A personal take on a craft that’s (almost) lost its spark
I loved poetry, and I think I still love her. Please don’t misunderstand. There will be no death knells to poetry here, à la Joseph Epstein. I have no interest (right now) in telling the many, many ways poetry has had a poor showing in the world outside its own ghettos. I love the schadenfreude of a good literary hatchet job as much as anybody; I love reading William Logan put contemporary poets (even beloved ones) into literary full-Nelsons. I was thrilled by Tanner Stening’s recent takedown of poetic pretensions in The Metropolitan Review. It’s fun and cathartic to take the piñata treatment to contemporary poetry. (I can say that; some of my best friends are poets) But this piece is neither a manifesto nor a declamation on the poetry scene at large. This is what I think they call in couple’s therapy, “emotional ventilation.”
The thing is: poetry and I have cooled on one another. And though I know we’ll be entangled for life, I’ve realized, after countless low-grade disappointments and category errors, that there’s no livable path forward between us unless we put these grievances in the open.
I write and read vast amounts of poetry for pleasure, and I teach and edit vast amounts of poetry as part of my work. I spent four years studying poetry and then two more years studying it far, far more intensely. The MFA is a curious kind of degree, compared with other tracks for humanities grads. You spend enormous amounts of your coursework not necessarily probing the classics (although there’s plenty of that, too), but dissecting works in progress—yours and others’. Dissection really is the word for it: you put the poor printouts flat on the table and scribble and pluck them into seventeen different kinds of submission, and you end up with the guts of the thing spread out across the room and everyone upset. You see every possible angle of every possible kind of poetic expression at every stage, many of them (especially yours) bloody and awful.
I say this not to establish my poetry bona fides—I mean, after all, my one published work to date, written at the ripe age of 11, shockingly listed as “Out of Print” on Amazon, but still (I think) paying three dollars in royalties per copy sold, and now with its own Goodreads page filled with exclamatory AI-bot-generated reviews, was a work of supernatural horror fiction—but to show that I care.
From the beginning, then, briefly: I was enchanted with literature as a very young child, and a little while later I became enchanted with capital-a “Art.” Finally there was a word that yoked and unified all the things I found most precious in my free time: writing, drawing, painting, video game design, music (Rock and Hip-Hop and orchestral and everything I could find). Everything. “Art” was also ancient and, uniquely among youthful interests, universally respectable. It was popular and it was elite. You never had to feel silly or embarrassed about “Art”—artworks, yes, sometimes, but not “Art.” “Art” had its defenders in all times and corners of human experience, and to be involved in it, as an appreciator or as a creator, felt like a sacred calling. I was in middle school, and the following years would refine this perception into a near-religious devotion.
Poetry wasn’t primus inter pares among the arts from the beginning. It never had the pathos of great films or the expansiveness of thrilling novels—but it was portable, and it was flexible, and it sat comfortably at the crossroads of other art forms I deeply loved. It was both a cousin to songwriting and a silent, moody child of the print world. Unlike with, say, video games, or comic books, or landscape painting, a single artist working through poetry could switch registers instantly. You could knock out a poem about the horrors of World War I during lunch after World History, and then you could write sardonic, braggadocious odes during Spanish (I may be speaking from experience). And, it seemed from my high school research, everybody in the world of “Art” wrote poems. Novelists wrote them; Picasso wrote them; rock stars wrote them. It was the most accessible and economical of all the arts.
I had no facility with drawing, and only a little with music, so when it came time to specialize in the years to come, poetry was my first choice. It stayed that way for the next seven years.
But familiarity breeds contempt, or if not contempt, passive aggressiveness. The only way out is through, so here, I suppose, are all the reasons I can think of that poetry has “lost its shine.” I will not call out any poets or presses by name. In the spirit of a good therapy session, I’ve simply prepared a rambling and petulant list:
Most poetry (like most writing) is bad. Most published poetry is— fine.
This means, in other words, that for the vast, vast, vast majority of my time spent reading new poetry, the dominant sensation is neutrality. Occasionally outrage, sometimes meditative gloom, but rarely anything that redeems the time. It feels mercenary to say so. I wouldn’t even say so in the first place, except for the realization that poetry is the only genre of literature that seems to produce this sensation of tastelessness for me. Prose almost always thrills, even when it infuriates. Plays are structurally incapable of being dull. But an hour spent reading contemporary poetry, even as somebody with my poetic sea legs under me, is almost always just fine.
The thing is, time is so short. I have decades ahead of me, if I’m lucky. But there is so much to read, and even in these early acts of adult life, I’m having a harder and harder time justifying reading hours which I can almost guarantee in advance are going to be, simply, fine.
“Nobody cares about poetry”
In the spirit of honesty in this relationship, I will say that this never used to bother me. I said at the beginning of this relationship that it would never bother me. I went in knowing that contemporary poetry was one long extra-innings game of insider baseball after another. “Nobody reads” poetry, “nobody cares” about poetry, “nobody discusses” it, it’s “a cultural fossil,” it’s “elitist,” it’s “backward”—I didn’t care. Poetry was precious because it wormed out from under the lids of neat containers. It was its own thing. It was, even, sort of, “exclusive.” It had a solid, devoted following of aesthetes, and it was beautiful, and that was enough.
For a while. But it became exhausting, too. The overwhelming majority of the global population does not read for pleasure, and an infinitesimal fraction of that readership reads new poetry. And that fraction is overwhelmingly, maybe exclusively, made of other poets or aspiring poets. And the overwhelming majority of those poet-readers read new poetry in order to support their friends, or to keep up with the culture, or to check if their own work meets a certain journal’s standards. I would venture that very little of that reading is based on pure, disinterested pleasure. By the sheer volume of MFA grads in circulation, most poets do not know most other poets and have no real likelihood of reaching one another unless they shared a program with them. Writing and reading poetry is a spiritually purifying exercise, but it is, by definition, siloed labor.
There are, roughly, 10,000 new poetry releases a year in the United States, as well as over a thousand “little magazines” and a solid few hundred small presses putting out new work. The average new poetry volume, between 70 to 100 pages in length, sells barely enough copies to cover printing costs. A good percent of small presses are nonprofits, and many rely on state or public funding. A venal, cruel way to put this might be: Poets are being subsidized by a public that has absolutely no interest in what they do. That’s an exaggeration, but only partly.I have worked with and among many of these institutions and will continue to do so. I know and love this ecosystem. But even those in the ecosystem know that their cultural footprint is basically imperceptible. And even though every poet I’ve ever known, including myself, has daydreamed of starting up a new journal or small press, one that will really innovate and expand the culture, the reality is that there are already too many journals and too many presses to matter. Attention and resources are splintered across thousands of mostly identical publications. If poets want to reach the “real world”—which is not everyone’s goal—then consolidation would be the surer strategy.
There are defenses for every single part of why the poetry world works the way it does. I don’t need to make them, I don’t need to hear them again, because I live in that world and I am committed to its survival. All I’m saying is this: it does become really, really dispiriting to work toward something, and promote something, that “real people” do not, and will never, read. There is a sturdy wall between poets and “real people.” And outside of really, truly exceptional work, it’s impossible to imagine scaling over this wall to let real people in. There’s a reason that most poetry recommendations tend to be works that are older and more time-tested. Even on the best day, I can’t imagine slipping an ordinary volume of contemporary verse to a grocer, or a nurse, or a suburban mom, or a fry cook dad, or a mechanic, or a Wall Street quant, or an evangelical pastor, or a DC staffer, or a dreamy-eyed high school kid. There’s not even enough residual confidence among most of us poets to try. Maybe it’s only me. Maybe I’m a yellow-bellied coward. I simply fear that most new poetry is not going to do anything for most people.
Songwriting can do everything that poetry claims to do, and does it better, and reaches more people, and has done more for the human race than poetry has done since the 1950s.
I can’t prove the claim above in any scientific sense. It’s a category error to compare genres like this. But I challenge other poets to dispute it. What does your gut tell you? Does it actually seem wrong? The only thing we poets can say in response is: It’s not a competition. Sure. I agree.
Still: take any year after 1950 as your starting point and measure the collected outputs of popular music and mainstream poetry from that point onward until the present and match them together. Which body of work is better in all the ways that matter for poetic expression? Which body of work straddles the delicate balance of public and private experience? Which has energized more fellow artists and seeded the culture with a renewed attention to language and the hidden musicality of words? If you had to make the case that “Art” can really, truly change somebody’s life, can resurrect them, can pull them from their swirling Gehennas of self-loathing and inwardness and give them a small, glimmering chance to experience the depth of human life in a way that felt real, in a way that reverberated from their core to every extremity of their body—which would you choose as your champion?
I don’t think it’s an unfair question. The poetry vs. songwriting question is a family affair. In my poetry classes, I always love showing students the family tree of poetry’s deep history and the many splintering branches that emerged from a distant past where songwriting and poetry writing were essentially identical crafts. The very term “lyric poetry” (that is, poetry written to be accompanied by a lyre) betrays this history. Hip-Hop lyrics and Rock lyrics and, yes, Noah Kahan and Taylor Swift lyrics are not fundamentally different art forms from what Plath, Berryman, and Lowell were doing a few decades before. They’re cousins; they may operate across vast oceans of petty formal differences, but they are blood relatives.
And since they are blood relatives, I don’t think it’s a bad question to ask which child is the favorite. Ask one million people and you’ll get one million votes for “songwriting.” Ask two million people and you may get one vote for contemporary poetry, and that’s because you asked a contemporary poet. But the poet’s time-honored roles within public consciousness—the poet as bard, troubadour, griot, mystic, jester, voice of conscience, voice-of-a-generation—have all been entirely overshadowed (I want to say subsumed) by the rise of the figure of the popular musician. You don’t need me to give you any numbers. The truth of this is embarrassingly evident.
Songwriting is evangelical by nature. It demands to spread and be shared. And yet it reaches people in their most private moments. It fills stadiums; it crowds dive bars; it comforts lovelorn teenagers sobbing into their pillows. It stirs and rallies the elderly and the youths of Appalachia, the Bronx, the Texas border towns and the Chicago suburbs. It impresses itself upon grief-stricken grandfathers and traumatized doctors and ambitious welders, and it soothes fussy 11 month olds in car seats (I speak from experience). It is the medium of love and despair and violence and passion and peace. And, for most people, it accomplishes all these miracles through the transfiguration of words.
Poets: what can we possibly offer in the wake of this absolute cultural—and spiritual—conquest?
Poetry has underdelivered on its most extravagant promises
I don’t know whose fault this is. It’s probably mine. I made the mistake of accumulating too many theories of poetry from too many different (and contradictory) teachers and expecting them to work together.
At one stage of my education, I had brilliant teachers who truly, truly believed that every syllable of a poem was freighted with meaning. Every line break, every consonant was a contingent choice exercised by a master; every moment of deliberation could have gone another way if not for the genius of the artist, and thus, poetry demanded a level of close, sustained attention which no other art form could match. This was the inheritance of the so-called “New Criticism,” which is now almost universally dismissed in higher ed programs. It was enchanting—it promised an extraordinarily difficult and belabored reading process, one that seemed almost impossible, but which promised immeasurable prizes.
But of the colossal amount of contemporary poems I’ve read since taking these classes, a very, very small number actually demanded, let alone rewarded, this level of close reading. The median poem published in major presses from 2010-2026 is too chatty, or too precious, or too unbounded to open onto any but a surface-level reading of its thematic material. Too much of the contemporary poetry scene actively resists the kinds of formal depth that even invites the sort of attention the New Critics were so eager to bestow. I’ve simply given up on expecting that the median poem wants to be read in the thrilling way I grew up expecting to read them.
Then under other teachers I grew to believe—and still do—that poetry uniquely records the development of a thought. Poetry is intensely psychological. It’s one of the most human of the arts. Its job is not to describe an external scene but the inner phenomenon of a mind at work with and often against itself, struggling to grasp and express reality while under the weight of its own daemonic influences. A poem records the layered complexity of personhood. Readers had the thrilling job of distrusting the voice of the speaker—of finding in even innocuous details a wellspring of hidden emotional struggle. The median poem published in major presses from 2010-2026 eliminates this readerly imperative: the speaker, almost always a stand-in for the poet, will tell you exactly what the struggles are and what they mean. And since the speaker of the median poem is almost always identical with the poet, there are hard limits on the amount of readerly skepticism “allowable.” Poets are as vulnerable and self-deprecating as the next artist, but they seldom invite outright criticism of their psychological processes in action.
And then for the briefest of times—and beautiful they were—I believed that poetry could actually create the highest and purest form of politics. Poems, by their nature, exposed the complexities of personhood in real time for a mass audience. They invite mental communion with absolute strangers. The poetic “encounter” is intimate but theoretically limitless. At their best, poems cultivate a deeply meditative, and humane, self-criticism in their readers. And this attentive self-criticism plays a salvific role in world history. I still believe this. But not only does the median poem published in major presses from 2010-2026 prefer cultivating a very different kind of politics (let’s say, far shallower, often narrowly identitarian), it has no means of actually affecting political life at all. Poetry, as I’ve discussed, is a non-entity in the cultural sphere. Poetry’s unique mental-sharpening effect is limited strictly to other poets, many of whom are consumed by their own incredibly narrow political programs to get much benefit from it in the first place.
Anyway: all this is to say that for a long stretch of my education, I was trained to see poetry as containing all these meanings: down to the syllable and semicolon and all the way up to the highest possible post-political transfiguration. It was musical and subtle and psychological and spiritual and expressed the most complex truths accessible to the human mind. I was trained to see poetry as something that could, without any exaggeration, save the world. And I still believe that it can. But the median poem of the 21st century is doing very few of these things, let alone all of them. My expectations for what the genre could be were set soaringly high and have been in a managed decline ever since.
What now?
I’ve resolved not to write a “hit piece” on the genre I love. Hence why no poets or presses are named. I don’t think it’s especially helpful to name-drop practitioners of a field that is already so contracted—not to mention, there’s plenty of that writing out there.
Nothing changes for me. I’ll continue to teach and edit and write and read poetry, and to push myself to read continually more, and more widely. Maybe I’ll start a band. But I still love poetry.
I think that, more than other artists, poets—and those working in the poetry ecosystem—sacrifice our own honesty for the sake of keeping a privileged position in a world we don’t entirely love. Some of us do find absolute rapture in contemporary poetry, and we feel a thrill upon considering its future. We want to be published and for our own works to be bought and reviewed and memorized and cherished. We want what we are making to matter to our fellow artists and, perhaps, to the larger world. We believe that this is possible and might even be happening already, in some corners of the ecosystem we haven’t yet seen. But others of us have inwardly mellowed on a field we’ve realized is not exactly changing for the better anytime soon, and which produces works which are, on average, perfectly okay. We perform rapturous approval for new releases and newly launched journals; we feign hopefulness that our niche subculture matters; but when we think of the ways that “Art” shapes the world, our own poems, and the poems of our peers, are not what spring to mind.
I think it’s okay to be honest about this. I think, in fact, honesty is the only way to cultivate a sober—and therefore lasting—love of the craft.
*One final note: I’ll be launching (and explaining) a new weekly poetry feature within the next few days. In short, it’s a challenge for myself to publish poems regularly according to a very specific, and perhaps unusual, pattern. My plan is to intersperse these regular poetry posts with ordinary articles, and maybe eventually some more adventurous work as well. Take this as my attempt to win back Poetry’s favor as we continue to work things out between us*
Either the greatest or the stupidest presidential list ever compiled
Prelude: The List and the Gimmick
The wonderful, terrifying, complex, and wholly original United States turns 250 years old in a few weeks, and to mark the occasion, I’ve tried my hand at a great American tradition: the clickbait listicle. What follows is my amateur attempt to rank all 65 men and one woman who have served in the nation’s highest office or who have found themselves, for however brief a time, under the title of “American President” or one of its close corollaries.
The gimmick is this: between Independence and the first federal election, twelve men served the country under the title “President of the United States (in Congress Assembled)” – more commonly called Presidents of the Continental Congress. For very sensible reasons, nobody considers them in histories of “the presidency.” They shared a name, but the two roles were radically different, and it wouldn’t be fair to compare them; apples and oranges, etc. But in a very, very narrow and very, very technical sense, they count as Presidents of the United States, and nobody has ever ranked them properly, so here they are.
If you think that’s ridiculous, it gets way worse. There were also two short-lived sovereign Republics on American soil – the Republic of Vermont and the Republic of Texas – who boasted their own “American Presidents” in the brief spans of time before their annexation. Technically speaking, the Republic of Vermont had one other chief executive not on this list, Moses Robinson, but he was only ever called “Governor.” Thomas Chittenden, on the other hand, was called “President” and “Governor” interchangeably during the early days of independence— and so, by the extremely lax standards of this list, he counts.
And if we’re counting “legitimate” American Republics which were later annexed into the US, we should also probably count the illegitimate Republic that spawned on American soil and declared war on its host and was destroyed and reabsorbed by force. So Jefferson Davis, technically an “American President,” gets added to the list and immediately punted to the very bottom.
It gets even dumber. There were three times in the modern presidency – twice under George W. Bush and once under Joe Biden – where the chief executive underwent a colonoscopy under anesthesia and the VP became, for a few brief hours, the Acting President of the United States. Both of those individuals are on this list. How is it fair that Kamala Harris (85 minutes) and Dick Cheney (2 hours 15 minutes) share space on the same list as Lincoln and Roosevelt? It’s not fair. It’s not fair to anyone involved. But they had the nuclear football and the full vested power of the presidency. If those colonoscopies went south, they were already positioned to take over. They could have taken over anyway, if they really wanted to. It’s to their credit that their hours-long tenures were extremely boring. If Thomas Chittenden gets to be on the list, they get to be on the list.
It gets even, even dumber. Inauguration Day in 1849 fell on a Sunday, and Zachary Taylor refused to swear his oath on the Sabbath. So when Polk’s term expired, the powers of the presidency, according to a very, very niche and very, very suspect legal argument, devolved upon then-President pro tempore of the Senate, David Rice Atchison. Nobody aside from Atchison actually believes that he held the powers of the presidency. But his gravestone is inscribed with the words “President for a Day” (which is better than, I guess, “Butcher of Kansas,” which would be more appropriate). He has never been represented on a serious list of American presidents. This is not a serious list, so he is represented here.
Surely, you might think, there has to be a better way to represent all these “real” and “half” and “barely” and “probably illegitimate” presidents and all the complicated things that their very different tenures have meant to the country. Surely lists are all a bit silly to begin with— surely not every president needs a number. Surely, you might object, there’s a better way to honor the multiform weirdness and wonders of American history than with something as structurally flawed as a straightforward list.
Anyway, here’s the list. (Scroll seven paragraphs down)
The Real Introduction and Final Caveats
I’m not a historian, and this list has no authority. This is a purely personal exercise, published for the sake of hearing alternative perspectives.
The other issue is that this is a deeply, deeply unscientific list. Some presidents are given a lot of credit for what they might have done, had they lived longer (Zachary Taylor, James Garfield). Some are penalized for what they probably would have done had they reigned for longer (William Henry Harrison). Some are given credit for their personal character above their concrete accomplishments; others’ tremendous personal flaws get excused because of their accomplishments. Some presidents get credit for bold and ultimately failed visions (John Quincy Adams), while others’ failed visions count against them (Woodrow Wilson). Some presidents (John Quincy again) are bumped in the rankings because of their post-Presidency careers, while others’ remarkable retirements (Jimmy Carter’s) don’t count as much, and others’ (John Tyler) send them cratering down to the bottom. Alcoholics get small bumps if they were tragic and graceful drunks (Franklin Pierce) and get demoted if they were oafish buffoons (Andrew Johnson).
Many of the early presidents get credit for the butterfly effect: their otherwise mundane actions are rewarded because they set meaningful precedents for centuries to come. This puts modern presidents at a severe disadvantage, since even a sparkling modern record might have less of a benevolent influence than a mediocre tenure in the first few generations. John Adams at #3 is almost certainly a stretch, but he gets an enormous amount of leeway for being the second ever to hold the position
There’s also not a partisan program here. These are not the presidents with whom I am most “politically aligned.” Some of my personal favorites are very low on the list. (For reasons of sympathy alone, I wish I could bump Franklin Pierce higher) I tried to capture, as best I could, the men who “did the best job for their times,” keeping in mind that that looked like very different things in different moments. The closer the timeline gets to the present (W. Bush through Trump), the more uncertain and liable to change the rankings become. Trump, still in his second administration, gets a provisional asterisk.
Strange patterns emerge in this history that have nothing to do with politics proper. Others have pointed out that, pound-for-pound, the American Presidency is one of the deadliest workplaces in the country (nearly 18% of “real” presidents have died on the job). Also eerie is the number of sons who died while their fathers were in office. Lincoln lost 11-year old Willie; Coolidge lost 16-year old Calvin Jr.; Adams lost 30-year old Charles; Kennedy lost two-day old Patrick Bouvier; Franklin Pierce lost 11-year old Benny weeks before Inauguration; Biden lost Beau while still serving as VP. Many of these men took these losses as a personal punishment and never forgave themselves. Coolidge believed the loss was a macabre “price” for his own political success and became dissociated with politics ever afterwards. Pierce refused to swear his Oath on a Bible because he thought he was under God’s wrath; he is the second (or possibly third) president to use a book of secular law instead.
One final note, in case it bears repeating: the country has always been bigger than its chief executives. However great, or terrible, or forgettable our presidents have been, the country has never found its source and summit in them. Our history can be written through them only partly.
**And some last niche caveats: Among those not included in this list are: Presidents of other North, Central, or South American countries, though they are, properly, “American Presidents” (I challenge someone else to make that list); American monarchs (King Kamehameha, Queen Liliuokalani); Native American chieftains; presidents of unrecognized, fringe republics; William B. Ide (California Republic); Moses Robinson (Republic of Vermont); leaders of the Mormon State of Deseret; the Seven Presidents of Pennsylvania (aside from Thomas Mifflin), and anybody else I forgot to mention.
1. George Washington
President of the United States of America, 1789-1797
The most imaginative, brilliant, and level-headed collection of political philosophers of the last 500 years (the Founding Fathers) were only ever unanimously agreed on one thing: Washington was their leader. The man himself was, arguably, unimpressive (as a general, as a thinker, etc.)— scholars can handle that question. But within his lifetime Washington was elected to play the impossible role of Great Unifier and National Hero. He knew what was at stake, and he played it brilliantly. Consider: he was still alive when he was immortalized, a situation which defeats almost everybody who experiences it. And yet, knowing that the integrity of the frail republic depended upon such theatrics, he carried himself in public as the consummate “gentleman” politician: courteous, self-denying, dignified in everything— an American Cincinnatus called unwillingly from his farm to take up the cause of the nation. Was it a show? Maybe. Did he really know what he was doing, or was it a desperate put-on? Either way, he did the job that was expected of him: the narrow, unglamorous, undeclared job that actually mattered for posterity. A boring choice for #1? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Partisanship and party politicking, which would explode upon his resignation, were mostly kept offstage during his terms by the sheer respect that Washington commanded. But beyond all this, he belongs in this spot for the most important and consequential precedent of all: he willingly gave up his own power at the end of his term. When King George III learned that Washington was planning to do just such a thing, he replied, presciently: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
2. Abraham Lincoln
President of the United States, 1861-1865
An eternal enigma. A backwoods Kentucky boy turned failed statesman turned failed Senator turned most consequential president of American history, full-stop. A rhetorician. A folk hero. A winsome ghost. A Dark Angel. Presided over, and won, the deadliest war ever fought by Americans. Gunned down by a coward before the final stretch of victory. The wittiest, and strangest, and most mythopoetical president we’ve ever had.
3. John Adams
President of the United States, 1797-1801
A diplomat first and foremost, and one of the most misunderstood and slandered presidents of any age. Taunted and sabotaged while alive, treated as second-rate in posterity, his accomplishments are understated but world-shaping in their reach. Like Washington, his actually meaningful achievements are unglamorous, and in many ways unmeasurable. We simply can’t say how badly our first decades might have been without Adams’s steady hand and diplomatic adventurism. In the Revolution, he channeled support from France and, on his own initiative, from The Netherlands. As president, he prevented absolute catastrophes (like War with France) and he did so by playing the unforgiving game of soft diplomacy. He did almost everything right and was ruthlessly vilified for it.
4. Thomas Jefferson
President of the United States, 1801-1809
A sneak; a partisan; a manipulative genius whose successes somehow dwarf his gargantuan flaws. Doubled the size of the country; penned some of the greatest documents in the nation’s (and modern world’s) history; designed and built a world-class university; supplied his own book collection to rebuild the Library of Congress; a scholar and philosopher and amateur scientist and architect and debtor and cynic and slaveholder and author of religious freedom.
5. Dwight D. Eisenhower
President of the United States, 1953-1961
Hero of the Allied troops in Europe; architect of the Interstate; master of Cold War diplomacy and domestic politics; New Deal Republican; President of Columbia University; military genius and arch-skeptic of the “Military-Industrial Complex” (his phrase). A Kansas man in the best meaning of the term: affable, clear-eyed, humble, masking a quiet, disciplined ferociousness. A good man and a great leader.
6. Theodore Roosevelt
President of the United States, 1901-1909
In the words of his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” Shot mid-speech on the campaign trail by a would-be assassin and, quite literally, kept speaking. A cartoon character of a man. The Ernest Hemingway president. His bizarre, outsized affectations threaten to outshine his actual presidential accomplishments—but the first Roosevelt president produced a remarkable and bewildering legacy (National Parks; trust-busting; the Roosevelt Corollary; the Panama Canal).
7. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
President of the United States, 1933-1945
Presided over the nation in some of the most consequential years in World (if not necessarily American) history. Every American seems to know something about FDR, and everybody has their pet theory and pet complaints about his reforms and about the man. Did the New Deal do more economic harm than good? Did Roosevelt know about Pearl Harbor in advance? Shouldn’t he have done [any number of actions leading up to, and after, the outbreak of war]? And these are good questions. But even so. The sheer range and scale of the only four-term president’s tenure is impossible to capture. The WPA; the Civilian Conservation Corps; Social Security; Glass-Steagall; Japanese (and Italian and German) Internment; the Fireside chats; rationing; the bulk of the deadliest and grandest war ever fought in the history of the planet. Whether or not he was a “good” man (and he almost certainly was), he was a textbook case of a “Great Man.”
8. Ronald Reagan
President of the United States, 1981-1989
With Reagan (and Kennedy, just below), the question of greatness drifts into the question of image. Were these men Important Men because of what they accomplished or because of the myth they built, or allowed others to build, around themselves? Reagan’s policy record is full of blunders and near-blunders even from the conservative side of the ticker (supply side economics, Iran-Contra, a ballooning deficit)—and yet, he is remembered (and probably will always be remembered) for the role he played at the End of History: the fall of the Soviet Union. Could another president have managed the delicate and showy pageantry that led to the final collapse of the Evil Empire and the Iron Curtain? Possibly; but Reagan did it in our timeline, and, like Washington, he understood the role brilliantly.
9. John F. Kennedy
President of the United States, 1961-1963
President for a thousand days and change, and yet, next to Lincoln, one of the modern nation’s most potent Myths. Sixty years on, nothing can break the spell of Camelot: not the affairs; not the drug regimen; not the health scandals; not the ghostwritten Pulitzer Prize; not the Bay of Pigs. Every now and again, someone poses the question: what if Kennedy had survived? Meaning: would we still love him? Or would he become, in our eyes, a sickly, lewd, small man? We will never have the answer to the question—but, as with Reagan, there’s also plenty behind the myth to sustain it. If nothing else: Kennedy shepherded the country, and the world, through one of its categorical near-misses with the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, as the president who threw down the gauntlet of the Space Program, he’s responsible for perhaps the noblest and most important project ever launched by any world leader.
10. James Garfield
President of the United States, 1881
One of the few men of unimpeachable character to hold the office and the greatest “What If” story of American presidential history. A Church of Christ preacher turned visionary president and the second Chief Executive to die by assassination. Almost certainly would have steered the country through the wreckage of Post-Reconstruction better than any of the men who followed him.
11. John Quincy Adams
President of the United States, 1825-1829
The most intelligent man ever to occupy the White House. Along with Henry Clay, advanced a vision of American greatness (“the American System”) which was dashed by the populist who succeeded him. Unafraid of a fight and willing to fight even in the inglorious arena of the People’s House. Afterwards, a voice of conscience until his fatal collapse on the floor of Congress at age 80.
12. James Madison
President of the United States, 1809-1817
An odd, mousy, joyless character immortalized more for his work on The Federalist Papers than for his presidency. A political genius whose genius seemed to wane the longer his career went on. The War of 1812 president. The one under whom the British burned DC. A mixed bag as a Commander in Chief. But—again—The Federalist Papers, and more importantly, the Bill of Rights (of which he was the principal author), are more than enough to redeem him.
13. Calvin Coolidge
President of the United States, 1923-1929
Silent Cal. An oddball “do-nothing” president who managed to oversee one of the strangest and most prosperous eras in national history (“The Roaring Twenties”). “The chief business of the American people is business.” An (apocryphal) dinner guest bet that she could compel more than three words out of him over the course of an evening; he replied, “you lose” and said nothing else the rest of the night. Rode a mechanical horse called “Thunderbolt” three times a day. Often pressed the “panic” button installed in the White House so he could play hide and seek with Secret Service. Sworn in by his own father. Lost a son while in office. Blamed by some for the crash that followed his term. But of all the horrendous abuses that occurred after him in the 20thand 21st century Modern Leviathan-Presidency, from so many different ambitious men, it’s refreshing to hear the story of somebody who transparently didn’t want the job, and did so little with it, and yet did so well.
14. Harry S. Truman
President of the United States, 1945-1953
The legacy stands and falls with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was either (the wisdom goes) a “tragic necessity” or one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the century. More and more, with distance, the latter seems to be the prevailing wisdom. That Truman felt no discernable guilt over his decision makes it incredibly, incredibly hard to keep him ranked this highly. But as both a wartime and postwar president, Truman gets an enormous amount of leeway that may or may not rightly belong to him. He presided over V-E and V-J Days. The Marshall Plan, and the rebuilding of the smoldering ruins of Europe, are to his enormous credit. Whether the Truman Doctrine can be blamed directly for all the disastrous entanglements of the rest of the century is an open question, but in the calculus of the early Cold War, it’s hard to imagine how else a chief executive ought to have addressed himself to the Soviets. They can’t all be John Adamses, after all.
15. Zachary Taylor
President of the United States, 1849-1850
The only good Whig president (because every Whig convention chose a disappointing candidate). A Southern slaveowner, he opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, encouraged admission of California and New Mexico as free states, and promised action against Texas if it tried to encroach on New Mexico. Likely would have vetoed the disastrous Compromise of 1850 (including the Fugitive Slave Act), and threatened, with complete seriousness, to personally lead the Army to fight and hang the Southerner slavocrats who were then agitating for secession. His incredibly attenuated actual record as president is boosted enormously by the very real possibility that, if he had lived, the contest between secessionists and Unionists might have been brought to a head a whole decade sooner. Would it have meant Civil War? Was there an alternative path that might have avoided the war altogether, maybe conjured up with the black magic of Henry Clay (also a Whig, even if a rival)? It’s impossible to say. In the gonzo metaverse of presidential “what ifs,” there’s a world out there where Zachary Taylor plays the role of Lincoln in a far stranger Civil War than the one we got. All of this is speculation, and Taylor, probably, is getting far too much credit here. But he certainly stands as one of the most underrated of the forgotten presidents.
16. William McKinley
President of the United States, 1897-1901
Third President to be assassinated and a candidate for the bravest death on record (“go easy on him, boys”). Fought and won a morally grey war but inarguably launched a new era of American power—the United States as a global empire. Whether this was good, or right, or just, is, as always, an open question. Added Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii to the country’s territories before being gunned down by a Polish anarchist whose name nobody can ever pronounce.
17. James Monroe
President of the United States, 1817-1825
The Era of Good Feelings president. The closest president (after Washington) to receive a perfect electoral college score (short one vote by the end). The first president of the original lineup to be, really, a dud. The glory for most of his successes (like the acquisition of Florida) were John Quincy’s or had to do with the fact that the entire opposition party collapsed in the aftermath of the War of 1812. It’s not hard to run a country as a one-party system. But Monroe was there at the right time, and he did run it.
18. James K. Polk
President of the United States, 1845-1849
A genuinely terrifying man. Annexed Texas; acquired massive tracts of Western land after launching the Mexican-American War; bullied the British over the Oregon Territory and won; and famously accomplished all of his campaign goals in a single term and refused to run again. As with McKinley, the queasiness around his conquests makes the overall judgment a hard one to fully sanction. Undeniably the country would be far, far different – and ultimately, far, far weaker – without Polk. And yet, he is not the kind of man I’d like to share a room with.
19. Ulysses S. Grant
President of the United States, 1869-1877
One of the saddest success stories in the Executive branch. A business failure and a drunkard turned war hero and savior of the republic, turned president whose cabinet forever besmirched his reputation. Failed his bid for a presidential comeback and died nearly penniless, working on his (brilliant) memoirs to keep cash flowing in. A genius and a good man with a troubled reputation that, hopefully, will keep improving.
20. Sam Houston
President of the Republic of Texas (1836-1838, 1841-1844)
The first and third President of the Republic of Texas and a character so outsized, so enmeshed in the American story of the nineteenth century, so closely tied to the Union with which he struggled so long to enjoin his beloved Texas, that, provincial as his title might seem, he ranks easily with the upper-middle range of American Presidents. The “Washington of Texas,” the “hero of San Jacinto,” the only foreign head of state also to serve in the US Congress, the architect and figurehead not only of Texas independence but of later annexation—and so tied to the Union that, refusing to swear the Confederate oath after 1861, he had to be booted out of office by force by secessionists—he may just be a more consequential President than many of our “real” ones.
21. George H. W. Bush
President of the United States, 1989-1993
Next to his predecessor, Bush looks small, which is strange, given that he presided over the Cold War’s final act and presided over (and won) a greater war than ever occurred under Reagan.
22. Bill Clinton
President of the United States, 1993-2001
His name is synonymous with scandals, some of which are still “live,” meaning this ranking is highly conditional. Christopher Hitchens wrote a scathing takedown of him in order to be contrarian, but he also wrote a scathing takedown of Mother Teresa in order to be contrarian, and does not necessarily need to be humored. Internationally, Clinton was (mostly) solid. Domestically, he sparked the first modern reactionary wave which crested three decades later—but maintained a fairly steady economic hand.
23. Barack Obama
President of the United States, 2009-2017
Alone among 21st century presidents, Obama embodied the specific range of “intangibles” which tend to activate lifelong sympathies even among political enemies: tempered speech; personability; charity; impassioned but humane oratory; nuanced writing; and, more than anything else, a good sense of humor (and, slightly different, a sense of good humor). The ACA’s legacy remains questionable, and the administration’s foreign adventurism led to slow-burning catastrophes. But Obama also implicitly understood the real limitations of the modern American president amid the machinery of the modern American presidency: surrounded by the thousands and thousands of Executive branch lifers, and hemmed in by thousands and thousands of people employed by the government’s shadow agencies, sometimes the most powerful avenue of influence available to a president is the soft power of being a good man on the world stage.
24. Woodrow Wilson
President of the United States, 1913-1921
The only president to hold a PhD. President of both Princeton University and the United States during his lifetime (the first of two Ivy League presidents who also held the highest office). An ambitious and ultimately failed visionary whose dream of the League of Nations went unrealized and, in the succeeding decades, collapsed in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. Went back on his word about the Great War. Was secretly incapacitated during the last stretch of his presidency. But he foresaw, and in many ways shaped, the future of American power on the international stage.
25. Martin Van Buren
President of the United States, 1837-1841
A politician’s politician — after serving beneath the architect of the Trail of Tears, became a Free Soiler and a voice for abolition in his post-presidency when it was costly to his political reputation. Diplomacy-minded and able to calculate disasters well in advance, he staved off war with Britain and delayed the annexation of Texas, buying the country a few more years of balance on the slavery question before Westward expansion dashed those hopes forever.
26. Benjamin Harrison
President of the United States, 1889-1893
Grandson of President #9. Lost the popular vote. Reigned over the Billion Dollar Congress (when a billion dollars still went a long way). Added the Dakotas and several mountain states to the Union (which, not entirely accidentally, helped shore up his party’s Congressional representation and electoral college votes). Often ranked as the most forgettable president of all time, perhaps for good reason—but a perfectly fine president even so. A president can do an incredible amount with a supermajority, which he had for the first two years; and a president can’t do much when he’s lost his supermajority, which happened during his last two years.
27. Jimmy Carter
President of the United States, 1977-1981
Charismatic, born-again, and famously philanthropic until his death at age 100. Presided over disastrous and humiliating economic and diplomatic crises. Challenged the American people to be braver than they felt like being, and paid the political price. A good man – perhaps a great man – at the wrong time.
28. Gerald Ford
President of the United States, 1974-1977
A good man who only ever wanted to be Speaker of the House. Famously gained the presidency without earning a single vote. Much maligned for pardoning Nixon — although, in hindsight, it’s almost impossible to imagine any alternative.
29. William Howard Taft
President of the United States, 1909-1913
A good man who only ever wanted to be the Chief Justice. Contender for most brilliant office-holder (along with Adams Jr. and Jefferson). A rare voice of conscience in the Philippines before his presidency and a distinguished legal genius after his presidency. His actual presidency was overshadowed by the two Great Men who sandwiched him. (Mis)remembered mostly for (not actually) getting stuck in a bathtub. Betrayed by Roosevelt during reelection. Like Coolidge, a man who didn’t really want the job and yet did a mostly fine job with it anyway.
30. Richard Nixon
President of the United States, 1969-1974
It is no defense of Nixon as a person or as a commander in chief to say that Watergate was peanuts compared with Iran-Contra or MKUltra or the entire 21st century (Abu Ghraib, PRISM, Little Saint James/Epstein Island)— and, really, anything before or since. Nixon broke public trust in an unprecedented way, but that has more to do with the high quality of investigative journalism during his terms in office than with the moral rectitude of his predecessors. The National Guard committed atrocities stateside under his watch (Kent State), just as they’d been committing them under Johnson’s watch. He had bizarre, druggy, borderline psychotic breaks. But he also implemented the only feasible path forward for a war he inherited (Vietnamization). He ended the draft. He opened diplomatic relations with China. He was a complicated president.
31. Lyndon B. Johnson
President of the United States, 1963-1969
The soaring peaks that might have enshrined Johnson’s legacy – the Civil Rights legislation, the promises of the Great Society – cratered against the realities of a devastatingly unpopular war. Johnson the political muscle man, elsewhere so brilliant at corralling (and threatening) votes out of Congress, could not muscle his way out of the morass of Vietnam and the cultural atrophies of the Sixties. I’m not sure what leader could have—but it wasn’t Johnson. The horrendous aftermath of the Chicago convention in 1968 (in which Johnson’s late abdication played no small part) essentially took his own party out of power for another decade.
32. Warren G. Harding
President of the United States, 1921-1923
A jolly old man discovered, after his death, to be a scandalous lech. Perhaps the most harmless, but least important, and least impressive, “real” president of them all. (And then there was Teapot Dome—a scandal so boring that even APUSH students can barely remember it)
33. Herbert Hoover
President of the United States, 1929-1933
Universally blamed for a Depression he did not cause; eclipsed by his successor for solutions he initiated. Spent the rest of his life complaining about it. Deserves credit for his humanitarian and food aid work during World War I, saving upwards of ten million Belgian civilians from starvation.
34. Grover Cleveland
President of the United States, (1885-1889, 1893-1897)
I used to teach classes right across the street from Cleveland’s historic birthplace monument, so he will always have a special place in my heart. He represents, more than any other president, the now-foreign politics of the Gilded Age (when gold and silver were serious policies). First, before Trump, to serve non-consecutive terms. The source of absolutely, filthy scandalous rumors which turned out to be only partially filthily scandalous.
35. Chester A. Arthur
President of the United States, 1881-1885
Candidate for the greatest personal White House redemption story: Roscoe Conkling’s consummate toadie turned halfway-almost-nearly decent man. There is, even so, a reason he is forgotten.
36. George W. Bush
President of the United States, 2001-2009
Of all the presidents on this list, Bush was the hardest to rank. The standard reading from pundits tends toward disaster: the Florida recount debacle, 9/11 security failings, two extraordinarily destructive wars with extraordinarily destructive legacies, the 2008 crash. Even the modern Right has no love for him: he’s a neocon (or some other slur), an “establishment hack,” a puppet of the Deep State, Israel’s stooge. All of this is fair territory. It’s hard even to begin to respond. And yet— and yet— there is something about Bush which, if it isn’t “Greatness” (in the sense that FDR gets excused by being a Great Man), is some strange, barely articulable combination of affability, resolve, personal courage, Texas charm — all the things which, probably, count for very little in the moral calculus of war — but Bush the commander in chief,
Bush the wartime president, Bush the national unifier on September 12 — these
are all real images with real potency that come from some real subterranean
surfeit of something. I know many brilliant people who rank Bush a little lower than the Antichrist, who were fully conscious during the Bush years and kept track of every disgrace, and for whom Bush represents the worst of failed American promise. But I cannot help but be drawn to Bush the individual.
37. Andrew Jackson
President of the United States, 1829-1837
The first “personality president.” A man whose greatest and most celebrated political accomplishment involved saying “no” to good ideas. Stood against the “American System” and anything that smacked of Federalism and in doing so, stopped a level of national development that might have transformed the country (in a good way) beyond recognition. Praised, like Jefferson before him, as a “man of the people” and a populist—but like every populist since, overextended the powers of the executive branch to the point of crisis (on the Supreme Court: “John Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it!”). Most significantly: responsible for the mass removal of Native Americans from the Southeast and setting the blueprint for the mass exterminations to come.
38. John Hancock
President of the United States in Congress Assembled (1775-1777, 1785-1786)
Chronologically, in the most technical sense, the “first President of the United States.” The signing of the Declaration happened on his watch, bearing his infamous enormous signature. Presided over some of the bloodiest and most difficult days of the Congress’s history and discharged his duties admirably, raising funds and supplies for Washington’s forces when they were needed most. Like most other Revolution-Era “presidents” on this list, he was a wartime president first and foremost, and his legacy extends impressively far.
39. John Jay
President of the United States in Congress Assembled (1778-1779)
Brilliant, versatile, and cool-headed in nearly every post he held, Jay is in the top rank of greatest Founding Fathers. Contributor to The Federalist Papers; first chief justice of the Supreme Court. His presidency (of the Congress) was the least interesting of his positions, but he performed it unobjectionably.
40. Rutherford B. Hayes
President of the United States, 1877-1881
How much blame he deserves for the disastrous 1876 election is an open question, but his entire presidency is marred by the bloody pact that it took to get over the electoral finish line. The end of Reconstruction and the resurgent ghosts of the Confederacy and the new reign of Jim Crow all happened, or started, on his watch. A largely forgettable, ineffectual leader of a nation starting to crack again into pieces.
41. Thomas Chittenden
President [sic] of the Republic of Vermont (1778-1789, 1790-1791)
The first and third governor of the sovereign Republic of Vermont and occasionally, in very scant records, called “President” during his first term, Chittenden almost certainly should not be on this list at all. And yet the Green Mountain State should be proud to have him (as first head of state in both the republic and the eventual 14thstate). Ably handled border disputes with New York to the West and the British to the North.
42. Joe Biden
President of the United States, 2021-2025
An impressive tenure in the Senate and Vice Presidency which led to a dreadful, slow-motion, unbearable lame-duck interregnum. Botched the possibility of national unity when it was most needed and neglected the good counsel of his team when it might have counted. The wrong man at the wrong time.
43. Franklin Pierce
President of the United States, 1853-1857
Inarguably the most handsome president ever to serve. Also the most tragic. Lost all of his children in childhood, and lost his son right before inauguration in a horrific decapitation accident. Drank himself to a slow and grim death. Stayed loyal to the Union in retirement but crept close to Copperhead territory.
44. William Henry Harrison
President of the United States, 1841
“Tippecanoe.” Inexplicably gained the nomination that was rightly Henry Clay’s. Gave a two-hour inaugural address in the freezing Washington air and died barely a month into his office. His vision for the country was a dim one, and he almost certainly would have aided and abetted the expansion of the slavocracy had he lived longer. Of the three bad Whig presidents to give the Whigs a bad name, he was the first.
45. Millard Fillmore
President of the United States, 1850-1853
A small-minded, petty man whose entire legacy stands (and miserably falls) on the Fugitive Slave Act and so-called “popular sovereignty.” Later put in his lot with the Know Nothings and failed at reelection. A disgrace to the realpolitik abolitionist legacy of his predecessor and a disgrace to the state of New York.
46. Anson Jones
President of the Republic of Texas, 1844-1846
The last Texas President (but not the last President from Texas). Negotiated the terms of annexation and lowered the Lone Star flag himself to make way for the Stars and Stripes. A dignified send-off to the Republic of Texas.
47. Andrew Johnson
President of the United States, 1865-1869
It’s true that much of Johnson’s leniency towards ex-Confederates was also Lincoln’s. His pardons and his perhaps-too-eager-reconciliation with the South would also probably have been Lincoln’s tack. But Johnson was transparently ill-equipped for what turned out to be the most significant political transition in American history. If not for an activist Republican Congress, Reconstruction under Johnson would have been mangled worse than it was (and it was already very, very bad). A Union Democrat and an embarrassing drunk, Johnson was probably more liability than benefit to Lincoln’s second campaign. The cause of his impeachment was frivolous, but the nation probably would have been better off if it succeeded. Returned at the end of his life, briefly and bitterly, to the same Senate that nearly ousted him. A sad, unfortunate presidency.
48. David G. Burnet
President of the Republic of Texas, 1836
Interim President of the Republic of Texas for less than a year. Responsible for relocating the barely-formed government in a bid to flee from Santa Anna, an allegedly un-Texan thing to do, but as Santa Anna was in the business of executing prisoners, it likely saved the lives of heads of the interim government, and Burnet rode with the Texas Declaration of Independence in his saddlebags as he fled, which, on further consideration, seems like a very Texas thing to do.
49. Richard Henry Lee
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1784-1785
The man who motioned for Independence on the floor of Congress and the man to thank for the Declaration’s inception. As president almost a decade later, he provided a sensible (if ultimately inadequate) method of meeting federal debt that didn’t rely upon federal taxation or issuing new debt.
50. Elias Boudinot
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1782-1783
The first Jersey president. Called for reforms in treatments of British and American prisoners of war. Signed the Preliminary Articles of Peace. A deeply religious and deeply moral man all his life.
51. Thomas McKean
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1781
Presided over the effectual end of the Revolution with the Battle of Yorktown. Helped draft the Articles of Confederation. A few years earlier, was booted from Congress by his own state’s (Delaware’s) General Assembly for his “scandalous” vote for independence, until the British inroads into Delaware made the Delawareans hate the British again, and was promptly reinstated.
52. Samuel Huntington
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1779-1781
Spent most of his presidency (understandably) asking for money. Saw through the ratification of the Articles. Resigned (understandably) for health reasons. Had an illustrious gubernatorial career afterward.
53. Henry Laurens
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1777-1778
The only American (so far) to be imprisoned in the Tower of London. Crisscrossed France and the Low Countries around the same time as John Adams and played key diplomatic roles in the eventual creation of the Treaty of Paris.
54. Thomas Mifflin
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1783-1784
The seventh and final President of Pennsylvania (a fact and a position of which I was unaware until I was nearly done compiling this list and which nearly drove me to despair). As president of Congress, accepted Washington’s resignation as commander in chief and then struggled to get enough states to continue to take Congress seriously in the immediate aftermath of the war.
55. John Hanson
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1781-1782
A man who, in the noble tradition of a very few select and brave American presidents, did not really want the job, and wanted to give it up after only a week, but stuck it out for the sake of duty. A very charming campaign was launched, nearly a century later, to call Hanson “the first President of the United States,” which is not true in any sense of the term but which has made him a sort of Maryland legend.
56. Arthur St. Clair
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1787
President during perhaps the messiest of the years under the Articles – Shay’s Rebellion, stonewalling state governments, a weak central government – but did pass the Northwest Ordinance.
57. Cyrus Griffin
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1788
The last President before Washington. I’m sure he did a fine job. Information is light on Cyrus Griffin. There is no argument against Cyrus Griffin’s having been a fine president.
58. Nathaniel Gorham
President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1786-1787
Apparently – and this is still, technically, a rumor – Gorham is the man who proposed that the United States offer the role of head of state to Prince Frederick Henry Ludwig of Prussia. He made this suggestion while serving as president, making him, in terms of far-sighted judgment, the worst of the Presidents of the United States in Congress Assembled.
59. Dick Cheney
Acting President of the United States from 7:09am – 9:24am EDT on June 29, 2002 and from 7:16am-9:21am EDT on July 21, 2007
It is to Cheney’s everlasting credit that, in the 260 minutes of Bush’s colonoscopies in which he, Cheney, held the nuclear football, he did not pull a Kevin McCallister. From all accounts of the 260 minutes Cheney served in the highest office, he spent part of the time writing a rather touching letter to his grandchildren so that they might have a souvenir from the then-unprecedented occasion.
60. Kamala Harris
Acting President of the United States from 10:10am – 11:35am on November 19, 2021
It is to Harris’s everlasting credit that, in the 85 minutes of Biden’s colonoscopy in which she, Harris, held the nuclear football, she did not pull a Kevin McCallister. From all accounts of the 85 minutes Harris served in the highest office, she continued working in the West Wing (though not in the Oval Office), prepping for a trip to Columbus, Ohio to promote legislation on infrastructure. There is, however, no souvenir letter on record, so by the air-tight scientific methodology of this list, she ranks below Cheney.
61. Mirabeau B. Lamar
President of the Republic of Texas, 1838-1841
A difficult ranking. On the one hand, he ranks with Houston as one of the most consequential men to emerge from the Republic of Texas. His vision for the republic was expansive—his legacy in state education lasts to this day (Texas A&M and the University of Texas exist in part thanks to his vision). He was, in contrast to the two other Texas Presidents (besides Houston), an actual “leader of note.” On the other hand, in stark contrast to Houston, he advocated a complete, uncompromising policy of extermination when it came to the Cherokee and Comanche. While Houston lived for three years among the Cherokee as a young man (they called him “Raven”) and had a fundamentally level-headed outlook when it came to “Indian policy” in Texas (and even tried to curb some of Lamar’s more heinous ideas), Lamar upended that diplomacy completely and bears the direct blame for multiple massacres conducted with his full blessing.
62. James Buchanan
President of the United States, 1857-1861
Often called the worst president for his refusal to act during the long, slow, miserable secession crisis. But the Dred Scott case, “popular sovereignty,” and his Kansas policies are far more repugnant. Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, admiringly described a political phenomenon he called “The Pennsylvanian”: “supple in action,” “large in motive,” “the strongest American in America.” Looking at the two Pennsylvanians who made it to the highest office, you could never tell.
63. Donald J. Trump
President of the United States (2017-2021, 2025-)
The president we deserve.
64. John Tyler
President of the United States, 1841-1845
An opportunist who, through sheer luck, got a free ride on the ticket that was rightly Henry Clay’s. The only (former) president who joined the Confederacy after 1861 and betrayed the country he was elected to serve. It happened 15 years after his presidency, but it’s enough to rank him the lowest of the “official” presidents. He lies buried, unloved and forgotten, in a coffin draped with the Stars and Bars. Sic semper tyrannis.
65. David Rice Atchison
Acting President of the United States, March 4, 1849 (disputed)
“Acting President” for a measly 24 hours, and of all the men on this list, he is the only one who demonstrably did nothing during his “presidency.” If he was not single-handedly responsible for so, so, so, so much bloodshed during Bleeding Kansas (where he still bears a town and county after his own name), that fact alone might actually have skyrocketed him to the top 20 in this list (after all, do-nothings like Coolidge made a good showing). But Atchison was who he was, and he belongs down here—along with Tyler, he is one of the few “Presidents of the United States” who later switched to the dark side. Of his own 24 hours in office, he wrote: “if I was entitled in it I had one boast to make, that not a woman or a child shed a tear on account of my removing any one from office during my incumbency of the place.” I suppose that’s a consolation.
66. Jefferson Davis
President of the Confederate States of America, 1862-1865
Amazingly, astonishingly, bewilderingly, bafflingly, bamboozlingly, after everything, the man lived out an ordinary retirement on a bucolic coastal estate in beautiful Biloxi, Mississippi, daylighting as an insurance executive, receiving glowing letters and autographs from the Pope, turning down cozy sinecures from prestigious universities (for their low pay), scribbling away at his memoirs and histories, enjoying, we can imagine, a refreshing mint julep in the steamy summer mornings on his porch while pondering the autumn of his life and not, as one might fairly imagine, hanging from the shortest rope on the tallest tree in Washington. Maybe this is the reality of justice—or if not justice, grace. Maybe this is what Lincoln meant by “malice toward none.” Maybe Lincoln would have preferred this to Davis’s summary execution as a traitor (in fact: from the evidence we have, he almost certainly would have preferred it). But it’s still inconceivable that while Lincoln’s body was mouldering in the grave, Davis’s, in such consummate comfort, went marching on, unmolested, for so, so long.
If you’ve read even a fraction of this mess, God bless you, and God bless the USA.
A few last complaints and then I’m done writing about it forever
I’m fatigued. You’re fatigued. Gallons of ink—and gallons of data center wastewater—have been spilled on the subject of LLMs and their impact on the humanities. You and I know “slop” when we see it. You and I know where we stand. We’ve negotiated and renegotiated our relationships to this technology, and, more than that, we’ve heard everyone around us, loudly and often, negotiate their relationships to this technology. We’ve made predictions and been correct; we’ve made predictions and been wrong; we’ve gone back on our word and disappointed ourselves and made amends.
In short: there is nothing new worth saying about LLMs or agentic learning in the public sphere. There is, instead, a kind of eternal return: we are cursed to hear the same shoddy excuses regurgitated by ever fresher (and less human) faces on the internet. At the end of all this pseudo-theorizing, you and I are done talking about “AI.” The proper response to this saturation is probably good old-fashioned silence.
But silence in the face of smugness can feel emasculating. And there are levels of smugness and self-righteousness out there on the internet that, if left unchecked, are more cancerous to the mind than lead poisoning or the leaching of radioactive isotopes into our groundwater.
I’ve plucked out a few of the most common soundbites from LinkedIn and elsewhere that I think represent the laziest thinking around AI. Most of them are from the self-credentialed “AI thought leader class” (which means, really, anybody who spends their free time promoting AI in education on online forums or who runs a consulting side-hustle).
So here are my last words (hopefully) on AI and humanities education and the culture at large. And then I don’t want to talk about any of this ever again.
[Some previous blog posts on the same subject can be found hereand here]
Hysteria and pearl-clutching around “AI detectors”
The AI thought leader class knows that it doesn’t have the moral high ground. The scale of the cheating epidemic in K-12 and higher ed is too overwhelming for them to ignore. The moral degradation that goes along with it (lost trust, inherent suspicion, adversarial relationships between faculty and student) is, on balance, very, very bad.
But every now and then, the winds of justice swing (so they believe) in their direction— and from that rare and blesséd wind, the manna of self-righteousness comes tinkling down upon them, and they must – must – share it with the world.
Because, the thought leaders have discovered, somewhere out there, a lonely student has been falsely accused of using AI by their tyrannical professor. The tyrant – hypocrite that he or she is – had banned their students from using AI in the classroom but has in fact used just such an automated system – an “AI detector” like, say, Turnitin or Pangram – to besmirch their students’ good names.
Granted: I’m sure this has happened somewhere at least once. It sucks to be falsely accused of cheating. That kind of slander, for impressionable young learners, leaves nasty wounds. And I’m aware of at least one viral case where an older professor displayed an outrageous lack of judgment (which was resolved in the student’s favor shortly afterward, once the deans entered the picture).
But don’t let anybody distract you with stories like this. It is impossible to be kicked out of school because of the results of an AI detector. No Academic Integrity board accepts these technologies as substantive. Quite literally all a student needs to do, in order to avoid a career-ending accusation (false or otherwise), is to appeal their professor’s decision and keep appealing up the ranks of disciplinary panels until the case is dismissed. Raise a fuss. Howl. It is impossible to lose. Institutions are more afraid of students than students are afraid of them, and for good reason: colleges don’t want to face legal action, and they have every financial incentive in the world to accommodate their tuition-paying students rather than endure bad PR by accusing their paying customers of crimes which are basically impossible to prove. Any legal case that does make it to court on the basis of an AI detector’s results is going to be a nightmare for the university. I may be wrong. But I would be shocked if any innocent higher ed student has ever faced a meaningful consequence from a false accusation of using AI—beyond the (understandably frustrating) sting of a professor’s suspicion.
Anecdotally: no serious faculty I know use AI detectors, and if they did, they wouldn’t use them to make their final judgment on a plagiarism case. What would be the point? I’ve sat through multiple rounds of AI trainings at multiple institutions, and every single one of them has advised against – no, straight-up mandated against – the use of any sort of automated AI detector. They don’t work. I have never met a single faculty member, from middle school up through undergrad, who trusts AI detectors. It’s common knowledge among faculty that it’s not even worth trying to raise an accusation unless you have incontrovertible, uncontestable, absolute, titanium-level proof that a student breached the rules. In other words, you must have a recording of the student saying, “I cheated on this assignment on such-and-such a date.” Anything short of that is guaranteed to fail. And even that, in the era of deepfakes, may not be enough. Most of the faculty who are trying to maintain any kind of rigorous standards of integrity are demoralized beyond belief. To insinuate — as those who keep harping on “AI detectors” do — that students are the “real” victims of the cheating epidemic is absurd.
So why do these increasingly rare cases of false accusations keep surfacing among the thought leader class? Because they create doubt. Doubt prevents accountability. And a lack of accountability means this technology can finally flow unimpeded. And an unimpeded flow means that overwhelmed departments might, for a small fee, seek the services of an “AI Strategist Consultant” to help them sort things out. And where better to start than with the thought leader class themselves?
“Where is the guidance?”
An apparently harmless question. The thought leader class loves to point out that school districts and colleges are slow in coming up with comprehensive protocols to deal with AI. In fact, the thought leader class loves to point out just how behind many of these districts are falling in their policies.
Why the rush? School policies can have generational effects, after all. COVID reminded us of this. Districts are justified in exercising extreme caution in the face of a transformative technology famous for its unpredictability. The thought leader class, however, is indignant that every institution hasn’t already articulated a fully scalable policy for their thousands of students yesterday.
Just like with the sob stories about AI detectors, there’s a slightly manipulative touch to these complaints. Think of the poor educators, scrambling to deal with this brave new world without any guidance from their administrators whatsoever! Or: Think of the students, who are terribly confused by the conflicting advice from their teachers! Mr. So-and-So tells them AI is banned, while Ms. Such-and-Such allows them to use it for some assignments. How can they handle this burden of confusion?
Why all the whining? Because it’s easy, but more importantly, because the thought leaders doing the whining are also trying to sell their services. For a small consultation fee, we can help your district cut through this confusion and draft a more comprehensive approach to policy…
Why does it have to be comprehensive? Why is it a bad thing for composition teachers to have different approaches to technology than accounting teachers? As helpful as it might be to strike a baseline for what constitutes “cheating” across a single district, I don’t otherwise see a problem in allowing teachers to set their own rules. So what if the rules change from class to class? How is this a bad thing?
School administrators are roundly abused by every faction of society, including by the teachers operating alongside them, many of whom have no actual idea how schools function and stay afloat outside their own classrooms. Admin is the most thankless rung of the ladder in education. Schoolteachers are national heroes; deans and assistant principals are crooked hags who ruin everything they touch (apparently). The thought leader class somehow expects to insult the competence of school administrators and to fleece them for their cash at the same time. Leave the administrators alone, for once.
“We are living in the age of AI. If we deprive students of AI in the classroom, we’re handicapping their future.”
I wonder if the people who write these sorts of things have ever “used AI.”
I mean, clearly they have. Their text is almost always AI-generated and accompanied by AI-generated images. They know very well what the consumer AI landscape looks like. So then I wonder what they mean when they talk about “AI literacy” or “the necessary skills future employers are looking for.” And I wonder why they think this new literacy is so overwhelmingly urgent that it mandates scrapping every workable model of traditional instruction and replacing them with untested tech-centered class environments (which demonstrably harm students’ long-term retention and critical thinking skills).
It turns out that when the thought leader class talks about “AI literacy,” they mean: “prompting a chatbot.” That is basically it. There are some variations of this fundamental skill, like vibe coding (which also involves prompting a chatbot) or using more involved suites like OpenClaw (which involves a bit of additional prompting), but even those variations only apply to a small fraction of the student base targeted by the thought leader class. In most cases, “AI literacy” really means: “asking an agent for what you want and waiting for the agent to create it.”
Consumer AI chatbots are streamlined so efficiently, and they remove so much friction between client and software, that they are, in the best sense of the word, fool-proof. You have to actively try to get a useless result. If you know how to spell, and you know how to be specific, and you remember not to fall in love with your agent, then you have enough AI literacy to be employable in almost any sector that claims to demand AI literacy (with the exception of the high-level software engineering firms that actually design the software itself). It really is that easy. In fact, that’s the whole problem with AI in education—it’s too easy.
Motivated students can internalize the mechanics and limitations of every popular agentic model in the span of a single casual session. Most teenagers, even those whose teachers disallow the use of tech in class, have already figured it out on their own. Perhaps a little bit of metacognitive guidance from teachers would be useful here and there, but not nearly enough to justify jettisoning traditional instructional environments. If a student never saw or used an AI model until the weekend before their new job’s start date, they would probably be just fine. They may even be better prepared and higher functioning than their peers whose entire middle and high school experience was saturated by AI agents.
“AI didn’t ruin education—it only revealed the problems that existed all along.”
No. The mass-scale adoption of novel technologies did, in fact, introduce novel problems.
Which leads right into:
“It’s not the product—it’s the process” Or: “Measure the thinking, not the final result”
Take the oft-used complaint: “We used to grade students based on what they could produce (answers on tests, research papers, etc). Now that AI can produce those results just as well as students can, it’s clear that we need to measure student thinking instead of the final product. In fact, we should have been doing this all along.”
The situation has certainly changed. But there’s no reason to lie about how “awful” things used to be. There was never anythinginherently wrong with grading students based on “final products” or “artifacts.” Those final products and artifacts are the culmination and proof of student thinking. You can look at a research essay and pinpoint the exact moment and manner in which a student’s argument has gone off track. Thinking is baked into the writing process. The insinuation that past approaches to college assignments somehow failed to “capture student thinking,” is a neat little post-hoc way of feeling better about AI’s annihilation of trust in the modern classroom. It implicitly absolves students from their participation in the most extensive cheating epidemic in the history of American education. Of course students cheat now that they’re able to get away with it. The system was broken to begin with!
This is nonsense. The previous model (teacher teaches > student demonstrates understanding through independent work > teacher assesses independent work) is perfectly sensible. “Adapting” curricula to the existence of AI by getting rid of “final products” just means a retreat into lesser forms of learning. Almost every alternative to measuring student growth is far, far inferior.
Nils Gilman’s essay “The University as We Know it is Finished” is the best articulation this concern that I’ve seen. I disagree with his solutions, but his diagnosis is the fairest and most charitable out of all the reform cases out there. For Gilman, term papers are out, lectures are out, and anything involving knowledge transfer from teacher to student is functionally out. Instructors must become “facilitators,” as they are in the “Oxbridge tutorial system,” if they are to survive. The liberal arts, says Gilman, do have a bright future, so long as we shift our instructional focus in radical new directions:
“The replacement, as many education researchers are arguing, is live assessment and demonstration: real-time diagnosis of novel situations, design critique, structured adversarial debate, and Socratic examination. These formats test the ability to sense-make under pressure, defend a frame against live challenge, revise a model when evidence contradicts rather than confirms it, and recognize when uncertainty is too high to proceed. In practical terms: collaborative student projects will require documented decision logs tracing reasoning behind commitments, the canonical deliverable shifts from polished artifact to demonstrated live reasoning, and oral examinations and hand-written exams will become the primary assessment instruments. But despite this emerging consensus among education researchers, institutional practice has barely moved.”
All of this assumes that learning actually happens in these new modes. Socratic seminars, fishbowl discussions, project-based learning, personal reflections, classroom debates, oral exams – all of these are, allegedly, “AI-proof,” but all of them fall far, far short of what might be gained from good old-fashioned reading and writing assignments (which can, apparently, no longer be “trusted”). I’ve seen each of the alternatives listed above done well, but even at their sparkling best, they possess a fraction of the rigor that comes from sustained written work. It’s not even close. The process of researching and writing, say, a 20-page paper is an unexampled exercise of a young mind stretched to its fullest capacities, and it provides opportunities for a careful instructor to give feedback down to the smallest shifts of emphases in an argument— all the way down to the sentence and clause level. No “live critique” or classroom debate can match the capacity for subtle distinction in individual expression that comes about naturally through the writing process. If we are effectively removing long-form writing from instruction (and replacing it with, I suppose, “decision logs”), then we are removing the central pillar of humanities instruction. There is no substitute for writing, and we need to stop pretending that there is.
And anybody who thinks that AI won’t be able to intercede for a cheating student during these “live critique alternatives” (debate prep, or discussions, or “decision logs”) has simply not interacted with AI enough or has not met enough AI-native students. Most AI models can already handle even the most adaptive and personalized and spontaneous assignments of an “AI-proofed” classroom. Plug some documents into Google’s Notebook LM and select the “podcast” option and listen as two AI voices will plausibly stutter and “um” their way through a conversation in a way that’s virtually indistinguishable from human speech. Ask ChatGPT’s voice feature to interrupt your debate in real time and list your fallacies, and it will do so. Ask Claude to create a fictional chat log between you and the machine that “demonstrates your independent thinking,” spaced out over multiple realistic timestamps, and it will gladly acquiesce. There are always novel ways of cheating with AI. If you model your instruction entirely around what AI “cannot do,” you end up with very elementary levels of instruction in which students who want to cheat will end up cheating anyway.
I teach English. I assign papers. There is, quite literally, no other way to grow as a writer than to write. There was no pre-existing problem with English education that needed to be solved. There is no overriding reason to remove writing from the curriculum. All of this is stupid.
If the AI-driven cheating epidemic leads to the devaluing of college education (already in progress); if it produces generations of graduates with less functional literacy than their predecessors (already in progress); if it leads to the further marginalization or collapse of liberal arts programs or the shuttering of entire institutions (already in progress), then we shouldn’t lie about it or pretend like this had to happen. This was neither inevitable nor necessary. There is no silver lining that we have to pretend to embrace. AI came along and killed a good thing. It didn’t “open the door for exciting new opportunities”; it didn’t expose pre-existing problems in the education-industrial complex; it didn’t operate on the playful-but-ultimately-productive Silicon Valley model of “move fast and break things.” It killed things that were good and didn’t need to die.
“Progress” is catastrophic and always has been. Every new development — whether good or outrageously unnecessary — sacrifices what was good and wholesome in the old. Things happen. Things break. The paradigm shifts, and we shift with it. I have very few illusions about any of this and what it means for my chosen profession. I’m just lucky that I entered education when I did and that I’m not having my heart broken after decades of sacrifices, like so many teachers I know. Colleges were already facing bloat and a tuition crisis, and now it looks like they’ll be undone even sooner than that by the credentialing problem: the cheating epidemic has forever poisoned the reputation of the Bachelor’s degree. At the end of all this, we will have lost so, so much in our cultural life that truly matters to human flourishing.
So we go on. Colleges will change or they won’t. The arts and humanities will find new homes outside the academies. I’ll keep assigning essays and brace for the worst until I stop teaching. Students who are able to challenge themselves out of pure intrinsic discipline will succeed; those who don’t will struggle. I don’t have a rah-rah coda to the whole mess. I don’t, in fact, want to write about this again. The doomer case has been laid out brilliantly already. I want to move on. But I want, more than anything else, for the grifters and charlatans and salesmen cluttering LinkedIn and other forums to stop lying about the collapse of traditional learning. I want them, for once, to look their favorite creation squarely in the face and be honest about what it is doing to the world and the young people they claim to care about. Even Nero had the good taste to fiddle while Rome burned. If the fire broke out in 2026, perhaps he would be shelling out seminars on “fire literacy” and writing posts shaming the close-minded fire brigades for trying to save the wreckage. “They’re not just putting out fires — they’re putting out opportunities.”
An honest religious response to modern disenchantment is not as simple as we like to believe
Stop me if you’ve heard this before:
The modern world is a shell of itself. We are living through a Meaning Crisis™, a Loneliness Crisis™, an Attention Crisis™, and everything is spiraling away faster than we can keep track. Our work is less fulfilling and more precarious than it was for our great-grandparents. Our few hours of leisure are channeled through flashy, prefab dopamine sinks that leave us feeling emptier than before. But our problem is deeper than this. It’s a spiritual problem. There was once a unifying moral vision which grounded us, a grand narrative into which everything—we might once have said “all of Creation”—might fit. Now the old magic is gone—though you can catch it in snatches, like the trace mists of an already-evaporated morning dew.
It wasn’t (says the story) always this way. We used to understand, long ago, that the world, and our movements through it, and its natural cycles, and the very stuff of reality, were saturated with meaning. The much-maligned medieval mind was, compared with our scientific modernism, rich with a lost enchantment. In fact, the “superstitious” medieval mind might offer us the escape hatch we so badly need for our modern malaise.
In fact (says the story), our chronology is flipped. We’ve been told there was a steady upwards march from the nadir of the Dark Ages through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’s peaks. This has it backwards: we’ve actually fallen from a culture of universal enchantment (the High Middle Ages, Catholicism, Chartes) into a morass of alienation and atomization (secular post-liberalism). The culprit? It depends how far back you want to look. The Frankfurt School? The Industrial Revolution? Robespierre? The philosophes? Bacon? Hobbes? Descartes? Maybe farther than that: maybe agriculture. The Younger Dryas. Maybe the slaughter of Abel. Maybe the Fall.
How a person answers this question of origins is a pretty good predictor of their politics. The past worth recovering is the blueprint for tomorrow’s utopic vision. Everybody, in other words, will use the same framing to tell you a different, but equally urgent, story.
But the trajectory of this story as a whole – divine beginning, calamitous fall, hope of restoration – is true. In some fundamental ways, the world really is hollower than it once was. However exaggerated and cliched, however frustratingly trite its retelling, however reliant on poor apings of Charles Taylor—the story of disenchantment remains true.
Disenchantment (Materialism’s displacement of metaphysics) changed human consciousness. It worsened it. “Re-enchantment” promises a richer future through a recovery of what was lost. And if disenchantment is at the root of so much that is broken in our arts, culture, and relationship to nature, then surely re-enchantment is the most significant project of our time.
That’s the coda to the story I began with. This is the call-to-arms for religiously-inclined artists and thinkers we hear most often, after we hear the long litany of modern ills.
Our job, the coda says, is to recover the old metaphysical vision charted in antiquity and brought to perfection in the lost Middle Ages. Culture must be rebaptised in the Thirteenth Century (or some other benchmark) if it has a chance of surviving our modern decadence. This means not only the mass recovery of Aquinas (and through Aquinas, Augustine’s Christian Platonism), but of the vast stock of folk traditions and local color which were suppressed during the iconoclasms of “Progress”: the Reformation, the Puritan revolts, the juggernauts of capital-s Science and capital-t Technology. Whatever was once dismissed as “superstition,” as old wives’ tales and big fish stories — whatever was mocked as backward, primitive, idolatrous, embarrassing, kitsch — now stands a chance at revival.
For young Christians in the Traditionalist circles of the internet, this takes on a particular shade. This means a recovery, not so much of the “early church,” but of the late antique church and its roseate medieval flourishes. It means the cult of the saints; medals and novenas; candles for the dead; reclaiming old fasts; bringing back “Rorate Caeli” and Lammas and Gregorian Chant and the Churching of Women.
It also means an openness – if not an outright, premeditated credulity – toward those dimensions of spiritual life which modernity had apparently “erased.” It means a wariness of demons and an invocation of angels. It means a renewed attention to hyper-local workings of divine grace (holy wells and holy grottoes and bleeding statues and oil-oozing icons). It means that miraculous accounts (floating men, divine healings) once dismissed as improbable by Enlightenment rationality demand new reckonings.
What could be wrong with this?
Nothing wholeheartedly wrong-headed (provided you already accept the supernatural). But there is a tenor to the drive toward re-enchantment which I think contains the seeds of future hollowness and future disillusionment. I want to try to stave off those consequences.
I have, then, three concerns or semi-objections to the re-enchantment project as popularized in the trad-sphere.
The Dialectic of Re-enchantment
I don’t think that history follows any kind of script. I don’t believe dialectical materialism (whether Hegel’s or Marx’s or anyone else’s)works. But there is undoubtedly a temporary, historically determined character to the re-enchantment movement which grinds against its appeal to timeless, eternal truth.
Firstly, re-enchantment looks backward to an already narrow historical band of liturgical and mystical traditions (almost always medieval and never, for instance, including the spirituality of the Second Temple era). But more than this, it also generates most of its energy (and following) from its loud opposition to an incredibly narrow, incredibly modern range of ailments. (How often does “Great Books” and “Western Civilization” content on Substack and YouTube, for instance, pivot into outright venting sessions?)
The rhetoric of re-enchantment is often better characterized by what it fights against than by what it reclaims. And what it fights – falling under the bogeyman term of “Modernity” (or something crasser like “wokeness”) – are usually part of a hyper-local, post-industrial smorgasbord of Western European and American complaints: the spiritual pressures of deracination, decadence, and other “-isms” (secularism, globalism, etc) specific to a particular time and place. Look outside this narrow sliver of the world, or wait another hundred years for these specific problems to evolve or disappear, and the re-enchantment movement begins to look like just one more local subculture among many.
There is nothing wrong with subcultures. But souls can’t be wagered on subcultures. And religion is the arena of the soul, not merely one more lane of cultural pride. In soul matters, the stakes must be as clear as possible—it would be disastrous to learn, years later, that one’s religious life was merely a gamble on a time-bound social media trend whose relevance fizzled out in a matter of years.
The “Modernity” of the 21st century is not the final boss of history. It’s very possible that whatever dystopian future follows from here – whether it looks more like accelerationist transhumanism or a new theocratic barbarism – will make our Modernity look full of promise by comparison. The “modern” traits so often maligned by hardcore younger Traditionalists – tolerance, pluralism, skeptical inquiry, separation of church and state – did not arrive by accident or by some nefarious scheme to undermine the Old Good Order. They were the necessary historical outworkings of a crueler (albeit more “enchanted”) world which did not yet know their protection. And if re-enchanters are successful in overthrowing Modernity, it’s possible that these traits will be badly, badly missed in very short order. The old Soviet cliché of “thinking dialectically” would save us from such an overcorrection.
The Problem of Truth(s)
With re-enchantment, truth becomes muddled. The species of truth that most of us grew up to understand — call it “verificationist” or “positivist” or even just “common sense”— becomes frustratingly harder to articulate and apply in an enchanted, premodern worldview.
Enchantment does not only invite a new general perception of the world (following St. John of Damascus’s claim that “the whole earth is a living icon of the face of God”). It also invites questions that are very, very specific and which might sound embarrassingly hostile if put plainly. Is it true that Joseph of Arimathea really planted this tree in Glastonbury? Is it true that Thomas Becket’s blood cured blindness? Is it true that the Holy Houses of Loreto and Walsingham were built by angels and translated from Christ’s home in Nazareth? Is it true that this reliquary contains the wood of the cross, or St. Peter’s finger bone, or Mary Magdalene’s tooth? More: was King Arthur real? Was St. Christopher? Are fairies?
In Modernity, there is nothing wrong with asking such questions. Most of us were raised with the (“modern,” “reductionist”) idea that true is true, false is false, and there’s no two ways about it. Either it happened, or it didn’t. Either it’s real, or it’s fake. Most of us cannot imagine a world, and would not want to live in a world, where these questions were discouraged or obscured. But this “reductionist” way of thinking, to a re-enchanter, is merely a holdover from the Cartesian split between mind and matter which has removed us from Creation and limited our attention to a narrow sliver of reality. Here’s where even well-meaning, affable modern re-enchanters like Jonathan Pageau or Malcolm Guite might elide one definition of truth into another as a means of preserving the source of enchantment and its richness. A re-enchanter might be tempted, in response to one of the above questions, to say something along the lines of: “well, there’s a symbolic, archetypal weight to the story you’re investigating, a deeper truth which is, in fact, ‘truer than true.’” Which is not really helpful to an honest seeker. To truly investigate, to question, to criticize, to literalize, to be skeptical, to (heaven forbid) “debunk,” is to break with the spirit of re-enchantment altogether. There are entire attitudes and dispositions — perfectly normal to most of us — which are, in practice if not in theory, verboten in an enchanted world.
And what if the answer to any, if not all, of the questions above is “no”? What if it could be demonstrated, or at least plausibly argued, that many (or most, or all) of the artifacts and sites of sacred meaning that animated our medieval forebears were the result of misunderstandings or superstitions or placebo effects or outright frauds? The totalizing fear of disenchantment prevents us from being entirely honest with our own histories. At best, re-enchantment makes us more “open-minded” toward realms of experience outside of what Ross Douthat calls “official knowledge” – at worst, it provokes cognitive dissonance and sets the stage for a colossal relapse into disillusionment down the road.
And how, then, does something like rigorous scientific inquiry take place in such a world?
Re-enchantment and the Scientific Method
Re-enchantment sits uneasily with modern science. This is an extension of a larger problem with Traditionalist spaces. I don’t mean the old canard that science and religion are in conflict; the Aquinian-Aristotelian system is almost certainly a better and more comprehensive map of observable reality than the mere materialist systems we use today.
I mean that while scholastic metaphysics claims to leave a space for modern scientific inquiry of a kind, it holds Modernity’s mostly secular “philosophy of science” in deep suspicion, if not contempt. And I mean that this acts as a barrier to absorbing a great range of important truth which should otherwise inform our approach to Creation.
This line of suspicion runs obliquely through both Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option (both recent reads). In both, Francis Bacon’s commission to “subdue” nature through dispassionate inquiry, and Rene Descartes’s division between mind and matter are described as symptoms of a psychic break that never should have happened. Scientia ought never to have been divorced from noesis. But the break has happened, and we cannot exactly reverse it or forget what we have learned about the material world because of it. And that means that, while there may be no fundamental conflict between the findings of the sciences and those of the “queen of science” (theology), much of what’s been learned in the 800 years since the Summa was published has gone unattended by the faithful in any serious way.
Evolution by natural selection is an obvious example (less controversial in Christian circles than it used to be). But even basic facts about natural and geological history, about astronomy and oceanography and mycology and biology and particle physics—these are treated as the tiniest of footnotes, barely worthy of mention, in most religious accounts of reality. That they are true – and that they therefore are manifestations of the divine Logos – is treated as a minor concern. More sympathy and time and attention are addressed to small, dubious sources of medieval “enchantment” than to the grandest of new scientific discoveries. Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of science and faith as “non-overlapping magisteria” is unintentionally reinforced – and the magisterium of science gets punted to the side.
Here, I think, is my biggest personal hang-up with the movement toward re-enchantment. I am a skeptical person at heart, but I can accept, in principle, the miraculous. I can accept the existence of unfathomable numinous depths to reality, both material and immaterial — I can accept, in principle, the existence of registers of spiritual reality which dwarf our own knowable plane of existence. (This, I think, is a necessary prerequisite of orthodox Christian faith.) Paul believed in, and taught, not only the literal existence of angels but of a fundamentally grander and weirder model of our kosmos, full of archons and a divine council (as in Psalm 82) whose ultimate realignment under Christ is a major part of his Christian gospel. Pseudo-Dionysius ranked up to nine orders of angels. A twofold miracle stands at the center of the Nicene Creed: a man is born of a Virgin and raised from the dead, two things that otherwise “cannot happen.” Creation itself is a foundational miracle demanded of every orthodox monotheist. So it’s very possible that medieval peasants, in their easy accession to the realms of angels and spirits, really did have an understanding of reality which exceeded our own. The enchanted vision of the world itself, with its extravagant miracles, is not really at issue.
The real hang-up is that I cannot abide any system which asks me to ignore or discount the almost infinite splendor of material reality qua material reality. I can accept as a matter of faith that material reality is the lowest tier or plane or experience of total reality, compared with what we analogically call “the heavens” and with the final dwelling place of God. But I cannot easily accept the intrusion of “enchantment” where the full extent of material wonder has not even been acknowledged, and where that acknowledgement is often treated as a regrettable distraction.
If something is true, it declares the glory of God. It matters to the whole rest of reality. And the modern scientific method has entirely reshaped the scale and the number of “true things” which need to be accounted for. The physical universe is larger and older and weirder by several million orders of magnitude than what the most brilliant medieval minds could have imagined. And all of it matters. What happened on Planet Earth in the late Mesozoic matters. The terrifying marine monsters of the now-lost Western Interior Seaway matter. The Zanclean Flood matters. The 5.1 million species of fungi alive on Planet Earth at this moment matter. The 99.9% of species ever to live, before the dawn of homo sapiens, matter. The existence of each lunar crater, each exoplanet, each newly discovered star, each supernova, each Black Hole, each lightyear inside the space of the Boötes Void, matters.
Dashed-off paeans to the “beauty of Creation” – usually involving vague tropes like “the heavens,” “the mountains,” “the sea” – are wholly inadequate to capturing the magisterial scale of material reality. A mature and comprehensive 21st century religious account of the universe would involve a more sincere and ambitious encounter with these avenues of knowledge and wonder which our ancestors never had the opportunity to experience. Our ancestors believed human history was only a few thousand years old. We know now that the species has existed for above 200,000. They believed in a static cosmos of spheres; we know that the heavens are infinitely wider and more dynamic. They knew only their local ecosystems and legends of far-off places. We know of biomes far stranger than they could have imagined, and of awful alien fauna who roamed the Earth for millions of years longer than our own civilizations existed. Just as it is true that our ancestors knew things about reality which we’ve forgotten, it’s undeniably true that we have plumbed depths that would have paralyzed them with awe.
Re-enchanters want to skip over this station of reality and go right to the angelic. Without regular infusions of the supernatural, the lowly earth is not enough to sustain their interest. Our world, they say, has lost its connection to the divine. Perhaps, sitting in a cubicle in the heart of a lonely metropolis, surrounded by screens for ten hours a day, it can feel that way. But perspective is everything. If we’re in the business of recovering lost knowledge and lost affections – as well we should be – then we need to go farther and recover a proper narrative that accounts for the full scale of modern knowledge. I have never heard an artist or poet or novelist or clergyman or theologian or philosopher give proper weight both to mature religious faith and to a mature rendering of the scale of the material universe. One is always sacrificed for the other, and these limitations are probably inevitable. But so long as we’re striving for re-enchantment, we ought to take our enchantment all the way, into the farthest corners of human knowledge, including the untouched magisteria of the last two centuries of scientific discovery. At even this lowliest junction of the Great Chain of Being, there is glory to be found. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!
There is too much to say about the Year of Our Lord 2024 – too many moments of joy and tragedy, personally and geopolitically – so I’ll limit myself to writing about books and some other media.
If you counted up the number of words that passed in front of my eyeballs in 2024, I think I read more this year than in any other. I fell well short of my goal for books but made up the difference in student essays and other “required reading” – or that’s what I’m letting myself believe.
The books I’d solemnly vowedto finish by the end of this year were crowded out by a mounting stack of overdue library books and others that demanded immediate attention. And there was a theme to this year’s reading that I wouldn’t have predicted this time last year. My end-of-year tally was unexpectedly heavy on new indie releases (for review purposes) and religion books (for personal reasons) and unforgivably light on poetry and fiction. In 2025 I hope (as always) to be more disciplined.
I have pet projects for the new year and some more serious ones. I’m still working through a stack of books I should have finished long ago (I know, “should” is relative, but many of these were assigned readings, so “should” is appropriate). Augustine and Kierkegaard are at the top. John Donne is up there too. The list is embarrassingly long.
In 2025 I want to finish all the parts of the Bible I haven’t yet read (and reread as much as I can of what I already have). It becomes more difficult to do the more seriously I take it. After that, I want to finish the Mishnah, the Quran, and the Book of Mormon, in that order – I’ll save my explanations for another time.
Looking back over the list of everything I read this year, I’m struck by how underwhelming so much of it seems. True sparks were fewer and farther between than in almost any year I have on record. That’s not to say I read no masterpieces – but somehow, on the whole, I don’t think I had nearly as much fun with these titles as I usually do. Perhaps I let circumstance and gut-instinct guide my reading choices too often, and I postponed too many books that would have genuinely captured my interest.
But I am unspeakably grateful to be alive and reading. There is much, much, much more to explore.
Some highlights:
Books
Highly, Highly Recommended:
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth (and the excellent HBO miniseries adaptation from 2020)
A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold
Tom Lake: A Novel – Ann Patchett
The Dearly Beloved: A Novel – Cara Wall
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics – Ross Douthat
The Marriage Portrait: A Novel – Maggie O’Farrell
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God – St. Thomas Aquinas (a surprisingly readable ease-in to scholastic theology)
Most Beautiful Prose: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Every now and then a book comes along that makes my writerly self despair of ever coming close to its triumphs. Kingsolver’s multi-decade narrative of an American missionary family in the Belgian Congo had that (not unpleasant) effect on me. Kingsolver masterfully juggles the voicings and psychological profiles of five very different narrators while telling an ambitious and genuinely gripping story of despair and change. This is not a perfect novel, but it is probably the closest thing I’ve read in a very long time.
Most Fun: Dracula by Bram Stoker
Everything has already been said about Dracula, so here are two quick thoughts. One: Dracula is somehow even more fun to read when you already know the major narrative beats; that’s the sign of a superbly-crafted, dread-inducing “slow burn.” Two: the comradeship formed between the book’s heroes in the second and third acts seems like a window onto another world. Maybe that’s my post-COVID, Millennial/Gen-Z isolation talking – but it’s almost inconceivable to imagine this sort of brotherly attachment to a shared higher calling cropping up very often among adults today. That level of bond may be limited to the military or the consecrated religious life. Perhaps the Victorians were more sentimental, or perhaps I need to get out more. At any rate: I’ll probably return to Dracula every October from here on out.
Most Aggravating: Origin by Dan Brown
It’s a little silly to complain about a thriller that was published back in 2017. But the latest Robert Langdon mystery is a rare canker of a book that does something worse than bore its readers: it calls them stupid. Origin takes on religion as its subject – a scandal (as though The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and Inferno hadn’t done the same thing) – and never ceases to be impressed with itself for this decision. Brown treats atheism as a chic vanguard force in a European context that is and has been, by actual reckoning and reputation, thoroughly secularized. And the book’s central figure, Edmond Kirsch, is a creation that would have felt dated even two decades ago in the New Atheist publishing blitz. Brown’s characters are scandalized and spellbound in ways that would tickle their real-world counterparts. Worst of all: Origin spends most of its pages teasing an earth-shattering revelation – a revelation so profound that it launches the “world’s most brilliant religionists” into an existential headspin – and then actually delivers it. The revelation is piddling (a rehash of uncontroversial ideas about abiogenesis and a future “singularity”), but we get the sense that we’re meant to be as impressed as are the smartest people in Brown’s fictional world. And then our hero Robert Langdon, speaking as Brown’s stand-in, ends with a note of magnanimous “tolerance” for those (read: you and me) who may not be ready to face this brave new truth. I hate when books do this. And this isn’t even the worst offender I read this year. Origin makes me think that Dan Brown, for all his globetrotting, lives in an odd simulacrum of the modern world.
Other media:
Highly Recommended 2024 Films:
Anora
Give it 40 minutes and you’ll find that this is not at all the movie you first walked into. This is a hilarious, heartbreaking, very Russian sort of black comedy.
Back to Black
Musician biopics from Hollywood usually feel a little overcooked, but this one is grounded by serious musical talent and retains a certain authentic messiness.
Between the Temples
On a budget of exactly $75, this team did something remarkably weird and (I’m going to use the term for the second time) heartbreaking.
Conclave
A little corny, and more than a little preachy (which makes sense) – but full of wonderful performances.
Dune: Part Two
There is no such thing as a perfect Dune adaptation. This, however, is a solid one.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
This was a hard sell (that nobody asked for), which made its triumphs all the more wonderful.
Longlegs
Ignore the haters. It did overpromise in its ad blitz; it does fall flat in the third act when its mysteries are finally answered. But the first two thirds of this film are masterful horror storytelling.
We Live in Time
Once again, I need my favorite word: “heartbreaking.” A quiet, humbling take on parenthood, commitment, and growing up.
Highly Recommended TV series (ones I first came across in 2024):
The Bear (Max)
The show’s third season may have been its weakest, but this is still far-and-away the best drama in the game. Almost unbelievably good.
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clarke (BBC)
Demands multiple viewings – this was my third time straight through from start to finish (while waiting for PBS to make a second season of their successor series Civilizations)
Rick Steves’ Art of Europe (PBS)
A sunnier take on the same ground covered by Kenneth Clarke.
Country Music: A Film by Ken Burns (PBS)
I only just started this one, but it still has to go on the list.
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
I’m only two episodes into this one, but it already has to go on the list.
Best overall series: The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBO)
Paolo Sorrentino’s baroque 2016 and 2020 miniseries may be the most important treatment of religious faith in popular culture of the 21st century. Overstatement or not, The Young Pope and The New Pope form a layered and beautiful narrative. Visual decadence and obvious clichés about piety abound, not always in productive ways, and Sorrentino is clearly in love with his own set pieces. Some of the subplots are more affecting than others. And as with this year’s Conclave, there’s an ultimately predictable (and dramatically uncompelling) softness that seeps in around the rougher edges at the narrative’s close. But even so: Popes Pius XIII (Jude Law) and John Paul III (John Malkovich) are some of the most interesting protagonists to appear on HBO or anywhere else. The story itself, thanks to the scale of the burdens shouldered by our characters, is as intense as anything in Game of Thrones or House of Cards. There are moments of this story that I believe will profoundly move any viewer patient enough to give it a try. The series have my imprimatur.
Highly Recommended Albums (that I first heard this year):
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Damn the Torpedoes (1979)
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk (1979)
Lou Reed, New York (1989)
Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (1998)
American Football, American Football (1999)
Ryan Adams, Gold (2001)
Mk.gee, Two Stars & The Dream Police (2024)
MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks (2024)
Recommended musical artists in general (that I first heard this year):
Charley Crockett
Maggie Rogers
English Teacher
Dinosaur Jr.
Son Volt
The Carter Family
John Fahey
The Louvin Brothers
Lonnie Holley
Soul Coughing
Superchunk
Traveling Wilburys
Mk.gee
MJ Lenderman
Highly recommended podcasts (that I listened to most frequently this year):
In Our Time (BBC)
Dollar Country (WTFC Radio Lawrence Kansas) – thanks to Justin Randel for recommending
[Abridged] Presidential Histories with Kenny Ryan
Premier Unbelievable: Ask N. T. Wright Anything
The Jewish History Podcast with Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe
Lectures in History (CSPAN)
Humane Arts (Wesley Cecil)
Westminster Presbyterian Church at Rock Tavern, New York (sermons)
About this time last year, The New Republic nominated Cornel West as their “Charlatan of the Year” for running as an independent in 2024’s presidential election. Now that that contest is up, it’s safe to say that West was a political non-factor among non-factors. His votes melted almost immediately into the nameless mass of 388,817 “Other Candidate” ballots, which is roughly half the total that Chase Oliver (?) took home.
The article was written by David Masciotra, whose incisive Exurbia Now I reviewed earlier this year. Masciotra is a thoughtful chronicler of the American Left and its metamorphoses over the last four decades, and his catalog spans an impressive range over American culture generally. He’s also faced dressing-downs in the past for his criticisms of West – since West, like many public intellectuals who’ve mastered the lecture and cable circuit, has no shortage of loyalists – and I have no business piling on. Masciotra’s critique, for the most part, is sound. I can speak comfortably from this position of hindsight, knowing now that West’s candidacy was never a threat to anybody, and say that perhaps Masciotra leaned a bit too hard on the man.
Easy for me to say.
I was only reminded of TNR’s article because I’ve been working my way through recordings of West’s 2024 Gifford Lectures this last week. This post isn’t meant to cover the logic (or illogic) of third-partyism – I want to write instead about West’s artistic side – but I will say a few things in brief. Yes, in the end, West was a non-player in the election, but even if he could have made a difference:
In December 2023, when the article was published, President Biden was the unquestioned Democratic nominee and was still a full seven months away from withdrawing from the race – a call that was almost unanimously affirmed even by his own diehard supporters.
When the article was published, West was perhaps the only charismatic candidate on the Left launching any kind of “internal opposition” to Biden’s run. (Who else was there – Dean Phillips?)
The threat of a serious electoral challenge from West may (in some alternate reality) have been one (small) part of a movement to reconsider Biden’s candidacy an entire year before that conversation actually took place, following “the debate heard round the world.”
Many Democratic strategists – the same who opposed West’s candidacy as the vanity run it may have been – now lament the lack of a “real” primary, and the lack of time for Harris’s campaign to get off the ground, blaming those factors for Harris’s defeat. A third-party challenge from the Left was, perhaps, one way to deal with these factors far enough in advance to make some kind of a difference.
Even if it never led to a shake-up at the top of the ticket, the purpose of a “spoiler candidacy” like West’s is not to win but to exert real pressure on the closest ally with the best chance of winning – and to get some kind of humane concessions from them before they dish up their usual tasteless election-year-milquetoast gloop.
Enough about the presidential run, which is the least interesting thing about West’s career even in the last few years.
Watching the Gifford Lectures this month (and several of West’s guest lectures from elsewhere) brought me my first sustained dose of West’s rhetoric. This was the first I’d experienced of West’s infamous web-spinning: his deep familiarity with, and playful references to, the canons of world thought – of philosophy, poetry, novels, plays, theology, and, importantly, music.
Now, a quick note to set up my next point: unlike many wonderful writers and scholars I know, I never had to be converted to the liberal arts. I’ve always bought into the corny platitudes that college recruiters shell out about becoming a “versatile thinker.” For as long as I can remember, I always believed that something tethered all the arts together; that there was some mystical union – some Platonic canon – that gathered together all forms of human expression over the ages, and that they really did and really could be held in conversation with one another – and that they all really mattered in the grand scheme of things. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was, and still is, a nearly religious ideal for me. I won’t go into that here – only to say that this faith has been scattered over some very rocky soil in the last decade or so, both in and out of academies.
West, of course, is from an older generation of scholars, and his lower-case-l-liberal use of the canon was probably not so unusual in the past. (I’m thinking especially of the High Romantic Harold Bloom, who sang a 40-year swan song over the waning of just this kind of hallowed treatment of literature before his death in 2019) West knows the literary greats intimately. But to hear West speak about other arts, and especially about music and musicians – jazz, the blues, John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone – is astonishing. It’s far different from the way that any other contemporary critics – at least the ones I’ve read recently – approach the arts.
To take a basically random example, consider the cultural criticism of Mark Greif, the n+1 founder whose 2016 collection Against Everything covered Keeping Up with The Kardashians, Nas, “Octomom,” the lyrics of Radiohead, and other so-called “pop culture phenomena.” Here, as in almost every other example of “Media Studies” that I can think of, there’s an overdetermined, almost deadly seriousness to the treatment of the subject matter. The absolute refusal of “Media Studies” to make aesthetic divisions between what their audience instinctively recognizes as “high” and “low culture” sometimes feels like a challenge to the reader: What, aren’t you going to say anything about my Kardashians chapter? Not quite what you expected? Was that a smirk I saw there? I don’t think Greif necessarily wants this reaction – but at no point does the reader get the sense that these songs/TV shows/films/individuals are anything more than proxies for the writer’s own analytical flourishes. The attention is entirely on the writer’s brilliance: look at all the insights I can glean from the cultural detritus you, the common middlebrow reader, probably don’t even think twice about.1
Not so when West caps off his tangents with a lyric from Curtis Mayfield. In short, West thinks these artists have something to say – their works are in conversation with Nietzsche and Chekhov and Lukács and Heidegger and all the rest, and not just in the pandering way that our disciplines use that term. They aren’t merely “cultural artifacts” or objects of “ethnographic study.” And therein, I think, lies one of the most vital effects of West’s public lectures: it actually allows the arts a place in the most meaningful conversations of history.
And one last note: West’s reading of Christianity – his unbelievably consistent insistence on the equal dignity and worth of every human life; his welcoming of even ruthless opponents as “dear brothers/sisters” – is a welcome thaw for the chilling hoarfrost of radical politics. It’s given him a universal conception of justice and solidarity that makes the factory-grade Marxism of his compatriots look provincial and clannish by comparison. His so-called “revolutionary Christianity” exalts the poor and the low-caste while leaving a space, even theoretically, for the publicans – the Lazaruses as well as the imperial collaborators like Zacchaeus.
(Not a dig at Greif specifically — this is a generalized “I” shared by, let’s say, the broader discipline of “cultural studies”) ↩︎
After hypocrisy, “whataboutism” is the most vexing conversational vice of our time. And like hypocrisy, it’s almost impossible to criticize in good faith. None of us can dispatch a hypocrite bloodlessly – the sword of criticism cuts in both directions – and the “whataboutists” in our lives can count themselves safe on the same grounds. All have sinned and fallen short, etc.
Even so, I think that “whataboutism,” as a reflex, however much it tends to infantilize our discourse, is worth keeping in circulation.
The term “whataboutism” might literally have come from The Troubles of Northern Ireland, but it describes an ancient pattern with which we’re all familiar to some degree. It’s a more generalized application of the fallacious tu quoque argument, and its goal is the same: to avoid personal responsibility. When carefully used, it can serve a useful counter-cultural function. It can redirect public outrage from a minor sleight or gaff toward a larger, more deserving target. It contextualizes small breaches of decorum (and even ethics) by showing their place within a larger and more terrifying system.
That’s an occasional benefit. But more often “whataboutism” is a child’s toy that adults use to excuse the worst kinds of human behavior.
One egregious example: let’s say that a man murders another man in broad daylight and that the victim works in a deeply unsympathetic profession. Let’s say that the broader public valorizes the man who commits the murder and that the murder becomes a cause célèbre which straddles uneasily between the internet’s standard “post-irony” and a genuine appetite for bloodletting. Internet commenters who offer gestures of sympathy, caution, or regret for the murder are treated to long lists of the victim’s own actions over the course of his career. To return to the question of murder and to entreat our ordinary responses to murder is impossible: the broader public is more interested in scoresheets. What about…?12
The list of possible examples is bottomless.
Whataboutism infuriates us because it challenges our power. We see our opponent equivocating, ducking, and dodging their way out of acknowledging the truth we want them to see. If they would stop moving for a minute, we could, as we do with misbehaving puppies, force their heads down into their own filth and let them stay there until they emerge whimpering and repentant. We are prevented from our exercise of True Justified Violence – and it makes us angry.
The only way out of this anger is to experience it from the other side. I can think of several examples of this, and you can too. You (or your position) are thrust on the hot seat; you (or your position) are excoriated for your participation in some evil; you (or your position) are given no escape hatch. Why me? Why this position out of all the others? Why now, of all times? What about…
All have sinned and fallen short. Christians and the Soviets agree (correctly) that guilt exists everywhere, at all times, in everyone, and all it takes to find it in someone else is to choose to look for it. Every criticism of another’s shortcomings – intellectual, moral, or otherwise – is, on the cosmic scale, entirely justified. There is something there. Once we’ve got someone in the interrogation chair, we can keep them there indefinitely; their protests, on the cosmic scale, are weak and entirely unjustified. But who makes these kinds of calls? Who decides who ends up in the chair?
In a way, it comes down to who makes the first accusation. Whoever throws the first stone and lands the first blow is, for a time, safe from the same treatment. It’s a game of brute power.
On the one hand, we are called to a life of radical self-examination; to hear our faults read back to us from others’ mouths should move us deeply. But on the other hand, we reserve the right to appeal to balance and proportion to preserve our sense of moral clarity. Perhaps this is “whataboutism.” Perhaps not. One does not preclude the other – radical responsibility is required us, while common sense tells us that flagellating our backs raw will leave us unable to shoulder the heavy burdens of the future.
It’s frustrating to see others equivocate and “whatabout” themselves out of meaningful criticism. It’s a problem that probably will worsen over the rest of this decade. But I think it’s a fair tradeoff when considering the other extreme: an endless series of ridiculous Puritanical3 tribunals headed by the worst and least generous among us.
Not to belabor the point here, but this is where common sense ethical judgments hold supreme. We reserve the right to say that something is morally wrong, and we reserve the right to be deeply suspicious of any calls to the contrary that cloak themselves in “nuance” and “complexity” and “a long history of [X]” (or, God forbid, “the revolution,” “the country” “racial purity,” “the intifada,” or whatever other excuses we make for others’ crimes). We oughtn’t chuck these questions to “the philosophers” when they seem beyond our reach – laymen too often discount their moral compasses, which often point truer north than those of their professional counterparts. ↩︎
The point isn’t lost on me, either, that moral contradictions of this variety are the cornerstones of literature itself, stretching back to Aeschylus and Homer and deep into prehistory. Revenge, comeuppances, revolution, blood-feuds, and questions of the appropriate exercise of violence have jostled their way into most literary canons of the world, and they’ve produced some of the world’s most passionate (and even beautiful) philosophical and political writing. We exist in a world at war with chaos and the legion evils of human nature. But to acknowledge that violence has a draw on usand speaks to our deepest selves is not (as obvious as it may sound) to justify it. That we cannot help breaking the moral law is not a reason to give up on the moral law – it is all the more reason to hold fast to it. ↩︎
I mean this, if you can believe it, without any disrespect to the actual Puritans. ↩︎
I write this exactly a month after the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Up to this point I’ve put off writing anything about Hamas’s October 7 attack and the subsequent war because I know I won’t do it well enough. It’s impossible to honor the scale of human suffering in Israel and Gaza over the last month. And it’s impossible to avoid the mire of qualifications, understatements, false equivalence, and all the other noxious distractions that characterize our public discourse. I’ll try to keep my aim here very, very limited.
In recent years, even before the outbreak of the war, I’ve been shocked by the range of the coalition amassed around antisemitism: the usual fringe actors, but also agitators from the broader Islamic world; the post-colonial revolutionary wing of the Left; the racialized, “extremely online” Right; the resurgent Black Hebrew Israelites; Kanye West – and others. There was no top-down organization; it always seemed a grassroots phenomenon, spontaneous and stochastic and ecumenical in a way that few other ideologies are.
Next to everything else – and this is not at all the most important point to make here – antisemitism is unbearably lazy. It’s tedious watching people take it up as though they’ve discovered it themselves, and as though it were a mark of intellectual courage. In a literary/aesthetic sense, it’s ugly for the same reasons. An example: if I wrote a novel featuring a garden-variety 21st century antisemite, with dialogue taken verbatim from any of his flesh-and-blood prototypes, I’d be justly panned for taking part in such derivative and cliched world-building. It’s all been seen and said countless times before. The element of cliché in antisemitism – and the implausibly hokey, comic-book-villain nature of most of its manifestations – is puzzling for such an ancient prejudice.
I have a hypothesis about why these cliches persist. In the liberal democratic West, and with good reason, antisemitism is one of the last remaining taboos in polite society. I don’t know, twenty or thirty years from now, if that will remain the case. The world is changing. But for now, children in the U.S. and through much of Europe receive a comprehensive primer on the Holocaust; we learn from an early age to guard against the species of evil that spawned it. Ask any American or Western European who was the single most detestable human to ever live, and you’ll almost certainly get the same answer.
But the human proclivity to bristle against authority – to push boundaries, to be “edgy,” to slaughter sacred cows for a laugh – finds a natural target in the Jews. For a certain caliber of middle schooler, nothing is as hilarious, or as “brave,” as carving a swastika in the school bathroom. These kids (most of them, I’d hope) outgrow this urge when they outgrow spitballs and fart jokes. A charitable reading of human nature would hold that these kids “know not what they do” – that this isn’t really antisemitism, but preteen anarchy.
But hordes of others grow up, and, having never had a streak of contrarianism before, discover as adults the terrifying thrill of “unorthodox opinions.” I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time lurking in conspiracy circles online – Flat Earth, 9/11 Trutherism, and uglier stuff – and hear the same “conversion” testimonies ad nauseam: after a life of complacency (living as “sheep”), these individuals start asking the “real questions.” For this sort of person, there is no better “final boss,” no better shibboleth, no better badge of intellectual “courage,” than the repudiation of Jews as a protected class.
Every generation has its share of people like this – people who, having asked no meaningful questions during their formative years, turn into paranoid, impressionable adults who renounce every solid judgment they took for granted growing up. Taboos, they think, exist only to hide “forbidden knowledge” — why else would they exist? Why else wouldn’t THEY want you to poke around there? In the decades after the Shoah, when antisemitism in the West became anathema – again, only in polite society – the pressures against these expressions formed a perverse attraction for newly-minted anti-establishment types.
For the deeply anti-social (e.g. most Neo-Nazis) and for those under the strain of public psychotic breaks (e.g. Kanye West) – for people who strive for extremes of incivility – the anti-Jewish canon offers a ready stock of images and phrases to draw on. For as long as Jewish history is taught to children, children will grow up with a deep sympathy for the plights of the Jewish people. For as long as some of those children grow up susceptible to the thrill of cheap “gnosis,” they’ll continue to reject the sympathies of their youth, and Jews will bear the brunt of this.
Naturally this is a very shallow reading of a very old problem. I haven’t addressed the issue of deeper cultural inheritances, or the web of structural causes for the persistence of antisemitism. I’m talking about only a fraction of it – and specifically why the same cliches, the same “conclusions,” keep surfacing out of the same “benign” liberal cultural ferment. I’ll end this with another, and better, cliché: the price of liberty – including the liberty to express heinous ideas – is eternal vigilance. We need to be aware of the sort of world which our liberties are making.
There’s a part of me – a nostalgic, desperate part – that wants to recreate in adulthood the sense of time I had when I was a child. For as long as I can remember my life has been measured by the American school calendar, a curiosity anywhere outside our borders.
(A Danish guest at a family dinner a few weeks back was almost as shocked by this as by our systems of healthcare.)
Millions of my peers have happily (or begrudgingly) discarded this for a “grown up” calendar built around vacation days and sick leave. If I stop teaching, I’ll need to do the same.
Grinches and overworked retail employees might point out that the “holiday cycle” is a euphemism for marketing campaigns. But that doesn’t matter to a child. An average child in the U.S. measures time in steadily increasing enchantments: the first day of school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s; a buffer, and then Valentine’s Day, Easter, spring break, and the long languid freedom that characterizes our summer breaks.
At some point this fades, and between the slow end of childhood and the dawn of parenthood, most holidays become strange: it feels a bit silly to celebrate them, but it feels grotesque to ignore them. I’ve made compromises with the minor ones: I’ll look for a sprig of green on Saint Patrick’s Day, give a solemn nod on Labor Day, think about trees on Earth Day, etc. – midnight passes, and I might feel a prick of guilt for my non-observance.
I hadn’t heard of All Saints Day (“All Hallows”) and All Souls Day until comparatively late. I was in grad school, living alone for the first time in my life, and the idea of a “feast day” was new and Romantic. I wasn’t Catholic, and didn’t know the rules, so I took a literal interpretation: one day, I assumed, celebrates all the saints, the other celebrates all the souls that are now, have been, and ever shall be.
I know a little more now. But I still like my first interpretation. Every “Allhallowtide” (Oct. 31 – Nov. 2) for the last four years, I’ve tried to “celebrate” these days in the awkward, private way I’m accustomed to with all the minor holidays. And I end up with an amalgamated mush of inward rituals: some confused prayer, some baffled reflection; once or twice, a piece of writing that never sees daylight. I take the days in their broadest possible meaning, transfixed by the sheer magnitude of that word “All.”
Questions arise. Doesn’t the “All” in “All Souls” supersede the “All” in “All Saints?” If you take the traditional, limited observance of All Souls to include only the souls of the faithful Catholic departed, doesn’t that encompass the saints, who must, in order to be saints, have died? Why the distinction – and why commemorate them as their own days to begin with?
Holidays – holy days – outwardly constrict the expressions of devotion. They do this in a way that even observers recognize as artificial. I was raised to understand, for instance, that to a believing Christian, every day is Easter; every day is Christmas. But these days – and in some traditions, entire seasons in preparation (Lent, Advent) – still have their place on the calendar. Some fundamentalists, and a few major sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, dismiss holidays altogether as superfluous (or worse); but the majority of people embrace and celebrate holidays which they recognize as, technically, “redundant.”
I would rather have redundant holidays than none at all. Life is short, and the world is wide.
Our ancestors lived at the mercy of the seasons. In most of the last 12,000 years, the cycles of harvest and planting were probably the most important things in the world. Civilization was impossible without them, and even the most remote urban elite were wracked with more anxiety about agriculture and natural disaster than most of us can imagine now. Seasonal changes, and the recurring holidays that commemorated them, were unbelievably significant. To be freed from this mode of life is a blessing and a curse.
To have survived another cycle of seasons, another trip around the sun, and landed on the same day, in the face of all the vagaries and tribulations of the year, was and is a powerful feeling. No matter how much we’d like to abstract out the “meaning” of certain holidays from their position on the calendar, we can’t ultimately rid ourselves of the instinctual “rightness” of the connection between a fixed date and what it celebrates.
Even so: why only one day for “All Souls?” As I understood the day, and still do – as a day to honor and celebrate, literally, every human person – it seems to express a conception found, at least nominally, in most major religions, and in most generous secular attitudes (humanism et. al.). If every day is Easter, surely every day is All Souls Day.
And it’s an impossible task, too, especially for 24 hours: the “All” covers, quite literally, the totality of human existence.
I think it comes down to human weakness. As with religion, so with literature and art. We have vocabularies to express the infinite; we have access to registers of thought and experience which can hint at, or reach, heights of sublimity, ecstasy, super-human conceptions of life, and all the rest. We all – at least I hope – have experienced something like transcendence, and something like agape, an all-consuming, overpowering sensation of charity and respect and love for the whole human family; but we can’t maintain it. The noblest aims of art – to expand the self, to produce a deeper sense of love – run up against the same reality: we can never “stay” in one place. We can’t live in that frame of mind indefinitely. Some of us can stay in the heights for longer, and some of us (the “saints,” I suppose, “known and unknown”) are up there for most of the time. But everyone comes down. We get hungry, and we need things. Transcendence needs constant nourishment.
Which means we need to take things in small pieces. We need to pace ourselves. And we need to repeat some things year after year. Every day is and ought to be All Souls Day – but most of us aren’t there yet.
What stories about AI – and AGI – are we accepting as “normal” at this point?
I.
Imagine waking up at 4:00 AM in a foreign hotel. There’s a racket going on in the hallway. It’s impossible to sleep with all the commotion, and after grumbling a bit, you put on some pants and open your door. You’re not the only one: an entire hallway full of bleary-eyed guests are poking their heads out to see what’s going on.
Everyone around you is speaking a language you don’t know. All the guests seem concerned – a handful are jubilant. One of them points to an imposing concrete vault at the far end of the hallway. You catch, finally, some snippets of conversation you recognize: “it’s coming”; “who will it get first?”
Rubbing your eyes, you see that a small crowd is huddled around the vault with all kinds of tools. You muster some courage and walk down to investigate. More obscure chatter hits you from all directions as you walk, from strange and familiar tongues. What’s coming? you wonder. Is this an emergency?
You get to the end. The entire maintenance crew is there, working away at the vault with jackhammers and hand-chisels and a blowtorch. The concierge is there, too – so is the doorman, and the bellboy, and the valet, and the fitness trainer. Several conversations are going on at once; none of it is intelligible over the noise.
You gesture toward the door and ask, in your halting attempt at the local tongue, what’s going on. You get sideways glances and cold shoulders from the crew until the concierge steps in and offers to translate. You begin:
“What are you doing to that door?”
“We’re opening it.”
“But what’s on the other side?”
“Something dreadful; truly gruesome. When we breach this door, a beast that lives on the other side will be loosed.”
“What will it do?”
“Oh, it will be a bloodbath, sir. Guests will be slaughtered in their beds. Joists will be ripped from the walls. The hotel itself will be a mound of rubble in mere minutes. We’ll be lucky if any of us make it out alive.”
“Why are you opening it?”
At this, you get a blank stare. You’ve made a dreadful faux pas; announced your philistine Americanness. Still, you need some clarity. You ask again. The concierge responds a little indignantly:
“Sir, why aren’t you opening the door?”
Baffled, tired, and horribly out of your depth, you abandon diplomacy. You scream, curse, gesticulate wildly at the maintenance workers, who by now have made quite a dent in the concrete.
The concierge, more amused than angry, wipes the spittle you’ve sprayed him with and responds:
“Listen, sir: just above us, the 16th floor is making significant progress breaking through the 16th floor vault. They may break through to the 16th floor beast by daybreak.”
Your face must register your bewilderment. He clarifies:
“How, in good conscience, sir, can we sit around, with our eldritch horror locked behind this vault, and wait for the 16th floor to release their eldritch horror and destroy this hotel as we know it?”
II.
My parable is a little on-the-nose. I’m sure, given the title of the series, you know what I mean by “the beast behind the door.” But if I were to extend the metaphor all the way, there’d be some updates. The guests, rather than stand mutely in doorways, would have been swarming the hall, placing bets and taking odds. Hustlers would pitch deep-pocketed guests in the hotel bar about “integrating the beast into existing workflows.” Very possibly, as some guests would surely speculate, there may not even be a beast on the other side of the concrete.
At least with my own experience grappling with A.G.I., the broad strokes line up. Nobody knows what the beast looks like; nobody, except for the hustlers (who’ve never seen the beast) can put a positive spin on it. Everyone involved thinks it’s inevitable – and, therefore, desirable? — that the beast is freed.
I believe there are people out there who truly welcome A.G.I., warts and all, who don’t also want to see civilization collapse. Transhumanists would be one group. “Post-scarcity” anti-work utopians are another. Some people are seduced by the idea of a “next step in evolution,” no matter the costs; I don’t totally blame them. I find them interesting. But they’re not the class that’s accelerating the quest for A.G.I. True A.I. boosters appear to possess, if not a double consciousness, at least a decent share of cognitive dissonance.
It’s of course possible to deeply fear an A.G.I. run amok, and still believe in the promise behind the concept. That, at any rate, is the guiding philosophy behind OpenAI (creators of DALL-E, ChatGPT, GPT-4, etc.). But we have a disparity in our stock of stories: AI promoters have built a solid canon of dystopian possibilities for A.G.I., and comparatively few visions for what A.G.I – a “new kind of mind” – could add to human civilization.
When we do hear the benefits of A.G.I., we hear variations on “automation.” Automation and its impact on labor are perennial concerns. What would this automation look like? It’s left unsaid. I’ll let ChatGPT give the canonical answer:
Does any of this sound well-defined? Unique? Note ChatGPT’s definition of A.G.I.: “a highly autonomous system that can perform any task a human can do.”
Any task a human can do is disingenuous. That’s not at all the same thing as a new order of consciousness, a new step forward for intelligence, of the sort that makes some A.I. boosters salivate (or wring their hands). A.I. taking over existing human occupations is one thing. If that were all we were talking about with A.G.I., we could cut the conversation short and say no thank you, we’d rather have full employment (or something close to it). The promise of A.G.I., if it’s going to be worth fussing over, has to be greater than this. Any task a human can do, as far as I’m concerned, is only the baseline for recognizing whether you’ve truly got A.G.I. or just a mishmash of really good programs.
And ultimately, as I’ve heard more and more laymen claim, this cataclysmic promise of A.G.I. may just be a strategy to drum up interest. And investment. It certainly gets people talking, and writing.
III.
“The man that invented the steam drill
Thought he was mighty fine,
But John Henry made fifteen feet;
The steam drill only made nine.“
Pete Seeger, “John Henry”
John Henry beat the steam drill. He persevered over an unfeeling machine built to replace him, through his own blood and grit.
The details of his life – even whether he was real – hardly matter. He triumphed; he became a legend. By now he’s become almost a pure archetype of human will in the face of automation.
It also cost him his life.
Strength – as in, brawn – is valued in the 21st century. Strength wins championships and wins places in halls of fame and record books. It’s a physical signifier of an individual’s discipline and work ethic, and often of a high level of commendable self-denial. But I don’t think any person alive would put up a modern John Henry against even the most rudimentary of modern machines. The most perfect specimen of human strength wouldn’t even be a bit player in a competition between standard-issue robotics in an average factory. We wouldn’t even consider holding up “strength” as the defining virtue of civilization.
So instead we say we have other defining features. Intelligence and its cognitive relatives – creativity, empathy, understanding, wisdom, et. al. What we lack in our physical comparison to “the machines,” we more than make up for with these distinctly human intellectual traits.
I think this is generally true. But before this year, I also never expected to have a productive conversation with a bot. Since then, I’ve asked ChatGPT – now considered lower-grade next to newer models – to write me a Socratic dialogue, and it did – in seconds. I’ve asked it to write me a screenplay full of French puns and goofy names and obscure themes, and it did, also within seconds. I’ve asked DALL-E to draw me some pictures – and, actually, it didn’t do very well with those. But my point stands.
What sets us apart – from the vegetable/animal/mineral kingdoms, but especially from machines of our own design – has to be found in our minds. That’s our stake to specialness in the world. And now something new has arrived. It “thinks”; it “empathizes”; it “creates.” Our John Henrys are raising hammers and laughing in the face of the “new steam drills.” They’ve won a race against a machine once before. But that was a long time ago.
The Procrastinating Poet 