A thought experiment

A few weeks ago, out of curiosity I asked Claude to identify the ten people whose thought most shaped the twentieth century.

After a few turns, it came back with this:

There are plenty of obvious objections to this list: people who should be included, people who shouldn't, biases towards including or excluding some groups, inaccurate characterization of some of these contributions, etc. The premise of the question itself has its issues. The list isn't right, but it is interesting, less for the specific individuals than for the broader intellectual projects they represent.

I looked for patterns and saw two threads, in tension. Half of these contributions related to discovery, in emerging domains and to a degree that had been only dreamt of in previous eras: Einstein and the fabric of space and time, Watson/Crick and the encoding of life, Freud and the human mind, Turing and information and computation, and even Keynes and political economy. In each case, discovery led quickly to a quest for mastery, sometimes with deep involvement by the same individuals: nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, information technology, pharmaceuticals, active economic management and the welfare state: many of the scientific breakthroughs achieved in the first half of the century were followed by a rush to put them into practice. The individuals here might not have thought of their work this way, but together they represent an exaltation of humanity's ability to understand the world and to use that knowledge to bend it to our purposes.

The other half of the names, however, represent something in opposition: a reckoning with our own greed and hubris. Gandhi stands here as a rebuke against colonialism, King against segregation (and, more broadly, caste and apartheid everywhere), de Beauvoir against the subjugation of women, Carson against the devastation of our environment. Even Friedman, maybe the most unexpected member of this company, spent a career warning against believing we could control the economy, and that our misguided and overconfident efforts would lead only to hardship.

I was curious to see how Claude fared on earlier centuries:

I asked about centuries earlier than that, but Claude came back with names like Lorenzo Valla and Nicholas of Cusa that I admit I hadn't heard before, and in any case the entire premise of the exercise seemed even shakier projected back that far. It should go without saying, but the biases and eurocentrism of the twentieth-century list become all the more pronounced in these earlier lists. The refrain for this entire exercise: interesting, not accurate.

These lists put the twentieth century in perspective. In school, we learn about the earlier eras that shaped our own: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment. All of these are reflected in these lists, but seen in this way there's a simpler throughline through all of them:

I can't read this without feeling that reducing a century to three or four words is absurd; the intellectual culture of even a single city won't allow it, let alone the lives and preoccupations of all of the millions of people globally whose thought was never recorded.

But there's something there. The second half of the last millennium saw the emergence of human thought (or at least the portion of it captured in these lists) out from under the thumb of stultifying authority. A belief in natural law aided that emergence, because natural laws were beyond the grip of a monarch or the mediation of a church. We could discover those laws, we could master ourselves, and, bit by bit, we could master our world.

Half of those twentieth-century thinkers were continuing that tradition, further perhaps than what Newton or Mendel or Smith could have imagined, discovering natural laws beyond and even contradictory to our perception. The other half were introducing a new caution: mastery is illusory and dangerous. So the spirit of the twentieth century became:

If that sounds hyperbolic, think about World Wars enabled by technology that allowed intercontinental projection of force and propaganda. Think about schoolchildren learning to duck and cover because of the threat of complete annihilation. Think about the accumulation of dystopian culture: Brave New World, 1984, Blade Runner, even Jurassic Park, and a thousand more. Each of them dwells in the dread that our increasing capability has exceeded our wisdom, our virtue, our ability to adapt.

Near the midpoint of the century, John F. Kennedy captured the feeling in the opening lines of his inaugural address:

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.

And that is how we tumbled into the twenty-first century: in extraordinary mastery of the world around us, and profoundly fearful for our own safety and identity because of it.

The spirit of our century

Naturally, the next question to ask was which ten thinkers have defined this century. Claude struggled and then demurred; we are simply not far enough in to know. Climate and artificial intelligence seem set to be defining concerns — both of which, unsurprisingly, sit between mastery and danger — but it's not clear yet who the leading voices in these areas will be, though there are of course early contenders. Beyond these, what? Democracy, I hope, but a quarter of the way in we don't know. Think of everything that hadn't happened yet in 1926. The people of that year had seen the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the early rise of fascism, a major pandemic, women's suffrage in the United States and Great Britain, anticolonial movements, and more. They could be forgiven for thinking they understood where the century was going, but they'd have been as wrong as we'd be today.

Uncertainty is openness: the spirit of this century is ours and our children's to define. We arrived ambivalent about our inheritance. What will we do with it?

So far we have not done well. The contradictions unearthed in the last century have deepened into a fracture a quarter of the way into this one. Our politics is splitting into camps, each embracing parts of the future and retreating from parts. These camps are deeply distrustful and even hateful of one another, but they share a rejection of progress, or parts of it, and of the difficult choices it demands. Progress makes demands of us. I do not want the spirit of our century, after the long march out of authority toward freedom and reason, to be a retreat, in any direction.

Instead, this century must be about pushing forward despite the contradictions, about finding ways to break the binaries imposed on us.

Consider these false choices:

Prosperity vs. Care

For generations, our politics has set prosperity and care at odds. One camp tells us that if we want strong economic growth, we have to strip away regulation, taxes, and protection for workers, and that our people have to fend for themselves on everything from health to housing to feeding their children.

In response, the pro-care camp is hardening against growth. The strongest advocates for care rarely spare a thought, let alone have a plan, for economic growth; in fact, they often embrace policy that actively holds it back.

This is self-defeating. It has always been the case that care depends on economic capacity. To neglect or even work against growth is to limit the possibility of care. It has always been the case that prosperity that is hoarded is not only morally repugnant but precarious; eventually, concentrated wealth leads to fury and decay.

We need a political economy where growth and the wealth it builds are put to use making sure we all have the care we need. There are already economies that do this, and we have no excuse not to do the same.

Discovery vs. Dignity

The relationship between science, exploration, and invention and human dignity has always been fraught. There are times when discovery ennobles not only the individual but the entire species, which is why we celebrate Nobel Prize winners and take pride that our curiosity and reason are unique on Earth. Then, there are times when it makes us feel insignificant, when it upends our understanding of the world, when it crushes some of us in its gears.

When I was younger, accepting both sides in tension felt like the norm. It wasn't strange that Albert Einstein should be Time's Person of the Century at the same time that the nation was absorbed in a debate over the ethics of stem-cell research. Today, this has become a fault line. Public opinion against artificial intelligence is hardening, anti-scientific beliefs are taking root in the mainstream and in the White House, and great scientific achievements do not register with the public. Meanwhile, there is a contingent — a particularly powerful and wealthy one — that wants unchecked invention and the profits that accrue to it, regardless of any human costs.

The problems that bedevil humanity, from hunger and disease to the climate, cannot be addressed without discovery, to say nothing of the intrinsic value of better understanding the universe. But, like economic growth, discovery that proceeds without heed of human dignity can destroy just what it's meant to defend. It is time for creativity and innovation in the governance of science and invention, so that we can accelerate discovery even as we protect the people in its path.

Openness vs. Cohesion

The flashpoints in our politics are often about who we accept as part of our community. Immigration, "culture-war" issues, and even debates over cancelling and which views are acceptable are all about who is American and/or normal, as are the labels we use to include and exclude: "real America," "basket of deplorables."

Openness is fundamental to progress and to the American project itself, and it must advance until America is a place where anyone of good faith can feel welcome. And yet, even in the divisive and often hateful rhetoric I hear from the enemies of openness, there is sometimes a positive value worth taking seriously: cohesion. America is an idea, but its people cannot be sustained every day by the idea alone; we have to find homes and communities that sustain us. Democracy embraces disagreement, but it first demands common ground.

There are times when openness itself leads to cohesion. Where I live, the bonds of our community deepened as we stood together against raids that terrorized the immigrants in our neighborhood. There are times when the opposite happens, when we use openness as a test and exclude anyone who doesn't pass. That can't go on. We have to reach for one another. We can't ever give up on the openness that is this nation's greatest strength, but we have to tend to our national cohesion just as vigorously.

Democracy vs. Strength

At the close of the Cold War, it seemed that democracy had won — not only because it was right, but because it created nations that were strong. Strong enough to defend our interests, to handle threats to our security, and to achieve our goals at home. I grew up believing that democracy was obvious, even inevitable; every remaining authoritarian regime was on borrowed time.

Thirty-five years later, it's hard to remember that feeling. Autocratic regimes have endured and are on the march, and we find ourselves wondering how we can keep pace, particularly with China. In democracies, including our own, authoritarian and otherwise illiberal politicians are winning — not because they've seized power (though they try), but because the people are tired of feckless, ineffective, and captured government. The tragedy is that because many people no longer believe democracy is strong, they have stopped believing that it is right.

But democracy is non-negotiable; there is no balancing it with other interests. Still, it's not enough to assume support from a public that has lost faith, as the last two years have shown. Instead, we need to show once again that democracies can be strong: dynamic, effective, and secure, while protecting the civil liberties that are essential to freedom.

Truth vs. Expression

It is astonishing that these should be at odds with one another. In the relatively repressive societies where the idea took shape, freedom of expression was valued precisely because it was a way out of authority and toward truth. Today, we face a different problem. We have gone from a scarcity of expression to a glut, and truth and fiction do not compete on level ground when the most sensational, and therefore profitable, speech is promoted.

We cannot regulate lies and hatred and superstitions the way we regulate other harms, and a culture of shaming others for their thoughts is incompatible with persuasion, and therefore with democracy.

This story has been told countless times in recent years, without solution, and I'm no better. I wish I had a clear idea of the way through. There are interesting possibilities people are exploring to use AI to combat misinformation, encourage dialogue, and get people engaged, and I'll be watching and following them here. That's the best I've got, for the moment.

To refuse these choices is not a centrist position, because it is not seeking a midpoint. We can and must be unequivocal, for example, in our defense of civil rights. It is not a moderate position, because it is not about tempering our goals. I want, for example, to set enormously ambitious targets for discovery and growth and invest heavily to achieve them. Instead, it is a rejection of a ridiculous politics that sets our most deeply-held values at odds, particularly when in truth they are necessary for one another. In some ways, our work may be more daunting than that of earlier generations, because we know better than they did the dangers of progress. But that knowledge is also an advantage they did not have.

There is so much work to do.

Embracing the abstract

There's a popular view that the two central figures in Raphael's School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle, are posed in a way to capture the central contrast in the philosophies. Plato points upward, reflecting his interest in the abstract and universal, while Aristotle's lowered hand reflects his concern with the concrete and particular.

In one of my first posts here, I argued that Democrats lost in 2024 because we could not offer a clear vision to contrast with MAGA:

I expect that, despite all the noise he generates, even minimally engaged American voters could articulate the basic points of Trump's message, including what he believes the problems facing America are and what he would do about them. In contrast, I could not articulate the same for Harris, or Biden before her — or Obama before him, for that matter. Against that strong, consistent message, Harris had a basket of policy positions that were hard to communicate, hard to remember, and hard to understand as a whole. Her final rallying cry, "Freedom," wasn't clearly connected to a vision, let alone any policies, with the important exception of reproductive rights. In the end, Trump was by far the more disciplined candidate.

Trump's message is wrong. Its problem statement is hateful and false and its prescribed solutions are cruel and idiotic. He cannot make America great again, because he is ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt. But, he found a message that resonated and he stuck to it. Until there is a more compelling vision for the American people, Democrats may flip enough voters to win in a given election, but the country will not move past this era.

A year and a half later, the problem has become even more acute. The pressure within the Democratic Party continues to push toward the concrete and particular. The prevailing wisdom is that this is what ordinary voters care about, rather than more abstract concerns like preserving democracy.

Of course Americans care about daily concerns like affordability, but two and a half centuries of history attest that this isn't how we vote. We want our nation to stand for something, to mean something, to be part of a story that has direction and energy. Defining American leaders have been the ones that could speak to that desire, who could make the problems of the moment resonate in a timeless story, who were, in other words, comfortable and confident in abstraction.

I care about the future of humanity and of my country, not the future of a political party. But that party is the best vehicle we have for putting an end to a terrible era and recapturing our future, and it continues to fall short. The reason Democrats want to focus on the concrete is not because it is what voters want, but because today's Democratic Party is more comfortable thinking and talking about policy than it is navigating broader themes. To the extent we transcend policy today, it's typically only as far as vibes. With perhaps one exception, Democrats, the Left, progressives, whatever we want to call ourselves have no ideas to offer. We have policy proposals, and catchphrases, and reheated ideology, but no ideas.

Meanwhile, MAGA and its fellow travelers are willing to think in broader terms, to tell a story of the nation that precedes policy. Take a look, for example, at the essays produced by the influential organization American Compass, beginning with Reclaiming American Citizenship. These are not technocratic policy documents, nor do they talk down to the reader. They are ideas and stories about the nation. A negligible fraction of Americans will ever read essays like these, but they will become the source text for speeches and interviews and policy papers and campaign books, and they will resonate for millions if only because there is no coherent alternative.

The whirlwind of the President's venality and incompetence will go, but we will still have the political forces he awakened. His would-be successors are building a movement around those forces, one that will survive him. Maybe it will all fall apart without the force of his personality. Maybe it will be stronger without him continually confusing and distracting it.

We should be serious about the concrete and the particular. We should be just as serious about the abstract. This essay, and the entire New American Century project, are working through the kind of ideas that we need. I'd like to persuade you that this is the right vision, because it is the one I want for the country, but it's more important to me that it convinces you of the need for this work.

The future of our country will not be decided by who ekes out a majority in the midterms. It will be who tells the story that Americans want to be part of.