Harper's Magazine May 2022

Eros and Villains Milan Kundera once said that all great love stories begin and end outside of consummation. Agnes Callard seems to agree, though with a less romantic sentiment [“The Eros Monster,” Essay, March]. Callard’s story of an “all chase” affair is a treatise on eros as a corrosive to independent thought. During her relationship, Callard flipped between deep love and searing hatred, which, she writes, is “exactly what happens when eros becomes a trap.” During my own extramarital affair, I was possessed by a similar recklessness. I take issue, however, with Callard’s implication that eros is necessarily intertwined with hate. Of course, there are plenty of examples which support her interpretation. Though Freud posited Eros as embodying the drive to live—the opposite of Thanatos, the drive to self-destruct—many couples have embodied…

A young woman is waiting in her New York apartment for her fiancé to arrive and take her to city hall to get married. When he doesn’t turn up, she goes to his address, only to find that he never lived there. She has no way of getting in touch with him, and is reduced to asking people at a nearby newsstand and flower shop whether they have seen him. He has vanished without a trace. The transitive verb “to ghost” is a product of the internet era, but as this scenario from Shirley Jackson’s story “The Daemon Lover” reminds us, the phenomenon is much older. When Jackson published the story in the late Forties, people left no digital trails of surveillance images and credit card transactions. There were no phones…

Modern democracies are facing a deep cognitive crisis. For many years now, societies have been living with moral relativism, which asserts the essential subjectivity of all value systems. Liberalism was founded on the premise that people disagree on the final ends of life or understandings of the good. Postmodernism, however, has moved us further, from moral to cognitive relativism, in which even factual observation is regarded as subjective. The journalist Jonathan Rauch notes that the approach to factual truth coming out of the liberal Enlightenment rests on trust in a social system that adheres to two rules: that no one gets the final say, and that knowledge must be based on empirical evidence and not on the authority of the speaker. To this we need to add a battery of techniques…

Colonialism Complicity in the slave trade Passivity during the Holocaust The Inquisition Systemic sexual abuse Missionaries in China Sins against the Roma Sins against Aboriginal peoples Sins against the Jewish people Sins against Irish women and children Repeating quotes that the Prophet Mohammed was “evil and inhuman” The theft of indigenous Amazonian statues Sacking Constantinople Mistreating Galileo Preventing women from being themselves Slapping a woman’s hand Forcing a future pope to kneel Attending an orgy Being the pope…

I’m embarrassed by the bitterness I am feeling. It’s as if I had been sipping poison for the past ten years and it was now beginning to work. It has something to do with my American self as a power-mad machine and even more to do with the disappointments of a life now reaching self-judgment. Something to do with family life—my own childhood. And much to do with my work unnoticed (i.e. useless) and the simultaneous success of others close to me (as close as it is possible to be!) in my generation. I am a failure. All my life I have been obsessed, overly distressed, by injustice, by the way whole populations are turned away at the gates to the palace because of a human preference for force over friendship.…

Progressives have struggled to comprehend the foundations of the far right’s continuing support. Many assume that the populism unleashed by Donald Trump was a reaction to the decades of wage stagnation endured by the working class. But in fact, it is a movement of small-business owners, many of whom saw their assets depreciate as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis. The Trump diehards who cut their teeth in the Tea Party were not wage-workers but small-business owners concentrated in the blue-collar residential construction sector and its white-collar satellite professions of homeware retail, real estate services, mortgage brokerage, and accounting. It was the meteoric rise of this small-business sector—not deindustrialization—that gave birth to today’s far-right populism. This style of conservatism dates back almost a century. When the largest publicly listed corporations…