Enlightenment Now

Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.

any picture of progress in society and politics has to involve some progress in how we think and feel: an escape from illusions and delusions, attachments and symbols that no longer serve us well, towards some deeper and more accurate truths. Much of what we count as progress has been a progress in consciousness of just this kind—progress in our kn

Societies can collapse. These texts problematize the idea that conditions of life are inexorably improving; according to Greer, we are moving to a condition that is After Progress (2015). These texts point to the possibility of systemic reversal, some deploying the language of austerity, and show that this is directly affecting people's lives and l

Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.