RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few days after the November 2016 elections, I sat down to write out my feelings, which consisted mainly of fear and loathing. The president-elect, I intoned, was a dangerous lunatic, one likely to recall the ghosts of Fuehrers past. His election meant the death of America, of democracy itself, and maybe even scores of Americans. “Assume the worst is imminent,” I advised. Celebrities I’d admired my entire life praised the piece on Twitter. NPR came calling. Seven years later, my cri de coeur remains one of Tablet’s most widely read articles. As a piece of writing, it was moving, forceful, and … entirely wrong.

You can find much to dislike about Trump—his policies, his personality, and an assortment of other failings—and, over the next four years, I did just that, often and with gusto. But my piece remains an embarrassment, more hysterical ululation than an attempt at the kind of useful or correct analysis that readers deserve. Reading it today, I realize that, for a brief moment there, I lost my goddamned mind.

So, what happened? It’s important for all of us, but particularly for those of us who make a living asking others for their trust, to give an honest accounting of our mistakes, so here’s a very brief one of mine. Trump’s ascendance was a time of uncertainty, and I felt scared. The language of moral absolutes offered some solace; so did the company of so many others who treated me to encomia like “morally courageous” or “a fierce and clear-eyed defender of democracy,” and with whom I relished text threads in which we shared articles and tweets and posts that enabled us to soak together in a pool of ever-expanding righteous fury.

The resistance offered purpose and community, and something else too: It offered the pleasure of letting yourself get caught up in something. The Women’s March, BLM, Russiagate—they all seemed to offer, in the moment, the irresistible possibility of coming-together-ness to promote or defend justice. And in every single one of these cases, the core leadership or premise which we held as solid was later proven wrong, or worse.

And now, the same fever is taking over Israel. Last month, I walked around Tel Aviv as hundreds of thousands of Israelis began to take to the streets, again for a righteous purpose: They’re opposed, they said, to the government’s proposed judicial reform, which they worry will weaken the checks and balances needed for democracy to survive. Sounds great! Until and unless, that is, you welcome in reality—at which point you have to reckon with the fact that even some of the protest’s leaders admit that the reform was drafted in response to the very real problem of judicial overreach; that some of the reform’s most maligned clauses are already in effect as legal precedents passed long before Bibi Netanyahu came to power; that, to date, no opposition leader had drafted anything resembling a viable and serious alternative; that all opposition leaders have thus far rejected the government’s offers to meet and negotiate a compromise; and that the most stirring battle cry you hear in these mass protests—Israel needs a constitution now!—has been calmly and seriously debated by scholars for, oh, 75 years with neither political pressures nor any viable resolution.

None of this is to say that the folks on the march—my mother, by the way, among them—aren’t earnest, or patriotic, or truly concerned citizens. And none of this is to say that they haven’t legitimate claims; I’m a staunch supporter of the reforms, and even I would love to discuss the possibility of adding a few meaningful safeguards to the bills currently on the table. It’s to say, instead, that whatever else is going on in Israel, it’s not an emergency that just burst forth out of nowhere, suddenly flinging the country to the precipice of disaster unless action is immediately taken.

As I tried to understand this better, I zoomed out and saw something unexpected: more protests. Actually, many more. This week alone, there are emotional marches in Australia (gay rights), New Zealand (climate change), Buenos Aires (farmers), France (against the plan to raise the retirement age). Oh, and one more: “Across England and Wales, a handful of schools have been hit by protests against rules such as banning trips to the toilet during lessons or regulations against rolled up skirts,” The Guardian reported this week. “Schools admit they are extremely worried about the copycat protests that have erupted in the last two weeks, typically sparked by videos shared on TikTok with many thousands of views. But what has shocked many leaders most is the number of parents on social media applauding pupils taking part … by openly questioning the fairness of school rules and the authority of teachers.”

Something is definitely wrong here, but it’s not the Israeli judiciary, or pension plans, or teachers infringing on the human rights of students by restricting toilet use during lessons. If you take a sober look at these gatherings, you’ll see that they’re all about the same thing—which is not what any of them individually claim to be about. Instead, they’re being driven by a global drought in basic human connection, leading to too many people seeking a hit of pure purpose and belonging, and a fully automated network to activate it all.

How did we get here? A very crude but somewhat useful explanation goes something like this: Human beings have hearts and minds and souls, which is why, unlike, say, sparrows or sharks or mules, they must be convinced that their lives have some higher purpose. Without this conviction, our brains, masterful probability machines that they are, go crazy by asking themselves too many questions they simply cannot answer and registering too many phenomena they simply cannot explain. For most of the species’ run, the solution to the challenge above was simple: Trust in God, or gods, or spirits, or whatever you’d like to imagine is the unseen heavenly force that animates the world. This worked reasonably well for millennia, give or take a crusade or two, but when the excesses of the organizing principle we call religion got too pricey, we ushered in the Enlightenment to curb faith’s worst impulses.

Naturally, this produced some unforeseen consequences, like new ideologies that replaced the belief in divine forces with a belief in social ones without losing any of the zeal or the messianic fervor. If you’re wondering how well this replacement worked, see under: Stalin, Josef. Finally, for two or three decades now, we’ve seen the rise of a new phenomenon, brought about by the ascendance of new media and new socioeconomic arrangements: These days, we’re all more or less alone, communicating via machines. More and more of us are unmarried. Fewer and fewer of us go to church, synagogue, or mosque. More and more of us don’t have kids. Fewer and fewer of us feel like we truly belong to anything—family, city, nation, you name it.