How Long the Lonely Road

Henry Adams defined politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”[1] Though Adams was speaking of Massachusetts politics at the turn of the twentieth century, the observation captures something enduring about the American experience: the tendency to approach politics not as a domain for public policy, but as an arena in which to reinforce privilege and reimpose domination. Wilhoit’s Law summarizes the conservative (or possibly revanchist) proposition this way: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”[2] This antagonism, with its focus on group identity, manifests the culture war: the overt political contest over contentious policy outcomes (including abortion, sexuality, marriage, and secularism), overlaying a more fundamental contest between those cultural dispositions which underwrite our attitudes and values but go deeper than our ability to articulate or reason about (fear of extinction,...

Today is a very special day, but it might not seem like one. This is not the transition from middle school to high school – we did that last year. And you’re not going from IGCSEs to A Levels – that won’t happen until next year. It’s also not the big moment when you leave high school and enter something like adult life. That’s three years away, which really isn’t that long if you think about it. After all, it’s already been three years since Skibidi Toilet first appeared. I want to talk about time, because I’ve heard a lot of students tell me how insignificant this moment is, and I disagree. But I also see the problem. The problem with living in time is that we get so caught up looking at the past and worrying about the future that the present becomes like a single point in geometry. A position without breadth and magnitude. A calendar of assignments and alerts. A schedule of tasks that doesn’t leave time for anything to just happen.  The twentieth century’s greatest minds, includi...