist tradition, absorbed less as explicit proposition than as philosophical habitus, he took the foundational assumption on which everything else would rest — that genuine knowledge must take the form of a total system in which every particular finds its place within a single unifying principle, and that any knowledge which falls short of this systematic totality is, to that extent, incomplete and philosophically deficient.

By 1952, before Faruqi had undertaken any formal study of the Islamic sciences, before his sojourn at al-Azhar in Cairo between 1954 and 1958, where he would acquire the credentials of Islamic learning, the philosophical architecture of his life’s work was already fully constructed. The totalizing impulse, the system-building method, the Hartmannian axiology, the conviction that all domains of knowledge and value must converge upon a single metaphysical horizon — all of this was in place, waiting to be inhabited. What was not yet settled was the name under which the system would present itself to the world, the civilizational vocabulary in which the Absolute — which the system required as its generative center — would be clothed.

The subsequent career, for all its appearance of dramatic transformation — from Palestinian exile to Arabist philosopher to Islamist systematizer, a trajectory that one of his students would later summarize as a pilgrim’s progress “from an average Palestinian to a devoted Arab nationalist, from an Arabist to an Islamist, and from an Islamist to an intellectual jihadist against Zionism” — was in its philosophical substance the performance of a single operation twice: the narration of an Absolute, in which the philosophical form and method acquired at Indiana were each time activated by being filled with civilizational content, first under the name of Arabism and then, when that name became politically unavailable, under the name of Islam. System and Absolute came into being together in the same constitutive act, which is why the act could be performed again, with different symbols, and produce what was recognizably the same system, because it was the same act.

Arabism

In 1962, Faruqi published the opening volume of what was to be a four-part philosophical system — Arabism and Religion, Arabism and Art, Arabism and Society, Arabism and Man — of which only the first appeared before the political ground shifted beneath it and the name “Arabism,” as a vehicle for civilizational ambition, became unavailable. Even in its incomplete form, however, the work reveals the nature of the ambition Faruqi was performing because the philosophical machinery is closer to the surface than it would be in his later, more self-consciously Islamic writings, where the Hegelian scaffolding would be more carefully concealed beneath the language of the Qurʾan and the Sunnah.

Arabism (ʿUrūbah) is not treated in this work as a modern nationalist project in any recognizable political sense — not as a program for the political unification of Arabic-speaking peoples, not as an ideology of anti-colonial resistance, not as a platform for the redistribution of power in the post-Ottoman Middle East — but as a transhistorical “idea-in-movement,” what Faruqi calls the animating soul of “the Arab stream of being.” The phrase is striking as it performs is nothing less than the constitutive narration of a civilizational Geist — an operation indistinguishable, in its philosophical form, from Hegel’s narration of the Weltgeist in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In both cases, a vast historical trajectory — comprehending peoples, religions, empires, and epochs — is subsumed under a single, self-realizing Spirit whose movement through time is governed by an inner necessity, and whose truth can only be grasped by the philosopher who, standing at the culmination of the process, narrates the whole into intelligibility. The act of narration does not merely describe Spirit; it constitutes it — bringing it into existence as a unified subject of history by imposing a teleological form on the chaos of the past.

This constitutive character of the narration — the fact that the “Arab stream of being” exists only insofar as it is narrated by the philosopher, and that without the narration there would be nothing corresponding to it in the historical record, only a bewildering multiplicity of peoples, languages, religions, and political forms lacking any common essence — is what Faruqi must conceal if his system is to carry conviction, and the means by which he conceals it is a displacement into mythic antiquity:

The Arab stream of being is infinite like time. Neither its beginning nor its end can become the object of knowledge. It has always existed, though the consciousness of its existence may have started to be at a certain time. But even this consciousness is as old as history, although it has known periods of comparative weakness or strength. The locus classicus of this stream of being is the Arabian Peninsula, “the fount of pure Semitism” and the principal source of the stream.

The maneuver here is philosophically transparent, though it would have required some training in the German tradition to see through it: by locating the origin of the “Arab stream of being” before recorded history, in a primordial “Semitism” whose reality is invoked but can never be verified — since “neither its beginning nor its end can become the object of knowledge” — Faruqi places the constitutive act of narration beyond the reach of empirical challenge. The “stream of being” has “always existed”; what is new is only the “consciousness of its existence,” which is to say, the narration itself, the act by which the philosopher makes explicit what has always been implicitly present. This is an exact reproduction of Hegel’s claim that the philosopher does not impose a pattern on history but merely brings to consciousness the rational necessity that has governed it from the beginning — a claim whose circularity is the same in both cases, and can never be resolved from within the system, because the system is the narration, and the narration is the system.

Having narrated into existence this transhistorical “Arab stream of being,” Faruqi proceeds to unfold its history through three dialectical stages, each of which he calls, in precise Hegelian usage, a “moment” — not a passing instant in chronological time but a determinate configuration of Spirit that both preserves what came before and prepares the transition to what follows.

The first moment is Judaism, in which the Arab spirit — for in Faruqi’s narration, the ancient Israelites are absorbed into the “Arab stream of being” as one of its early manifestations — encounters divine revelation, but sees it immediately corrupted by a principle of racist particularism that refuses to allow the universal truth of monotheism to fulfill its vocation as a summons to all humanity. Faruqi’s account of this corruption is worth quoting at length, because the philosophical operation it performs — the casting of Judaism as the negative principle in a dialectical system that requires a negation in order to advance — is precisely what will be preserved, intact and unchanged, when the system is re-symbolized as Islam two decades later:

“In its Judaic period, Arab consciousness was engaged in a fierce battle between those who discovered, worshipped, and taught the One God of all, and “the Hebrews” who adamantly resisted that teaching. The whole of Hebrew history is the tale of the struggle of a handful of “faithful” against their brethren, “the Hebrews,” who stubbornly rejected—as they still do to the present day—every universalist idea of God that gives all men equal standing in God’s sight. Not only were the Hebrews as a whole never converted to the Judaic faith, the faith of Abraham, but, on the contrary, recognizing the dynamism of the new idea, they appropriated it simply to use it as a weapon against their enemies and a means of further self-separation from mankind.”

What is happening in this passage is not historical argument but the constitution, through narration, of a structural position within a dialectical system. “The Hebrews” function here not as a historical people but as the embodiment of a metaphysical principle: separation, particularism, the refusal of universality. Their resistance to “every universalist idea” is not contingent but essential, not historical but eternal — “as they still do to the present day” — because the system requires a permanent negation, a principle of dis-unity against which the unifying movement of the “Arab stream of being” can define and advance itself. Without this negation, the dialectic cannot move; without the stubborn particularity of “the Hebrews,” there is no occasion for the universal to assert itself, and the entire narrative — which is to say, the entire system — loses its engine.

The second moment is Christianity, which achieves the universal ethical ideal that Judaism refused but achieves it incompletely, and under the custodianship of the West, which distorts it beyond recognition. Here Faruqi performs a characteristic absorption, drawing Jesus himself into the “Arab stream of being” as one of its authentic expressions:

Fundamentally, Christianity came as a solution to the chronic perversion of the Hebrews within the Arab stream of being… However true this may be in fact, it does not appear to be the case prima facie. That Christianity, or the message of Jesus, was such a solution to the Hebrew problem may become apparent only when that message is sifted from its unchristian accruements…. Jesus was born and grew up as a Jew. Against Jewish separatism and Roman worldliness, his consciousness was formed and readied for the receipt of the spirit of God. Thereafter, he proclaimed the results of his vision—values consubstantial with those that constitute ʿUrūbah [Arabism]. His Christianity was as much the product of the Arab spirit as the monotheism of Abraham and Moses, or, as we shall see, the Islam of Muhammad.

The word “consubstantial” — homoousios, the term of the Nicene Creed defining the relation of the Son to the Father — is remarkable here, whether Faruqi deployed it with full awareness of its theological resonance or not, because what it effects is the absorption of Christianity’s central claim to universality into the prior and more encompassing universality of Arabism. Jesus’s values are not merely compatible with Arabism; they are “consubstantial” with it — of the same substance, identical in essence. Christianity, in this narration is a moment in the self-realization of a civilizational Spirit that precedes it and will outlast it, a partial and ultimately insufficient expression of a truth whose full realization awaits the culminating moment.

That culminating moment is Islam, in which the Arab spirit encounters divinity anew in the person of Muhammad and achieves at last the complete and final expression of the values toward which the entire dialectical movement has been tending. Islam is “the fairest flower in the Arab stream of being,” now given expression in Faruqi’s system of Arabism — the final and “highest moment of consciousness.” Having narrated the “Arab stream of being” from its primordial origins through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to its consummation in his own philosophical system, Faruqi has arrived at the position occupied by Hegel at the close of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

“At this point, the World Spirit has come; each stage has its own form in the true system of philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved, since philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of Spirit during… centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself… At this point, I bring this history of Philosophy to a close.”

The parallel is a structural identity — the same narrating operation, performed in a different system, producing the same philosophical result: a System that is also a History, a History that is also a Spirit, and a Spirit that exists only in and through its narration by the philosopher who stands at its conclusion.

The implications of this is that if the “Islam” of Faruqi’s system is a narrated construct — if it exists only as the culminating moment of a philosophical narrative modeled on the Phenomenology of Spirit — then every subsequent act of “Islamization” is not the application of an independently existing religion to domains of knowledge it had not previously touched, but the extension of the narration itself: the continued performance of the constitutive act by which the philosophical system brings its own object into being. The “Islamization of Knowledge,” which Faruqi would launch two decades later as the central programmatic expression of his mature thought, would accordingly be not a return to Islamic tradition but the expansion of a philosophical narration whose relationship to the actual traditions of Muslims across fourteen centuries was no closer than Hegel’s narration of the World Spirit was to the actual history of the peoples it claimed to comprehend.

But Faruqi’s most revealing move in the Arabism and Religion phase was not constructive but critical, and its target was not the West but the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood, he argued in 1962, differed little from the nationalists it opposed: both substituted slogans for a coherent structure of values, and the Islamist’s loyalty to Islam as an end in itself was a form of collective self-identification no less prone to what Faruqi called the “fanaticism of the Jewish spirit.” What was absent in both camps was what Faruqi demanded, in one of his characteristically obscure speculations — a total axiological system, a Hartmannian conception rigorously derived from the Arab-Islamic heritage:

“Islam has not only furnished our ethical ideals, but has ethicalized whatever values our pre-Islamic ancestors had; that is to say, it has related vainglorious, one-directional pursuits of one value or another to the total realm of value and thereby transformed them into ethical willing proper which aims at all value in the hierarchical order that Istam has given them, on the one hand; and moved the fountainhead of ethicality from the narrow sphere of individuated being to the universalist sphere of the world-ummah. As monotheism, universalism, ethicalism, rationalism, and word-affirmation, Arabism is unthinkable without Islam. Islam is not merely the fairest flower the Arab stream of being has captured in its continual contact with divinity. It has interacted with this flower, and this interaction exercised a formative influence upon it. Islam may well be said to be constitutive of Arabism, though it is not exactly equivalent to it. And we shall soon see in what sense some of the contents of Islam may be said to be the contents of Arabism without making them identical.”

The passage is dense even by Faruqi’s standards, but its philosophical operation is clear: the “total realm of value,” the “hierarchical order” in which all particular values find their place, the movement from “individuated being” to the “universalist sphere” — this is Hartmann’s ontology of values, transplanted wholesale into Islamic vocabulary, performing the systematizing function that Faruqi found lacking in both nationalism and Islamism. And in the final, carefully hedged formulation — Islam is “constitutive of Arabism, though it is not exactly equivalent to it” — lies the embryo of the intellectual role Faruqi would later claim for himself: the thinker who could supply Islamism with the philosophical architecture it lacked, who could turn an ideological impulse into a comprehensive civilizational program by narrating it into systematic totality.

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Warning: my Flying Notes are not essays you enjoy. They are essays you survive. (Read the previous installment here.)

1

The death of conversation, of true dialogue, of the sacrament of social communion that is real communication, is not a subject I approach lightly. I approach almost nothing lightly—lightness being, in my view, one of the great moral failures of our age, a point I have made elsewhere and at some length and which I will not repeat here except to say that I was right—but this subject in particular I approach with the gravity of a man delivering a eulogy for someone he loved and who, he suspects, was murdered.

I have been to dinner parties, and I have broken bread with educated and accomplished human beings, and I’m sad to report to you: nobody is talking to anybody. They are talking at each other, past each other, through each other, and occasionally about each other, but the one thing they are not doing—the one activity that the entire dinner party was invented to facilitate—is conversing.

I had resolved—and the resolution was, like all my resolutions, conceived in charity and executed in love—to give you an account of a certain evening I lately attended. I was invited—again, by means I have learned not to investigate lest I foreclose such future possibilities—to a dinner at the home of a man whose name I shall suppress out of that same Christian humility and gentle forbearance I so assiduously cultivate in all my social dealings; I will call him, for his and your protection, a New York Man. By this account I intended to demonstrate, with the rigor of Euclid and the bedside tenderness of a physician who has grown fond of the patient he is about to pronounce dead, that conversation—I mean conversation properly so called, the thing Socrates died of and Johnson dined on, the thing Castiglione thought could civilize a court and Augustine thought could carry a mother and son, leaning at a window in Ostia, halfway to heaven—is dead; deader than disco; that what now circulates under its name is a procession of monologues delivered serially into the air.

On said evening, I was placed by Providence, temperament, and training to perform the autopsy on dialogue. The account begins immediately. Or nearly immediately. There are one or two things you must know first.

By temperament, I say, because I am—and I offer this not really as a boast——though I do on occasion boast as all cultivated men do—— but as a datum, a fact about the very nature of reality—a listener. Augustine records his amazement at seeing Ambrose read without moving his lips, the first silent reader in Western literature, a man who could take in another’s words without immediately converting them to his own breath; I am, I have been told, the conversational Ambrose of our times, a man before whom others unburden themselves because they sense that nothing they say will be interrupted or dismissed. Some friends even call me the Confessor. I absolve no one, but I retain everything, and I have noticed—humility compels the observation—that the truly great listeners of history, the Ambroses or the priests behind the grille, share with me a certain quality of attention so total that the speaker eventually falls silent out of sheer awe, whereupon one is regrettably obliged to carry the conversation oneself, sometimes for the remainder of the evening.

You will ask, reader—and I cherish you, Madam or/and Sir, for asking so perceptively—how a thing so sturdy as conversation, which survived the fall of Rome, the Inquisition, the telephone, and hip-hop, could die in our lifetime. I will tell you. It died the way all sacred practices die, by being replaced with a private exercise that wears its clothes; for what passes now stands to true dialogue precisely as—as—but I see, reader, that you have completed the figure yourself, and completed it perceptively. For shame. I was speaking of masturbation, yes, but of masturbation in the rhetorical sense, in which the seed of speech is spilled upon the ground where no other understanding can receive it, and nothing is begotten—a barren expenditure, a fruitless, solitary discharge made possible only through the fancies of one’s own self-told imagination.

Now. Where was I? Ah, yes, the dinner. The table was set beautifully. I will grant my New York Man that. The napkins were folded in that manner which suggests either genuine cultivation or a recent viewing of a YouTube tutorial; I have my suspicions but will keep them to myself, for I am a charitable man, and it costs me nothing to assume the best of people’s napkin folding.

I was seated beside a woman who worked in—what was it?—strategic communications, a field whose very name is a contradiction, since in my experience the people who work in communications are the least communicative people alive, and the addition of the word “strategic” only means they have systematized their incapacity—and across from a man who had recently returned from a conference in Davos, a fact I know because he mentioned it four times in the first five minutes, which I counted, not because I am petty—though I am sometimes petty, as all honest men are—but because by the third mention I had become scientifically interested: was there a pattern? Was there a rhythm? Was this a compulsion, a tic, a liturgical recurrence, a verbal rosary he was fingering under the table of his own self-regard?

Of the seventh invocation of Davos itself—its occasion, its astonishing pretext, and what it disclosed concerning the relationship between Swiss altitude and American, coastal self-regard—I shall say nothing here, for it deserves an essay of its own, which I have begun.

Where was I? The soup, I believe, had not yet arrived. It does not arrive in this note either, as you will shortly discover, and through no fault of the soup.

I attempted conversation. Genuine conversation—the kind in which one person says a thing and the other person responds to that thing, and the first person is altered, however slightly, by the response, and something is built between them that neither possessed alone. I made a point—a rather good point, I think, about the relationship between political rhetoric and the decay of public memory, which itself is a fictive political object. It was, if I may say so, the sort of observation that deserved a brief, appreciative silence—just a beat, a breath, the conversational equivalent of letting a fine wine rest on the palate before swallowing—before a thoughtful reply.

What I received was: “Totally.”

“Totally.” That was it. The entire harvest of my carefully cultivated thought, the compressed fruit of decades of reading and reflection and, yes, suffering—for one does not arrive at such insights without having suffered, and I have suffered, dear reader, not ostentatiously, not with the performative anguish of the performatively wounded children of Orientalism, no, no, no, but quietly, in the manner of a man who keeps his bleeding internal—all of it, met with “totally,” spoken with a rising intonation that suggested the verbal equivalent of a loading screen: please wait while I queue up my own entirely unrelated and uninteresting remark.

And indeed, before the second syllable had finished dying its ignominious death, the Davos man pivoted. “That reminds me,” he said, though it reminded him of nothing, for what followed bore no relation whatsoever to what I had said. It was related only to what had already been composing itself inside his skull while I was speaking—for he had not been listening; he had been preparing—“That reminds me of a panel I was on in Davos.” Fifth time. I stopped counting. Some data sets become redundant.

—I must pause here to observe that “that reminds me” is among the most dishonest phrases in the English language, rivaled only by “with all due respect” and “having said that.” The phrase pretends to be a connection—as though the speaker’s mind has been so stimulated by your contribution that it has leaped, via some dazzling associative chain, to a related thought. But it is not a bridge but a trapdoor. “That reminds me” is the hinge on which the conversation swings away from you and toward them, and the “that” in question is never what you said; it is simply the fact that you have stopped talking, which has reminded them that it is now their turn, which is the only thing they were waiting for.

The strategic communications woman, meanwhile, had begun emitting a rapid sequence of sounds while the Davos man was mid-sentence—“mhm, mhm, mhm”—fired in staccato bursts, each one landing slightly closer to the tail of his clause, like a car inching into an intersection before the light has changed. Do not be deceived, my dear reader. The “mhm” is not the sound of agreement; it is the sound of a piston chambering. And then—before he had even arrived at the verb of his sentence—“and, and—” She said this. “And, and—” As though his sentence and hers were continuous, when in fact the “and” connected nothing to nothing; it was a crowbar inserted into the first hairline crack in his syntax, a forced entry performed in broad conversational daylight, and what followed—a remark about a podcast, of all things—bore no relation whatsoever to anything he had said, which itself bore no relation whatsoever to anything I had said. The “and” was, in fact, a hijacking of a hijacking; a stack of non-sequiturs, each monologue parasitic on the previous one's corpse. And the Davos man did not even notice. He had not been speaking to her. She had not been listening to him. They were two performers on the same stage who happened to be facing the same poor audience—which was me, sitting between them, the only person at the table who had come to converse and who was now watching, with the quiet horror of a man who has arrived at a dance and discovered that everyone is dancing alone.

—It occurs to me, as I write this, that the podcast recommendation has become the modern equivalent of the religious tract: unsolicited, immune to context, and distributed by people who believe they are saving you. “Have you heard the good news? It’s a six-part series.”—And I will confess to you, reader, that the very sentence I have just written pleases me—“unsolicited, immune to context, and distributed by people who believe they are saving you”—that is a rather fine tricolon, a pleasing persistence of plosives—What a patter of p’s that I did not entirely plan but which arrived, as such things do, as a gift from whatever faculty it is that governs these felicities in a man of my learnedness and my constitution.—I am not boasting but merely observing. A scientist does not boast about his data; he records it. The sentence was good and I am merely its humble stenographer.——Where was I?—

Ah yes. The podcast. I smiled. What else could I do? I have developed, over the years, a smile specifically for these occasions—it is not the smile of pleasure, nor of politeness, nor even of concealed contempt, though it has been mistaken for all three. It is the smile of a man watching a civilization end, one monologue at a time, and finding in the spectacle a kind of terrible beauty—the way one might admire a collapsing building even as one mourns it.—Have I mentioned my idea for a coffee-table book on decay? I must have. In a previous essay, I think, and the response was gratifying: several readers wrote “great idea!” and then nothing happened, which is its own form of decay, and in that sense they have contributed to the project more than they know. I have since expanded the vision. The book, which I am now calling Decay: A Visual Meditation—the colon is essential; no serious book of photography can be taken seriously without a colon in its subtitle—will now include an entire chapter on conversations: photographs of dinner tables after the guests have left, the wine rings on the tablecloth, the napkins crumpled and abandoned, dirty plates, the chairs pushed back at angles that betray how eagerly their occupants fled the scene. The final image in this chapter: two chairs facing each other, both empty.——

Sir, I observe that you have been skimming. Do not deny it; I can always tell. You skipped the passage on Ambrose, did you not, on the grounds that it looked like background. Go back and read it. I will wait. The whole argument is in it, and you will be lost in the later parts without it, and I decline to be blamed for your confusion at the very moment of my vindication.

Now—Madam, at least, has remained faithfully with me, for I have found the womenfolk to be my most faithful readers—where was the dinner? For I am aware, with some astonishment, that we have been seated at this table for several pages and the soup has still not arrived, and neither has the account I promised you with the rigor of Euclid. I have just reviewed what I have written and I find it is largely concerned with me—which is fitting, in a way, since I was the only person at that table listening, and an account of the evening’s listening is therefore necessarily an account of myself; but the fact remains that the first course, the apocalyptic question I deployed at the cheese, the extraordinary scene that unfolded when our host proposed we go around the table and each share one thing we were grateful for—what I said, what followed, the quality of the wine, why one guest departed before the main course, and what the departure revealed about the state of gratitude in the professional classes—all of it remains untold, and must now remain untold a while longer, for I have reached the end of the space my discipline allots to a single note, and a man who will not respect his own design cannot expect his readers to respect his conclusions.

The dinner itself, then, I postpone—and if you protest, reader, that the preliminaries were digressions, I answer that digressions are the very sunshine of an account such as this one, the life and soul of it; take them out, and a cold eternal winter reigns over every page; restore them to me, and I am a bridegroom. The dinner will return when you least expect it and I am better rested. And no, in case you are wondering, it is not lost on me—a man as self-aware as I am misses nothing—that I have just delivered several thousand words on the death of conversation without permitting a single soul to get a word in, including the dinner. The observation has been recorded. It will be addressed. There is an essay in it.

For now, let us attend to more pressing humiliations.

2

You are expecting the dinner. You shall not have it yet, dear reader—a more pressing humiliation has intervened, and chronology, as I have explained elsewhere—you would know this, had you been a paid subscriber, but I forgive you, forgiveness being among the few things I still give away—is the tyranny of the clock over the truth.

I was approached, some months ago, by a young man—one of those people whom I maintain in my life the way a museum maintains its lesser holdings, not necessarily because they are remarkable, they usually really aren’t, but because discarding them would raise questions about the collection’s integrity—who wished to consult me on a matter of some personal gravity. He was considering leaving his career to pursue, as he put it, “something more meaningful.” He wanted my advice.

My advice. Let the reader appreciate the weight of this. A young man, standing at the crossroads of his life, turns not to the internet, not to a podcast—the death of civilization— not to ChatGPT—but to me. To a man who has thought more deeply about vocation, purpose, and the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action than almost anyone this young man is likely to encounter in his natural span on earth. I do not say this with pride. God forbid. Pride is the fall. I say it with the sober humility of a man who has spent years in deep thought and who knows, therefore, what he knows, and knows also—which is rarer—what that knowledge is worth, which is a great deal, though the market does not always reflect it, the market being, as I have observed elsewhere, a poor judge of value, which is why it prices hedge-fund managers above poets, a catastrophe of civilization from which we may never recover, though I will not belabor the point, having belabored it elsewhere to, I should say, insufficient recognition.

Here, at last, was a young person who understood that the important questions of life require a true sage.—And here I must confess to a sudden and terrible complication, for the reader will recall that I recently plucked a gray hair from my beard on the grounds that it was premature, a trespasser, a stolen valor of wisdom I had not yet earned. I argued, with what I still maintain was impeccable logic, that to keep it would be to impersonate an elder, to wear the costume of sagacity before one had been fitted for it. Very well. The logic was sound. But now—now!—a young man was sitting before me, consulting me as a sage, addressing me with the reverence due to a sage, effectively conferring upon me the very office whose badge I had just destroyed. He had come seeking a gray-bearded counselor, and I had, weeks earlier, eliminated the single piece of evidence he was right. Did this mean I must now cultivate the gray? Encourage it? Welcome the next one, and the one after that, and allow my chin to acquire the gravitas I had denied it? The thought filled me with a dread I am not equipped to describe, for it would mean I had been wrong—not morally or intellectually wrong, that is silly, but temporally wrong, wrong in my scheduling, wrong about the timetable of my own wisdom, which is the most humiliating form of error available to a man of my predictive wisdom. I resolved to think about it later. Some crises must be deferred.— Or at the very least, someone approximate to a sage. Or at the very, very least, someone who has read more books than the average person, which is a bar so low it constitutes a tripping hazard, but we must begin somewhere.

I told him I would need time to reflect. This was partly true—the question deserved reflection—and partly strategic, for I have learned that wisdom delivered too quickly is mistaken for opinion, whereas wisdom delivered after a suitable delay is received as judgment, and the difference between opinion and judgment is the difference between a paper napkin and a linen one: functionally identical, ceremonially worlds apart.

—I must digress here to note a growing crisis in the culture of advice-asking. People no longer know how to ask for advice. They approach you with the question already half-answered, their minds already three-quarters made up, and what they want from you is not counsel but ratification—the rubber stamp of someone they consider serious enough to dignify a decision they have already taken. I have been used in this way more times than I can count, and the indignity of it is bottomless, for it transforms the advisor into a notary public: a man whose wisdom is not sought but whose signature is. You are just being asked to cosign. But I did not suspect this yet. I was still innocent. The fall was coming, but the garden was still green.——

I reflected for three days. Three days, reader. I cleared time in my schedule—and my schedule, I should say, is the schedule of a man who is perpetually overcommitted precisely because he cannot say no to the demands of his own intellect, which generates more tasks than any single human life could execute, a fact I consider—in humility—not a burden but an honor, a superabundance of vision that would be a gift to the world if the world had the wisdom to receive it, which, as we are discovering, it does not.—I cleared time. I sat in my study. I consulted sources despite the fact that I did not need them—the essential insight was already available to me from my own reserves— because I wanted to dignify the young man’s question with the full ceremony of intellectual seriousness. I wanted him to feel that his crossroads had been met with the sincerity it deserved, and if I am honest—and I am always honest, sometimes to my own detriment, a detriment I bear stoically—I wanted to produce something worthy of myself. A piece of counsel so complete, so lapidary, so perfectly calibrated to his situation that he would carry it with him for the rest of his life and, in his later years, tell his own children: “Once, when I was young and lost, Hussein sat me down and said to me—” and here he would repeat my words, verbatim, the way the disciples of the great rabbis preserved the sayings of their masters, because some words, once heard, become permanent furnishings of the soul.

—Is this grandiose? Perhaps. But the alternative is to treat the advice casually, to toss off some remark between sips of coffee, and this I refuse to do, not from vanity—though vanity, as we established in my previous writings, is never entirely absent from my behavior, a fact I disclosed with such devastating honesty that I should think it has immunized me from further accusation on the subject—but from respect. Respect for the question. Respect for the young man. Respect for the ancient and nearly extinct tradition of one human being actually transmitting something of value to another through the medium of speech, a tradition so endangered that it should be protected by international treaty, and if the UN had any sense—which it does not, and I say this having studied its corruption with the same metacritical attention I bring to everything—it would classify genuine advice as an intangible cultural heritage, alongside Mongolian throat singing and the art of Neapolitan pizza, both of which are, admittedly, more widely appreciated than my advice, though I would argue less nourishing.——

We met at a cafe. I do not frequent cafes as a rule; they are too loud, too aesthetically liberal—by which I mean hollow and meaningless, which is what aesthetic liberalism always means in the end—and the coffee requires answering more questions than a doctoral defense. Hot or iced? What size, and in whose naming convention? What milk, and from which mammal, or which nut, for we have now extended the concept of milk so far beyond its biological origins that the word has become a metaphor for itself? Do I want room for cream? Do I want it for here or to go? Would I like to add a shot? Would I like to round up for charity? I would like a cup of coffee. Plain. Hot. In a cup. That this requires negotiation more painful than the ones with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard tells you everything you need to know about a civilization that has lost the capacity for conversation: it cannot even order a beverage without turning the simple transaction into a failed attempt at stillborn dialogue it does not know how to have. But the young man had suggested a cafe, and I consented, because a sage must sometimes descend to the conditions of those he serves—Moses came down from the mountain, didn’t he? He did not ask the Israelites to climb up—and also because the cafe was near my barber, and I had an appointment afterward, a conjunction of errands that I mention because it demonstrates my practical efficiency, a quality that coexists harmoniously with my intellectual depth, the two being complementary rather than contradictory, whatever certain critics—I know who you are—may think.

I sat him down. I ordered a coffee I knew would disappoint me—I was right; it was overpriced, thin, and acidic, a coffee that did not have any reason to believe in itself and yet was liberally narcissistic—and I began. What is life but an endless series of disappointments?

I spoke for perhaps forty minutes. I will not reproduce the whole of what I said, partly because it would require its own essay, and partly because I do not wish to give away for free what was, in effect, a bespoke philosophical counsel that, had I any commercial instinct whatsoever, I would have invoiced. But the gist was this: that the question “should I leave my career for something meaningful?” was itself the disease posing as its own cure, because it assumed that meaning was a destination one could travel to, a city on a map one reaches by leaving the city one is in, when in fact meaning is not a place but a posture of the soul, and the man who cannot find it where he stands will not find it where he is going. I told him that “meaningful” had become a consumer category—like “organic” or “artisanal”—a label affixed to certain lifestyles to distinguish them from other lifestyles, when in truth the distinction is wholly fictitious. The man who leaves his desk and the man who stays at his desk are not, before God, distinguishable by the meaning of their occupations but only by the seriousness with which they inhabit them. I told him that the entire vocabulary of “finding yourself” and “following your passion” and “living authentically” was the vocabulary of a solipsistic culture that had replaced vocation with preference, calling with appetite, and the question “what is demanded of me?” with the question “what do I feel like?”—and that the second question, however sincerely posed, will never produce an answer that satisfies, because the self that asks it is the same self that must be transcended for the answer to mean anything, which is why the people who talk most about “finding themselves” are always still looking, and will be looking when they die, because the self is the disease and not the cure, and what they needed was never to find themselves but to forget themselves in the service of something that did not ask their permission and did not require their enthusiasm.

—And here I was, I admit, warming to the subject considerably; I could feel the rhetorical temperature rising in the way one feels a sermon gathering force, and I was aware—I am always aware, for self-awareness is among my most finely developed faculties—that I was no longer merely advising the young man but testifying, delivering a witness, and that the forty-minute advice had become, in its way, a small oration on the structure of the moral life, which is what happens when you consult a man like me on what you think is a practical question: the practical question is a door, and behind it is the room you did not know you were entering, and in that room is everything.——It was, I say without false modesty—and all my modesty is genuine, or at least genuinely intended, which is close enough—it was magnificent.

I finished. I took a sip of the disappointing coffee. I waited.

The young man looked at me. He nodded slowly. He said: “That’s really helpful.”

“That’s really helpful.” Three words. I had given him forty minutes of concentrated wisdom—the residue of a lifetime’s reading and suffering and reflection—and he had received it the way one receives a weather forecast: useful, briefly, and already fading. A total non-reception.

And then—and this was the true catastrophe, the catastrophe behind the catastrophe—he added, with serene confidence: “I’ve actually been talking with my life coach, and she says something really similar.”

His life coach. She says something really similar. My forty-minute oration on the structure of the moral life—drawing on sources the life coach has never heard of and addressing questions the life coach does not know exist nor could imagine exist—had been filed, in his mind, alongside the life coach’s remarks, as though the two were in the same category, adjacent products on the same shelf. I was the artisanal version of his life coach. The hand-crafted, small-batch variant of a service, also available, presumably, in a more convenient format, with flexible scheduling and an app.

He had already decided, of course. Before he sat down. Before I ordered the coffee. Before I spent three days in my study, consulting sources. He had already decided, and what he had wanted from me was not my counsel but my audience—not my wisdom but my attention, which is to say, my silence while he rehearsed his decision aloud in the presence of someone he considered weighty enough to lend it a dignified approval. He had come to me for the experience of having consulted a serious person, and now, having had the experience, he could proceed with whatever it was he had already chosen and tell himself.

I smiled, of course. I told him I wished him well. I meant it, in the sense that I did not wish him active harm, which is as close to goodwill as I can manage toward a man who has just used me as a prop in the theater of his own decision-making.

—And here I anticipate the loyal reader, the one who is now thinking: this is the anchor all over again. The gift that was not received as a gift. And that reader would be right—partly right—for the pattern is the same: I offer something of weight, and it is treated as decoration. But there is a difference that matters. The anchor was unsolicited. I chose to give it. The young man asked. He came to me. He sat me down and said, “I want your advice,” and what he meant was, “I want the feeling of having sought your advice,” and those two things are as different as prayer and its performance, as different as a vow and its recitation, as different as real intercourse and masturbation—and the gap between them, that gap, is the subject of this essay, and we are only beginning to see how deep it goes.—

I went home. I slept the sleep of the unheard, which is a shallow and bitter sleep, full of dreams in which one is speaking and no one is there, the words dissolving into the air like smoke from a sacrifice that has not been accepted.

3

I am a man who abhors solipsism. I abhor monologuing. I am a very communicative man. A man who knows how to listen. I really am. I am, if anything, too attentive to the words of others—absorbing them, weighing them, turning them over in my mind with the care of a jeweler examining a stone for fractures. Those who have read my previous writings know how seriously I take the act of attending to another human being—I have written whole passages on it, passages which I flatter myself were rather penetrating, though of course it is not for me to say, and I mention it only so you understand the gravity of what I am about to confess.

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