Asked whether she could provide a definition of the word “woman,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court nominee, magna cum laude at Harvard and graduate of Harvard Law, seemed perplexed: “I’m not a biologist,” she observed. Yet we are told by Jeremi Carswell, a specialist in the field, that children know perfectly well which of many genders they wish to grow up to be “from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.”
During the 2020 pandemic, because of safety concerns, San Francisco took draconian measures to keep adults apart and children out of school, even as it promoted and protected the use of dangerous drugs by a large homeless population. That year, 257 San Franciscans died from the virus, while the number of overdose deaths climbed to 697.
In May 2024, former president Donald Trump was convicted in a Manhattan courtroom of a crime most Americans would be hard-pressed to describe. Three months earlier, a special prosecutor found that Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents but refused to bring charges because the sitting president of the United States was “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
These recent episodes are symptoms of a mass decline in America into unreason—bordering, at times, on a psychotic breakdown. Strange fantasies have overwhelmed reality: it’s an age of delusion, impossible longings, and ritual self-mutilation. The causes are many and complex, but the syndrome deserves a name. I’m going to call it the “Endarkenment” because it rises, like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment.
The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.
The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.
The chaos has infected every level of contemporary society. For many, its perfect avatar is Trump—a man who selects his facts out of his fantasy life. Trump is a worthy representative, but I prefer outgoing president Biden because the light has literally gone out in his eyes and in much of his mind. Though the most powerful man on earth, decider between peace and war, he is unable to complete a coherent sentence. At the fateful June presidential debate, he made Trump sound like Pericles by comparison.
Biden is a stumbler in the dark. He, or those acting on his behalf, assembled an administration of aging retreads, cliché spouters, identity maniacs, cross-dressers, and vulgar Marxists, who, from Afghanistan to the Mexican border, failed at every task they set for themselves. With Biden and his enablers, progressive politics surrendered unconditionally to the Endarkenment.
From the pinnacle of government to the youngest generation—the Zoomers—the same existential confusion prevails. Materially, the Zoomers are a privileged cohort. They benefit from more education and higher income than preceding generations. Emotionally and spiritually, however, their lives are parched of meaning and oppressed by fear of the dark. According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Zoomers suffer from unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Haidt blames the cell phone and social media. I would add: and the emptiness, too—the lack of anything else. The digital world, with its subjectivist distortions, has become God and religion for the Zoomers, their source of identity and measure of self-worth. It’s a generation imprisoned in a house of mirrors.
Fevered attempts to break out have only led deeper into the maze. Young gays and transsexuals, for example, have been, after the October 7 terrorist massacres in Israel, among the fiercest defenders of Hamas—an Islamist movement that condemns their behavior as a capital crime. “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” warned a Zoomer of uncertain gender at Columbia University’s anti-Israel protests. That chilling mix of self-righteousness and verbal threat is the starting point of Endarkenment politics.
Apocalyptic prophecies cast a deep shadow over the future. Each successive year, we hear, is the hottest on record. Every moment brings us closer to climate horror: humanity will end in burning desolation. The only cure to the sickness of industrial society is “degrowth”—a monkish embrace of poverty.
Democracy keeps dying on the information sphere—because of Trump, or populism in general, or the Deep State, or social media, or white supremacy. “What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leaves black communities behind?” wondered Biden, who, at the time he spoke these words, was still in charge of delivering on those promises.
Meantime, our public debates have come to resemble the shouts and moans emanating from a lightless lunatic asylum. Should men compete in women’s sports? Should children have the right of self-mutilation as soon as they have “any ability to express themselves”? Should the word “mother,” until now revered in every culture, be banned in polite society as too offensive to the barren? Such controversies are possible only in a place of impenetrable gloom, where the mind can trick itself into believing that it has finally overcome reality.
Two questions arise out of our current leap into the dark. First: How did we get here? Second: Can we turn on the lights again?
The Enlightenment,” wrote historian Peter Gay, “may be summed up in two words: criticism and power.” Inspired by an almost religious faith in reason and science, that criticism swept everything before it. The remnants of feudalism in Europe, the spiritual domination of the Church, the rule of men rather than laws—all disappeared in less than a century. The American and French Revolutions were offsprings of the Enlightenment. Liberalism, the official doctrine of the democratic West, must be considered its ideological grandchild (I will use the two terms, liberalism and Enlightenment, as roughly equivalent). The enlightened economy did away with tolls, tithes, and robber barons, and established the prerequisites for the Industrial Revolution, thereby normalizing affluence.
By every known measure, the Enlightenment inaugurated an unparalleled improvement of the human condition. But a penalty was to be paid: the critical impulse lacked a logical stopping place, an end of history of the kind that the Hegelians and Marxists promised. The monarchies and the old nobility were overthrown, representative democracy expanded the suffrage to all citizens, universal literacy and education were achieved, and free markets and science generated undreamed-of wealth and vastly enriched lives—yet still the criticism continued its inexorable assault on social relations.
Criticism was unrelenting because the gaze of science is total: no exceptions are tolerated, no waivers issued for angels in the great beyond. The Old World was enchanted. Meaning flowed from heaven to earth. Social structures reinforced the linkage: religion, class, guild, family, village, and neighborhood—all inserted the individual into communal arrangements rich in memory and certainty. But these were precisely the bastions of conservatism that liberal thinkers and statesmen undertook to tear down. By the mid-nineteenth century, the disruption of traditional forms had attained escape velocity. Listen to Marx in 1848: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
Liberalism sought to solve the problem of meaning by privatizing it. Individuals were free to believe whatever they wished, so long as it remained within the law. But this could only be a provisional expedient. The massive weight of the culture pressed against traditional sources of shared meaning, grinding them down. One was free to believe that the sun orbited the earth, but not if one wished to be taken seriously. The same became true of Christianity and religion in general. To be enlightened—or “modern”—came to mean disenchantment, skepticism, the impossibility of settled belief. Marx’s “fast-frozen relations” had aroused powerful feelings of belonging; for these, liberalism substituted the cold scalpel of the statistician and the bureaucrat.
Having severed all connection to the absolute, the entire project seemed to hang, magically, in midair. Liberalism made claims to universality—but on what basis? Most liberal ideals, like humanism, were secularized versions of Christian virtues—how could they survive the repudiation of the original? As Darwinian organisms in an indifferent universe, what, other than discredited custom, stood in the way of a “revaluation of all values” that would exalt the superior predator—the “blond beast”? Such questions, central to those like Marx and Nietzsche, who detested the system, somehow wound up elided in the mainstream of liberal thought. We look in vain in the many pages of John Stuart Mill for a moment of anguish over the matter. A curious lack of self-awareness clouded the critical enterprise.
The advance of liberalism sparked ferocious opposition. The pushback came less from conservatism, whose “long withdrawing roar” was scarcely audible in history, than from rival ideologies that were just as totalizing, but offered what liberalism couldn’t: social cohesion and a shared belief system. Two world wars and a “cold” war, adding up to hundreds of millions dead, settled the question. Liberalism triumphed over its external rivals (fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism), even as it completed the decomposition of internal sources of meaning (religion, community, family). The world was demystified. Social relations were stripped of all transcendental trappings. The purpose of human life was understood to be the reproduction of selfish genes. The universe, preached evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, had “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.”
In such a bleak landscape, the ideals that had stood as guideposts to behavior withered. Liberal politics degenerated into the will to power. The pursuit of happiness was reduced to a frantic grab for pleasure—but pleasure devoid of happiness is a tedious and insipid goal. The last surviving values were said to be reason and science—but why should they be privileged? At some point in the twenty-first century, the critical eye turned inward; the Enlightenment began to devour itself.
“Enlightenment is totalitarian,” charged Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their dense 1945 book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. With its accountant’s soul, the Enlightenment “reified” humanity, turning people into things to measure and manipulate. The centuries-long project had been an exercise in dehumanization; and “corrosive rationality” and science, far from being gateways to truth, were tools of domination by vast economic interests and the bureaucratic state. Wielding their own version of “critical theory,” the authors set out to dissect “scientific criticism” and found it to be an “annihilating” myth. There was no way out—no escape from the maelstrom at the heart of modern life. Horkheimer and Adorno were Marxists who had lost faith in proletarian revolution. The one faint hope of reasserting our humanity, they thought, was to flee into the private realm: into subjectivity.
The theories of Horkheimer and Adorno lay dormant for two generations, then went viral in the moral wilderness of our century: they justified an age of morbid wish-fulfillment. Today, critical theory is everywhere. Critical race theory fantasizes white supremacy and the eternal recurrence of Jim Crow; it sees science, logic, and mathematics as racist constructs. Critical gender theory denies the reality of men and women and offers a menu of 72 genders instead. Only climate science seems immune to criticism: it’s famously “settled” and prophesies the end of the world unless industrial society is dismantled. We live, subjectively, in the worst of times. Progress as a fact or an ideal is ridiculed, especially by progressives. But the darkness is real and has descended on us all.
The Enlightenment was always an elitist operation. The French intellectuals who, in the eighteenth century, gave the movement its name felt far more disdain for the rabble than for the nobility with whom they frequently hobnobbed. The light of reason, they argued, could never reach the lower orders. “The poor have no need of education,” wrote that sturdy egalitarian Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “As for the rabble,” wrote the encyclopedist Diderot, “I have no concern with it; it will always remain the rabble.” Voltaire made the point explicit: “We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers and servants.”
That attitude has endured. Diderot’s rabble has a counterpart in Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” vulgar creatures consumed by bigotry and superstition. Clinton would surely agree with Voltaire: deplorables cannot be enlightened. For the good of society, they must be kept in their place. Hence the liberal project’s embrace of representative government was, from the first, riven by a fundamental contradiction. Citizens were said to be equal and sovereign—but deplorables must be controlled. In America, the structures of representation aimed to prevent “an unjust combination of the majority,” as James Madison put it. In France, the elected Convention gave way to the 12 men of the Committee of Public Safety, as equality and fraternity devolved into the Terror.
“Critical race theory fantasizes white supremacy and the eternal recurrence of Jim Crow; it sees science, logic, and mathematics as racist constructs.”
The demands of industrial society compounded the contradiction. For reasons both of production and consumption, the rabble had to be made literate, educated, mobile, and relatively affluent. Yet, top-down control, orchestrated by specialists, had to be imposed for the system to function properly. The Enlightenment worshipped reason and science. Modernity meant the rule of experts: think of Anthony Fauci’s “I represent science.” There was an irreconcilable tension between these powerful tendencies and democracy. Supposedly, liberal societies kept the deplorables in check with new forms of control: political “machines,” in which the citizen was a mere cog, for example, and great hierarchical institutions tightly piloted from the top. Social and political relations mimicked the “scientific management” of the factory floor advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Enlightenment, never romantic in spirit, acquired the aspect of a monstrous mechanical contraption.
The elitism inherent to the system had predictable consequences. Large segments of the public have always felt disenfranchised and alienated from the liberal project. Rather than suffocate in a vacuum of meaning, the deplorables wanted out. Some joined totalitarian movements. Later, many dwelled in a sort of internal exile, passively inside the system, reaping its benefits, though hostile to it. This was the state of play when the Internet raised the disaffected public to the strategic heights above the information landscape. In a single leap, the criticism of the Enlightenment became the nihilism of the Web. The aborted Arab Spring of 2011 gave warning of what was to come: a storm of online rage and repudiation was about to vent its destructive force upon the structures of industrial society.
Though powered by the Internet, the revolt of the public emerged from a preexisting condition. The death of shared meaning could end only in self-idolatry. Deprived of God and fellowship, the disintegrating individual found the midnight dreamland of the Web, there to adore the infinite persons and sexualities that were him or her or them. In that realm, the deplorable stands eye-to-eye with the president of the United States. Everything can be explained in terms of microaggressions, systemic hatred, and pedophile conspiracies. The critique of society can be obliterating, and nothing will change. Truth is a function of despair. This is when the Endarkenment starts—an age without faith or reason. In the digital labyrinth, the Enlightenment played the part of victim and monster alike: it went in, swallowed itself, and ceded the world to the gloom.
Can the lights be turned on again? That, I would think, is an important question, though it rarely gets asked.
Many insist that the blackout is temporary. All it takes is to put Trump in prison—then we’ll be back to normal. Or maybe if we can use really good words to explain the benefits of reason and science, light will be restored to the twenty-first century. That seems to be Steven Pinker’s premise in Enlightenment Now, where he goes on at length about “how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people . . . might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment.”
It’s too late, I fear. Trump was a late-stage symptom, not the cause of death. Appeals to utility and self-interest have always failed because they lack spiritual substance. Elite voices like Pinker’s grate on the ears of the deplorable class. Humanism, torn from any transcendental framework, is thin gruel at best—and irrational at worst. The Enlightenment is over. We should turn our minds to what comes next.
Some aspects of society remain reassuringly familiar. For all our glib talk of postmodernism as the repudiation of the idea of progress, we still expect the economy to grow, and we panic when it doesn’t; we still expect to be cured of rare diseases and are shocked when we aren’t; we still expect the latest technology, like artificial intelligence, to be placed at the disposal of ordinary persons, and we’re willing to smash trillion-dollar corporations if it isn’t. And our expectations are largely met. Part of the darkness is rhetoric and hypocrisy—celebrities railing about climate change while moving around the world in private planes and enormous yachts. The Endarkenment isn’t a total eclipse—yet. It isn’t a Dark Age. We aren’t quite ready to surrender 2,500 years of Western civilization to the barbarians. That fight continues, though the outcome is uncertain.
Still, the sustained assault of the disenfranchised on the system has generated dangerous instability. The institutions of democracy and modernity totter on the edge of collapse. From one perspective, this conflict has been viewed as the equivalent of a barbarian invasion—a horde of lumpen-proletariats on the march, bent only on destruction. Yet, from inside, the movement is experienced as a revolt of the “normals” against a ruling class eager to sacrifice every shred of meaning on the altar of critical theory. There may be truth in both accounts, but that’s immaterial. The Enlightenment’s dismissal of the rabble is simply no longer viable. The deplorables, with all their anger, must somehow be brought inside the tent. The means are up for debate; the will, at present, is nonexistent.
The most radical departure from Enlightenment ideals will concern the manner in which we address the problem of meaning. Criticism is necessary for modernity. Meaning and moral aspiration are necessary for humanity. A balance must be struck that lifts us out of pure randomness and materialism to a credible—and shared—higher purpose. The famine of meaning can be fatal. The rise of totalitarianism and, to a lesser extent, the “established church” of identity and climate doom today are examples of the political deformations that occur when the balance breaks: the hunger will be satisfied in some way.
None of this entails the embrace of angels, or even necessarily of religion. Any good empiricist will admit that the richest human lives are lived symbolically, even mythically, and that a society intent on denying this on principle will shrivel. The road back to life and light will be harrowing. We will encounter many points of failure, many opportunities to slide off into the abyss. Can it be done at all? In my optimistic moods, I can believe that we’re due for a second coming of historian Karl Jaspers’s “Axial Age”: prophets and philosophers who conceive a dramatically updated spiritual vision, with the rational and the sacred, truth and meaning, reconciled in the righteous life.
Top Photo: Andrew Merry / Moment via Getty Images
