In my latest piece “On Truth and Beauty” I used John Steinbeck's East of Eden as an example of how art can “work” regardless of whether its central theme turns out to be true. In the case of that novel, the central theme is that we are not doomed to any fate, that we can choose who to become. My essay was also a response to another Quillette piece by biologist Jerry Coyne, who — unbeknownst to me at the time — frequently engages with the topic of determinism and free will.

I’ve long been familiar with determinism: the claim that our universe has been unfolding according to natural laws in a chain of cause and effect going back to the beginning of time, from which our minds are not immune, so that our experience of willpower is but an illusion we evolved to feel as we act out our fate. But I’ve never worried about it, because people still argue about the nature of reality, and physicists have yet to fully grasp its fundamental laws, and consciousness remains a mystery, so that it has always seemed to me that there is enough room for doubt to avoid an existential crisis. And in any case, even if we do live in a deterministic universe, then the illusion of free will is too strong to change our behavior, and the very pretension of choosing to change would be absurd.

Lately I’ve lapsed in my modus operandi of just not thinking about it. I’ve been carefully reading Coyne’s argument that free will is an illusion. And I’ve been wondering if I have an inescapable fate.

Most philosophers nowadays are “compatibilists” who claim to acknowledge the reality of determinism while maintaining that it is somehow still compatible with free will. This is nonsensical to me. Such philosophers seem to be playing semantic games to redefine free will into something less profound than genuine agency.

Compatibilism is not the same as operating within constraints, or within a narrow band of options. There are different flavors, but broadly, compatibilists claim that even if all of our desires are causally determined, we can still call those desires “free” so long as we genuinely want them, sans coercion, regardless of the fact that we were fated to have those desires and could not have chosen otherwise. And regardless of the fact that coercion would then be outside the control of the coercer just as much as the coerced.

Contra this attempt at contorting the concept of free will, Coyne writes that he adheres to biochemist Anthony Cashmore’s definition:

… I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.

Then Coyne elaborates:

In this definition there’s a “will” that doesn’t involve physical processes but can alter decisions. Another way of saying this is the way most people understand free will: “If you could replay the tape of life and return to a moment of decision at which everything—every molecule—was in exactly the same position, you have free will if you could have decided differently—and that decision was up to you.” This in turn can be condensed to the view that “you could have done other than what you did.” This concept is called “libertarian free will” or “contra-causal free will.”

I agree with Coyne and Cashmore that this is the only reasonable definition. But I don't want to rehash arguments about compatibilism here — you can read Coyne’s recent debate with for that. To me, the only relevant question is whether learning more about the nature of reality would strengthen the case for free will.

It isn't obvious to me that there's a compelling counterargument to determinism. At least since the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how agency could be possible in a world reliably governed by cause and effect.1 The philosopher Epicurus conjectured that atoms sometimes “swerve,” thereby injecting enough uncertainty into the laws of nature to make free will possible after all.

But as Cashmore points out, “even if the properties of matter are confirmed to be inherently stochastic, although this may remove the bugbear of determinism, it would do little to support the notion of free will: I cannot be held responsible for my genes and my environment; similarly, I can hardly be held responsible for any stochastic process that may influence my behavior!” In this scenario, atomic randomness rules the vagaries of fate. The causal chain would no longer be theoretically predictable, but the effects would remain outside of our control.

Nearly every day I wear a necklace bearing a quote from Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” It soothes me to fiddle with it constantly. If determinism is correct, then it may be my fate to have an invincible summer within me, but it’s troubling to consider that the opposite may just as well be true, and that someday my internal summer could wither away. I want to believe that under any circumstance, I can choose to muster strength. This isn’t about getting credit for being a strong person, but rather believing that resilience is within my control, so that nothing and no one can undermine me.

Similarly, I’ve often drawn strength from the example of Viktor Frankl, who persevered through extreme atrocity. By safeguarding his soul from the Holocaust, Frankl demonstrated that it is humanely possible to remain resilient no matter our condition:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Hard determinists like Coyne would contend that the ancient chain of cause and effect simply resulted in some humans who could hack it, and others who could not. That Frankl is still admirable, for what he was, much as we admire the majesty of other natural phenomena without attributing agency. We can stand in awe of Frankl just as we stand in awe of the Alps.

Having a fate doesn't bother me as much if I'm fated for greatness. I have no false modesty. If fate is real, then I couldn't take pride in my fortitude, but I would be inherently great through and through. Inevitably great. Irrevocably great.

In the Cashmore paper that turned Coyne into a determinist, Cashmore concludes:

The beauty of the mind of man has nothing to do with free will or any unique hold that biology has on select laws of physics or chemistry. This beauty lies in the complexity of the chemistry and cell biology of the brain, which enables a select few of us to compose like Mozart and Verdi, and the rest of us to appreciate listening to these compositions. The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.

But I don't want to be someone who only appreciates great art. I want to be someone who creates it, whether through my own volition or because it is my destiny. I want to experience an existence that is maximally interesting. I want my one, short life to be sublime. Whether greatness is achieved through merit, or is an intrinsic and inescapable quality of my being, matters less to me than the outcome I covet.

Arrogant? Probably. But I pity the artist who would settle for anything less.

Though I observe in myself that fate only bothers me if I am fated for mediocrity, I also see the inconsistencies in my point of view. For even if I have free will, then it is surely limited by so many factors outside my control — my genes and environment, the behavior of other people, sheer luck — that my determination alone could never be enough to secure my dreams. Even so, the feeling that I can do something about it, of being empowered at all, brings me (a perhaps illogical) comfort.

One of my favorite philosophers, Immanuel Kant, abhorred and rejected the ideas of determinists like Baruch Spinoza. For Kant, human dignity was predicated on freedom. He believed that if Spinoza was right, then humanity is naught but a “turnspit” lacking moral value.

Kant’s philosophy helped form the foundation of the humanistic worldview undergirding classical liberalism, alongside other Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, who asserted that man is “naturally free, equal, and independent.” This is the fundamental claim of the American experiment I cherish. Determinism does not necessarily undermine liberalism, if we are fated to insist on it, but taking determinism seriously does provoke me to wonder about the philosophical justifications for liberalism in a universe where dignity cannot be based on freedom.

I return, as ever, to Camus. He admonished us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Zeus punished Sisyphus by condemning him to push a boulder up a mountain, only for it to always roll back down to the foothills just before he reached the peak, where Sisyphus must descend to repeat his task for eternity. Camus found triumph within the tragedy:

But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

My understanding of Camus’ version of the myth is that the gods tried to take everything from Sisyphus, but one thing lay beyond their reach: his consciousness. They wanted him to suffer, but he does not agree to suffer. Sisyphus scorned the gods by choosing happiness instead.

But a hard determinist must go further and acknowledge that even our outlook is part of the causal chain going back to the beginning of time. That some of us are not merely condemned to mediocrity, but to degradation and wretchedness. Fated to be pathetic. Fated to wallow. Fated to despair.

If determinism is correct, then it is unavoidable that some of us are simply damned. So it chills my heart to take determinism seriously. And I fiddle with my necklace, but it brings me a little less solace than before.

1

Can no theory of physics rescue freedom? In The Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch points out that the threat to free will is actually more fundamental than the chain of cause and effect going back to the beginning of time. In classical physics, it is not just free will that is an illusion, but our experience of time itself. The concept of “cause and effect” is actually meaningless in spacetime, where past, present, and future exist simultaneously:

In spacetime, something happens to me at each particular moment in my future. Even if what will happen is unpredictable, it is already there, on the appropriate cross-section of spacetime. It makes no sense to speak of my ‘changing’ what is on that cross-section. Spacetime does not change, therefore one cannot, within spacetime physics, conceive of causes, effects, the openness of the future or free will. …

Consider this typical statement referring to free will: ‘After careful thought I chose to do X; I could have chosen otherwise; it was the right decision; I am good at making such decisions.’ In any classical world-picture this statement is pure gibberish.

But then Deutsch says that none of this matters, “because spacetime physics is false.” He insists that we must instead use quantum mechanics to explain the fabric of reality, and that this does not merely inject randomness. Quantum mechanics, according to Deutsch, suggests the existence of a multiverse — he believes this multiverse is compatible with freedom.

Though the passage of time is still an illusion in Deutsch’s multiverse, he restores meaning to cause and effect. It is sensical to say “event X” causes “event Y” to happen, if throughout the entire multiverse, Y reliably happens in universes where X took place, and rarely where X is absent. Conventional statements about free will, which classical physics had seemed to render absurd, are represented literally as the consequence of understanding free will as a distribution across the multiverse:

Because an individual’s variations and near identical copies share the same tendencies, most versions of an individual tend to make similar decisions. Taken together, the infinite versions of an individual’s choices emerge as a probability distribution across the many worlds. And because our choices affect the distribution of possible universes, the existence of human minds means that the multiverse is not random — that, for Deutsch, amounts to agency.

Even so, Deutsch’s multiverse presents a new tragedy. It would mean that there are infinite versions of me suffering every injury and injustice I thought I had narrowly escaped. When I tell the story of my car accident, for example, I emphasize that 90% of similar injuries require amputation — how lucky I am, that I was one of the 10% who got to keep her leg!

But doesn’t the existence of a multiverse suggest that most versions of me became amputees? How many multitudes of me died that night? I remember the icy nausea that accompanied the thought “I nearly died.” In a multiverse, that would be the sickening realization that an incalculable number of “me” really did just die. It would mean that every kind of agony that it is possible for me to suffer, some version of me suffers; the opposite is also true, of course, but that does not negate the tragedy.

Astronomy was my gateway drug to falling wildly in love with science. From time to time, I regret that I became an artist instead of an astronomer. Maybe it’s never too late to change your course through life, your identity, your ambitions… but I haven’t. One reason I wish I could live forever is to follow every path that one life is too short to take. I want to know what’s out there, in the final frontier.

The most wonderful part of being an artist is that I can use all of my untaken life paths, all of my unfulfilled yearnings, and create something beautiful out of them. My love of astronomy inspired two major artworks. I’ve written about both, and as I dream about what it must have been like for the Artemis II astronauts circling the moon, I’m also remembering how much joy I felt in making those pieces.

For one, I drew the moon every night for six months. The drawing at the top of this essay is a favorite. Last summer, I wrote about that experience for :

Drawing Never Dies

Learning How To See The Moon

visual essay by Megan Gafford…

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9 months ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Drawing Never Dies and Megan Gafford

For the other, I fitted star maps into the windows of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art that glowed like stained glass. Pinholes in the maps represented the stars, through which the sun projected constellations onto the walls and floors. As the sun travelled from east to west, and clouds floated by, the lights stretched and flickered. Sometimes, the star maps acted like pinhole cameras by projecting images of trees and passersby inside the museum. It was a cosmic cinema:

Both of these artworks taught me something I could not have predicted before I made them. In “Learning How To See The Moon” I explain what I discovered from my nightly drawings in depth. When I installed my star-map installation, I was uncertain about what optical effects would appear once I filtered all the sunlight through the blue panels, so that the result filled me with wonder as if I had no hand in its creation.

I feel so much relief that the Artemis II astronauts made it home safely, for their sake, but also for the sake of exploration. If they hadn’t, then I suspect future manned missions to the moon and beyond would become far less likely. And if I can’t travel the stars myself, then I need to live vicariously through the astronauts who get to make the journey.

If, like me, you wish there were even more images from Artemis II, then I hope my drawings and timelapse video help you scratch that itch.

Last week, dropped his latest serialized novel Time Machine on his new Substack for long-form fiction—complete with cover art by yours truly. Check out :

Cult Classic

Time Machine

TIME MACHINE…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Sam Kahn

This is the second novel I’ve illustrated for Sam. The first one was uproarious, and along with doing the cover art, I made a drawing for each chapter. If you missed Henchmen you can read it on Sam’s OG Substack :

Sam also has a Substack called dedicated to contests, debates, and polemics on literary and cultural themes.1 At this point, you might be wondering if Sam is addicted to creating Substacks. And you would be right! I had the pleasure of meeting him in person for the first time this month (he lives in Kyrgyzstan but came back to New York for a visit), and I witnessed him get the itch firsthand. It might be time to stage an intervention.

I had, of course, met Sam virtually before. Back in December, I hosted an salon with him about “The American Literary World of Today”:2

While he was in town, I gave him one of the chapter drawings I made for Henchman as a gift, with the ulterior motive of sending my artwork all the way to Kyrgyzstan—I wonder how many artists can say that their work is collected there? Sam says that he has “yet to have a conversation with anybody in America who knows anything about Kyrgyzstan—it’s in a part of the world that, from a Western perspective, is completely off the radar—but that’s basically just parochialism.”

Here’s the drawing embarking on that journey:

If you would also like to collect my artwork, you can take out a Founding Membership to Fashionably Late Takes. Founding Members get an archival, limited edition print of a drawing every year. You can also take out a regular paid subscription and I’ll mail you a postcard with my drawing on one side, and a handwritten thank you note on the back. This year’s print comes from my essay “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco.’”:

1

Another collaborator of mine, the indomitable , just came out with a piece in The Republic of Letters:

The Republic of Letters

Substacking While Female

Dear Republic…

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a month ago · 35 likes · 26 comments · The Republic of Letters and Liza Libes

Liza and I made this visual essay together a while back:

2

My next Interintellect salon with is tonight, in collaboration with the French Embassy in Manhattan, as part of a celebration of the Enlightenment coinciding with the 250th anniversary of American Independence:

Interintellect

Interintellect joins the French Embassy in the USA at the Villa Albertine on March 31

On March 31, Interintellect is teaming up with the French Embassy in the USA for NIGHT OF IDEAS, at Villa Albertine in New York…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Interintellect and Anna Gát

This drawing, which I made for my latest piece in , depicts the final scene in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I use the novel as an example of how “Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.” Curious how? Read on:

Quillette’s Substack

On Truth and Beauty

In a recent Quillette piece Jerry Coyne argues that “unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth.” When he made a similar assertion last June at a Heterodox Academy conference, it “resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane,” he writes. Wary that people might perceive him as “just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school,” Coyne writes about art from a defensive crouch—but because I’m an artist, and well within my lane, I have no such qualms. Coyne is correct when he writes…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Megan Gafford

In it, I defend biologist Jerry Coyne against allegations of anti-art bigotry. He claimed that art is not about truth. And he’s right! Art is about beauty.

was one of the people who bristled at Coyne’s claim. I’m a fan of McWhorter’s work, so I particularly wanted to convince him that art is actually about beauty. And I’m proud to report that he read the piece and told me that my argument won him over.

If you’re skeptical, then I hope I convince you, too. Please read it!

Coyne was so delighted that an artist agreed with him that he wrote a response to my piece on his blog Why Evolution is True, where he makes a similar point about the painter Francisco Goya that I discussed in for “The Power of Art in the AI Age”. Here’s the relevant passage, in which I compare Goya to Marcel Duchamp — I’m quoting at length because this excerpt pairs well with the Quillette piece:

About a century ago, Marcel Duchamp became the father of contemporary art by sidelining beauty in favor of what he called “a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anesthesia.” That was how he selected a manufactured urinal to display as an art piece titled Fountain. The art world eventually embraced Duchamp’s “ready-mades,” the ordinary objects he declared to be art, as the logical conclusion of devaluing traditional art skills to chase novelty.

Duchamp’s influence has diluted over time, but until recently, beauty was also an art-world taboo, and its unfashionable stench lingers. Art critic Dave Hickey tried to reconcile artists with beauty in the early 1990s by insisting that beauty would be the next major issue in the art world. This did not come to pass, but still emboldened future critics to soften their hearts.

Hickey inspired art critic Arthur Danto to think it was “time to have another look at beauty.” Danto admitted in the introduction to his 2003 book The Abuse of Beauty that he initially “felt somewhat sheepish about writing on beauty,” which “had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications.” For Danto, it took one of the most brazen terrorist attacks in history to make him realize that beauty matters, even though he was a philosopher of aesthetics:

The spontaneous appearance of those moving improvised shrines everywhere in New York after the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was evidence for me that the need for beauty in the extreme moments of life is deeply ingrained in the human framework. In any case I came to the view that in writing about beauty as a philosopher, I was addressing the deepest kind of issue there is . . . . But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.

Many contemporary artists are still embarrassed to unequivocally say that beauty is central to art. Such a statement, if not properly hedged, would be perceived as unsophisticated — even though it is true. This is not to say that artists should dismiss edge cases, but that edge cases should not overwhelm the central purpose.

Consider, for example, how the Spanish Romantic painter Francisco Goya depicted the grotesque. Goya said that his Los Caprichos (The Caprices), a series of aquatint and etching prints, is about “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.” Or, as art critic Robert Hughes put it, Goya made “eloquent and morally urgent art out of human disaster”:

Perhaps nowhere in his graphic work is there a deeper expression of pathos and fellow feeling for the condemned than in Capricho 32, Por que fue sensible (‘Because she was impressionable’). It is a portrait of a woman who was condemned to die for conspiring with her younger lover to kill her older husband . . . .

A beautiful woman sits in jail, surrounded by darkness of such intensity that it seems almost to be gnawing at her, eroding her fragile form. Her body, hands resting on her knees, forms a right triangle, the kind of absolutely stable and elementary composition Goya favored in his graphic work. Her head is bowed, and her expression is of silent, inward distress . . . . High up in the cell door is a rectangular spy hole, through which she can be observed. A crack of light beneath the ill-fitted door only reinforces the sense of carceral gloom . . . . It is entirely painterly, rendered only in brushstrokes. It is a tour de force of the aquatint medium, and its softness, its almost liquid delicacy, only serves to emphasize the terrible inequality that is its subject: the iron machinery of punishment poised to crush una mujer sensible into the grave.

In Los Caprichos, Goya paints misery beautifully. But elsewhere, such as in his painting of Saturn Devouring His Son, he creates an ugly scene of a hideous monster gnawing on a bloody and rigid human corpse. This comes from Goya’s Black Paintings, the murals he painted in his home later in life when he was consumed by misanthropy and feared going insane.

Though Goya had once made lovely pictures about sin and punishment, here he refused to beautify the brutality of the mythological Titan cannibalizing his son. That does not mean his Black Paintings cease to be art. They demonstrate the value of beauty by denying us its pleasures, showing us the tragedy of losing it.

Goya was never indifferent to beauty even when he would not create it. This is qualitatively different from Duchamp, who forthrightly described his own work as “anti-art” — and the art world should have taken him at his word.

You can read the rest of that piece here:

The Metropolitan Review

The Power of Art in the AI Age

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies…

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8 months ago · 100 likes · 20 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the hype around artificial intelligence is justified. How should a humanist — someone who cherishes human dignity and potential — react to this technological revolution?

If you ask , the prominent cultural critic who writes as , humanists should be horrified, perhaps even panicked. He’s the leading Substack Romantic denouncing AI and algorithms, calling for a New Romanticism to bring “technological overreach” and “brutal rationalism” to heel. Gioia talks about the Enlightenment like it’s a crisis to manage.1

While everyone who takes AI hype seriously is bracing for an uncertain future, humanists who disparage the Enlightenment are shooting themselves in the foot.

Gioia briefly concedes that “Rationalism has created tremendous benefits for society” but his disgust is palpable: “in its final stages it becomes... voracious and refuses to recognize any limits. It wants to swallow up everything.” Then he grossly oversimplifies history. Gioia talks about the “Age of Reason” and an “Age of Romanticism” as eras, while claiming that Romanticism caused any progress that took place in its time, as if its cultural influence was a complete and omnipotent cause.

He praises a shift towards “a more artistic, humanistic worldview dominated by Romanticism” that should serve as our “blueprint for the future.” And he gives the Romantics credit for everything from abolishing slavery and child labor to unlocking meaningful economic benefits from industrialization to “a growing respect for human dignity.” But Romanticism didn’t cause all of that progress just because it occurred during the Romantic Era, not least because humanism, in the sense that Gioia uses the term, came from Enlightenment thinkers.

Romantics who champion humanism are in philosophical debt to the Enlightenment. So when Gioia encourages us to “remove the light from the Enlightenment” to “counter the intense rationalism and expanding technological control of society” he should be careful what he wishes for. Threatening to extinguish the Enlightenment targets humanism along with rationalism.

If we’re going to plumb the past for good ideas, then we should start with a fuller history than what Gioia relates in his repeated calls for a New Romanticism.

The Enlightenment grew out of two radical upheavals in European thought: the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Martin Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, which fractured religious authority over what Christians believed. Then in 1543, Copernicus published his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around, reorienting how people understood their place in the universe. Both upheavals were made possible by the invention of the printing press, as Luther’s pamphlets and Copernicus’s book were both read widely because they could be printed at scale. Arguably, the Enlightenment ultimately emerged from an increased ability to disseminate knowledge.

Out of this intellectual landscape, Enlightenment thinkers tried to understand the world through empirical evidence and reason, instead of deferring to tradition and religion. They applied this worldview to their ethics and politics, challenging the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious persecution. John Locke argued in 1689 that men are “naturally free, equal, and independent,” and entitled to supplant governments that fail to respect their natural rights to “life, liberty, and possessions.”

About a century later, Immanuel Kant insisted that people have inherent dignity and an innate right to freedom. Philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin described Kant as being “virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedom” — and he explained how the Romantics would appropriate that intoxication as their own.2 Enlightenment thinkers believed these concepts were universal principles discoverable by reason.

To varying degrees of success, American and French revolutionaries tried to put these ideas into practice. They nearly lifted Locke word for word when, in 1776, the Americans declared that “all men are created equal,” and then in 1789, when the French insisted that men are “born and remain free and equal in rights.” But the French went too far with the beheadings and with converting Notre Dame into a temple of reason — the “Great Terror” was carried out during a revolution that began under an Enlightenment banner.

Gioia complains that “In the waning days of the Enlightenment, fact became bloodier than the bloodiest fiction.” He asserts that the “most obvious failure” of the “Rationalists of the 1700s… was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.” But just because 18^th century Frenchmen bungled liberal democracy, it does not follow that the Enlightenment and rationalism are responsible for their failures.3

The Terror is better understood as a devolving state-of-emergency, as French revolutionaries took drastic measures in fear of counterrevolution, civil war, and foreign invasion. It was the outcome of paranoia about political conspiracies, not of “imposing rational rules” on politics. Gioia is wrong to blame the Enlightenment through guilt of association.

He also takes aim at the Industrial Revolution, which like the Enlightenment was triggered by the Scientific Revolution — science applied to invention, rather than philosophy. Some inventions were profound; trains moved people, things, and ideas so quickly, across such vast distances, that they seemed to collapse space and time. In Gioia’s telling, “They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives — driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost”:

Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories — a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.

Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism — Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment?

As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives — an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.

Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments — embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

Gioia believes that today, as then, “Technology is no longer enhancing human life” while eliding the key legacy of the Industrial Revolution: it became possible, for the first time in history, for much of humanity to live above subsistence. Inventions like threshing machines made farming so efficient that grain and bread became vastly more affordable. The factories those Luddites torched were driving down the cost of cloth so that ordinary people could own multiple changes of warm, clean clothes. Basic necessities had never been so accessible. Industrialized societies today can hardly fathom pre-industrial levels of poverty — it’s preposterous to claim that technology ever stopped enhancing human life.

While Gioia writes that “We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today,” he ironically ignores the abject misery of pre-industrial life. Abuse and exploitation are ancient evils that persist in post-Enlightenment, industrialized societies — but to a vastly smaller degree than ever before in human history. And where humanistic values have reformed society, we have Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Kant to thank for them.

However polluting and cruel the earliest factories, they were better than no factories at all. Of course humanity wouldn’t get it all right within the first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution. Of course reform would be necessary. As Kant sagely observed, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” We are but apes muddling through a harsh yet beautiful world.

Future generations may look back at this moment and say that imperfect AI was better than no AI at all. That of course humanity wouldn’t get it right within the initial years of its invention, and of course reform would be necessary. But on balance, it was worth it.

Gioia isn’t wrong to worry about downsides and try to anticipate how we might prevent worst case scenarios, but he shouldn’t allow pessimism to consume him — even if tech insiders and AI researchers also express trepidation. Last month, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published a lengthy essay about “confronting and overcoming the risks of powerful AI.” Anthropic and OpenAI employees have been resigning with public letters expressing their dismay with AI safety. Meanwhile, in an X article by Matt Shumer4 that went viral last week, the AI startup co-founder and CEO wrote:

The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, aging itself... these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can’t predict or control. This isn’t hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

Notably, Shumer’s paragraph about downsides is roughly twice as long as his paragraph about upsides. Even someone who benefits from the power of this technology writes as if he experiences fear more vividly than hope. This is unsurprising, given that negativity bias — the human tendency to feel “bad” more potently than “good,” giving threats outsized weight compared to opportunities — is a thoroughly documented phenomenon.

It’s like dreading hell more than longing for heaven. It can be a risk-averse mentality that avoids catastrophe by giving up the possibility of flourishing. From this perspective, it’s better to languish in purgatory than take a gamble that might land you in hell, even if that choice forecloses on heaven.

But if “heaven” represents maximal human dignity and potential, then humanists should dare to open the pearly gates. They shouldn’t default to cowardice because risk is more salient than reward. This is the same dynamic that physicist Richard Feynman described in his 1955 speech “The Value of Science”:

Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does.

I learned a way of expressing this common human problem [from] a proverb of the Buddhist religion:

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

What then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use, but it obviously has value. How can we enter heaven without it?

The instructions, also, would be of no value without the key. So it is evident that, in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something.

Feynman grappled with the value of science because he worked on the Manhattan Project. Taking nuclear weapons into account, we can ask ourselves if we’d rather live with the state of scientific knowledge in the early 1940s, when there was no bomb but also no vaccines for polio or measles, when antibiotics were not yet widely available, when there were no effective treatments for cancer, and when maternal and infant mortality rates were roughly tenfold higher than today. Feynman’s first wife died of tuberculosis a few weeks before the Trinity test at the tender age of 25 — right at the cusp of when effective treatments were being discovered but were not yet available.

None of this is to say that we should be blasé about the perils of unlocking hell, but that we can’t unbundle the risks of scientific knowledge from the rewards. Like Feynman, we can take technological dangers seriously without disparaging the Enlightenment — especially because it was the Enlightenment that gave us humanism, and humanism is what Gioia should be reaching for.

Romantics tend to remind us that we can’t fully quantify crucial parts of the human experience like love, awe, and meaning. This reminder is true, good, and also compatible with the Enlightenment. It is quite reasonable to recognize the limitations of reason. Kant famously wrote a book titled Critique of Pure Reason, and David Hume understood its limits clearly when he declared that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” If Romantics chastise us for forgetting this insight, then they serve humanity well; when they attack the Enlightenment, they become churlish.

Gioia claims that “The goal isn’t to stop Rationalism. The goal is to make it serve human ends.” But harnessing rationalism to serve human ends is precisely what the Enlightenment thinkers set out to do. The Romantics were far more self-centered, as notes in “The ‘Neo-Romantics’ Are Just Nostalgic”:

The early Romantics wanted to transform the world, institute a regime of free love, open-air worship of God, aristocratic communism, and pagan sensuality. Their own experiments in these matters typically led to suicide, death, imprisonment, madness. … The Romantics were, in many cases, aristocrats or friends of aristocrats, who had the means to live — or at least attempt to live — unlike the masses, and at the same time, they in quite bad faith dreamed of egalitarianism. …

The melancholy failure of the Romantics — as Goethe, one of its progenitors and one of its greatest critics, saw — was its permanent dysfunctionality. Byron in the end might have done less for England than an anonymous schoolteacher, reverend, or member of Parliament. We could not say the same, however, about Goethe, who transcended pure romanticism in the pursuit of science, classicism, politics, theatre, art. It’s better to take the path of Goethe than Byron or Kleist.

Even Gioia admits, in an understated way, that Romantics tend toward excess. Buried in vitriol about how rationalism is “empty inside” and “lacks a heart and a soul,” he acknowledges that:

Even Romanticism can be pushed to dangerous extremes. When it rose as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, circa 1800, the Romanticist impulse had a healthy influence on society for a period of roughly fifty years. Then it got entangled in intense nationalist rivalries and other dysfunctional trends. So anything I say in favor of Romanticism is solely with regard to the current context.

At the present moment, it would provide a healthy corrective. But that doesn’t mean that the Romanticist impulse is beneficial in every setting.

Gioia fails to grapple with how his New Romanticism — if he even manages to channel such a feral impulse into a movement — may quickly spiral into similar dysfunction. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment never stopped having a healthy influence on society. Where science and technology may be misused, the Enlightenment gave us humanism to counteract abuse. The Romantics gave us incredible art, but no such practical tools for human flourishing. Being practical is rather antithetical to Romanticism.

If the AI hype is justified, then humanists should gather their resolve to harness it. Carl Sagan, the greatest popularizer of science and a humanist through and through, understood the stakes:

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds — a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others are not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Sagan admonished us to achieve a feat that’s far easier said than done. Becoming a spacefaring species will require solving a mindboggling confluence of puzzles — in propulsion, life support, radiation shielding, and problems we have yet to anticipate. What if this challenge exceeds what human minds can solve alone?

Space travel may require a kind of intelligence we don’t yet possess, and therefore need to build. If AI can help us solve these puzzles, then it could save us from going the way of the dinosaurs. Someday our descendants may look back at us with gratitude for braving the technological risks necessary to give them a chance at life.

That is what it means to open the gate to heaven — to the heavens.

1

I addressed Gioia’s concerns about AI harming art in “The Power of Art in the AI Age” for :

The Metropolitan Review

The Power of Art in the AI Age

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies…

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8 months ago · 98 likes · 20 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

A couple news items reminded me of old essays.

Last week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hand of their Doomsday Clock to “85 seconds till midnight,” which is “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.” If this sounds familiar, then that’s because they almost always move it closer to midnight with a grim pronouncement. By 2030, they might start counting the milliseconds.

I wrote about their fear-mongering in 2023, after the Bulletin announced that the Clock was “the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.” This piece was an Idea Worth Drawing For about ’s complaint that “There’s nothing particularly “scientific” about the clock. There’s no complicated risk-assessment algorithm or anything resembling the scientific method involved. It’s just a bunch of experts expressing an opinion and boiling it down to a dopey clock intended to scare the bejeebus out of people.”:

Claudette Colvin died a few weeks ago at age 86. I discussed her civil right activism in another Idea Worth Drawing For, this time riffing off one of ’s best essays about the difference between activists and thinkers. Haider writes that the activist game is about results — “every minute in which her goals are not achieved is a minute in which a harm has been achieved” — while the thinker game is about truth — “Meanwhile, from the thinker’s perspective, the only activism that doesn’t look like dishonorable demagoguery is, in practice, ineffective activism”:

And if you’re concluding dry January with a February cocktail, then you might enjoy my Ode to Martinis — a short, fun piece:

An early Merry Christmas to you all!

I’m going on holiday through New Year’s, with the next post coming out on January 6. But before I do, given that many of you might be coming up short on figuring out Christmas presents for your loved ones, I’d like to suggest that one of my limited edition, archival prints would make an excellent gift. This year’s print comes from one of my favorite visual essays, “America was supposed to be Art Deco.”

The prints are to scale, and the print shop did such a great job that they are nearly indistinguishable from the original. I mail these to Founding Members of Fashionably Late Takes, but because Substack doesn’t offer the option for collecting mailing addresses at point-of-sale, I email new Founding Members to request their address after sign up. So if you’d like to send a print as a gift, then you can give me the mailing address of your loved one, instead of your own, when you sign up. I’m happy to wrap the gift in Christmas paper, too. Shoot me an email at megan@fashionablylatetakes.com if you have any questions!

By the way, the same drawing comes as a postcard for paying subscribers (the tier below Founding Members). And this drawing in particular makes a great postcard! Okay, I’m done with the shameless self-promotion until next holiday shopping season.

In my latest piece for , I staged a scene where the good and bad sides of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compete in a chess match. I used a reference image of Bobby Fischer (U.S.) playing Michael Tal (U.S.S.R.) to make sure I drew an accurate chess board layout, while nodding to the Cold War era that I was writing about in “The Line Dividing Good and Evil.” And then I swapped out the players for two different images of Solzhenitsyn, using the convention of old Western movies where the good guy wears a large, white cowboy hat, while the bad guy wears black — one Solzhenitsyn wears a white shirt, and the other a dark suit.

Quillette’s Substack

The Line Dividing Good and Evil

In his 1973 account of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn memorably cautions…

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5 months ago · 10 likes · Megan Gafford

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My latest piece in came out yesterday, and it’s about what we can learn from the moral and literary failings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and James Baldwin. I used to re-publish my Quillette pieces here a few months after they come out, but they recently changed their republishing policies — and I think that was smart, because Quillette has a substack now, too! There's no need for so many duplicates of the same essays. This does mean you'll have to subcribe to Quillette to read past the paywall, but given that it's one of the best magazines around, then I hope this forces your hand if you haven't already subscribed. Also, this year Quillette turned ten years old, and they deserve a birthday gift for hitting that milestone!

I can't cross-post paywalled pieces, but here’s the link:

Quillette’s Substack

The Line Dividing Good and Evil

In his 1973 account of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn memorably cautions…

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5 months ago · 8 likes · Megan Gafford

Two of my recent essays are about the value of drawing: “Learning How To See The Moon” in and “The Power of Art in the AI Age” for (this one is also about the relationship between art and technology, and between Romanticism and the Enlightenment).

I wrote these pieces back to back, so that the first one felt like a prelude to the second. And they’re best read as a pair, which is why I want to weave them together here. “Learning How To See The Moon” elaborates on a key point I made in “The Power of Art in the AI Age” about the difference between how a camera and an artist see the world:

This is what it means to see great art and think, “That looks like a Friedrich painting,” rather than, say, a Degas. Even if Friedrich and Degas had painted the same scene, their equally accurate observations would not yield identical paintings like replicable scientific studies, because their styles are singular. Merely good artists cannot transcend imitation to paint pictures so uniquely their own. Those who fall just shy of the mark become the second-rate painters captured in the orbit of great artists, amplifying their styles into full-blown art movements until history forgets them.

This is one reason why the camera could never truly replace drawing and painting for artists, whereas it made sense for scientists to stop relying on naturalist drawings once photography provided a more objective way to make pictures. Artists never needed to react to photography by rejecting naturalistic representation or traditional skills, because cameras cannot observe reality with the same subjective lens that artists see through. These were never interchangeable ways of looking at the world.

The Metropolitan Review

The Power of Art in the AI Age

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies…

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7 months ago · 97 likes · 20 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

In “Learning How To See The Moon,” I get at the same point — that a camera and an artist see quite differently — by explaining what I learned from spending six months drawing the moon every night:

Photography produces more accurate images, but it cannot teach you how to see nearly so well as observational drawing. Had I snapped a photo of the moon every night, then I could have never known it intimately — like how sex brings you far closer to another person than sharing a kiss.

I paired my own drawing experience with my observations from teaching drawing at universities for a decade:

You can take a photo in an instant but then hardly register all the information it contains, whereas observational drawing demands that you choose where to place each line and dot, repeatedly comparing reality to every square centimeter of the emerging image, then changing the drawing to better match what you are looking at. When I teach drawing, I explain to students that the process is like those puzzles in children’s coloring books that present two nearly identical pictures and ask you to spot ten subtle differences between them; except in observational drawing, as you spot discrepancies, you correct them. Even when students fail at realism, after spending hours carefully observing their subject, they see it more clearly than if they had snapped an accurate photo, and that clearer vision helps them draw better on their next attempt.

It would have been easier to draw the moon by looking at a photograph, where my fingers would have never stiffened from hours spent drawing outdoors on frosty nights. Photography does the hard work of flattening the moving, three-dimensional world into two static dimensions. This is how Photorealists, like the painter Chuck Close, held the world still long enough to recreate it as accurately as the photos their paintings were based on. Otherwise, even if drawing a still life that supposedly sits still, every time artists move their heads, they see their subject from a slightly different angle, and over the course of an hours-long drawing, light changes from morning to evening, shifting shadows and colors. Admiration for Photorealism stems largely from appreciating how keenly those painters observed their photographs, which is indeed masterful, but they did not have to grapple with what the Impressionist ringleader Claude Monet called “the most fugitive effects” of nature.

Drawing Never Dies

Learning How To See The Moon

visual essay by Megan Gafford…

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9 months ago · 25 likes · 1 comment · Drawing Never Dies and Megan Gafford

This is not to say that cameras cannot teach something. You must sharpen your powers of observation to become a good photographer, too. But cameras cannot give you the most advanced lessons in learning how to see — for that, you will need a pencil.

I worry that as image generation becomes easier and easier, people will have fewer incentives to learn how to draw. It seems probable that AI image generation will make a lot of illustration and design work obsolete, for one thing. As I wrote in “The Power of Art in the AI Age,” technology has democratized the ability to transcribe reality — once upon a time, only artists could take selfies.

And though I’m excited about AI overall, I grieve over a possible future with less people drawing in it. If you don’t know how to draw from observation, then you can’t see well. This became apparent to me as a teacher, when I had to figure out how to show my students things that I could see clearly, but they could not see at all. Often teaching would feel like pointing something out to a friend who can’t locate what your finger is indicating. There! Right there! Can’t you see it?! Just turn your head a little! Oh, come on, it’s right there!

How can you see beauty fully without clear vision? I feel so much pity for people who can’t draw. It seems tragic to go through life without being able to see all of the beauty that’s right before your eyes.

A friend recently reminded me of something John Adams wrote about art, in a letter he sent from Paris to his wife Abigail in 1780. The quote became an earworm irritating my mind for the past few weeks:

Since my Arrival this time I have driven about Paris, more than I did before. The rural Scenes around this Town are charming. The public Walks, Gardens, &c. are extremely beautifull. …

To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries, and describe the Statues there, all in marble, in which the ancient Divinities and Heroes are represented with exquisite Art, would be a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment , improving in History, Mythology, Poetry, as well as in Statuary. Another Walk in the Gardens of Versailles, would be usefull and agreable.—But to observe these Objects with Taste and describe them so as to be understood, would require more time and thought than I can possibly Spare. It is not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires. The Usefull, the mechanic Arts, are those which We have occasion for in a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in Luxury, altho perhaps much too far for her Age and Character.

I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The Science of Government is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

When I first read this quote many years ago, I appreciated that one of America’s Founding Fathers felt duty-bound to make sacrifices so that future generations may enjoy a fuller life. But these are harsh words for the arts, which Adams slandered as relatively frivolous. He made the wrong sacrifice.

Winston Churchill understood the value of beauty better than John Adams did. Churchill was memorably misquoted by the Village Voice as rejecting a suggestion by a member of Parliament to suspend arts funding during World War II by demanding to know “Then what are we fighting for?” Though apocryphal, this quote is directionally true to what Churchill actually said about art in an address to the Royal Academy in 1938, on the eve of war:

The Arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them…. Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.

Churchill said that art is essential and valuing beauty is our duty; Adams said that art is a luxury and beauty is a waste of time until more important matters have been studied. Then again, in the same year that Adams wrote his letter to Abigail, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ratified its state constitution, which was principally drafted by Adams. In it, he penned a section titled “The Encouragement of Literature, &c.” to explain how the state government should promote education, science, and the arts. Adams also encouraged the formation of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that Massachusetts chartered in 1780. So he couldn’t have meant that he literally had no time to spare for art — at the very least, he cared about building state institutions “to sustain and encourage” the arts as Churchill admonished, even if Adams didn’t expect those institutions to mature until his grandchildren’s time.

There’s also a whiff of utopia in the vision of progress that Adams laid out in his letter that seems incongruous with his worldview. He was a principal architect of the American system of checks-and-balances in government, because he believed that whenever people “felt themselves secure in the possession of their power” they “would begin to abuse it,” and therefore “Without three divisions of power, stationed to watch each other, and compare each other’s conduct with the laws, it will be impossible that the laws should at all times preserve their authority and govern all men.” This understanding of humanity as innately corrupt, and therefore in need of a system to restrain our vices, is hardly utopian.

But in his letter, Adams confidently assumes that children will remember the lessons their parents drew from studying politics and war. He seems optimistic that he had identified an incentive structure to free future generations from the need to explore weightier topics. And when he wrote about balanced government, he expressed a hope that the American people were “too enlightened” to undermine checks-and-balances. It’s as if Adams could only meet Kant halfway, and only agree with the first half of the philosopher’s famous quip that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Adams accepted that humanity is crooked, but I wonder if he believed that he could straighten us out with his ideas for American governance.

The Metropolitan Review

The Power of Art in the AI Age

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies…

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8 months ago · 97 likes · 20 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

Contrast this idealism to how political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted the children of liberal democracy would behave in his 1989 essay (later expanded into a book) “The End of History?”. By this phrase, Fukuyama meant:

“History” with a capital H—what you could today call modernization or development. And the “end of history” was not about a termination of historical events, but more about where that historical process was going.

So the premise was basically trying to raise the question of progress: You know, are we making progress in human civilization? And if so, in what direction is that movement tending?

And at that time, my argument was that for 150 years, most progressive intellectuals thought — along with Karl Marx — that at the end of history there would be some form of communism. Marx says that quite explicitly. My observation was that it sure didn’t look like we would ever get there, and that if we were tending towards any final outcome, it would look more like a liberal democracy connected to a market economy. That was the argument, anyway.

I didn’t see a superior form of social organization over the horizon that we were still aspiring to — but it didn’t mean that all existing political systems were great or perfect.

And Fukuyama had concluded his 1989 piece on this glum note:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945 with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

Fukuyama predicted that art would become improbable once liberal democracy progressed into boredom at “the end of history”; Adams asserted that liberal democracy must progress through a couple generations of learning to justify art. But if Adams misplaced his faith in us to use our freedom wisely, then his prescription would defer art indefinitely. What if the moment we earn the right to study art, we just get bored and restart history instead?

Human history is an extended atrocity, and yet all throughout we have created beautiful paintings and poems. Should we have waited millennia until John Adams and his compatriots came up with the American system of government? And why didn’t we? Why has humanity felt compelled to paint for tens of thousands of years, even while living under conditions that modern man would find obscene? That suggests to me that painting has been useful to humanity for an incomprehensibly long time — it is not just a luxury.

I write often about the value of art and beauty, and a couple of my go-to examples come from Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor and psychologist, and Arthur Danto, who was a philosopher of aesthetics and an art critic. Both men treated beauty as a higher value in a way that may strike some as old-fashioned today. And both of them emphasize that beauty and art take on great importance in dark times.

In his 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl recalled how concentration camp prisoners would rush out of their huts to glimpse a sunset reflected in muddy puddles and whisper to each other of their awe at the world’s capacity for beauty. They “were carried away by nature’s beauty” and “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” Frankl also described how listening to a symphony can give us a reason to live — and I urge anyone skeptical about the value of beauty to contemplate the significance of a Holocaust survivor describing beautiful art as a reason to live.

Despite his training as a philosopher of aesthetics, Danto didn’t discover the value of beauty until he was pushing 80. In his 2003 book The Abuse of Beauty, Danto admits that he initially “felt somewhat sheepish about writing on beauty” which “had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications.” It took one of the most brazen terrorist attacks in history for him to realize that beauty matters, when “The spontaneous appearance of those moving improvised shrines everywhere in New York after the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was evidence for me that the need for beauty in the extreme moments of life is deeply ingrained in the human framework.” That’s when he finally realized that “beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.”

Both pretentious art world insiders and John Adams have treated beauty as unserious. And at times, beauty can be appropriated for saccharine purposes. The same sunset that sustained the souls of concentration camp prisoners may also be printed on a sappy Hallmark card or painted into the background of a kitschy Thomas Kinkade painting. But these tacky representations do not detract from the beauty of a real sunset. They show us what it looks like when someone has not depicted beauty eloquently.

Artists are responsible for summoning more beauty into the world. They have a duty to enrich humanity just as John Adams had a duty to begin the American experiment. In dark times, masterful artists can give people a reason to live, and at the end of history, artists must try to resist apathy. Imagine if we could summon enough new beauty into the world to divert people from boredom and help prevent us from restarting history. Even if we fail, the beauty we create will sustain us in the dark times ahead once history begins again.

For this “Artist Statement” series, I share the influences and decisions behind the artwork in Fashionably Late Takes.

Earlier this month, released the final chapter of his serialized novel Henchman, which I had the joy of illustrating. It's a satire of some of my favorite stories — James Bond, Indiana Jones, John Wick, Flash Gordon — told from the perspective of an introspective henchman named Banx Mulvaney. The story begins with Banx reflecting, “So many of my friends are dead.”

When you meet Banx in the cover art, he's posed like Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, surrounded by the still-warm bodies of his vanquished friends. Behind him, a nuclear missile sits ready on a launch pad beside a glowing control panel, and a femme fatale gazes down at the sad scene from a suspended walkway. Banx is hopelessly in love with her, but no mere henchman gets the Bond girl.

These three elements — the dead and disposable henchmen that Banx mourns, the career in villainy that he takes pride in perfecting, the unrequited love that haunts his hopes — are the preoccupations that motivate Banx throughout the novel. The cover art is like a large thought bubble that introduces readers to the mind of our protagonist.

Castalia

Henchman

HENCHMAN…

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10 months ago · 41 likes · 9 comments · Sam Kahn

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Every year, I put out a limited edition, signed series of archival prints for Founding Members of Fashionably Late Takes. These reproductions are to scale, and the print shop does an excellent job reproducing the tone of my original drawings. For this third year of my Substack, the annual print is from my essay “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco.’”

If you’re already a Founding Member, then you’ll receive your new print when your membership renews. Paying subscribers also receive access to my “artist statement” posts, in which I explain my thoughts about my drawings. If you’d like to purchase this year’s print, then please upgrade your subscription:

Subscribe now

And just in case you missed it, please check out my latest piece in about art and artificial intelligence. Culture critics like have been calling for a New Romanticism to combat the impacts of AI on art. Here’s my take:

The Metropolitan Review

The Power of Art in the AI Age

Once upon a time, only artists could take selfies…

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7 months ago · 90 likes · 19 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

A steady hum of artists and writers have been calling for a New Romanticism, largely in reaction to artificial intelligence. Romanticism is often — though neither inevitably nor entirely — a negative reaction to new technologies.

And no wonder: Last year, for example, blogger Scott Alexander challenged 11,000 people to conduct an AI Art Turing Test that asked them to identify which of the 50 pictures were generated by AI versus which were culled from the art historical canon. He concluded that “most people had a hard time identifying AI art" and barely performed better than a coin toss at figuring out whether a human made a given image. Perhaps remarkably, he also found that “most people slightly preferred AI art to human art" and that “even many people who thought they hated AI art preferred it."

What, then, is the purpose of 21st century painting?

This question is the focus of my upcoming salon, which will take place online at 6pm EDT on September 20. I’ll lead the conversation about artistic anxiety in the age of AI, but this isn’t a lecture — everyone who participates gets to share their point of view. You can register for the event here:

Get your ticket!

My visual essay on this topic for will drop on September 12, and then I’ll cross-post it here for Fashionably Late Takes subscribers on the 16th, ahead of the salon. In it, I’ll give an overview of who the “New Romantics” are and what they believe, some context about Romantic art, and my perspective on what Romanticism should mean for us today in our irredeemably technological age.

Hope to see you at the salon!

This visual essay first appeared in on May 3, 2025. I regularly contribute visual essays to Quillette that spotlight pieces from the magazine’s archive.

For almost 300 years, America has cultivated the metaphor of a shining city on a hill to describe how a righteous society is a beacon for a better life—but the same light casts that city under a glare, exposing its defects. The image comes from Jesus speaking to his followers in the Book of Matthew (5:14), “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” When the Puritans departed England for Boston in 1630, their leader John Winthrop used the metaphor to warn them that “the eyes of all people are upon us,” as they set forth to establish a new community.

Two hundred years later, when Alexis de Tocqueville chronicled American democracy in the 1830s, he asserted that these early colonists “brought to the New World a Christianity that I cannot depict better than to call it democratic and republican,” for “[n]ext to each religion is a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity.” Twentieth-century American presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama made a habit of referencing the shining city in speeches, especially when visiting Massachusetts, to define America as a lighthouse for liberalism. In Australia, the variation “the light on the hill” was used in a 1949 speech by Prime Minister Ben Chifley.

The image of a shining city on a hill encapsulates the optimistic vision that free, open societies will thrive and spread as the world converts to liberal democracy. But it comes with a warning: The same torch that beckons the huddled masses toward Lady Liberty also illuminates the shame of liberal democracies that betray their values. Because the light symbolises righteousness, every failing is an indication of hypocrisy. And like women inspecting their pores under the cool glow of LED-rimmed mirrors, each blemish can make citizens of liberal democracies more neurotic—while clever dictators shroud themselves in mood lighting.

If the story of the twentieth century was that of liberalism overcoming totalitarianism, then the question facing the twenty-first century is whether that win is durable. Liberalism likely needs the self-esteem expressed in a belief that it is a shining city on a hill to withstand whataboutism from its repressive and violent competitors. Its people need to fix problems rather than fixate on them, so that when citizens of liberal democracies feel as though they’re standing under harsh fluorescents, it is because they are like surgeons stitching wounds—not pathologists conducting autopsies.

Admittedly, right now it feels as if the American-led liberal order is haemorrhaging on the operating table. It has been compromised by President Donald Trump curtailing alliances and trade with nearly every other liberal democracy—except perhaps one. “Publicly, Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters continue to paint Trump as a staunch, irreproachable supporter of Israel,” wrote the Israeli historian Benny Morris for Quillette last month:

They point to the fact that, during his first term as president, he transferred the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Israel had long demanded, and remind people that he helped facilitate the Abraham Accords of the early 2020s, which normalised the Jewish State’s relations with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and even Sudan. And in recent weeks, he revoked his predecessor Joe Biden’s suspension of certain weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound (907 kg) aerial bombs and 155 mm artillery shells.

But serious doubts remain as to Trump’s commitment to the “special relationship” between Washington and Jerusalem, especially in view of his apparent abandonment of Ukraine and his very public efforts to distance the United States from its traditional commitments to European security.

Morris explains that the special relationship is “based on shared values like support for democracy” and that it “predates even the establishment of Israel itself in May 1948.” From the American perspective, many people understand the very existence of Israel as a consequence of the twentieth-century battle between liberalism and totalitarianism, and they learn about Israeli history as a sequel to the Holocaust story. More broadly, citizens from all countries that once liberated Nazi concentration camps have incorporated their grandfathers’ heroism into their national identities so that the outcome of the Holocaust story is pivotal to how people in all liberal democracies think of themselves.

This includes Israelis. For David Ben-Gurion, the “founding father” and first prime minister of Israel, the Jewish State was meant to be “a light unto the nations.” This formulation comes from the book of Isaiah (49:6), “I will also make you a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

W.E.B. Du Bois saw Israel’s potential and urged his fellow Americans to help the aspiring country, writing that it was “not a difficult question.” He became an early supporter of Israel after he saw the flattened Warsaw ghetto. It taught him that his previous framework for understanding race relations had been provincial, restricted as it was to conflicts between black and white. He writes:

I have been to Poland three times. The first time was 59 years ago, when I was a student at the University of Berlin. I had been talking to my schoolmate, Stanislaus Ritter von Estreicher. I had been telling him of the race problem in America, which seemed to me at the time the only race problem and the greatest social problem of the world. He brushed it aside. He said, “You know nothing, really, about real race problems.” …

I was astonished; because race problems at the time were to me purely problems of color, and principally of slavery in the United States and near-slavery in Africa. …

The result of these three visits, and particularly of my view of the Warsaw ghetto, was not so much a clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as it was a real and more complete understanding of the Negro problem. In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery. So … the ghetto of Warsaw helped me to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.

Du Bois describes liberalism as having the impact of the shining city on a hill—a “civilization… to triumph and broaden in the world.” He imagined Israelis as fellow dreamers about the freedom that liberalism has to offer. But now, 75 years later, many Americans who think they continue his legacy, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, compare Israel to the villains from the Jim Crow era that Du Bois lived through.

And so, the only liberal democracy not yet alienated by President Trump is viewed with suspicion by many Americans, and plenty of others in the Western world. Though all liberal democracies are frequently subjected to scrutiny, only Israel is strip-searched. Leading up to 7 October 2023, it became fashionable among some liberals to call Gaza an open-air concentration camp. But if it is true that even the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors can grow up to behave like Nazis, then that implies that liberalism itself is a precarious condition—that lofty ideals will dim once our inner demons inevitably overcome the better angels of our nature. And that perhaps human nature is not honourable enough to keep us faithful to our enlightened ideals for very long.

For those of us who cherish liberalism as a philosophy, it can feel imperative that Israel succeed in living up to our ideals, to give our Holocaust story the right ending. And so the West obsesses over Israel; perhaps no other topic inflames tempers and attracts propaganda merchants as much as the twinned fates of Israel and Palestine. It is hard to find information on the subject that is uncontaminated by prejudice.

One heuristic for discerning who aims at the truth is finding those willing to critique their own side of the argument—this is a terrific challenge, for it is human nature to fear that criticising one’s own side will simply give succour to one’s enemies. We can use this metric to help distinguish whether someone is partisan or principled. The principled person is an emissary from the shining city on a hill, in an information landscape suffering from a blackout.

One such emissary is Israeli historian Benny Morris. In 1988, he coined the term “New Historians” to describe writers like himself, who set out to clarify their country’s story. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ethan Bronner has summarised their influence in a 2003 New York Times piece:

Dismissed at first as self-haters and even traitors, the new historians gained respect during the 1990’s—so much so that a 1998 series on state television to mark Israel’s 50th anniversary borrowed considerably from their work, as did ninth-grade textbooks introduced the following year.

History does not get written or read in a vacuum. The new historians had an agenda—promoting the peace process then beginning. And many Israelis, eager to put an end to their century-old conflict, were willing to be told that their successful nation building had come at a high cost to the Palestinians. They were adjusting their collective narrative to make room for coexistence with onetime enemies.

Morris expresses this stance in his first essay for Quillette, where he shares the story of his military jail-time in Israel. He served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for over twenty years, first as a conscript and later as a reservist, and during that time spent three stints in jail. The first two incidents were humorous and inconsequential wrist slaps for acting like a “miscreant,” as Morris describes his younger self, but he writes that “the third and last incarcerative episode was the most serious, and no joking matter”:

I refused to take part in the suppression of the First Intifada, which had broken out the previous December …. The platoon and company commanders tried to dissuade me. I stuck to my guns. …

“What we are doing is wrong; a crime,” I said.

“You leave me no choice,” [my commanding officer] replied. “I’ll have to send you to prison. And believe me, it’s not for you, you’re a journalist, a doctor [of history].” (A few months before, I had published my first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949.)

“I also have no choice. We have to get out of the territories.”

“Even if I agree with you, in the army we must carry out orders. It’s not a matter of political beliefs. I sentence you to 21 days in jail,” he concluded. …

Prison Number 4 would not take in new inmates during the weekend. So I spent it in a tent with a quartermaster who had been denied leave for some offense or other. He was of North African origin and his hard line was typical of Israel’s Mizrahi Jews. “The only way to end the Intifada is to hit them hard, with an iron fist. It’s the only language they understand. If you speak to them and act softly, they think you are weak, they will exploit you. Be tough, and they’ll respect you,” he said.

While he was imprisoned for his conscientious objection, Morris got into an argument with a fellow prisoner who believed the kinds of things that Israel’s critics and enemies often suspect of Israelis:

“They should have given you a year, not 21 days. We should kill all of them [i.e., the Arabs]. Stand them up against a wall and shoot them.” He takes aim with his arm, spraying the wall with gunfire. “We should do to them what Hitler did to us. Because that’s what they want to do to us. And you guys, you Peace Now-niks and leftists, you’re working for them, for the PLO. As it says in the Bible, ‘thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth out of thee.’” (Isaiah 49:17) It was all very public. During the discussion—more accurately, his rant—prisoners gathered around us. They clearly agreed with Darwish. There was a feeling of mob violence in the air. But nothing happened.

A lesser man would have left that part out of his story to help his side of the conflict save face.

In the coming years, both Morris and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would change. When the far more vicious Second Intifada began about a decade later, Morris opposed conscientious objection. In 2004, towards the end of the Second Intifada, he gave an interview to Ari Shavit in Haaretz. Shavit prefaces the interview by splitting Morris into two personalities: historian Morris, “the great documenter of the sins of Zionism,” and citizen Morris, who “in fact identifies with those sins … he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.”

Shavit sets the scene: “The researcher who was accused of being an Israel hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in the British paper The Guardian.” At the same time, Morris continued publishing new evidence of Israeli war crimes, including frequent rape, from their 1948 war with the Palestinians. Shavit probes Morris to understand how the historian reconciles his exceptional compassion for Palestinian suffering with his unapologetic Zionism, and how the Second Intifada altered his point of view.

Their exchange is breathtakingly blunt:

Shavit: Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

Morris: There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.

Shavit: We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society …. They perpetuated ethnic cleansing.

Morris: There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing … when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing.

Shavit: And that was the situation in 1948?

Morris: That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

Shavit: The term “to cleanse” is terrible.

Morris: I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.

The connotations of “ethnic cleansing” are more powerful than the definition, on which none agree. But Morris refuses to pussyfoot around phrases just because they elicit disgust and opprobrium—elsewhere in the interview, he explains that compared to other nations’ wars, Israel only committed “small war crimes” in 1948. Whatever this bald language may cost Morris in diplomacy is compensated by the credibility it gives him as a straight talker. People can condemn him for his beliefs, but he clearly came by them honestly. He seems immune to any temptation to sugarcoat the Israeli side of the story.

When Shavit asks Morris if he would advocate a population transfer in the future, the historian answers that it would only be justified in an apocalyptic situation. Morris also explains that his views changed at the turn of the century, after diplomacy had repeatedly failed. The violence of the Second Intifada convinced him that the Palestinians “are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all.” Similarly, in his 2003 New York Times piece, written during the Second Intifada, Bronner notes that:

There were virtually no Palestinian “new historians” asking whether their leader in the 1930’s and 40’s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was right to collaborate with the Nazis, calling for the killing of Jews “wherever you find them.” Few Muslim leaders questioned whether sending suicide bombers into Israeli cafes was a moral act. No Arab television station ran a series on David Ben-Gurion’s confrontation with rebel Zionist militias. Israel’s new historians were viewed by Arab intellectuals not as an invitation to self-examination but as further evidence that Zionism was a crime. Worst of all, in 2000, when Israel offered Yasir Arafat more than 90 percent of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a Palestinian state, his rejection was accompanied by a terrorist war that shows no signs of stopping.

Morris clarifies that he still supports a two-state solution ideologically, because it is the most humane outcome. But he predicts that there will be no peace in either his lifetime or for the next generation:

Shavit: Aren’t your harsh words an over-reaction to three hard years of terrorism?

Morris: The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don’t see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us.

Shavit: Yet we, too, bear responsibility for the violence and the hatred: the occupation, the roadblocks, the closures, maybe even the Nakba itself.

Morris: You don’t have to tell me that. I have researched Palestinian history. I understand the reasons for the hatred very well. The Palestinians are retaliating now not only for yesterday’s closure but for the Nakba as well. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but nevertheless I don’t see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren’t blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here, something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture.

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and, as Morris points out, the fundamental problem for the Jewish State is that it is located within an illiberal and tribal part of the world where, Morris believes, “human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien.” Though he believes that Western liberalism is strong, he is unsure whether Western liberals understand how to “repulse this wave of hatred.” He frames the conflict between Israel and Palestine as “a clash between civilizations” that threatens liberal democracy everywhere. He tells Shavit,

Morris: Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic of the 21st century …. It’s not only a matter of bin Laden. This is a struggle against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front line. …

Shavit: … You are not entirely convinced that we can survive here, are you?

Morris: The possibility of annihilation exists.

We are reading this interview about twenty years after Morris and Shavit spoke, while every liberal democracy in the world has been embroiled in protests over the Israel–Hamas war. Morris’s perspective suggests that the unrest is global because Israel is “on the front line” of an international war of ideas and values.

Reading Benny Morris can help the West comprehend the inescapable savagery of this conflict. He embraces the complexity that undiscerning polemicists like Ta-Nehisi Coates reject. Morris recently lambasted Coates’ The Message in his Substack newsletter Benny Morris’s Corner:

In “The Message” Coates zooms in on Israel’s ills: The minority of extreme right-wingers and Kahanists—like Israel’s former national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who honors, indeed adulates, murderers like Baruch Goldstein, who mowed down 29 Arab worshippers in a Hebron mosque in 1994—and their deeds and pronouncements. The inexpert reader will come way from “The Message” with the impression that that is Israel. “Goldstein has won,” he tells us. And maybe down the road he will. But he hasn’t yet and maybe he won’t. And certainly this wasn’t the picture during most of Israel’s lifetime. Wokists may not pardon me, but I still believe that Ehud Barak hit the nail on the head when he described Israel as “a villa in the jungle.” Coates, after a ten-day junket spent mostly among Arabs and in the occupied territories, and reinforced by selective reading, mostly by Israel-haters, is essentially ignorant. A little modesty is perhaps in order, even by a person perched on the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English Department of Howard University.

Morris has published numerous essays in Quillette, many of which offer commentary on the current Israel–Hamas war. Consistent with his longstanding practice, these essays do not shy away from painful truths, even when they implicate Morris’s own side. For example, in the piece, “Benjamin Netanyahu, Would-Be Authoritarian,” Morris argues that the Israeli leader has been trying to “concentrate power in his hands” to “allow him to undermine free speech and the rule of law in Israel.”

Morris explains how the Prime Minister has tried to wrest control of the Israeli Supreme Court; how he has allied himself with extremists who allow (or even encourage) “West Bank settlers to harass and terrorise their Arab neighbours”; how the police under Netanyahu’s tenure have increased surveillance of Arab Israeli citizens, so that “freedom of expression of Israel’s Arabs has been severely curtailed.” Clearly, Morris has not become a nationalist yes-man.

Some of Morris’s other Quillette essays directly confront falsehoods about Israel. After the New York Times published an erroneous primer on the 1948 war—a topic Morris covers in detail in his 2009 tome 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War—he wrote a comprehensive rebuttal to their “welter of factual errors and misleading judgments.” Where the Times obfuscates with the passive voice and lies of omission, Morris assigns agency and makes history explicit. As he writes:

the article’s worst historical distortions concern the events surrounding the Second World War. [Derek] Penslar claims that “between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought for the Allied forces in World War II.” In fact, as far as I know, it is doubtful whether any Palestine Arabs actually “fought” during the war, though perhaps some 6,000 of Palestine’s 1.2 million Arabs signed up with the British and served as cooks, drivers, or guards in British installations in Palestine. By comparison, around 28,000 of Palestine’s Jews—out of a population of around 550,000—joined the British army, and many of them actually fought in North Africa and Italy in 1941–1945.

This talk of Palestine Arabs “fighting” alongside the British is, at best, misleading. Palestine’s Arabs—like most of the Middle East’s Arabs—would have preferred a Nazi German victory and the defeat of the Western democracies. The British were seen as the common enemy of the Germans and the Palestinians. As Sakakini, a Palestinian nationalist, relates in a diary entry of 1941, the Arabs of Palestine “had rejoiced when the British bastion at Tobruk fell to the Germans,” and “not only the Palestinians rejoiced … but the whole Arab world.”

This support for Hitler wasn’t merely a matter of the old adage that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestine national movement, was an outspoken antisemite. He aided the 1941 pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad. When it collapsed, he fled to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war years enjoying a handsome salary for his work as a Nazi propagandist and a recruiter of Balkan Muslims for the SS.

Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust; and they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war. In radio broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against Britain and “kill the Jews.”

Similarly, in “Tragedy and Half-Truths: A Gaza Diary,” Morris describes how Atef Abu Saif’s 2024 book Don't Look Left “provides a vivid account of the horrors of daily life in the Gaza Strip, yet omits to mention Hamas’s role in the war.” Morris unflinchingly acknowledges how much misery the war, including Israel’s attacks, has inflicted. In Saif’s memoir, “Death haunts every page; everyone lives in fear that today might be his last.” Compassion is important—but so is historical accuracy. He writes:

But why the ongoing tragedy of the 2023–24 war in Gaza came to pass—at least, its immediate context—is completely elided in the book’s 280 pages, which renders the work, however accurate and moving in its details, a piece of propaganda. Completely absent from its pages are the Hamas fighters and their brothers in the smaller Islamic Jihad organisation, who, in a surprise attack on 7 October 2023, invaded southern Israel and murdered 850 civilians, raped countless women, and took some 250 Israelis hostage—most of them civilian men, women, and children ranging in age from a few months old to octogenarians—and killed some 360 IDF soldiers, while they destroyed most of the border-hugging kibbutzim with their peace-loving, left-wing inhabitants. Yet it is that assault that triggered the devastating Israeli response, now in its eleventh month.

Incredibly, the word “Hamas” appears only twice in the book and Hamas fighters, whether alive, wounded, or dead—and, according to the IDF some 15–20,000 of them have died so far—are nowhere mentioned, not once.

The West won’t be so easily misled if more liberals read Benny Morris. And given the potentially moribund state of the American-led liberal order, becoming genuinely knowledgeable about this conflict is imperative. If we take liberalism seriously as the best ideology humanity has yet mustered, then it is our duty to champion that position on the world stage.

Israel may not survive without US support, as a tiny country on the frontier of liberal democracy that has always depended on American military aid to fend off the enemies that encircle it. We should worry with Morris about the possibility of its annihilation. Given that US support for every liberal democracy has become unpredictable, the rest of the West must find enough self-esteem to defend liberal values and liberal states while America gets its house in order. For too long, the status quo for “good liberals” in the West has been self-depreciating cynicism about the virtues of the free world. This is a cowardly position that shrinks from the challenge of never making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Liberals don’t like to think of themselves as the kind of people who wage war; it is not gunfire that lights up the shining city. But come what may for this vexed conflict, liberal democracies can neither allow their adversaries to define them with bad-faith accusations nor compromise on their commitment to self-examination. And they have the best tool on hand for finding this clarity: enough light for those who have eyes to see.

This art review first appeared in back in December 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and it seems fitting to re-release it as a companion to my latest visual essay for , “Learning How To See The Moon.” Though I was not pairing my writing with drawings back then, I had already drawn the moon every night for six months before writing this essay about art that was smuggled to the moon — and I’m including another moon drawing here that I didn’t share in the last piece.

Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1969, the New York Times broke a story about a handful of famous U.S. artists who claimed they smuggled art to the moon. The tiny work, titled “Moon Museum,” was spearheaded by sculptor Forrest “Frosty” Myers in collaboration with five icons of the 1960s American art scene: John Chamberlain, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Each artist contributed a minuscule drawing that two engineers from Bell Laboratories, Fred Waldhauer and Robert Merkle, etched onto ceramic wafers smaller than postage stamps.

Myers wanted NASA to bring one of the “Moon Museum” wafers on the Apollo 12 mission to land men on the moon for the second time, just four months after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind. He tried to go through official channels, but when NASA was unresponsive, he recruited another engineer at Cape Kennedy, Florida, who promised to attach one of the wafers onto the Intrepid lunar module that would be left behind on the moon during the Apollo 12 mission.

On this 50th anniversary year of the moon landings, museums across the U.S. — from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to the Gregory Allicar Museum in Fort Collins, Colorado — have put “Moon Museum” wafers on display in art exhibits that celebrate NASA’s historic achievement.

In the Colorado show, Allicar Director and Chief Curator Lynn Boland plays up the mystery by displaying the kind of paraphernalia that fictional FBI Agent Fox Mulder might hoard in his basement office for investigating X-Files.

There is the telegram signed “John F” allegedly confirming that “Moon Museum” was successfully attached to the Intrepid. An aged newspaper clipping from the New York Times story, which broke while the Apollo 12 astronauts were en route back to Earth, details how “the engineer is said to have attached the wafer to the hatch of an access port on the Intrepid’s leg.” The stained schematic for the ceramic wafer, complete with its chemical composition, claims, “Aboard the LM on the APOLLO 12 flight Nov., 69.”

It is a mystery born out of ambivalence between art and science. Myers says that NASA initially “seemed optimistic” about bringing “Moon Museum” on the Apollo 12 mission before losing interest. When the Times reached out to NASA for comment, an assistant administrator for public affairs responded, “If it is true that they’ve succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art.” In light of this hope, consider Warhol’s contribution: according to the Times, he drew “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature,” which was their euphemism for a penis and ballsack. Warhol’s “signature” is covered by a thumb in the photo that the Times ran with their story.

It’s hard to imagine an alien finding Warhol’s “signature” on “Moon Museum” and appreciating him as the best in contemporary American art. Indeed, Oldenburg seemed underwhelmed with the project when he wished “it could have been a more elaborate presentation. In fact it would have been nice if artists had worked with technologists on the design of the lunar module.” Perhaps, although the engineering feat of unprecedented space travel might have been complicated enough without added aesthetic burdens.

Myers, enthusiastic about his brainchild, said, “Now I know that there’s a soulful piece of art up there — a piece of software among all that hardware and junk.” But for Warhol, at least, it was a silly piece of art; the deepest interpretation of his dick doodle suggests it might reference both the shape of a rocket and the comparison of the Cold War to a dick-measuring contest between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., a conflict in which the race to the moon was a key front. If so, this is surface-level commentary.

A dick-measuring contest implies a petty display that is obnoxiously unnecessary — but the Cold War was neither petty nor unnecessary. Rather, it was a reckoning between clashing conceptions of human nature.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Soviet gulags to chronicle their horrors in The Gulag Archipelago, described the Soviet understanding of human nature as a Manichean struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots.” He explained how the Soviets pursued utopia by purging people they deemed evil, with a continuously expanding definition of evil as utopia remained elusive. Over time, the “haves” even included peasants who owned a couple cows, who were killed or imprisoned for having more than their neighbors. Notably, Stalin’s death toll of 20 million competes with Hitler’s. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Meanwhile, Americans were grappling with their failure to live up to their nation’s founding ideals of equality and liberty, corrupted by the inner demons within each American heart. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the year before the moon landings. Feminists were fighting for access to birth control pills while unmarried, sexually-active women were often equated with prostitutes. In the same year as the moon landing, the Stonewall riots broke out in reaction to police raids in an era when homosexuality was widely illegal. (Warhol may have held this event close to his heart as a famous, openly gay artist.) Over time, these American “have nots” won many battles by appealing to the better angels of their opponents’ nature, epitomized in King’s I Have a Dream speech:

In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred… I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” …that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

King channeled an understanding of human nature that was fundamental to his country from its very inception. The American Founding Fathers prefigured Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. When the U.S. was in its infancy, James Madison wrote in Federalist 55:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. fought proxy wars for global influence to spread their rival philosophies: identifying “evil” people for elimination in pursuit of utopia vs. cautioning people to constrain the evil in their own hearts. Neither nation was blameless. But if this was a dick-measuring contest, then I’m glad America had the bigger dick.

It’s hard to know whether Warhol was glad about America’s prowess, too. Perhaps his dick doodle was simply a puerile gesture, if the artist is to be taken at his word: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” At the very least, Warhol was glad to be an American:

I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it’s so great. It’s fantastic… I feel I represent the U.S. in my art, but I’m not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best. I’m not trying to criticize the U.S. in any way, not trying to show up any ugliness at all. I’m just a pure artist, I guess. But I can’t say if I take myself seriously as an artist. I just hadn’t thought about it.

Warhol’s flippant persona clashes with the gravity of the moon landings and their historic context. Even as the Cold War fades into history, the Intrepid lunar module and other relics left on the moon live on as monuments to the human spirit. The Apollo missions gave us our first photographs of planet Earth in its entirety and launched the field of planetary science; in the words of the most well-known planetary scientist, Carl Sagan:

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

We escaped our provincial vantage point. And yet, Myers dismissed the technology that helped humanity touch another world as “hardware and junk,” and Oldenburg’s criticism disdains the breathtaking challenge that technology faced. Their comments, combined with Warhol’s juvenile contribution to “Moon Museum,” disregard the value of this historic accomplishment. Maybe NASA lost interest in “Moon Museum” because it is less soulful than Myers believes. The tiny ceramic wafer is more engaging as an enigma than as an artwork.

Ross is the founder of , where I was excited to publish my review of The Brutalist, and he also writes at magazines like and for his Substack . His latest novel, Glass Century, just hit the shelves and I look forward to reading it — the plot seems like it might have parallels to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities: both are New York novels expressing interest in the city’s architecture, with plots driven by adultery.

The Metropolitan Review

Architecting a Myth

Oscar night is upon us! Who’s going to take Best Picture? A top contender, of course, is The Brutalist, and we’re deeply excited to have the writer and artist Megan Gafford in The Metropolitan Review meditating on the film and what it means from an architectural perspective. What is—or…

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a year ago · 90 likes · 24 comments · Megan Gafford and The Metropolitan Review

If you have yet to learn about Interintellect, then you should check out their website to get a sense of the variety of salons:

Interintellect is a leading cultural institution dedicated to the enjoyment of the life of the mind without polarizing politics. A high culture creator platform with a cozy community tier, our online city of minds welcomes the greatest thinkers of our times joining ambitious seekers from around the world to explore timeless ideas. Now also present offline in global hubs.

Currently, I’m signed up to attend nine upcoming salons, to give you a sense of how worthwhile they are to me and how I want to spend my time (of which there is never enough). Besides hosting this interview with Ross, I also just attended a lovely Interintellect book club about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America that has been one of the highlights of my past 6 months. And I’m excited to invite you to the next salon that I’ll be hosting about “The Purpose of 21st Century Painting.” You can register for the online event here, which is currently slated for mid-September. That date is subject to change — I’m working on a visual essay about the topic we’ll be discussing, so I’ll firm up the date once that’s published — but we wanted to share the salon now to give people more time to explore the reading list (which you will find at that event registration page).

More about the event:

A steady hum of artists and writers have been calling for a New Romanticism, largely in reaction to artificial intelligence. Romanticism is often — though neither inevitably nor entirely — a negative reaction to new technologies. And no wonder: Last year, for example, blogger Scott Alexander challenged 11,000 people to conduct an AI Art Turing Test that asked them to identify which of the 50 pictures were generated by AI versus which were culled from the art historical canon. He concluded that “most people had a hard time identifying AI art" and barely performed better than a coin toss at figuring out whether a human made a given image. Perhaps remarkably, he also found that “most people slightly preferred AI art to human art" and that “even many people who thought they hated AI art preferred it." What, then, is the purpose of 21st century painting?

At this salon, artist and writer Megan Gafford will lead a discussion about artistic anxiety in the age of artificial intelligence, and the role that Romanticism should play in how artists grapple with new technology. As we get closer to the date, this reading list will grow. But for now, pick up a copy of Isaiah Berlin's slim volume The Roots of Romanticism for a comprehensive yet succinct history on the topic. To familiarize yourself with those now yearning for a New Romanticism, please read Ted Gioia's essay "We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism," Ross Barkan's "The Rise of the New Romanticism," and Udith Dematogoda's "Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age."

I hope you’ll come talk about this with me in the Fall!

I got to thinking that some Fashionably Late Takes subscribers might be curious about the decisions I make for the pencil drawings in each essay. So in this “Artist Statement” series, I share what influenced the artwork.

You’re getting two artist statements in a row this month, because I’m working on pushing through some big projects — including illustrating a novel! It’s written by , who is serializing it on Substack. I’ll cross-post the first chapter in a couple weeks once it drops on July 1st. You should check out his Substack and consider subscribing.

Because computers resurrected the scroll, I have an infinite vertical composition when I publish visual essays online. In some, I’ve played with the experience of scrolling through drawings. The most vertical drawing that I’ve made so far comes from the essay “To Err is Human” about scientific hubris. This is the only one that begins without a drawing — you don’t encounter it until you’re eight paragraphs in, where it creates a bridge between stories about two fateful events that took place on the same day but across the world from each other. In between, I drew a long stretch of clouds to try to give readers a sense of being transported from one event to the next.

For another piece (which also touched on the topic of scientific hubris), I drew a progression of five daisies that become increasingly mutated. They appear as five separate drawings in the visual essay, although in real life, they are composed in a single drawing that is shaped like a large, horizontal scroll, as you can see displayed here:

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I got to thinking that some Fashionably Late Takes subscribers might be curious about the decisions I make for the pencil drawings in each essay. So in this “Artist Statement” series, I share what influenced the artwork.

Accidents happen.

That was an overt theme in my very first visual essay for Fashionably Late Takes about “lab leaks,” a broad phrase that encompasses any event that might release a pathogen from a laboratory. And as you can see in the picture above, my drawing about one such accident was also struck by misfortune. It only takes one careless moment. I forgot to put my drawing away when I went to the bathroom, giving my toddler a brief opening to scribble all over it. But unlike the smallpox victim that I was depicting, my drawing survived.

I can still hardly believe it was salvageable. Yet there is no longer a trace of the substantial damage my daughter inflicted on this drawing; I even managed to buff out the deep grooves her wild scrawling engraved in the paper. This restoration is a point of pride for me as an artist, so along with explaining the ideas behind this work, I also want to explain how you, too, can repair a scarred drawing.

“When Curiosity Kills The Cat” is special because it best demonstrates what I mean by a “visual essay” — after all, most essays include some kind of banner image and often other relevant pictures, so what’s the difference? Achieving the full potential of a visual essay is particularly time consuming, and I’ve been slowly crafting the next piece for Fashionably Late Takes that will fully embody the concept. After I explain the idea behind my lab leak drawings, the meaning of “visual essay” will come into sharper focus.

How to Save a Drawing

But first, let’s talk shop. Anyone who loves to draw should develop strategies for bringing their artwork back from the dead, because accidents happen:

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This visual essay is a tribute to Claire Lehmann. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

We seem to have transitioned from Postmodernism to Post-Truth. Back in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries proclaimed “post-truth” the Word of the Year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief,” and explaining that the concept became ascendent “in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.” Oxford Dictionaries goes on to clarify that in this usage, the prefix “post-” is not “simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event” but instead “has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant,’” akin to comedian Stephen Colbert’s more playful synonym, truthiness.

For those of us who believe that the world is ultimately knowable, however difficult the learning curve, our Post-Truth Era is a frustrating escalation from Postmodernism. As , the founding editor of , wrote in her recent essay for The Dispatch “Feelings, Facts, and Our Crisis of Truth”:

Since the mid-20th century, many elite institutions have rejected the philosophical orientation of empiricism in favor of a faddish postmodern view of the world. Postmodernism, alongside romanticist and fundamentalist religious modes of thought, rejects the notion that humans are able to discern what is true through data collection and experimentation. Romanticists believe that the truth is discerned through feeling, fundamentalists through revelation—and postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as truth at all. Our new media ecosystem blends all three of these outlooks, rendering empiricism a quaint relic of another age.

A core facet of the Post-Truth Era is an expansion of the quip “Some ideas are so absurd that only intellectuals believe them"1 to a generalized hostility towards elites and expertise. And while there are certainly intellectuals who have embarrassed themselves by embracing nonsense, the same is true of every type of person,2 and the only solution is more intellectual rigor—the very quality that creates experts. Lehmann offers the example of Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary-biologist-turned-podcaster, as someone who has been rewarded for renouncing expertise in favor of conspiracy theories:

Weinstein has suggested that Israel’s unpreparedness for the October 7 attack was deliberately orchestrated by powerful interests to create division among COVID skeptics; China’s one-child policy was strategically designed to create an army of males to infiltrate the U.S. military; and that his own groundbreaking telomere research was stolen by one of his peers—who went on to win a Nobel Prize.

The continuous positive feedback from a growing audience doesn’t just reward methodological shortcuts—it demands them. There is no clearer demonstration of how audience capture drives counter-Enlightenment thinking in digital media than Weinstein’s trajectory. Rigor dampens engagement, and uncertainty saps attention. The marketplace of ideas has been subsumed by a marketplace of emotions, where incentives reward those with the sloppiest procedures.

And living in the age of “do your own research” can have deadly consequences for people who are bad at doing research. Lehmann begins her essay with this sad example:

An outbreak of measles—a disease once declared eliminated in the U.S.—has hospitalized 91 people in Texas, killing two unvaccinated school-aged children. It is a horrific disease: In severe cases, a child’s immune system collapses, and they suffer seizures and brain damage from encephalitis or drown as fluid fills their lungs.

And any outbreak of measles is entirely preventable. The first vaccine was introduced 62 years ago, and vaccination saved an estimated 60 million lives between 2000 and 2023 alone. Measles epidemics once represented a public health crisis, but today the disease represents a different kind of affliction—one that is both psychological and cultural in nature, and one that is surprisingly resistant to intervention.

This cynicism about expertise is exacerbated by the arms race between truth and lies—most recently enhanced by artificial intelligence. On the one hand, AI assistants can help those who genuinely seek the truth by collating vast amounts of information. This gives the writer and neuroscientist hope that AI can bring polymaths back from the dead, if it can help generalists absorb the cavernous knowledge of myriad specialists. But then again, seeing is no longer believing in an age of generative AI. Posts on X are filled with plaintive calls to Grok, “Is this true? What is real?”

Fashionably Late Takes

On Richard Hanania's “Why the Media is Honest and Good"

This visual essay is a tribute to Richard Hanania. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire…

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a year ago · 31 likes · 16 comments · Megan Gafford

But this is just a technological upgrade to a familiar problem: Dishonesty has always enjoyed an advantage from fighting dirty. As I wrote in my last Ideas Worth Drawing For about ’s “Why the Media is Honest and Good”:

Perhaps an underlying problem with misinformation is that the solution is so boring. Hanania recommends that people be mindful of bias when they read the media and take time to listen to opposing views—bland stuff …

Even as technology evolves, the same staid advice applies to the pursuit of truth. Whether the media is duking it out over newspaper subscriptions in 1898, or vying to dominate the 24-hour news cycle in 1991, or scheming to addict you to social media algorithms in 2016, savvy readers are mindful of bias and take time to listen to opposing views. Photographic or video evidence may become meaningless in the age of artificial intelligence, but only because thoughtful people refuse to accept simulacra as their reality when they care about what’s real. We have yet to enter a period of history when someone genuinely determined to find the truth can’t make some progress toward that goal, however much the accumulation of knowledge in any given domain may ebb and flow. The conventional advice to be mindful of bias and listen to opposing views is so reliable as to become monotonous.

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with “doing your own research” if that entails finding credible experts and understanding their limitations—and most importantly, recognizing your own limitations as a layperson aspiring to comprehend a complex subject. When laypeople first wade into complexity, they need heuristics to help narrow the field of potential honest brokers. In my latest essay for Quillette, I wrote about one such heuristic: Look for people who are willing to criticize their own side of an argument, because that indicates they are probably principled rather than partisan.

Quillette’s Substack

Liberalism as the Shining City on a Hill

For almost 300 years, America has cultivated the metaphor of a shining city on a hill to describe how a righteous society is a beacon for a better life—but the same light casts that city under a glare, exposing its defects. The image comes from Jesus speaking to his followers in the Book of Matthew (5:14), “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” When the Puritans departed England for Boston in 1630, their leader John Winthrop…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Quillette and Megan Gafford

This standard should be combined with another heuristic courtesy of The Dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg: Look for people who can survive the invasion of the body snatchers.

Back in March 2016—just a couple months before Oxford Dictionaries noted that the word “post-truth” exploded in frequency of usage—Goldberg complained in the pages of the storied conservative magazine National Review about the way American conservatives were succumbing to Trumpian populism:

At times, I sometimes think I’m living in a weird remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you’ve seen any of the umpteen versions, you know the pattern. Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew.

Except.

Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to. It’s almost like they became Canadian overnight—seemingly normal, but off in some way. Even once-friendly dogs start barking at them. I live in constant fear that I will run into Kevin Williamson, Charlie Cooke, or Rich Lowry and they will start telling me that Donald Trump is a serious person because he’s tapping into this or he’s willing to say that. I imagine my dog suddenly barking at them uncontrollably. …

I’ll say, “I’m sorry Rich, I don’t know what got into her.”

And I can just hear the Lowry-doppelganger replying, “When Mr. Trump is president, dogs will behave or they will pay a price. Just like Paul Ryan and Michelle Fields.”

“Lowry you bastard! You went to sleep! Why!? You went to sleep and now you’re gone!”

And that’s when he’d give me the Donald Sutherland finger.

In a 2021 Vanity Fair interview Goldberg added, “People would go to sleep violently opposed to Trump and everything he represented, but by morning they’d start telling me how under comrade Trump, we were going to have the greatest harvest we’ve ever seen.” For Goldberg, a conservative intellectual born into a family of conservative intellectuals, this invasion of the body snatchers fractured his friendships and his career. But it also separated the wheat from the chaff by revealing who was willing to pay the social cost of maintaining their principles. While it is of course true that people may change their minds about ideological commitments, Goldberg was describing “a kind of crowd-sourced brainwashing” that “spread across the land like a wet rolling fog”—not intellectual growth. The invasion of the body snatchers is an extreme form of peer pressure or social contagion, against which survivors demonstrate true conviction.

Both aforementioned heuristics are about identifying who can resist assimilation into groupthink, and they overlap. People willing to criticize their own side of an argument may take that stand from within the madness of crowds. But the invasion of the body snatchers heuristic is distinct from the criticizing one’s own side heuristic. Defined simply, the body-snatched have hopped on a bandwagon that nullifies once strongly-held principles, without offering a coherent explanation for their change of heart.

In my Quillette piece about the criticizing one’s own side heuristic, I argue that we should all read Israeli historian because he passes that test masterfully. As I wrote, “perhaps no other topic inflames tempers and attracts propaganda merchants as much as the twinned fates of Israel and Palestine. It is hard to find information on the subject that is uncontaminated by prejudice.” Because that debate has so thoroughly muddled the truth, it offers an excellent case study for how we can apply the body snatchers heuristic:

Consider the case of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on March 8. The government has not pressed criminal charges against Khalil, a green card holder married to an American who gave birth to their first child last month in New York, whom he has not met because he is still imprisoned in LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana. reported on March 10 that a White House official said that:

Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” said the official.

“He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S.,” said the official, noting the Trump administration reviewed intelligence that found Khalil was a national security risk.

Also on March 10, writer bemoaned that “looking around the web today, so many of my usual free speech supporters are quiet.” Then he began calling out The Free Press for their coverage. Though only a couple of days had passed since Khalil was detained, 48 hours is enough time for their robust newsroom to delve into an event that involves two of the biggest preoccupations at The Free Press: defending Israel and free speech—so that hateful speech towards Israel becomes a litmus test for whether The Free Press can be body snatched regarding free speech principles.

Could the Khalil case make some Free Press journalists feel as if their values are in tension?3 Their news story quoted above includes comments from people both condemning and supporting Khalil’s arrest, and it is reporting rather than editorializing. But Sullivan noticed that their only other comment was to post a video of Free Press staffer Maya Sulkin making dubious claims in a Fox News segment that Khalil is responsible for violent crimes because he handed out pro-Hamas pamphlets, compelling Sullivan to accuse The Free Press of placing “a massive asterisk next to the First Amendment.”

Notably, Sullivan criticized The Free Press as a friend to the newspaper’s founder, , who had published Sullivan’s essay “How Many Children Is Israel Willing to Kill?” in January 2024 with this introduction:

Andrew Sullivan is one of this country’s great independent thinkers. He’s allergic to tribalism and groupthink, perhaps because, as a gay Catholic and a conservative who makes the case for liberalism better than most liberals, he doesn’t really belong in any one tribe. This is part of what makes Andrew such an interesting and important writer.

Andrew’s also a friend. A friend I often disagree with on a subject that matters a great deal to me: Israel.

So Sullivan knows that Weiss and her newspaper have been willing to hear out criticisms of Israel before. But he also knows that The Free Press had previously been quicker to defend free speech, and wondered aloud if anyone could give him an example of “another free speech issue where they haven’t taken a stand?” He seemed to worry that they had succumbed to the body snatchers, who “don’t care about the same things they used to,” as Goldberg described.

Throughout the month of March, Sullivan harped on The Free Press to uphold their free speech principles in a series of Substack notes:

By the end of the month, the editorial board at The Free Press finally put out a strong defense of free speech in their statement “No Deportations Without Due Process.” ICE had also arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student and Fulbright scholar who had done nothing more than write an op-ed—unlike Khalil, no one is insinuating she is responsible for campus protest violence—and while The Free Press editors focus on her more sympathetic case, they do not forget Khalil either:

Due process is not a privilege for the guilty. It is a protection for the innocent. It is a hedge against the prospect that sometimes the state gets it wrong.

It may turn out that Ozturk and Khalil have coordinated their activism with Hamas, or encouraged or participated in riots or other activities that are more than sufficient grounds to expel them from the country. But the government should present the specific evidence against them in a court of law and also—crucially—in the court of public opinion. In other words, the burden of proof is on the government, and they’ve so far failed to provide sufficient evidence to justify their actions.

Sullivan celebrated:

In the end, The Free Press was not body snatched. And now, when their readers apply heuristics to gauge credibility, they’ll find that Weiss and her colleagues ultimately summoned the courage to defend their ideological opponents against a miscarriage of justice. Resisting temptation can be more admirable than having never been tempted, because it’s harder than innocence.

On the other hand, the temptation of The Free Press played out in parallel with a controversy at the University of Austin (UATX); both institutions share some of the same leaders, with Weiss on the UATX Board of Trustees alongside historian and UATX co-founder , who is also a columnist at The Free Press. While the newspaper and university are distinct entities, this overlap in leadership offers more insight into how Weiss and her colleagues grapple with the body snatchers. Last week, Quillette broke the story “Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” by Ellie Avishai, who co-founded a thriving affiliate institute at UATX that was abruptly cancelled because a donor took offense at Avishai tweeting that “We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion”:

If UATX officials want to prevent their school from operating merely as a high-concept redoubt for conservative culture warriors, they should re-commit to the school’s own founding principles, and leave the vitriolic “anti-wokeness” fusillades to podcasters and YouTubers. The school must be unwavering in its commitment to free inquiry, and show itself to be a welcoming home to a diversity of views, not just those that fall within a range acceptable to its biggest funders and most influential administrators.

Just as it was necessary for The Free Press editorial board to take a stand on the Khalil case, it would behoove Weiss to publicly address the UATX controversy.4 Though the latter is far less severe than the U.S. government abusing its power, both events reveal clues about how much someone values free thought. It’s reasonable for Free Press readers who apply the body snatchers heuristic to wonder about the implications of the UATX controversy for the newspaper’s founding editor.

Quillette’s Substack

Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?

On 8 November 2021, the founders of the University of Austin (UATX) announced the launch of their new project—a school where students would receive “an education rooted in the pursuit of truth.” Unlike Ivy League universities, where “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life,” the school’s founding president declared, this would be a place “where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” On a web page titled…

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a year ago · 57 likes · Quillette

But heuristics can only take you so far, because they are shortcuts for beginning to understand. Discerning credibility is but a starting point. In her essay about our crisis of truth, Lehmann diagnoses a key cause of the epistemic spasms in our Post-Truth Era:

On a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, British author Douglas Murray challenged the world’s most popular podcaster over his penchant for hosting “armchair experts” who promote ideas outside of the mainstream. Specifically, Murray cited Rogan’s interviews with Daryl Cooper, a podcaster who has argued that Winston Churchill was the “real villain” of World War II, and comedian Dave Smith, who appeared on the podcast with Murray, and whose taste for criticizing Israel has never inspired him to pay a visit. Murray faced significant backlash from right-wing influencers on social media, while writers at The Atlantic, UnHerd, and Quillette rallied behind him. Yet despite the lengthy conversation, which spanned hours, some crucial concepts were left unaddressed.

The main issue that Murray did not raise was that in the ecosystem that Rogan occupies, many podcasters and their listeners do not read. Murray brought his norms of journalistic rigor into a largely postliterate culture, where information is consumed via aural and visual formats as opposed to the written word. It was a clash of cultures between an author and journalist who primarily lives in the world of printed text, and those who primarily live in the world of conversation and storytelling.

Long ago, when the arms race between truth and lies was just beginning, the invention of literacy made the truth durable. Of course, lies would also propagate and persist within the written word. But Lehmann explains how long-form texts uniquely benefit knowledge accumulation and accuracy:

This postliterate shift isn’t merely occurring in digital media ecosystems—it has penetrated some of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. In an article for The Atlantic last year, Rose Horowitch described students at elite universities who struggle to read an entire book. One first-year student confessed she had never been assigned a complete book throughout high school—only excerpts and articles.

It’s important to distinguish the difference between a literate and postliterate world. For centuries, women died in childbirth at relatively steady rates. Only when doctors started sharing knowledge about obstetric techniques in medical journals did mortality rates start to decline. Sharing knowledge via the written word enhances the accuracy of the transmitted information, whereas oral reinterpretations lend themselves to inefficiency and error.

When an audio-visual narrative culture—which lacks the precision and permanence of written documentation—combines with amateur methods, our collective ability to discern the truth simply deteriorates.

But some bookworms are starting to see glimmers of hope. Last week, published an optimistic piece in his literature newsletter explaining why he thinks that “Literature is so back.” He has started noticing that everyone around him seems to be reading the classics, including house painters blasting the Middlemarch audiobook, a novel that also went viral on Substack recently:

Look around Substack. We have so much energy here for all forms of literature, from science fiction to the Mahābhārata. So much of the enthusiasm I see about literature (on social media and in my WhatsApp), is from people in science, economics, and technology. Reddit is full of people reading the classics. 4chan too.

There are articles in the Guardian about spending less time with Twitter and more time with Jane Austen. Libby is showing strong numbers. Classic novels are selling well thanks to TikTok and fancy new editions.

Who knows why this is happening? … maybe we’re taking literature seriously because the times are complicated. We need humanism to help us see things clearly now. … We might be starting from a low point, but the literary recovery has begun. In a world of chaos and slop, the best stands out.

Hopefully Americans are embracing this nascent trend. As Lehmann points out, “The United States, a country founded on Enlightenment ideals, is at a crossroads”:

Trade policy is conducted according to vibes, anti-vaccine propaganda is spread by the highest health official of the land, and children now die of a once-eliminated disease. A path forward requires a counter-counter-Enlightenment. This doesn’t require censorship or an appeal to authority, but a return to rigor and the written word. While podcasts and videos are undoubtedly entertaining, their ability to transmit knowledge is time-consuming and inefficient. They are the equivalent of the fireside yarn—what humans did before we emerged from our caves. Text may not be as popular as a three-hour podcast conversation, but it remains the form of knowledge most likely to be accessed by future generations. Principia Mathematica was not a podcast, and On the Origins of Species was not a video series. Technologies may continue to create disruption, but we won’t enter a new Dark Age unless we forget the ability to read and write.

Maybe bookworms can seize American culture with our own invasion of the body snatchers. Oliver recalled the 1940 trend of people reading War and Peace everywhere, “On the bus. In restaurants at lunch. People were taking Tolstoy wherever they went.” After all, social contagion can cut both ways.

A podcaster may go to sleep one night and appear the next day to be the exact same person his audience always knew.

Except.

Except he’s different, somehow. He talks funny. He doesn’t care about the same conspiracy theories that he used to. It’s almost like he developed a hankering for Middlemarch overnight—seemingly normal, but off in some way. Even once-friendly dogs start barking at his podcast recording.

A podcast listener will say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into her.”

And the podcaster-doppelganger will reply, “After I finish Middlemarch, I think I’ll start reading Shakespeare’s Henriad.”

“You bastard! You went to sleep! Why!? You went to sleep and now you’re gone!”