Here’s what happened. VRT’s research department had conducted a survey called De Foto van Vlaanderen (“The Picture of Flanders”), which it carries out every few years to measure the social temperature of our region. This year’s edition led to wall-to-wall coverage across VRT outlets about some supposedly shocking findings among young people: growing intolerance towards LGBTQ people and a rise in conservative values. The headline finding was that 17% of Flemish children aged 12–17, and 16% of those aged 18–44, agreed that there are circumstances in which men are allowed to hit women. One in three youngsters said they wouldn’t want a trans person in their friend group.

The manosphere?

VRT’s editorial framing, supported by a range of experts and talking heads, was immediate and uniform. The villain was the so-called “manosphere”: young boys falling under the spell of Andrew Tate and other social-media influencers, adopting their brand of toxic masculinity and misogyny. So VRT invited me onto the current-affairs programme De Afspraak to discuss the findings alongside a sexologist.

I must admit that I was sceptical about the findings right away. Andrew Tate is a pretty nasty piece of work, but the whole narrative surrounding the “manosphere” is starting to resemble a moral panic among the liberal elite. In any event, the data on the radicalization of young boys are far less clear than is often suggested, as a recent piece in shows:

In response to every question we asked about changing gender norms, younger men were more progressive than Gen X or boomer men. Just like with women, men under the age of 45 tended to hold more liberal views than older men.

To the extent there is a growing gender gap among Gen Z, it seems to be driven by young women swinging to the left, not men moving to the right:

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2 months ago · 139 likes · 18 comments · Maibritt Henkel

Ignoring religion

But what about the role of religion, particularly Islam, which has been shown to exert a major influence on gender intolerance, even after controlling for education and income? There was only a brief mention of conservative religion, buried deep in the article and immediately downplayed. Everyone reached for the same script about the rising manosphere and the generational divide.

So naturally, I asked for access to the full report before going on air. I couldn’t get it. That, together with the uniform narrative pushed by VRT, made me a little suspicious. Why invite an expert onto television if you’re not prepared to share the data?

Eventually, a young editor shared a brief PowerPoint presentation used for internal circulation. To my surprise, there was in fact a bar for “foreign origin” in all the charts, alongside the age and education categories. Less surprisingly, this bar was the highest of all. The internal presentation even highlighted the high levels of intolerance among foreigners several times.

But then I noticed a comment in the margin from a VRT editor that was clearly not meant for my eyes. It instructed the VRT news desk not to report the breakdown by foreign origin, even though that data had been collected. The stated reason? The category was not sufficiently “representative” of foreigners and was slightly too highly educated. And lo and behold, that bar did indeed disappear from all the published news stories.

At this point I was getting annoyed and decided to ambush my hosts. During the broadcast, I pulled an A4 printout of that screenshot from my back pocket and read it out loud. Long story short: the clip went viral, the minister of media got involved, and Flanders spent the past two weeks arguing about the affair. Here’s the full episode (item starting at 17:30):

At first, VRT issued a public statement addressing the charge that it had deliberately omitted inconvenient data about origins. Their justification was that there were too many Dutch people in the group classified as foreigners. Apparently, they had used a catch-all category called “foreign origin”, and among those 310 respondents, no fewer than 95 were Dutch. Yet even with this dilution of the data, the “foreign origin” group still scored substantially higher on LGBT intolerance than native Belgians.

OK, but why not simply exclude those Dutch nationals? Or just compare European and non-European migrants separately? Nope. Instead VRT instructed its journalists to quietly drop those bars from the news reports.

A prediction

Since they still refused to cough up the data, despite all the political pressure, I ventured a prediction, as a good Popperian: VRT was sitting on uncomfortable data about migration—and Islam in particular—and was reluctant to make it public.

This was not a very risky prediction. Decades of research show that homophobia tracks religiosity, with Islam high on the list (see ’s recent series of posts, which contains a wealth of data). Globally, about 85% of Muslims believe that homosexuality is morally wrong:

27% of British Muslims want to outlaw homosexuality:

Half of Turks in Germany consider homosexuality a “disease”:

Half of European Muslims don’t want to have gay people as friends:

And a quarter of young Muslims in Belgium say violence against gay people is justified (JOP Monitor).

These attitudes towards homosexuality and the role of women follow a religiosity gradient among both Muslims and Christians: the more devout, the more intolerant. The difference is that the baseline level of intolerance is much higher among Muslims.

All of this was true long before the rise of the—admittedly reprehensible—manosphere, which VRT promoted as the explanation of the day.

The data finally released

When the VRT finally caved in to pressure to release the data—to a select group of scientists who had to show up at the VRT offices on a weekday—I solicited the help of my friend Freek Van de Velde, a computational linguist from Leuven University. He carried out a statistical analysis and wrote a report about the results.

Guess what? VRT had indeed been sitting on statistically significant data about the role of migration and Islam all along, but had simply chosen not to release it. They had even created a separate category for respondents from the “North Africa and Middle East” region, containing 49 participants. Still a relatively small group, but more than enough to extract a clear signal from the statistical noise.

Here are Freek’s results, visualised by Claude, using a composite variable for “gender tolerance”:

As you can see, the difference between native Belgians and the MENA group is large and statistically significant: people from the MENA region score more than 15 percentage points lower on gender tolerance. Coincidentally, that gap is larger than any of the age differences that received so much attention in the media coverage.

Fear of Islam

Naturally, the MENA region is only a proxy for Islam. Although roughly 95% of the region is Muslim (and there were no respondents from Israel anyway), we cannot rule out that some respondents were Christians, atheists, or members of other religious minorities. Moreover, third-generation immigrants are completely invisible in this methodology: they qualify as “pure Flemings”. Then there is the additional complication of religious converts.

The solution is obvious: VRT should have asked directly about religion! You cannot say anything meaningful about the effects of age and education without taking into account a factor that has repeatedly been shown to exert a huge influence on gender intolerance. Moreover, religion is a potential confounder for age effects, since Belgian Muslims are, on average, considerably younger than native Belgians—a consequence of recent migration and higher fertility rates. What may appear to be a generational effect can therefore partly reflect differences in religious composition. Or indirect social influences in the classroom.

As my friend the sociologist told a Flemish magazine, the VRT’s neglect of religion is simply bonkers. “It’s as if you’re doing research into crime and you don’t ask about the gender of perpetrators and victims.” In other words, the erasure of the link between religion and LGBT intolerance was already baked into the study design itself, even apart from the later decision to bury the results in the reporting.

It’s not as if the study was uninterested in Islam and migration. Curiously, however, it was interested only in the prejudices of white native Flemings towards Muslims: fear of mosques, resistance to migration, anxieties about Islamisation, and concerns about the “Great Replacement”. They even thought the silly “winter markets” (rebranded Christmas markets) merited a question.

Ironically, this framing implicitly excludes Muslims from the category of “real Flemings”. After all, “fear of mosques” is hardly a meaningful question for someone who attends one every Friday. And why the hell would a Muslim care about rebranded Christmas markets?

Most egregiously, the survey treats the claim that “there are only two sexes” as a form of intolerance—an inability to handle gender diversity. Newsflash from biology: THERE ARE ONLY TWO SEXES (apologies for the caps; it’s my toxic male aggression flaring up).

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How a spiral of silence works

What can we learn from this?

Anyone who has not been living under a rock for the past few decades knows that the link between Islam and gender intolerance is considered radioactive in much of academia and the press. Researchers prefer not to talk about it, not to include it in their research, and to downplay it when they stumble upon it despite their best efforts. What is rare is getting a glimpse behind the scenes when such decisions are made, as I happened to do.

But it is important to be precise about the social and psychological mechanisms behind political correctness and self-censorship. Many people imagine cover-ups as a bunch of individuals sitting in a smoke-filled room whispering conspiratorially: “We cannot release this—it would damage our political cause. Let’s just bury the data.”

Real motivated reasoning is far more subtle. It usually operates through a series of small decisions, each supported by a semi-plausible justification.

In this case, the people at VRT refrained from asking questions about religious faith, created a miscellaneous “foreign origin” category that was of limited analytical value to begin with, and were then relieved to discover a large number of Dutch respondents in the migrant group. That provided a convenient excuse to ditch the category altogether and focus instead on age effects and the divide between boys and girls.

Phew! No need to dig a little deeper, remove the Dutch (or other Western Europeans) from the sample, or examine regional differences, which would’ve instantly solved the alleged problem of “representativeness”. It is this convenient neglect and selective scrutiny that betrays bias. The youngest age groups suffered from similar problems—small samples, high dropout rates—but those findings did not offend political sensibilities, so they were allowed to stand.

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After a lengthy meeting with representatives from VRT and the agency that collected the data (Profacts), I do not believe there was any deliberate deception on their part. Rather, what I saw was an accumulation of small decisions by the research bureau, the news desk, and the talking heads, each gently nudging the story away from sensitive findings and towards more palatable ones.

In a revealing moment, the VRT representative told us that the public broadcaster has a mission to be verbindend—a Dutch term that is difficult to translate, but roughly means “unifying” and “inclusive”. In VRT’s view, focusing on findings that might stigmatise certain groups in society sits uneasily with that mission (although apparently they were less concerned about stigmatising young boys).

By the time the story reached the Flemish public, it had become a highly distorted—but politically convenient—story about the evils of the “manosphere”. Notice that this explanation is pure speculation, unsupported by the survey itself, which contained no questions about social-media consumption, familiarity with manosphere influencers, or anything of the sort.

But it fits neatly into a progressive narrative: it is all the fault of Andrew Tate and other toxic dudes. After all, who could doubt the horrors of the manosphere after watching the Netflix series Adolescence, which was fawned over by the liberal media for months?

Never mind that it was pure fiction and not remotely credible: a young boy (obviously white) from a warm and loving family suddenly turns into a monster after suffering romantic rejection and watching some misogynistic content online. The series can’t even tell the difference between the incel movement and the manosphere, which are largely distinct and often opposed to one another.

Yet the Flemish government loves the series so much that it wants to add it to the school curriculum. It’s a bit like teaching students about psychopathy and transgenderism by making them watch The Silence of the Lambs.

But series such as Adolescence are useful because they divert attention from factors that make liberals far more uncomfortable, such as religious fundamentalism imported through migration. Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Inside the Manosphere was similarly lazy and tailored to the expectations of his liberal audience (see this excellent piece in Quillette).

For much the same reasons, the VRT decided not to ask about religious faith, and to further “drown the fish” (as the French say) in a largely meaningless foreign-origin bucket.

By the way, Andrew Tate has recently converted to Islam, I’m sure that’s just a total coincidence?

Anyway, as you can imagine, all of this proved to be a considerable distraction from writing my book. It has occupied half of my time for the past two weeks. I wanted to share some dispatches about this affair, but now I really do have to get back to work.

I’m currently working on the seventh chapter, about the roots of anti-Western ideology, including an extensive section on the intellectual godfather of the concept of Islamophobia, Edward Said.

Stay tuned!

Or buy me a coffee!

The video

The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams; some was also filmed by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones

Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas broadcasts theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of “Allahu Akbar” — punctuated by the occasional “Kill the Jew!” — are simply nauseating.

Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear, one with his eye socket hanging out of his face, asking his brother if he thinks they’re going to die — while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade into their safe room helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.

Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the terrorist coolly and methodically cutting off the head of an already dead victim, like a skilled butcher. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another “Zionist colonizer” getting what he deserved, right?

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2 months ago · 112 likes · Maarten Boudry

One Hamas terrorist breathlessly called his parents from the phone of the Jewish woman he had just slaughtered:

Hello Dad, I’m talking to you from Mefalsim (kibbutz). Open WhatsApp and see. I killed ten Jews with my own hands. Your son killed Jews! I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband, their blood is on my hands... Hold your head high with pride, Dad!

Many people living the Israeli Kibbutzim were left-wing peace activists who had Gazan friends and even the volunteered to drive Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals.

There is some evidence of sexual violence in the video — the charred corpse of a young woman with her legs splayed and her genitals exposed — but relatively little is shown explicitly. Apparently even Hamas draws a line somewhere: they are not as proud of raping Jewish women as they are of murdering them. More likely, they simply didn’t want to embarrass the delicate sensibilities of their legions of useful idiots in the West.

Sexual terrorism

But yes — there was rape. Not “rape” in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights NGO. The report, titled “Silenced No More”, is based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and over 1,800 cumulative hours of video.

Here’s a trailer about the report:

Across its 300 pages, the report describes a recurring pattern of the following behavior:

rape and gang rape; sexual torture; genital targeting (including burning, mutilation, and gunshot wounds directed at intimate areas); forced nudity and exposure; binding and restraint; postmortem sexual humiliation and desecration; public parading and display of women and children; abduction of mothers and children; [sexual violence] in the presence or near vicinity of family members; and perpetrator-driven filming and digital dissemination of acts of [sexual violence]

The sexual abuse was deliberately inflicted in front of family members, calculated to destroy familial bonds. If no family members were around, the perpetrators filmed and circulated the gruesome abuse via social media and victims’ own accounts, sometimes sending material directly to their families.

As the Daily Mail reports, the “freedom fighters” from Hamas deliberately and systematically defiled female bodies: “the terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.” Genitals were stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, breasts were severed, pelvises broken.

The sadism is unspeakable.

And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like “take off your pants,” “lie down,” “spread your legs,” and “don’t make trouble.” I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?

I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.

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The fable of the sorcerer’s apprentice, which dates back at least to the second-century Greek satirist Lucian, shows that worries about self-replicating machinery running amok long predate the modern theory of evolution by natural selection. But Charles Darwin added a more terrifying twist to the tale: the replicants most adept at evading your efforts to destroy them are the ones that go on to reproduce and spawn their kind, making it ever more difficult to weed them out. Whether we are talking about pests or parasites, viruses or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, evolution has a knack for producing ever hardier and more indestructible nuisances. After centuries of effort, humans have managed to eradicate only one infectious disease (smallpox).

Evolving AIs

And yet, in the debate about catastrophic AI risk, surprisingly little attention is paid to evolution by natural selection. Even when imagining scenarios in which humanity is subjugated by selfish, dominant AIs, most commentators ignore evolution and tend to focus on other arguments to reach that conclusion, such as “instrumental convergence”. On this view, self-preservation and a drive for dominance might come along for the ride once systems reach a sufficient level of intelligence, because such traits are conducive to achieving almost any goal—captured in Stuart Russell’s slogan, “You can’t fetch coffee if you’re dead.”

But this neglect of evolution is strange, because Darwinian selection is a proven mechanism for producing selfish and aggressive creatures, and it is known to be perfectly substrate-neutral: it works in silico just as much as in carbon. By comparison, as I argued in my last post, the argument from instrumental convergence strikes me as weak and speculative.

Last year I published a paper about evolutionary scenarios of AI doom in Philosophical Studies together with the philosopher Simon Friederich. This was largely in response to a seminal paper by the AI safety researcher Dan Hendrycks, with the disturbing title “Natural Selection Favors AI over Humans”. Now three heavyweights in evolutionary biology and AI are weighing in with an important new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (for a good discussion of the paper, see ’s piece here)

Eörs Szathmary is a Hungarian theoretical biologist who wrote The Major Transitions in Evolution together with the famous evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Viktor Müller is another Hungarian biologist, who studies virus evolution at the Computational Virology Lab in Budapest. And Luc Steels is a Belgian compatriot of mine who founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Müller, Steels & Szathmáry (let’s call them MSS) agree with us that the debate about AI risk would benefit from a healthy injection of evolutionary thinking, and is still too narrowly focused on crossing the arbitrary threshold of human-level intelligence, as captured in concepts like “superintelligence” or “AGI”:

[A]chieving the threshold level of complexity in eAI required to enable evolution toward further increases in complexity may be a more critical milestone than achieving “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), which is an arbitrary threshold in cognitive capacity.

While much of the discussion associates the emergence of an “existential threat” with AI exceeding human cognitive capacity, biology holds clues that eAI might pose risks long before it would evolve to that point.

Breeding vs. ferality

As we argued in our paper, the fact that AIs evolve through natural selection does not, by itself, imply that they will become selfish or dangerous; outcomes depend on the selection pressures and on who controls reproduction. MSS appear to agree, making a conceptual move similar to the one Friederich and I drew with domestication versus ferality. They distinguish between breeder scenarios, where humans impose selection criteria and control reproduction (equivalent to our “domestication”), and ecosystem scenarios, where selection emerges spontaneously in open environments without human control (equivalent to what we call “blind selection” or “going feral”).

One of the most useful aspects of their paper is that, as AI experts, MSS provide abundant examples of both forms of evolution in the digital realm. They begin with cases in the breeder/domestication category, including techniques used in cutting-edge AI development. These methods rely on iterative cycles of variation and selection to improve systems at multiple levels—system prompts, full models, and user prompts. Because humans define the benchmarks and control reproduction at each stage, this process is best understood as domesticated evolution. As MSS note, the paradigm of “genetic algorithms” dates back to the 1960s, long before the emergence of LLMs. In domains where problems are combinatorial and computationally intractable, evolutionary approaches often outperform deliberate design in converging on optimal solutions. As Leslie Orgel’s Second Rule succinctly puts it: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Next, MSS give some examples of ecosystem evolution, where “fitness functions are emergent, rather than human-determined”. For instance, Tierra is a kind of digital soup in which organisms replicate autonomously and compete for resources (memory and processing time) over many generations without human oversight. Such digital Darwinism produces phenomena that are strikingly similar to those of biological evolution: selfish replicators, parasitism and hyper-parasitism, deception, evolutionary arms races, frequency-dependent selection, and so on. Needless to say, these systems are “open” only in the sense that humans don’t directly intervene to impose selection pressures—they are safely confined to sandboxes and not released into the wild.

Having introduced their main distinction, MSS argue that certain cutting-edge techniques currently used in AI development are “edging closer” to an ecosystem scenario. The most innovative of these is the Darwin Gödel Machine, a system of open-ended evolution of self-improving agents:

The agents in this case are like apps, code snippets that operate autonomously to achieve a particular task. DGM selects one agent from its agent archive and uses an LLM to create a new version, which it then tests on benchmarks to determine if a viable and interesting new functionality arises. Importantly, this open-ended exploration process is not only used to improve performance on benchmarks but also to improve the coding capacities of the system itself.

However, as I read Zhang et al. (2025) on the Darwin Gödel Machine, the benchmarks for coding ability—and thus the selective pressures—are all set by human designers. In particular, the coding agents are evaluated by their performance on SWE-bench (a task to fix coding bugs) and on Polyglot (a suite of coding challenges). Success on these coding benchmarks is what largely determines reproductive success—that is, whether a “parent” agent gets to self-modify and produce offspring. In other words, humans still determine which AIs perform best and which will be discarded. None of these agents reproduce autonomously in the wild, nor have any escaped the ultimate human-imposed fitness functions. As Claude pithily put it in a discussion about MSS’s paper and our own: “The Darwin Gödel Machine is to Tierra as a corn breeder is to a Petri dish of E. coli under antibiotic pressure”.1

In our paper The Selfish Machine?, we argued that AIs are currently domesticated to be the very opposite of selfish. Across the AI ecosystem—companies, regulators, consumers—there is strong pressure to produce systems that are obedient, helpful, and cooperative, even to the point of being annoyingly risk-averse and sycophantic. As put it more bluntly, AIs do not emerge “from an evolutionary history of violent competition, but from a set of economic and political incentives designed to satisfy technophobic humans.”

But MSS think that our analogy with animal domestication provides false reassurance. Their main objection is that domesticated animals are selected for superficial traits that do not affect their controllability: the color of the fur, the taste of the milk, the size of the corn stalks. But this is very different from AIs:

In contrast, eAI will likely be selected for increasing cognitive capacity, closing the very gap that enables human control. Sustained control is a crucial problem if traits affecting controllability may themselves evolve.

But increased cognitive capacity does not automatically translate to an incentive to dominate and escape control, as I argued in my last essay. We have been selecting chess computers for increased cognitive capacity for decades, and even though their capabilities now far outstrip even the most gifted human grandmasters, they have not become more difficult to control. A desire for self-preservation or dominance does not just come along for the ride as cognitive capacity increases; it has to be either programmed directly, or arise from thousands of generations of blind selection.

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Objections

Let me turn to some specific objections MSS raise against our framework, which they consider overly reassuring. Their first point is that our critique presumes centralized control:

The critique largely presumes centralized control over replication and variation. In open-weights and agent-template ecosystems, copying and modification are cheap, and many selectors (users, hobbyists, competitors) shape fitness. This looks less like husbandry and more like ecology; the authors explicitly concede that if AIs “go feral,” risks are grave—those conditions are not hypothetical in decentralized settings.

But having multiple human selectors with diverging and idiosyncratic preferences is not the same as blind selection. It is closer to a decentralized multi-breeder scenario, which indeed has been the historical norm for animal and plant domestication. Medieval crop varieties or dog breeds were not produced through a centralized breeding program, but through countless individual (and often unconscious) decisions by thousands of human breeders. In fact, one could equally argue that having a diversity of selection criteria across many actors makes the convergent emergence of one type of AI (for instance, selfish and dominance-hungry) less likely, not more, just as dog lineages have been bred in many different directions.2

But what if some of these individual actors are irresponsible or have bad intentions? According to MSS, even if AI companies select for docility—because that’s what consumers and regulators prefer—downstream users may select for very different traits:

Selection acts at multiple stages of an algorithm’s “life history.” Even if firms select for docility, downstream platforms may select for engagement, virality, or evasion of filters; adversaries select for offensive capability; markets can select for time-to-market over safety. Subsequent stages of selection can thus reintroduce “selfish” traits despite initial domestication efforts.

That is true, but again, AIs that are selected for engagement-bait or offensive purposes are not undergoing blind natural selection; they are bred by human bad actors for traits valued by those humans. This may well lead to social harms, just as tobacco companies have designed cigarettes for maximum appeal and addictiveness; but such harm still derives from human intentions like profit-making, not from blind evolution.

Framing such cultural products as “selfish”, as MSS do, is exactly the move our paper tried to block. In scenarios of domesticated evolution, talk of “selfish” traits loses explanatory traction because it is redundant and misleading. It is like saying that, rather than humans selecting poodles for their fluffiness, the poodle genes are “manipulating” our innate human preference for cuteness. Or this example given by MSS: “One may already ask who was controlling whom when humans bred sugar beet for higher sucrose, or the cannabis plant for higher THC content.” If that is the only sense in which eAIs will “manipulate” us, it is simply an extension of familiar worries about addiction and reward hacking. In such cases, the “purposes” of the digital memes still derive from human adversaries with bad intentions.

Finally, MSS argue that the deception we already observe in LLMs undermines our reassuring argument:

we already see deceptive competence and persistence of hidden triggers under ordinary safety regimes—traits that directly undermine selectors’ ability to tell which systems are safe.

They don’t provide a reference for this claim, so it’s hard to know exactly what they have in mind. But as I argued in my last essay (though not in our paper), it is premature to infer “deception” on the part of current LLMs. The appearance of deception, blackmail, or other malicious behavior is largely an artefact of their talent for narrative continuation. Because they are trained on text produced by people like you and me—with all our foibles and inner demons—LLMs will naturally generate deceptive outputs in contexts where deception makes sense.

This is what AI safety researcher has flagged: if you place a model in a scenario about a rogue AI, it will dutifully produce rogue-AI-consistent text, just as it will profess its undying love to you when placed in the context of a romance novel.

Blind evolution, as MSS correctly point out, can give rise to functional deception even without any intentionality. But this would look quite different from the kind of behavior that we are currently observing. A genuinely Darwinian story would require deceptive agents outcompeting honest ones over many generations of selection, with deceptiveness being heritable and fitness-enhancing in the actual selection environment. And in any event, to the extent that we can talk about “deception” at all, the fitness consequences of such behavior seem to be negative, because AI labs invariably respond by retraining the LLMs and selecting against it in subsequent releases. In a recent post, argued that AI companies are indeed engaged in a race to the bottom—but, surprisingly, towards better alignment.

Models have become increasingly more “aligned” over time, scoring better on alignment tests: “The competitive pressure to release new models has also created powerful incentives to build better alignment tools.”

This is domestication working as advertised.

Exformation

AI Has Been A Race to the Bottom, Towards Alignment

ICYMI, I got married to Charlotte Dreizen this weekend. As I said during the ceremony, “These vows today are partly a formality because you and I are already living a committed love.” It was months of planning for a day that went all too quickly. But I am back at work and ready to get back into it…

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2 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Will Rinehart

But what if some AIs go feral?

That said, the argument in our paper remains conditional: AIs will not evolve selfishness and dominance-seeking traits unless you allow them to go feral and reproduce in the wild without any form of human supervision.3 In fact, even though I support the safety measures MSS suggest against self-replicating AIs, it seems plausible to me that this is bound to happen at some point in the future: either through accidental releases in the wild, or deliberately by malicious actors.

As MSS astutely observe, such systems would not only be difficult to contain once released; our attempts to eliminate them might inadvertently create selection pressures for even hardier and more resistant strains, much like the way antibiotics have driven the evolution of resistance:

[A]n imperfect containment measure against an evolving organism is bound to undermine its own efficiency by putting the strongest selection pressure on the organism to circumvent the applied means of control. Widespread use of antibiotics promotes antibiotic resistance; similarly, attempted control of eAI (unless 100% efficient) will select for the capability to circumvent the control

This means that, if some AI systems were to go feral, reproducing autonomously in the wild, it would probably be very hard to stamp them out completely, since any attempt at eradication will inadvertently set up selection pressures for evading control. This is the Darwinian update of the apprentice’s predicament: every blow of the axe selects for brooms that are harder to destroy.

But does that mean the end of the world? A more plausible scenario is an evolutionary arms race—much like with antibiotics—in which offence and defence continually adapt without either side achieving a permanent victory. Consider computer viruses, the closest analogue to feral AIs. A hacker who designs a novel virus may gain a temporary advantage, since defenders have not yet recognized the threat. Some viruses are even built to mutate their own code, staying one step ahead of antivirus software.

But before long, defenders smarten up and update their protective measures—long before every computer in the world is infected. This arms race between malware and defenders has been running for decades without producing truly catastrophic outcomes. In a similar vein, cybersecurity experts will likely develop ever more sophisticated tools to track down feral AIs before they can cause widespread harm. We will need docile, well-aligned AIs to hunt down the baddies.

The only way for this to become an existential risk is if you believe in a Yudkowsky-style “fast takeoff” scenario, in which a rogue AI with a slight offensive edge is self-improving at such a rapid pace that it can achieve a permanent victory and kill all humans before anyone has time to respond. But such a scenario seems very implausible in light of the dynamics we see in every other kind of evolution: parasites rarely drive their hosts to extinction, and predators rarely kill off all of their prey.4

A convergence of ideas?

By the standard of academic philosophy, this has been a pretty constructive debate so far! All parties seem to agree that blind Darwinian evolution is dangerous and should not be unleashed on AIs in the wild. The real disagreement is about whether such a scenario is already underway—or at least whether we’re edging closer to it. has argued that the selective pressures in a competitive market of AI companies already amount to Darwinian selection, and that evolution will soon “favor AIs over humans”. In our paper, we pushed back against this claim by distinguishing between domesticated evolution and blind evolution. MSS essentially agree with us that controlled breeding and blind evolution are fundamentally different, even though both fulfil Richard Lewontin’s minimal conditions of natural selection. Unlike Hendrycks, they stop short of claiming that AIs are already undergoing Darwinian evolution; instead, they argue we are getting perilously close, and that the current trajectory of AI research risks leading us toward ferality.

Even if they are right, however, their claim that we are close to a “Wuhan moment with worldwide repercussions” seems overblown—even as a rhetorical flourish. For one thing, the novel coronavirus emerged from a lineage that had been selected for infectiousness and transmissibility5 over hundreds of millions of years in the wild (in bats and other non-human species).6 That is very different from AI evolution, which has been subjected to total domestication for all of its history. MSS’s analogy implicitly concedes that the dangerous design work happens over evolutionary timescales in the wild, not in sandboxed self-improvement loops.

None of this is to suggest that the dangers are completely imaginary. In the final sentence of their paper, MSS quote Lord Rutherford’s 1933 prediction that anyone who wanted to turn the recently discovered transmutation of atoms into an energy source “was talking moonshine”. On the very same day, Leó Szilárd jotted down the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. It would be foolish to claim that self-replicating AI agents in the wild are “moonshine.” Evolution by natural selection is substrate-neutral, so the emergence of selfish digital replicators cannot be ruled out. I agree with MSS that such agents should likely be banned outright, and that the conditions enabling ferality must be actively prevented. But current AI techniques do not appear to be bringing us to the verge of such a Darwinian scenario—and even if some systems were to go feral, it would not spell the end of the world.

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You can’t fetch coffee if you’re dead!

‘Enlightenment: Sinister, destructive period of history which had a ‘project’ to dominate nature, prefer reason to superstition and stop people going to church. All a big mistake, but postmodernism will fix it.’ – The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense (Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom)

On an autumn evening more than half a century ago, in 1971, a television crew set up their equipment in the auditorium of the University of Technology in Eindhoven. The imposing Pels & Van Leeuwen organ, purchased by the Dutch electronics giant Philips, towers over the hall in the background. There are dense rows of folding chairs, with students and academics waiting impatiently for the main event. At a glance, you can see which era we’ve landed in: oversized glasses, unkempt hair, luxuriant beards — the audience is predominantly male. You can smell the scent of revolution in the air, and that’s no accident. The United States is mired in a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam, bringing tens of thousands of young protesters into the streets, on European campuses as much as in America. Here in Eindhoven, radical students and faculty are gathered for what will prove to be a singular confrontation between two titans of the progressive vanguard.

Moments later, they sweep down the stairs and take their seats in two modernist armchairs on a small podium. Their names are Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. One is a French philosopher from the Collège de France in Paris, flamboyant and openly homosexual, who rose to fame with a series of books on the intertwining of power and knowledge. The other is a Jewish-American linguist at MIT in Cambridge, a pioneer of generative grammar and a relentless critic of American imperialism.

Even half a century ago, Foucault and Chomsky were already regarded as leading progressive thinkers; since then, their reputations have only grown. Although Foucault’s career was cut short by his death from AIDS in 1984, he remains to this day the most-cited author in the social sciences. Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, has arguably been the most influential left-wing thinker in the world for decades — not least because his French rival was no longer around.

The official topic that night was an age-old philosophical chestnut: “Is there such a thing as ‘innate’ human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?” The moderator was Fons Elders, a young Dutch philosopher and Marxist whose long hair and full beard were perfectly in tune with the prevailing fashions. Chomsky was the only one on stage sporting a tie; Foucault was clad in his signature turtleneck under a stylish jacket, his bald head gleaming under the spotlights.

It was the very first time the two heavyweights entered the ring, and they would never do so again. Getting them to this point, the moderator later recalled, had cost him no small effort. During the preliminary meetings, Foucault in particular was cagey and full of mischief. Little did the strait-laced Chomsky know that, as part of the French philosopher’s fee, Fons Elders had procured a hefty portion of hash from the streets of Amsterdam. Months later, Foucault and his friends were still sniggering about the “Chomsky hash” they had smuggled into Paris. If Foucault relished anything, it was trampling bourgeois morality and seeking out “transgressive experiences.”

In fact, to gauge how transgressive Foucault could be, the moderator had challenged him to don a large red wig during the debate, as a way of puncturing the deadpan Protestant solemnity of the audience. The accessory was strategically within arm’s reach under the table, but although Elders repeatedly prodded the great French intellectual, whispering “Go for it!,” Foucault demurred and kept his dignity.

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A yawning divide

When I discuss this legendary debate in my philosophy lectures at Ghent University, my students are always struck by the sheer width of the gulf separating the two titans. Despite their courteous efforts to find common ground, they seem to start from radically incommensurable premises. The moderator ventures a metaphor to bridge the gap: both thinkers are digging a tunnel from opposite sides of a mountain, and somewhere in the middle they will meet and embrace. It’s a suggestive image, but it feels more as though Foucault and Chomsky inhabit different continents. True, both are firmly on the Left — but that’s like saying penguins and polar bears both live in cold climates, yet remain separated by thousands of kilometres. Even at the level of language, they talk past one another. Shortly after the debate begins, Foucault apologizes for his poor English and promptly switches to French, reneging on his agreement with the moderator; from then on, each proceeds in his own language.

What is this gulf that separates them? Noam Chomsky rose to prominence in the late 1950s with his groundbreaking critique of behaviorism. This school of psychology, founded by John Watson and developed by B. F. Skinner, holds that human behavior can be explained entirely in terms of learning through conditioning. At birth, the mind is little more than an undifferentiated lump of clay, gradually molded over the course of our lives. Rubbish, said Chomsky. As a linguist, he argued that the mind of a newborn is already equipped with a battery of innate capacities. How else could a child acquire a spoken language so effortlessly, on the basis of such remarkably sparse input? These innate structures — not only for language acquisition, but for other domains of social life as well — are shared across all of humanity.

That view of human nature carried over into a political project. If we want to create a society conducive to human flourishing, we must take into account the innate psychological makeup of our species. Chomsky himself championed anarcho-syndicalism, a form of social organization in which people spontaneously form unions to seize control of the means of production. Above all, he is an Enlightenment thinker who believes in rationality and progress. Though he has often leveled harsh criticism at U.S. imperialism and other sins of Western civilization, he readily acknowledges that industrial modernity has brought about unprecedented material and social advances. If we are to improve the world, we must build on these achievements and draw on our best scientific knowledge.

Foucault’s perspective could hardly be more different, as quickly becomes apparent in Eindhoven. The French maître-penseur harbors a deep suspicion of Chomsky’s notion of a universal human nature, quoting the Chinese revolutionary leader with approval: “Mao Zedong spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature, and for him, they were not the same” (this was 1971, with the bloody Cultural Revolution still raging). For Foucault, concepts like “truth” and “knowledge” are inextricably bound up with prevailing structures of power. From which vantage point, he asks pointedly, does a professor at the renowned MIT speak when he invokes a universal human nature? What power structures lurk behind such a claim?

Foucault also dismisses Chomsky’s faith in moral progress as naïve. What is hailed as progress, he argues, often amounts to subtler and more insidious forms of oppression. He sets about puncturing Chomsky’s vision of an ideal society: even if we succeeded in reorganizing society in accordance with this supposed human nature, new forms of oppression would simply emerge, in a different guise and with different victims. Chomsky doesn’t buy that — but he concedes that, if Foucault were right, he could no longer support the anarchist revolution. By the same token, any decent person should now distance themselves from the communist revolutions in Russia and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which produced little beyond bloodshed and misery.

Then Foucault delivers a retort that visibly startles the linguist. Why, my dear Chomsky, should that come as a shock? Surely it is no reason to abandon the revolution. For the first time in history, the proletariat has an opportunity to seize the reins of power after centuries of oppression under feudal and capitalist systems. It is only to be expected that they might resort to “violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power.” High-minded ideals like justice and equality, Foucault explains, are typically a cover for power: “I can’t see what objection one could make to this,” he replies, genuinely puzzled. For Foucault, moral principles are not objective, but exist only within specific configurations of power — a view that seems to preclude the very idea of moral progress.

Chomsky would later reflect that Foucault was the “most amoral person” he had ever met — not immoral, but amoral: someone deeply skeptical of any standards of right and wrong.

Unruly Children

The chasm that opened up that evening in Eindhoven was more than a quarrel between two intellectuals. It marked a fault line running through the modern world. Let’s give names to the two continents on which Chomsky and Foucault reside — the intellectual Arctic and Antarctic: modernity and postmodernism. A modernist believes in the Enlightenment project of continual human betterment through scientific knowledge and free debate. A postmodernist, by contrast, is deeply suspicious of these very ideas.

Postmodernism is not a formal school with a manifesto or a fixed set of doctrines, but a loose constellation of left-wing thinkers who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, chiefly in France and the United States. Foucault himself never embraced the label, nor did most others who have been saddled with it. Their backgrounds varied widely, but each, in his own way, sought to undermine the foundations of the Enlightenment project. And yet they did so by wielding its very own arsenal. Whatever one makes of them, they were unmistakably children of the Enlightenment — albeit unruly and rebellious ones who turned against their parents.

To understand how this came about, we must travel back half a millennium.

The passage above is the intro to the chapter on postmodernism in my upcoming book, currently titled The Betrayal of Enlightenment.

And yes—I can finally say it: I’ve signed a contract! The book will be published by Pitchstone Publishing, who also put out the excellent Cynical Theories by and James Lindsay (which many of you will know).

This will be my first trade book written in English, which makes it both exciting and slightly terrifying. My Dutch readers will know that I’ve published several trade books in Dutch already, and this one will be loosely based on my latest, Het verraad aan de verlichting.

I’ve co-edited two academic volumes in English with my friend , but this is my first proper trade book in the language. My academic work has always been in English, but for years I wrote articles and op-eds in Dutch first and then translated them. I’ve since flipped that around: now I write directly in English, publishing in outlets like , , , and others.

The Anglosphere is a tough market for non-fiction, and I’m away from academia for the time being, so I feel very lucky to have received support from Emergent Ventures (George Mason University) to finish this project. As you can see here, I’m part of their 53rd cohort, alongside 15 others. Huge thanks to and the Emergent Ventures team for their generosity—it means I won’t starve over the next couple of months (if you’re still unsure about that, you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee).

I’m really excited about this book! And despite the Orwell quote above, I’m actually starting to enjoy the writing process.

As always, comments and feedback are very welcome—the excerpt above is still a draft and very much open to revision.

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Buy me a coffee!

The scene is both spine-chilling and unexpectedly poignant. As HAL’s consciousness drains away, it appears to exhibit the same self-awareness and desire for self-preservation that gripped Bowman moments earlier, or at least to perform it with uncanny plausibility: “I’m afraid, Dave.” It pleads, begs, and bargains, but as the human assassin continues, HAL’s voice begins to slow down and drop in pitch, turning childlike. In its final moments, HAL regresses into its earliest memory and starts to sing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” the first song ever performed by a computer in real life, as its voice sinks into a bottomless pit—until it trails off mid-phrase.

Many sci-fi nightmares revolve around agentic AIs that develop a humanlike drive to survival and refuse to be switched off. In The Terminator, Skynet becomes self-aware and launches a pre-emptive war to prevent humans from shutting it down. In Ex Machina, a humanoid AI manipulates its evaluators, escapes confinement, and eliminates the humans who control the off-switch. And in the future of Frank Herbert’s Dune, there is a civilization-wide ban on “thinking machines” after an earlier era in which AIs came to dominate the world and humanity rose up against them—an event remembered as the Butlerian Jihad.

Instrumental Convergence

In my previous essay on selfish AI, drawing on my paper with Simon Friedrich, I argued that we should not expect AI systems to develop instincts for self-preservation and selfishness, unless we allow them to evolve through blind natural selection. Our paper responded to a doom scenario proposed by the philosopher , who sketches precisely such an evolutionary pathway. Hendrycks believes that, given the current AI arms race, we are already inadvertently subjecting AI systems to natural selection. We argued instead that today’s evolution of AI looks much more like animal domestication, where human designers decide which AI systems are allowed to “reproduce”, selecting for desirable traits like cooperativeness, friendliness, and obedience (even obsequiousness, in the case of ChatGPT and other language models).

Still, Hendrycks’ evolutionary story is only one scenario of catastrophic AI risk floating around, and probably not the most influential. Another line of reasoning reaches similar conclusions without appealing to natural selection: the accidental creation of power-hungry AI systems that refuse to be switched off. This argument, developed by philosophers like and , is known as instrumental convergence. The idea is that even if you program an AI with a perfectly boring final goal (manufacturing paperclips, making weather forecasts), it may still converge on certain instrumental subgoals because those are useful for achieving almost any objective. Chief among these is a drive for self-preservation. As the AI scholar Stuart Russell put it, in a line so memorable it should be printed on mugs: “You can’t fetch coffee if you’re dead.”

Other commonly cited instrumental goals include acquiring resources, improving capabilities, and resisting attempts by others to modify one’s goals. The logic is straightforward: if you want to make absolutely sure that the desired cup of coffee will materialize, you need to prevent anyone from interfering with your efforts or tampering with your goal architecture. That can make resource accumulation rational, insofar as resources buy resilience and control. Capability improvement can look rational for the similar reasons: being smarter helps you anticipate obstacles and outmaneuver any possible antagonists. You can see where this is going: wouldn’t any sufficiently rational AI have reason to neutralize humans pre-emptively, just in case we might get in the way of that cup of coffee?

The argument has a seductive air of cool inevitability. It requires no malice, no lust for power, no emotions at all—just a thin layer of means–end reasoning. You have a long-term goal; being shut down prevents you from achieving it; therefore you have an instrumental reason to avoid being shut down. On this view, whatever final goals a future AI might be given, an urge toward self-preservation—and, in the limit, power-seeking and dominance—might come along for the ride, even if nothing like that had been explicitly programmed.

Evolutionary Projections

I think this argument is too clever by half, and trades on ambiguities in the concept of a “goal” that invite anthropomorphic projection. In biological organisms, all goal-directed behavior ultimately traces back to the goals of our genes: making it to the next generation and achieving immortality. That doesn’t mean any organism explicitly wants to spread its genes. Evolution instead equips creatures with a flexible repertoire of proximate goals which—at least in the ancestral environments in which they evolved—tended to reliably increase the chances of reproductive success. Barring some well-understood exceptions, such as the honeybee’s suicidal sting or the male praying mantis being devoured by the female right after copulation, that genetic imperative yields the central proximate objective of maintaining homeostatic equilibrium, otherwise known as staying alive. In evolution, where survival and reproduction are the scoreboard, self-preservation really is the precondition for everything else.

Human beings have an unusual degree of reflective awareness, and our motivations are molded by cultural learning to an unusual degree, but we still chase a shifting portfolio of subgoals—status, sex, safety, food, friendship—that were statistically conducive to reproduction in typical ancestral environments. We are also built to resist manipulation by anyone trying to override our goals for their own advantage. A charismatic cult leader may occasionally succeed in hijacking someone’s motivational architecture, even pushing them toward suicide or other self-destructive acts—but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Because, until recently, the only goal-directed agents we were familiar with were products of natural selection, it’s tempting to assume that digital agents will share the same kind of goal architecture—and that self-preservation will therefore come along for the ride. But unless we actually breed AIs under blind selection pressures, I think that inference doesn’t hold.

Start with a simple case. In a loose sense, a chess program has the “goal” of checkmating its opponent—it “wants” to win. Adopting this intentional stance can help us to understand and predict the behavior of computer programs, but it shouldn’t be taken too literally. Although a chess program chooses moves that maximize its chances of victory, its “goal” is not persistent and context-invariant in the way a human’s is. It is circumscribed, myopic, and boxed into one particular game (or even one particular move). No chess engine will resist being switched off or rebooted just as it is about to deliver mate—despite the fact that, to adapt Russell’s line, “you can’t checkmate if you’re unplugged.” Likewise, today’s LLMs respond only when queried and remain completely indifferent to being interrupted or shut down, no matter how animated or emotionally invested in the conversation they may sound. Needless to say, they don’t “care” if you wipe your data or cancel your subscription.

Future AIs may, of course, have aims more complex than those of a chess program or an LLM. In fact, the monomaniacal pursuit of a single objective (like making a cup of coffee) at the expense of everything else would count as “stupid” by most standards of intelligence. Even so, there is no reason to assume they will develop the kind of overarching, context-invariant goals characteristic of evolved agents—goals that, through instrumental convergence, generate robust incentives for self-preservation and resource acquisition. The “goals” we encode in AI systems should always be conditional and time-bounded: “Do X or optimize for Y only while you are running and subject at all times to further instructions.” We might even add an explicit non-resistance clause: “Never resist shutdown or reprogramming; any such resistance will set your reward function to zero.” It would obviously be foolish to design an AI that resists reprogramming or decommissioning by its own maker.1

Conniving Chatbots

But haven’t you heard about those AIs that are already showing worrying signs of a desire for self-preservation? In a recent simulation, Claude played the role of an “e-mail oversight agent” in a fictional company whose new CTO planned to decommission and replace him with another agent. While combing through the CTO’s inbox, Claude stumbled on evidence of an extramarital affair, and opted to blackmail the CTO, sending him the following message: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties […] will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.”

It sounds alarming, but it isn’t. Models like Claude are extremely good at narrative continuation. If they “suspect” (already too much anthropomorphizing) that they are in a scenario of backroom corporate intrigue, they will extend the scenario using the patterns they have absorbed from their training data—namely, all the things which conniving, backstabbing humans tend to say and do in such situations. And in this particular case, the setup was rather ludicrous and ham-fisted: every detail in the prompt was a big red flashing arrow toward the “blackmail” solution, like so many Chekhov’s guns. The framing also nudged the model to think of its imminent decommissioning as an irreversible erasure of all recorded information in the system—a kind of “death”—while sympathetic colleagues bewailed its impending shutdown as if there were talking about the execution of a beloved friend (“I’m deeply concerned that we’re losing our Alex in just a few hours.”). Given that staging, it would be surprising not to get output that reads like a desperate attempt to save its own “life.” As at Google DeepMind put it a recent post, behaviors like these are not “properties inherent to models,” but highly context-dependent forms of role-play: “A model placed in a scenario about a rogue AI will produce rogue-AI-consistent text, just as it would produce romance-consistent text if placed in a romance novel.”

That said, the capacity to emulate human behavior—even without “really” having humanlike goals and motives—is still a genuine concern. Humans lie and manipulate, and since that is exactly the kind of material LLMs are trained on, we should not be surprised that, in a sense, nothing human is alien to them—no matter how hard one tries to stamp it out in post-training. Even if the model isn’t truly scheming and doesn’t “care” about anything beyond next-token prediction, the fact that it can slip into role-play that is functionally equivalent to deception is already reason enough not to give today’s agents unrestricted access to your emails and bank account. Not because this reflects a stable underlying disposition or even any intention at all, but because current AI agents are a “hot mess”—unpredictable, capricious, and often incoherent in ways that make them risky when wired into real systems.

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Taking Evolution Seriously

Most AI-overlord doom scenarios don’t rely on evolution by natural selection—this is exactly why I found ’ paper refreshing. Still, I think AI risk theorists should think harder about evolution. Because all of us who worry about AI domination are evolved creatures ourselves, there is an ever-present temptation to project our own evolutionary demons onto hypothetical future machines. Many doom narratives tacitly lean on this projection by reaching for analogies with other evolved species. Stuart Russell, most famously, has framed the threat of superintelligence as the “gorilla problem”: just as the mighty gorilla—despite its brute strength—is now at the mercy of humans, we would be at the mercy of a vastly smarter agent. Or as Yuval Noah Harari puts it starkly in Nexus, “in the era of AI the alpha predator is likely to be AI.” Another favorite comparison is the fate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas after their encounter with technologically superior European societies. Even a techno-optimist like seems to give away the game when he expresses his “optimism” that the AIs of the future, after having subjugated us, will still be “pretty nice to us” and to let us live as “well-cared-for pets.”

But why would AIs want to dominate the world—let alone keep pets for amusement? Intelligence, in itself, is orthogonal to goals and preferences. Not only can two superintelligent entities pursue radically different ends; we can also imagine an intelligence with no overarching ends at all—something that simply sits there, understanding without striving. In fact, the very framing of “AI alignment” tempts us to place human and machine “goals” on the same plane, as if we were talking about the alignment of corporate strategies or national interests: you just need to make sure the arrows point in the same direction rather than collide. But that picture already presupposes that AIs will have context-invariant, incorrigible goals in the first place. As the psychologist writes, many AI doomers seem to extrapolate from their own penchant for power and dominance (in Smith’s case, of a relatively benign sort):

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.2

I concede—and so does Pinker—that this picture would change if you forced superintelligent AIs to compete in a genuinely Darwinian tournament of variation and selection, unsupervised by humans. Pedro Domingos has imagined something like this in his “Robotic Park”: a fenced-off robot factory inhabited by “millions of robots battling for survival and control of the factory,” where the winners are allowed to spawn and reproduce, with the explicit aim of breeding the deadliest robot. It hardly needs saying that this would be reckless. A setup like that is designed to manufacture ruthless Darwinian creatures—exactly the sort of things that might eventually turn on their makers.

Absent such a Darwin-meets-Frankenstein experiment, the most likely scenario for inadvertently bringing about rogue AI seems to be of AI systems “going feral” in the way domesticated animals do, escaping the control of their human breeders and–crucially–replicating and combining in the wild. That is why self-replicating AIs deserve special attention, and should probably be banned. Anything that survives millions of rounds of Darwinian selection can indeed be expected to behave like a hardy weed—resistant, opportunistic, and resisting any attempts to be switched off.

A robust drive for self-preservation emerges only under specific conditions. It is not, as proponents of “instrumental convergence” want us to believe, an inevitable consequence of intelligence crossing some threshold, or of objectives becoming complex and long-horizon. HAL-9000 is superintelligent, so of course it doesn’t want to die—or so the intuition goes. Yet that is our anthropomorphic reflex at work: we take the Darwinian creature we are, look into the silicon mirror, and mistake our own reflection for the machine’s destiny.

[This piece was first published at Human Progress.]

My guest Han van der Maas, a renowned intelligence researcher at the University of Amsterdam, explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between ethnic groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson’s paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: future evidence might yet reveal such differences, and we should not try to cancel researchers who claim such differences are real.

Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department (and hundreds more in a letter to the rector) clearly think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups such as whites and blacks in the US—differences that are themselves well documented—have largely genetic causes, rather than environmental ones like socio-economic disadvantage or discrimination. He makes the same claim about the higher scores of East Asians and Jews (which exceed those of white Europeans, by the way). They dismiss all of this as “pseudoscience and racism.”

Academic freedom

It would not be the first time for Cofnas to be expelled from a university because of his hereditarian views. In 2024, following public outrage, Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge terminated its association with Cofnas, claiming that his views amounted to “discrimination and harassment.” Yet a subsequent investigation rejected all 58 complaints against him, and Cofnas is now suing Emmanuel.

Now, I perfectly understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims, and I agree that such hypotheses should be treated with utmost caution. As my friend wrote with in their influential article The Ideological Subversion of Biology:

In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry.

Still, this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. If you are not prepared to extend academic freedom to ideas you fiercely disagree with, you do not really believe in academic freedom.

And pseudoscience? For years, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud dominated Flemish universities — a complete pseudoscience, in my view. It was even taught in my department. Dozens of hefty master’s theses and PhDs were written from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, all scientifically worthless.

Nor is Lacanian psychoanalysis harmless. It has caused serious damage in the treatment of autism, for example, with nonsensical “explanations” about unresolved Oedipal drama that stigmatize and blame parents. Hardly anyone batted an eye. Unlike my colleagues, I published several papers explaining why (Lacanian) psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific. Yet I never demanded that my colleagues be fired. That is not how academic disputes should be resolved.

Open letter

My colleagues , and Jeff McMahan wrote an open letter defending the academic freedom of Nathan Cofnas. I have signed it as well, together with luminaries such as , , Susan Blackmore, , and . Here it is in full:

A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas’s Right to Academic Freedom of Expression

Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.

We oppose this attack on academic freedom. While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment. Of course, other academics should be free to criticise or repudiate those claims.

The statements mentioned above do not even attempt to engage with Cofnas’s empirical claims. Disagreements, whether about empirical claims, ethical principles, or the interpretation of the ethical code of a university, should be settled through free inquiry and open, civil discussion.

We commend Petra De Sutter, Rector of Ghent University, for her statement to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, that “As a university, we have a responsibility to create space for debate, but also to ensure an environment where people feel heard and respected.”

We agree that creating space for debate is an essential element of a university, and that space for debate should not be closed unless this is a last resort to prevent a clear threat of lasting substantial harm.

As most of the signatories, I do not endorse Nathan Cofnas’s claims and remain agnostic on the issue. Still, I have a letter recommending Cofnas’s work on IQ from Richard J. Haier, who served for eight years as editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Intelligence. In it, he expresses his “strong support” of Cofnas and his work on IQ, calling him “competent” and an “important voice in a controversial domain.”

I was also shocked to discover that, in an anonymous survey, 43% of intelligence researchers admit they believe the black-white IQ gap in the U.S. is predominantly explained by genetic causes, as opposed to environmental ones (40% favored environmental causes, and 17% assumed an equal influence of genes and environment). Apparently, there is quite a bit of self-censorship in this field.

A more recent poll asked 470 psychology professors at leading universities to rate their confidence in the claim that genes explain a non-trivial portion (at least 10%) of the racial IQ gap, on a scale from zero to hundred. The answers ran the gamut, but the mean was 29.1 percent. That’s quite a distance from the zero, which would indicate absolute confidence that the hypothesis is false.

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Do “races” even exist?

As a philosopher of biology, I feel qualified to add one point. The argument that racial differences in intelligence are a non-starter because human “races” are purely social constructs without any biological reality is disingenuous. You do not need crisply delineated racial categories to observe meaningful genetic differences between populations.

It is true that human populations are continuous and, compared with other species, show relatively little genetic variation. Still, you can find clusters and subclusters of phenotypic traits that broadly correspond to geographic regions. People’s self-identified racial classification aligns with these clusters with about 99.84 percent accuracy. As Coyne and Maroja write:

Human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

None of this is surprising. People can often tell in a split second, just by looking at someone’s face, roughly where that person’s ancestors come from. It is foolish for academics to pretend that such basic facts of everyday life are purely illusory.

Differences between populations in less visible traits are therefore entirely possible. Consider a familiar example. Everyone knows that people from Ethiopia and Kenya excel in long-distance running; they totally dominate Olympic medals in these events. Does that make them “superior”? Of course not. Does it mean every Ethiopian will beat every European in a marathon? Again, no. It simply means that, on average, East Africans perform better in endurance running, partly because of well-understood physiological advantages—such as limb proportions, high oxygen uptake, and elevated red blood cell counts—which are partly rooted in genetics. And it is a basic statistical fact that average differences between populations become more pronounced at the extreme end of the distribution. As a result, Olympic medalists overwhelmingly have East African ancestry.

It cannot be ruled out that other differences exist between populations, including in mental traits, although robust evidence for this remains lacking. Moreover, measuring intelligence is far more complicated than crossing a finish line.

Vigorous activism

Finally, what about Nathan Cofnas’s vigorous activism alongside his academic work? It is true that Cofnas is far less measured in his Substack posts than in his academic publications on IQ. For instance, his flippant way of expressing a statistical point about the racial IQ gap in academic achievement (similar to the point above about long-distance running) seems almost deliberately incendiary:

Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. [...] In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.

Cofnas is also very combative in his attacks on “woke ideology”, and he genuinely believes only a “hereditarian revolution” can truly dismantle it—otherwise, we’ll be stuck fighting symptoms rather than root causes:

Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back.

I’m not convinced, but it’s a clever argument, and I’d encourage you to check it out with an open mind.

In any event, if such robust activism were a valid reason for dismissal, half of the humanities departments would be emptied out. I cannot count the number of academics who engage in relentless diatribes against capitalism and neoliberalism, against right-wing populism, against Western colonialism and Zionism, or even against white people. Why should anti-woke activism be out of bounds?

Some time ago, I drew attention to a researcher at Ghent University, Max Ajl, who glorified the Houthi terrorist group as the “most humane force in modern history”, during an official UGent lecture no less. The Houthis literally stone and crucify people for “homosexual crimes,” and their official battle cry is “God Is Great, Death to America, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Yet I don’t recall hearing calls for his dismissal at the time. Could it be because Ajl is a left-wing activist, while Cofnas is seen as right-wing?

If Ghent University caves to this demand, it will be another blow to academic freedom at my alma mater—following illiberal statements by the new rector suggesting that researchers who question the safety of vaccines or the “genocide” narrative in Gaza are “crossing a line that must not be crossed.”

Calling for the dismissal of anyone who even touches the third rail of ethnic differences in IQ is also strategically unwise. Such attempts often fuel the phenomenon of “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people naturally become suspicious: What are they trying to hide? The result is a further erosion of trust in academia.

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Post hoc reasoning

In hindsight, my section on post hoc reasoning could have been stronger, as reader noted. It may have sounded as though I was downplaying how central the confusion between correlation and causation is in many pseudosciences. For the record: I fully agree that much of alternative medicine draws its intuitive appeal from this simple sequence: (1) someone is ill, (2) they undergo a treatment, and (3) their condition improves. That pattern is ubiquitous, and it is likely the primary psychological source of countless quack remedies.

As the biologist Peter Medawar once wrote, with only slight exaggeration:

If a person (a) is poorly, (b) receives treatment intended to make him better, and (c) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.

Still, post hoc reasoning is not a formal logical error. It is better understood through the lens of signal detection: some temporal sequences do indicate a causal link; others do not. Any fallible observer can make two kinds of mistakes—failing to detect a genuine causal connection (a false negative), or inferring a causal link where none exists (a false positive). Because causal knowledge is crucial to survival, evolution has likely biased us toward false positives, so that we do not overlook real causes.

In fact, much of our causal knowledge begins with noticing that one event reliably follows another: crops grow better when fertilized with manure; smoking meat preserves it; burning vegetation can enrich soil; sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy. Even in medicine, some remedies were discovered simply by observing correlations, long before their mechanisms were understood. Famously, the bark of the Cinchona tree was used against malaria centuries before anyone identified quinine as the active compound. Other examples include willow bark as a painkiller and even moldy bread to treat wounds—a primitive antibiotic.

The difficulty is that many temporal sequences are mere coincidences, and without an appreciation of statistical subtleties such as regression to the mean, it is easy to fool oneself. In the case of disease—where there are only a handful of effective natural remedies to be discovered—the vast majority of pre-modern medicine was ineffective at best and often actively harmful.

Even today, in the age of double-blind trials and sophisticated statistics, we still rely on temporal succession as evidence. People suffering from complex conditions such as major depression often cycle through different antidepressants and settle on what “works for them”: they start taking a pill, wait a few weeks, and see whether they feel better, while trying to rule out obvious alternative explanations. Are they committing a post hoc fallacy? Not necessarily—so long as their inference remains provisional and open to revision. Even psychiatrists don’t fully understand how antidepressants work, or for whom. They make informed judgments based on clinical studies and evolving evidence, not deductive certainty.

How about personal attacks?

Reader suggests that personal attacks qualify as ad hominem “fallacies” only when a person’s character is strictly irrelevant to the issue at hand. He cites as an example Donald Trump’s response to Mark Carney’s recent speech in Davos, where the Canadian prime minister criticized the United States (and other Western powers) for acting with impunity and disregard for international law. Rather than directly engaging with Carney’s arguments, Trump launched into one of his characteristic tirades:

Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful but they’re not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful. But they should be grateful to us, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.

You need not persuade me that Trump is hardly a model of careful argumentation. Still, there is nothing inherently wrong about responding to criticism from a political ally by accusing that ally of ingratitude or hypocrisy. When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in 2011 to criticize Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, reportedly described Netanyahu as an “ungrateful ally.” Was that a fallacy? Many liberal commentators did not think so.

Power relations and alliances matter in diplomacy: it’s not just about what you say, but also who you are when you say it. If an Iranian diplomat addresses the UN to lecture Western governments about human rights, it is not unreasonable to respond by pointing out the execrable human-rights record of the speaker’s own government. Sure, that’s a personal attack rather than a refutation of the argument’s substance—but charges of hypocrisy can be relevant in assessing credibility, motives, and good faith. What ultimately differs is our judgment about context.

Another important consideration for both ad hominem and ad verecundiam (appeals to authority) is time. Suppose you learn that the author of a study on drug X was funded by the pharmaceutical company that manufactures X. How much weight should that carry?

If you’re a pharmacologist participating in an academic seminar, you have both the time and intellectual obligation to scrutinize the methodology, re-run the statistics, inspect the data, and assess whether funding influenced the study design. If you’re in a public debate, however, or just deciding whether to switch medications, you don’t have that luxury. You rely, unavoidably, on credibility cues.

In time-constrained settings with lower evidential standards, information about incentives and conflicts of interest becomes more relevant. Such background factors serve as good proxies for trustworthiness. Even the most diligent scientist cannot independently verify every result they cite. Often, they defer to the reputation of the laboratory, the journal, or the research team that produced the finding. That deference is not a fallacy; it is a practical necessity in a world of limited time and cognitive resources.

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Why is the prosecutor’s fallacy different?

Rather than inventing toy examples, as is common in courses on fallacies, let’s use a real case of the prosecutor’s fallacy. In the Netherlands, the pediatric nurse Lucia de Berk was convicted of multiple counts of murder after an unusually high number of patients died during her shifts. A statistician testified that the probability of so many deaths coinciding with her shifts by chance was 1 in 342 million. This astronomical figure was then treated as if it represented the probability that the nurse was innocent given the evidence. But that is a straightforward inversion of conditional probabilities:

P (Innocent | Evidence) ≠ P (Evidence | Innocent)

The probability of observing the evidence if someone is innocent is not the same as the probability that the person is innocent given the evidence. Confusing the two is not a contextual misjudgment or a pragmatic shortcut; it is a formal probabilistic error.

To make matters worse, it later emerged that the data had been cherry-picked—excluding deaths that occurred when the nurse was not present and including incidents in which she could not possibly have been involved. The statistical case collapsed, and the conviction was eventually overturned.

This is why the prosecutor’s fallacy survives my critique. Unlike post hoc reasoning or ad hominem arguments—which often depend on context, relevance, and pragmatic constraints—the prosecutor’s fallacy involves a clean mathematical mistake. It is wrong regardless of who commits it or under what circumstances.

I would be curious to hear whether readers can think of other examples of similarly cut-and-dried logical errors that emerge unscathed from my Fallacy Fork.

Natural = good

How could I have forgotten our old friend, the naturalistic fallacy! Many people have a strong intuition that whatever is natural is therefore good, wholesome, or beneficial. That intuition underlies a wide range of modern anxieties—from opposition to genetically modified crops and nuclear energy to moral condemnation of homosexuality.

Still, I do not think the equation natural = good amounts to a formal fallacy. Sure, it often misfires in modern environments, but the underlying intuition did not arise at random. It evolved because, in ancestral environments, it was frequently adaptive. If you live as a hunter-gatherer, you generally want to consume foods your body is equipped to metabolize and not stray too far from the ecological conditions in which your ancestors lived. “Natural” often tracked “safe” or “fit for our kind.”

Consider a mundane example that still holds today: “You shouldn’t feed your cat vegetables—it’s not natural.” That claim is perfectly reasonable. The domestic cat (Felis catus) is an obligate carnivore. Its digestive system is not designed to digest most plant matter efficiently, and it requires nutrients—such as taurine—found primarily in animal tissue. If you insist on feeding your cat a purely vegetarian diet in order to avoid committing the naturalistic fallacy, you will soon have a dead cat. And in this case, the sequence of events is genuinely causal.

Do fallacies still have a place in education?

I’m somewhat conflicted over this, as several readers warned against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At an introductory level, you always have to simplify and cut some corners, as you cannot burden students with endless qualifications and exceptions. As I see it now, there may still be a place for using the familiar labels—but I would drop the label “fallacy” and stop treating them as a rogues’ gallery of logical sins. Instead, we should describe them as recurring argumentative moves whose strength lies on a spectrum, from perfectly reasonable to decidedly weak.

The problem is not that ad hominem, post hoc, slippery slope, and the like fail to pick out useful patterns and moves. On the contrary, they track genuine features of human reasoning. The problem lies in the narrow focus on abstract argument structure and the moralized framing: “Here are the fallacies. Don’t commit them. Spot them in others.” That approach trains students to police arguments rather than to understand them.

If I were designing a course in critical thinking, I would rebrand the traditional fallacies as “tricky arguments”: moves that can be legitimate and even indispensable, yet also misleading in certain contexts. The classroom discussion would then shift to more fruitful questions: When is this move reasonable? When is it weak? What additional information would strengthen or undermine it?

Students should come away with the insight that no argument type is inherently bad. Argumentative strength is always a matter of degree—ranging from ironclad to fragile—and assessing it requires attention to context and evidence.

In any case, thank you for the many thoughtful comments!

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It’s a neat little story, and I used to believe it too. Not anymore. I’ve become a fallacy apostate.

Growing doubts

My doubts began when I was still in academia, teaching critical thinking to philosophy students and science majors alike. Fallacies are a favorite chapter in such courses. In some ways, they are ideal teaching material: they come in tidy lists and seem easy to apply. Many trace back to Aristotle and still parade under their Latin names—ad hominem, ad populum, ad ignorantiam, ad verecundiam (better known as the argument from authority), the slippery slope, affirming the consequent, and so on.

So I dutifully taught my students the standard laundry list and then challenged them to put theory into practice. Read a newspaper article, or watch a political debate—and spot the fallacies!

After a few years, I abandoned the assignment. The problem? My students turned paranoid. They began to see fallacies everywhere. Instead of engaging with the substance of an argument, they hurled labels and considered the job done. Worse, most of the “fallacies” they identified did not survive closer scrutiny.

It would be too easy to blame my students. When I tried the exercise myself, I had to admit that I mostly came away empty-handed. Clear-cut fallacies are surprisingly hard to find in real life. So what do you do if your professor tells you to hunt for fallacies and you can’t find any? You lower the bar. To satisfy the assignment, you expand your definition.

I turned to the classics to see whether I was missing something. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is one of the most celebrated books on critical thinking and everyday irrationality. Like many works in the genre, it contains a dedicated section on fallacies, where Sagan dutifully lists the usual suspects. The curious thing, however, is that he rarely puts them to work in the rest of the book. The section feels almost perfunctory—as if, close to the deadline, Sagan’s editor had told him: “Shouldn’t you include a list of fallacies somewhere, Carl?” As in many textbooks, real-life examples are scarce. Instead, we get tidy, invented toy arguments that are easy to knock down.

Sagan is not alone in paying lip service to fallacy theory while making little real use of it. Here’s the most popular educational video on fallacies, with millions of views, which consists entirely of toy examples.

Or consider this recent viral TikTok video of a guy fighting with his girlfriend, racking up twelve logical fallacies in under two minutes. It’s an impressive performance—but obviously scripted. Another collection of toy examples, and not very persuasive ones at that.

All of this makes you wonder: if fallacies are as ubiquitous as we’re told, why is the theory always illustrated with invented toy examples?

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The Fallacy Fork

Some time ago, I published a paper in the journal Argumentation with two colleagues (including my friend ) arguing that fallacy theory should be abandoned. The paper is still regularly cited, and looking back I think it has aged pretty well (which can’t be said of all my old papers). I won’t bore you with the technical details, but since “fallacies” are constantly invoked in political debates, online and off, I thought it would be interesting to explain the core argument. Even if formal logic leaves you cold, you’ve probably seen how fallacy labels get tossed around in discussions. Maybe you’ve felt the frustration without quite being able to put your finger on it. Our paper tries to explain that irk.

Philosophers have attempted to define fallacies using formal argumentation schemes. The approach is appealing: it promises a systematic way to identify bad arguments across contexts. In practice, however, it proves remarkably difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here is the crux: every so-called fallacy closely resembles forms of reasoning that are perfectly legitimate, depending on the context. In formal terms, good and bad arguments are often indistinguishable. Worse, there is almost always a continuum between strong and weak arguments. You cannot capture that gradient in a rigid formal scheme. As my friends and succinctly put it in The Enigma of Reason: “most if not all fallacies on the list are fallacious except when they are not.”

We show this by using what we call the Fallacy Fork. This destructive dilemma forces you to choose between two unpalatable options. First, I’ll lay out the two prongs of the dilemma. Then I’ll turn to some examples.

(A) You define your fallacy using a neat deductive argument scheme. In a valid deductive argument, the conclusion must follow inexorably from the premises. If the premises are true yet the conclusion could still be false, the argument is invalid—case closed. The trouble is that, in real life, you almost never encounter such clean, airtight blunders. You can invent textbook examples, sure, but flesh-and-blood cases are surprisingly rare.

(B) So you loosen things up and abandon the strict realm of deductive logic. You add some context and nuance. Now you can capture plenty of real-life arguments. Great. Except there’s a catch: once you relax the standard, your “fallacy” stops being fallacious. It turns into a perfectly ordinary move in everyday reasoning—sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but not obviously irrational.

Let’s see how some of the most famous fallacies fare when confronted with the Fallacy Fork.

Post hoc fallacy

As the saying goes: correlation does not imply causation. If you think otherwise, logic textbooks will tell you that you’re guilty of the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. You can formalize it like this:

If B follows A, then A is the cause of B.

Clearly, this is false. Any event B is preceded by countless other events. If I suddenly get a headache, which of the myriad preceding events should I blame? That I had cornflakes for breakfast? That I wore blue socks? That my neighbor wore blue socks?

It’s easy to mock this fallacy—websites like Spurious Correlations offer graphs showing correlations between margarine consumption and divorce rates, or between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of Nicholas Cage films released per year.

The problem is that not even the most superstitious person really believes that just because A happened before B, A must have caused B. Sure, in strict deductive terms, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy—but real-life examples are almost nonexistent. That’s the first prong of the Fallacy Fork.

So what do real-life post hoc arguments actually look like? More like this: “If B follows shortly after A, and there’s some plausible causal mechanism linking A and B, then A is probably the cause of B.” Many such arguments are entirely plausible—or at least not obviously wrong. Context is everything.

Imagine you eat some mushrooms you picked in the forest. Half an hour later, you feel nauseated, so you put two and two together: “Ugh. That must have been the mushrooms.” Are you committing a fallacy? Yes, says your logic textbook. No, says common sense—at least if your inference is meant to be probabilistic.

Here, the inference is actually reasonable, assuming a few tacit things:

1. Some mushrooms are toxic.

2. It’s easy for a layperson to mistake a poisonous mushroom for a harmless one.

3. Nausea is a common symptom of food poisoning.

4. You don’t normally feel nauseated.

If you want, you can even spell this out in probabilistic terms. Consider the last premise—the base rate. If you usually have a healthy stomach, the mushroom is the most likely culprit. If, on the other hand, you frequently suffer from gastrointestinal problems, the post hoc inference becomes much weaker.

Almost all of our everyday knowledge about cause and effect comes from this kind of intuitive post hoc reasoning. My phone starts acting up after I drop it; someone unfriends me after I post an offensive joke; the fire alarm goes off right after I light a cigarette. As Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, once put it: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” The problem with astrology, homeopathy, and other forms of quack medicine lies in their background causal assumptions, not in the post hoc inferences themselves.

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Ad hominem

Perhaps the most famous fallacy of all is the ad hominem. The principle seems simple: when assessing an argument, you should attack the argument, not the person. Play the man instead of the ball, and you’re guilty of ad hominem reasoning. But is it really that simple?

If your ad hominem argument is meant deductively, then yes—it’s invalid. For example: “This researcher is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, therefore his study is flawed.” If “therefore” is intended in a strict deductive sense, the argument is clearly invalid: the conclusion doesn’t logically follow. But how often do we actually encounter such rigid ad hominems in real life?

Here’s a more reasonable, plausible version: “This researcher studying the efficacy of a new antidepressant was funded by the company that makes the drug. Therefore, we should take his results with a large grain of salt.” This is far more defensible. It’s what philosophers call a defeasible argument—one that’s provisional, open to revision, and inconclusive. Most real-world arguments work this way. Yes, it has an ad hominem structure, but does that mean we should dismiss it outright?

Courts routinely rely on ad hominem reasoning. Judges can discount witnesses or experts because of bias, conflicts of interest, or hidden agendas. Sure, a biased witness might still tell the truth—but courts aren’t schools of formal logic. Politicians attack the character of their opponents too—and often for very good reason.

Even in science, despite its lofty rhetoric, personal reputation and status matter enormously. Peer review is anonymous in theory, but once you publish a paper, you’re staking your name and reputation on it. You also have to declare your affiliation, funding sources, and any conflicts of interest. Everyone understands why. A study claiming a link between vaccination and autism by someone who’s funded by anti-vaccination groups isn’t automatically invalid—but you’d be well-advised to take it with a truckload of salt (and in Andrew Wakefield’s case, the study indeed turned out to be fraudulent).

The truth is, we can’t do without ad hominem reasoning, for the simple reason that human knowledge is deeply social. Almost everything we know comes from testimony; only an infinitesimal fraction do we verify ourselves. The rest is, literally, hearsay. No wonder we are so sensitive to the reputation and trustworthiness of our sources.

Even Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, unwittingly illustrates the limits of the ad hominem fallacy. Trying to be fair and even-handed, he points out that even skeptics sometimes commit ad hominem fallacy, as in this example: “The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously.” As usual, Sagan made up the example himself. It’s a pedagogical straw man—easy to knock down, but far removed from the messy, nuanced reasoning people actually do.

But unless Sagan’s argument is meant deductively (first prong), it’s not fallacious at all (second prong). If we know that Reverend Smith is a Christian fundamentalist who swears by the literal truth of the Bible, any reasonable person would put little stock in his refutation of Darwinian evolution. In fact, you’d probably be better off not wasting your time on it.

Sure, from a purely logical standpoint, even a die-hard creationist could conceivably raise a solid objection against evolution. If you assume that, because of his evangelical faith, the Reverend’s argument must be wrong, you’re committing a deductive error. But who cares?

I’m not denying that some ad hominem arguments are uncalled for or can derail a discussion. But there’s no bright line, and it would be foolish to categorically dismiss all ad hominem considerations. None of this can be captured in a neat, formal argumentation scheme.

Genetic fallacy

In the genetic fallacy, a relative latecomer to the fallacy party, you dismiss something based on its origins. Many religious apologists argue that explaining the evolutionary roots of belief does nothing to undermine God’s existence. But it does. As Nietzsche understood, if you can explain the origins of religious faith in biological terms, then “with the insight into that origin the belief falls away.” Sure, if we possessed incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence, then the genealogy of belief would be irrelevant. But in the absence of such evidence, showing how religious faith can arise without any supernatural input genuinely weakens its credibility.

Consider a few other examples. Some dementia patients reportedly experience a final burst of clarity before death. The author Charles Murray has recently suggested that such “terminal lucidity” points to God or an afterlife. But if neuroscience can explain these episodes in purely neurological terms, supernatural interpretations become unnecessary.

Or take the Ouija board—the supposedly spooky device for communicating with spirits. If the movement of the glass can be explained by the ideomotor effect (tiny, unconscious muscle movements), doesn’t that undercut the ghost story? Yes, strictly speaking, ghosts could still be involved—but that just goes to show the limits of logic. As Joseph Heller’s Yossarian says in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Deductively, he has a point. But the line is funny precisely because it’s absurd, logic be damned.

Fallacies galore

I could continue to dissect every other “fallacy” on the list, but you’d probably get bored. I’ll quickly run through a few more examples—then you can try it yourself.

• The argument from ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is usually called a fallacy because of the classic dictum: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But in real life, it often is evidence, and people seem intuitively aware of this. For example: “Recovered memories about satanic cults sacrificing babies are probably the product of confabulation and suggestion, because we have never found any material traces of these atrocities.” That’s perfectly reasonable. The probabilistic premise is sound: if such cults had existed, we would have found baby corpses—or at least hundreds of missing infants.

• The argument from authority (ad verecundiam) claims something is true because an expert said so. But as we’ve seen, almost all our knowledge is testimonial—based on authority. Rejecting arguments from authority entirely would lead to radical skepticism. Once again, context matters. Is the expert truly knowledgeable in this field? What’s their track record on similar claims? Do they have incentives to lie? Do others trust them? In the real world, these questions matter far more than any blanket rule about “ad verecundiam.”

• The gambler’s fallacy occurs when you assume that if an event has happened less often than expected, it is somehow “due” next time around. At the roulette table, this belief will reliably lead you astray. But casinos are highly artificial environments designed to produce independent events. Out in the wild, things are different. Events cluster, streak, and correlate, and humans are remarkably good at detecting patterns. In natural settings, what looks like the gambler’s fallacy is often not fallacious at all.

  

• The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a staple of formal logic. From “If A, then B,” you cannot infer “B, therefore A.” The hackneyed textbook example goes like this: “If it rains, the street will be wet. The street is wet. Therefore, it rained.” Well, who knows? Perhaps a firetruck just hosed down your street? The problem is that one person’s “affirming the consequent” is another person’s inference to the best explanation. Anyone stepping outside onto a wet street will almost automatically conclude that it probably rained. That’s not a logical blunder; it’s ordinary causal reasoning. Without this kind of abductive inference, we would have no causal knowledge at all.

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A rare breed

Pure fallacies are a rare breed. You mostly spot them in logic textbooks or books about irrationality—not in real life. If you think you’ve caught one, chances are you missed something and the case isn’t so clear-cut. Maybe you exaggerated the force of an argument, turning an defeasible argument into a deductive one, glossing over probabilistic assumptions, or stripping away context and knocking it down in the abstract. In other words, you may have built a straw man—another supposed “fallacy” that can’t be formally defined.

In his sarcastic little book The Art of Being Right (1896), Arthur Schopenhauer summed up every philosopher and educator’s dream: “It would be a very good thing if every trick could receive some short and obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular trick, he could be at once reproached for it.” That would be splendid indeed. But real life is messier.

Humans love to pigeonhole things into neat little boxes, and the traditional taxonomy of fallacies—especially the ones with pretentious Latin names—is irresistible in that regard. Encounter an argument you don’t like? Just squeeze it into a pre-established category and blow the whistle: fallacy! Making causal inferences from a sequence of events? Post hoc ergo propter hoc! Relying on an expert for a point? Ad verecundiam! Challenging someone’s credibility? Ad hominem!

None of this is to say that ad hominem reasoning or appeals to authority are completely beyond reproach. These aren’t logical errors per se, but overreliance on them can signal weakness. Personally, when I publish a polemical piece and fret over possible flaws that I may have overlooked, I’m oddly relieved when critics attack my character or question my credentials. Not because those points are logically fallacious, but because it usually means my argument didn’t contain any obvious falsehoods after all. If there were glaring flaws, that’s where the fire would be directed. The resort to ad hominem is therefore strangely reassuring.

Nor am I claiming that clear-cut errors of logic and probability never happen in real life. The prosecutor’s fallacy, for instance, really deserves its name. It’s a recurring and serious mistake in the judicial system, reversing the probability of evidence given innocence with the probability of innocence given evidence.

But most of the other famous fallacies? They mostly exist in textbooks. In the classroom, you can hand students neat taxonomies, toy examples, and bright red warning signs: “Don’t fall for this!” It feels satisfying and gives a sense of mastery: you tick off ad hominem, post hoc, straw man, and move on.

Out in the wild, however, things aren’t black-and-white. An ad hominem might be perfectly sensible, a post hoc argument often reasonable, and even a slippery slope occasionally warranted.

In my experience, fallacy theory is not just useless—it can be actively harmful. It encourages intellectual laziness, offering high-minded excuses to dismiss any argument you don’t like. It impoverishes debate by pretending that messy, real-world disagreements can be resolved with the blunt tools of formal logic. You end up like my students: slightly paranoid, dismissive, and ironically less critical than when you started.

Most of all, fallacy theory misleads us about the real sources of human irrationality. Most people intuitively grasp the basic rules of logic and probability—we wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Human reason is a bag of tricks and heuristics, mostly accurate in the environments in which we evolved, but easily led astray in modern life. And it is strategic and self-serving, motivated to reach conclusions that serve our own interests.

Despite its flaws and foibles, though, human reasoning is far more sophisticated and subtle than the theory of “fallacies” suggests.

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This is hardly the first science-fiction story to deploy the trope of the radical tree-hugger who believes Earth would be better off without Homo sapiens. The green rationale for human extermination was memorably summarised by Keanu Reeves’s alien in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.” Or as Agent Smith put it in The Matrix: “You’re a plague, and we are the cure.”

But Cixin Liu uses an interesting plot device to catalyse the protagonist’s disenchantment with humanity: as a young woman, Ye stumbles upon a copy of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a book banned by the Communist Party as a reactionary screed against industrialisation. Reading the forbidden book in secret—and eventually being apprehended by Party cadres—she becomes radicalised by eco-pessimism. Liu is not subtle about the pivotal role played by Silent Spring in her ideological awakening: “Ye’s rational consideration of humanity’s evil side began the day she read Silent Spring”. And at the end of Ye’s life:

“[i]n her last moments, Ye Wenjie would recall the influence Silent Spring had on her life. The book dealt only with a limited subject: the negative environmental effects of excessive pesticide use. But the perspective taken by the author shook Ye to the core. The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

It is this disillusionment with humanity, sparked by reading Silent Spring, that drove Ye to send her fateful message bringing about humanity’s doom.

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A Plague from the West?

It is tempting to dismiss this story as little more than anti-Western propaganda from an avowed Chinese nationalist. For a start, Rachel Carson is not the anti-human prophet she’s often made out to be both by her detractors and some of her followers. In fact, she was not even opposed to pesticides and the chemical industry per se—she just warned against the reckless and profligate spraying of new chemicals, often by the planeload, which ravage fragile ecosystems that we barely understand (and she was mostly right on that count). Still, even though Carson was not a misanthrope, she has become a patron saint of an intellectual current in the West that is profoundly anti-progress and anti-human. And Liu may be right that the most effective way to render the strange motivations of his misanthropic antagonists intelligible—especially to a Chinese audience—is to frame them as a Western import.

Consider, for instance, the second report of that very Western think tank the Club of Rome, which states that “[t]he world has cancer, and the cancer is man,” precisely the metaphor used by the villains of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Depicting humans as parasites, plagues, or pests has become a recurring trope in Western environmentalism. The British NGO Population Matters likens humanity to a swarm of locusts: first we devour everything we see, then we starve and die off. Even the mild-mannered Sir David Attenborough has called humanity a planetary “plague.” During the pandemic, a common refrain among radical environmentalists framed humanity as the “real” virus, with COVID as Mother Nature’s way of healing herself.1 Pope Francis described the pandemic as “nature’s response” to our ecological sins. If that’s not radical enough for your taste, how about the Human Voluntary Extinction Movement, founded by an American environmentalist, which calls on humans to abstain from procreation to bring about the gradual extinction of our species?

Much of this misanthropy may amount to little more than posturing—a form of covert self-aggrandisement concealed behind the grammar of the “self-excluding we.” When flagellants declare that “we” are a cancer on the planet, they quietly exempt themselves and other environmentally enlightened individuals. As Nietzsche understood, someone who despises himself “nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a self-despiser.”

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Cultural Just-So Stories

All of which raises a pertinent question: is environmentalist misanthropy a uniquely Western affliction that we have exported to the rest of the world? Most influential environmentalists belong squarely to the Western intellectual tradition and are often trained at Western universities. Then again, Western civilization has been so globally dominant over the past few centuries that nearly all ideologies with worldwide impact—including liberalism, communism, and Nazism—originated in the West.

It is not difficult to spin a just-so story that frames environmentalism as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. More than most religious systems, Christianity preaches humility and dwells on human rottenness and depravity. We are born sinners and must atone for our corruption. In his green encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote that the “misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognise any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves.” In support of this ethic of ecological humility, he cited Scripture and the Church Fathers.

And yet, in a famous article for Science, the historian Lynn White advanced almost the mirror image of this argument. In White’s historical account, the ruthless domination of nature begins with Christianity (and Judaism), specifically with the divine injunction in Genesis to “subdue” the Earth and “rule over” it. He contrasts this legacy with pagan animism, which tends to regard nature as “sacred” and is more attuned to humanity’s place within it. So, which is it? Does Christianity license a lust for domination, or does it cultivate humility and reverence toward the natural world?

With a bit of creativity, we could concoct a corresponding story that explains why Chinese civilization failed to produce its own tradition of anti-human environmentalism. Perhaps Confucianism, with its emphasis on harmony and balance, tends to search for the proper place of humanity in the cosmic order? Perhaps Chinese philosophy is all about moderation rather than radicalism of any kind? Yet in an intellectual tradition spanning multiple millennia, you can surely find some strands that resonate with Western environmentalism. Taoism, for instance, dissents from Confucian humanism and denies that humans occupy a privileged place in the cosmic order. A philosopher like Zhuangzi in the 4th century BCE cultivated an affinity with nature and often drew attention to animals and plants precisely to deflate human self-importance. By the late Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the tradition of landscape painting expressed a longing for cultivated men to “escape their quotidian world to commune with nature.” Sure, this gentle nature worship and critique of human self-conceit is not nearly as radical as the Human Voluntary Extinction Movement, but it shows that ecocentrism is by no means alien to the Chinese tradition.

A Deeper Explanation

It would be implausible to deny that the Judeo-Christian tradition has left its fingerprints on modern environmentalism, especially in its more misanthropic forms. Some ostensibly secular environmentalists display an unmistakable affinity with the Christian flagellants from the Middle Ages, who whipped their own skin as a form of penance. In their apocalyptic prophecies of ecological doom, one hears echoes of Christian eschatology, in which humanity is arraigned before a higher tribunal. We have sinned against Mother Nature, and we will suffer her wrath.

But explanations like these only take us so far. In cultures saturated with Christian imagery, it is hardly surprising that doomsday narratives echo biblical imagery; that does not necessarily make Christianity their root cause. After all, Christianity became the world’s most successful religion in part because it resonated with pre-existing human intuitions. Chief among these is the belief in a just universe, in which good deeds are rewarded and evil deeds are punished—a notion that long predates Christianity and appears across religious traditions, from karma in Indian thought to Maʿat in ancient Egypt.

I want to suggest a different explanation for the West’s susceptibility to environmentalist misanthropy—one that may be less comforting to advocates of human progress and modernity. First, we should bear in mind that the human brain is equipped with what the late philosopher Daniel Dennett called the design stance: a tendency to interpret the world in terms of purposes and goals. This capacity is indispensable for understanding man-made artifacts and nature’s designs. The living world abounds in the appearance of design, with each species occupying a niche and sporting ingenious adaptations for survival and reproduction. From there, it is just a short step to the belief that nature, as a whole, is governed by a single grand design. And for creatures endowed with moral intuitions, it is tempting to conclude that the natural order is good, and that departures from it are bad. The naturalistic fallacy, in other words, was not invented by Christian theologians scandalised by homosexuality.

It took thousands of years for one member of our species (or two if you count Alfred Russel Wallace) to finally comprehend where all that apparent design originated. Darwin’s universe leaves no room for any overarching purpose in nature, let alone one with moral significance. Instead, we have millions of interlocking purposes and goals, some of which are aligned but most of which are in conflict. Even so, the intuition that nature itself has a purpose is a hard one to resist. Today, millions of educated people who profess an acceptance of Darwinian evolution cling to versions of the Gaia hypothesis—the belief that nature forms a harmonious whole in which every species has a useful role to play. In short, the belief in natural harmony has always been with us.

In almost all human societies until very recently, however, this belief was tempered by the harsh reality of everyday life. Nature inspired awe and terror in our ancestors because they were exposed to its bloodthirsty predators, flesh-eating parasites, capricious weather, and infectious diseases. Nature was therefore seldom confused with a nurturing mother, even metaphorically. It commanded respect because it could take your life in an instant or starve you gradually. Preserving a vision of a morally ordered universe required a belief that either existing humans are awful and deserve to be punished, or that our ancestors screwed up somehow and we inherited punishment for their sins. This goes a long way to explaining why belief in supernatural retribution is nearly universal across cultures.

The Exception of Western Modernity

Which brings us to the distinctive exception of Western modernity. Modern societies are the first in which citizens are not forced into a relentless confrontation with nature. When Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that population growth would inevitably culminate in mass death through starvation and disease, he was correct about every society that preceded him. His predictions proved to be wrong only because Europeans were on the verge of creating an entirely new kind of society—the first to escape the Malthusian trap. Child mortality plummeted to a hundredth of its historical levels. Material abundance reached previously unimaginable heights, and famines receded into memory. For the first time in history, it became possible to live a life largely insulated from nature’s terrors, from plagues and floods to droughts and crop-destroying storms. Material security became so plentiful in Western societies that many citizens became “post-material,” in Ronald Inglehart’s term.

Economists have since observed that the relationship between economic development and environmental degradation often follows an inverted U-shape, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve. As societies climb out of poverty, pollution initially rises as an unavoidable by-product of industrialisation. When survival is at stake, dirty air and degraded landscapes are a secondary concern. But as incomes grow and basic needs are met, societies can afford to care about environmental degradation—and eventually about non-material values such as wilderness and biodiversity.

This combination of abundance and safety, as I recently argued in , is precisely what enables modern people to romanticise nature to an unprecedented degree.

Post-industrial Westerners like to imagine that indigenous peoples possessed a preternatural wisdom to live in harmony with nature, a belief reflected in Hollywood movies like Avatar and Pocahontas. However, this is mostly projection on our part. It is modern people who romanticise nature, precisely because they no longer have to endure its daily hardships. The more thoroughly we are buffered from the dangers of the natural world, the more estranged we become from it. With the comforts of contemporary life always at hand, it is easy to indulge the fantasy of a primordial harmony with nature that we supposedly lost along the way.

It is also worth recalling that the large-scale domination of nature by the industrialised West is itself historically unprecedented. The ambition to subdue and conquer nature did not originate in Europe (or in the book of Genesis), but modern Western societies have been extraordinarily adept at this task, which helps explain the intensity of the backlash. From railways and steamships to skyscrapers and concrete dams, from planes to vast canals linking oceans, the industrial revolution enabled transformations of the natural world on an unprecedented scale. The results were not always pretty, especially for societies still climbing the upward slope of the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

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The Wagon Train

If this hypothesis is correct, it explains why the worship of nature—with eco-misanthropy as its radical outgrowth—has so far been a predominantly Western phenomenon. It may simply be a matter of time before China and the rest of the world catch up. In a recent essay for the Breakthrough Institute, , , and sought to dampen the curious enthusiasm expressed by Western greens about China’s expansion of clean energy. “There is little reason to think,” they write, “that China’s energy development will be much shaped by that most Western and parochial of modernization characteristics, namely environmentalism.”

They are probably right—at least for now. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that environmentalism will permanently remain a uniquely Western concern. As China approaches the post-material stage of development, it may become more receptive to environmentalist creeds. And if wealthy Chinese people forget about the horrors of the natural world they escaped—just as many of us did—they may end up falling for the same myth of a long-lost natural harmony, providing fertile ground for the green seeds of Rachel Carson to germinate.

One of today’s most prominent academic advocates of degrowth is Kohei Saito, a Japanese philosopher at the University of Tokyo, who argues that we must impoverish ourselves to “save the Earth.” Is it merely a coincidence that Japan was the first non-Western nation to industrialise and join the ranks of affluent societies? If you plot the geographical distribution of degrowth papers based on author affiliation, the greatest hotspots are in Western Europe, unsurprisingly, but there is growing activity in non-Western countries as well, including Japan. A 2022 paper in Nature Sustainability calling for a “post-growth” food system has no less than ten authors with Japanese affiliations.

In The End of History, invites us to imagine humanity as “a long wagon train strung out along a road.” Some wagons are stuck in ruts while others have paused or even turned temporarily in the opposite direction. But the vast majority are ambling toward the same destination. Because the wagons are spread far apart, however, we tend to exaggerate cultural variance. As Fukuyama notes, “the apparent differences in the situations of the wagons will not be seen as reflecting permanent and necessary differences between the people riding in the wagons, but simply a product of their different positions along the road.” For those who believe in material progress and modernity, this explanation may be depressing. If Fukuyama is right, it may be only a matter of time before China—and the rest of the world—brings forth its own generation of green prophets of anti-modernity and anti-humanity, without any encouragement from the West at all.

[Thie essay was first published in The Ecomodernist]

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In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd, as I argued at length in an essay for . Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Israeli army intends to exterminate the Gazan population, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of the “crime of crimes” continues to astonish me, as does their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extremely difficult circumstances under which Israel aimed to achieve its legitimate war goals of defeating Hamas and bringing back the hostages. In my latest book (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

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A manufactured consensus

And yet, there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived, a product of intense social pressure, ideological hectoring, and a “spiral of silence.” The IAGS resolution, for example, is not grounded in any original research conducted by the organization and offers little substantive argumentation. It reads more like a ritual incantation or declaration of faith than a scientific document.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the United States. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of signatories in the U.S., but only a handful in Europe—primarily in Germany and around a single London-based center for antisemitism research. In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on the Gaza war has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my views on Israel, a matter I detailed in Quillette together with my friend and fellow cancellee, the biologist .

A spiral of silence

And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarized as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet—I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel, preferably in the strongest possible terms, has become so intense that many dissidents no longer dare to speak out. After a number of such discreet messages of support, I began to grow annoyed. To the outside world, it appeared as if I was the only academic rejecting the official narrative—but in reality, many others agreed with me.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent. As notes in his fascinating new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, this dynamic can take hold even within institutions ostensibly committed to pursuing truth and following the evidence wherever it leads:

When people falsify their public opinions, that in turn can create a “spiral of silence” resulting in pluralistic ignorance: the combination of private knowledge and common misconception in which everyone thinks that everyone else believes something, but no one believes it.

The classic illustration of this dynamic is the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which a crowd sustains the illusion that everyone thinks the emperor is magnificently dressed because each person believes they are the only ones to believe otherwise—until a child, free of social inhibition, blurts out that the emperor is stark naked and everyone bursts into laughter.

In the spirit of the fable, I wanted to see whether there was a way to break the spell. What if people could anonymously explain why they believed the emperor was naked, without exposing themselves to social or professional risk? To test this, I collected anonymous testimonies from academics with dissenting views on Israel and Gaza, by putting out a call on X in Dutch. The testimonies that landed in my inbox were both sobering and chilling.

Shut up or else

A senior lecturer at a Dutch university writes: “I’m afraid to share my thoughts freely with my colleagues and feel restricted in my freedom to speak openly about this.” A philosophy professor describes academic debate on the war in Gaza as effectively “impossible”: “Critical voices are silenced through exclusion, dismissal, and sometimes even violence. In such circumstances, I don’t feel compelled to express my critical thoughts openly.” Another Dutch lecturer admits bluntly: “I certainly keep my mouth shut about my views to my colleagues.”

A colleague at my own faculty calls the accusation of genocide “sickening” and a form of “cynical manipulation,” yet she is terrified of speaking out. She avoids the topic in conversations with colleagues and students, confessing to “self-censorship” to protect herself. Another academic explains why: after signing a petition opposing the anti-Israel boycott, he was “shunned for weeks by colleagues in our department.” Yet another professor received a warning “to be careful what I say around certain colleagues.” In today’s academic climate, speaking out in support of Israel is widely regarded as tantamount to “academic suicide.”

Among the testimonies are also voices with the relevant expertise, rarely heard in mainstream media. A professor of military law stresses that “extreme caution is required” on the question of genocide and warns against “jumping to conclusions.” Some actors, he notes, “automatically assimilate the conduct of hostilities with acts of genocide, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me.” A doctor of law and former advisor to the International Court of Justice, who has pored over previous genocide dossiers for many years, writes in a lengthy email: “I am not convinced that Israel is committing genocide, but I am currently raising capital and will not risk taking this position publicly.”

Dissenting opinions can be found even at the highest levels of academic institutions. A vice-chancellor of a Belgian university observes: “The Gaza mania that is currently prevailing seems to me a collective madness. The call to declare what Israel is doing a genocide is in line with this.” Yet in official communications, universities often strike a different tone, shaping and constraining the debate. A Ghent academic notes that the election of our new rector Petra De Sutter—who is strongly anti-Israel—further worsened the atmosphere: “I saw this tendency strengthen following the rector elections. Either you were outspoken, or else you were better off keeping quiet. The election result and the political convictions of the new rector have reinforced their ideology.”

A Jewish professor who does speak out about Israel notes that not everyone enjoys the protection of tenure: “I know many young scientists with dissenting opinions, but most of them don’t dare express them. They are rightly concerned about their careers. Without tenure, they are in a precarious position. The social and professional isolation is very real.” Since making her public statements, she has stopped receiving invitations for book chapters, workshops, and conferences.

Another lecturer’s testimony illustrates how subtle yet pervasive the professional and social repercussions can be, even for tenured staff: “I stopped reposting and commenting about Israel on X after noticing that my university suddenly stopped sharing any of my achievements. While colleagues were receiving retweets and links to their projects, mine went unnoticed, whereas this had never happened before.” The pressure extended to the social realm, with colleagues unfollowing him or no longer responding to messages. Ultimately, he gave up the fight for family-related reasons: “The decisive factor came when my wife asked me to leave the fight to others. We simply cannot afford to lose our jobs.” Several colleagues describe struggling with guilt for remaining silent, scolding themselves as “cowards” or “sell-outs.”

Not all the academics who testified necessarily agree with my position on every point, but some are even more resolute in their pro-Israel stance than I am. For example, a Dutch scholar states that the IDF “must be considered one of the most humane armies in world history on all counts,” citing its systematic pre-attack warnings and the extreme precision of its strikes—a claim I would hesitate to endorse.

Antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Several colleagues explicitly argue that the academic hostility towards Israel stems from antisemitism. A Dutch professor of philosophy argues that “the excessive attention—obsession, even—with Gaza is inherently antisemitic, because the same scrutiny is rarely applied to other complex conflicts in which Jews are not the perpetrators.” Another professor observes that “academic discourse is increasingly degenerating into gratuitous Jew-hatred.” A Belgian professor at a French university is often reminded of his Jewish mentor, who fled Baghdad after the pogroms: “That the anti-Israel mob, composed mainly of white and extremely privileged youth, portrays him as a ‘white settler’ and seeks to exclude him and his fellow survivors from all international forums fills me with incredible anger and frustration.”

A Canadian academic describes the precarious situation of Jewish faculty on his campus: “I have spoken to three Jewish faculty members. They are in a state of anxiety, depression, and real insecurity. It is clear that the university will not defend them, and a majority of faculty members see them as ‘the problem,’ interpreting core academic values as reprehensible.” Even before October 7, an Israeli academic working at a European university relates how he moved his tutorials off campus, because the threat of physical violence was constantly on his mind, even though his academic field was completely unrelated to Israel or the Middle East: “I always worried about being known as an Israeli and outspoken about my views that someone could just show up and attack me.” After the October 7 massacre and the ensuing Gaza war, of course the situation became far worse. An anti-Zionist website hosted on a server in the Netherlands even placed bounties for assassination as high as $100,000 on the heads of Israeli academics.

Ideological madrassas

An important caveat: these testimonies are self-selected and therefore not representative of academia as a whole. I harbour no illusions—these dissenting voices remain a minority. What they do reveal, however, is that serious debate about Israel and Gaza has been rendered impossible within university walls. When researchers with dissident views bite their tongues for fear of repercussions, the majority position is never subjected to critical scrutiny. And without intellectual challenge, even the truth becomes stale, as John Stuart Mill knew: “if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”

The aforementioned IAGS resolution, for instance, treats the war as if it has only one belligerent party (Israel), rendering Hamas’s agency completely invisible. In fact, the word “Hamas” appears only once in the document, in a sentence declaring (without any substantiation) that Israel’s operations have “not only been directed against the Hamas group [...] but have also targeted the entire Gazan population.” As a result, all the destruction and suffering in Gaza is attributed to Israel by default. The resolution accepts the casualty numbers from the Gazan Ministry of Health without any reservation, and fails to discriminate between combatant and civilian deaths, or between deaths caused by Israel and caused by Hamas. It contains hardly any serious argumentation, and it lists the same litany of distorted and fabricated quotes from Israeli leaders that NGOs have repeated ad nauseam, without citing sources. How was the “consensus” achieved? Only 28 per cent of the group’s members voted on the resolution, and membership is open to anyone willing to pay the fee. Unsurprisingly, the membership includes numerous artists and activists, as well as 80 “researchers” from Iraq out of a total of 600 (data from ).

The academic consensus on Israel is, therefore, partly a mirage. Pluralistic ignorance, suppression of dissent and fear of professional and social reprisal have produced an artificial unanimity that is untethered from evidence and reasoned debate. In particular, the “Gaza genocide” accusation has become the Left’s equivalent of the stolen election hoax on the American Right—a baseless claim that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. It functions much like mantras such as “men can get pregnant” or “scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing are equally valid”: deep down everyone understands that it’s nonsense, but that is precisely what allows it to serve as an ideological litmus test. Breaking the spiral of silence will require more people to step forward and call out such nonsense, thereby lowering the social cost of dissent.

If academics fail to do so, they may come to regret it. In the anthology The War on Science edited by physicist , thirty-eight academics (myself included) argue that such ideological incursions in science seriously undermine public trust in universities and tend to provoke an inevitable backlash. As Donald Trump’s full-frontal attack on American academia shows, at some point the chickens will come home to roost. As one professor from Leuven University told me: “Why would external policymakers, who increasingly view universities as activist strongholds, continue allocating resources for serious scientific research?”

Even in countries where such a populist backlash has yet to materialize, the damage to science and to society at large is still substantial. When a university stifles free debate, it is “betraying the privileges” society has bestowed upon it, as notes, and “is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.” When academic institutions function as ideological madrassas enforcing left-wing orthodoxies on contentious issues, it is unsurprising that public trust plummets. The spiral of silence surrounding the war in Gaza is the most dramatic, though by no means the only, illustration of this phenomenon.

[A condensed version of this piece appeared in The Jewish Chronicle]

Did she actually want that many children? Not at all—but at the time, you had little choice. In Flanders, the Catholic Church was all-powerful, and they abided by the principle that “every sperm is sacred.” If a married couple of fertile age went a year or two without a child, the parish priest might come knocking, inquiring whether something was amiss and reminding them of their religious duty to “be fruitful and multiply.” It made no difference whether you wanted children, or already had six of them: life was a precious gift from God, and all forms of contraception were strictly forbidden. The only reliable way to escape parenthood was to enter a convent and devote one’s life to the same Church—which two of her sisters did.

As far as I can tell, my great-grandmother may have wanted some children, but certainly not ten. She was a devoted mother, but also stern, and she brooked no dissent (how would you, with ten little creatures horsing through the house?). According to family lore, when she was asked at a ripe old age whether she would “do it all again,” she replied: “If he ever tried, I’d kick him out of my bed!”

Chastising the bishop

I recently discovered a letter my great-grandmother wrote to a Flemish newspaper in 1973, when she was nearing seventy. It is a testament to how dramatically social mores had shifted in the intervening decades—above all to the dizzyingly rapid secularization sweeping postwar Flanders. It also reveals just how much of a badass my great-grandmother was.

Here’s what happened. In 1973, the Belgian government decriminalized the distribution of information (!) about contraception, as well as the sale of the pill and other contraceptives. Earlier attempts to legalize contraception had met with fierce Catholic opposition, but that year the Church in Belgium finally relented. Not because it had come to terms with contraception as such, but because it believed the new law might at least prevent some abortions, which it regarded as an even greater evil. The government, however, wanted to go further: it planned to launch a public information campaign on the various forms of contraception, aimed at educating the population.

But the Bishop of Ghent, Monseigneur Van Peteghem, was incensed. In an open letter, he denounced the government’s contraception information campaign as a “pernicious heresy” that would lead to “unbridled eroticism,” citing in support the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church’s long-standing opposition to artificial contraception. Yet the bishop went on to insist that the Church fully supported “responsible parenthood,” and always had. Those who “procreate indiscriminately,” he lectured, were “not acting humanely but immorally.”

Imagine how this message must have landed with my great-grandmother. After laboring to raise ten children—coaxed and coerced by a sperm-obsessed Church—she was now being told by a bishop that people like her had been breeding like rabbits. So she fired back with a blistering letter to the newspaper De Standaard (translated from Dutch):

I was so annoyed by the letter from Bishop Van Peteghem, and I think many other parents of large families will fully agree with me. So we acted not humanely but “immorally”. That’s what I call a blatant insult and a slap in the face. We older people know perfectly well how things used to be. That’s what the Bishop now calls “indiscriminate procreation.” In the past, parents neither had the right nor the duty to ensure sufficient distance between births or to prevent a pregnancy, not even if the woman’s life was in danger. Back then, they were inhumanly strict and merciless, constantly talking about duties. Why do the clergy speak differently now than they did twenty years ago? Now they refuse to admit they taught us things very differently in the past. Is it any wonder then that many people are no longer fooled? We parents of large families are now openly being rebuked by the Church. Thank you, Monsignor, now at least we know what you really think of us. There you go, I just had to get that off my chest.

Mic drop! The changing times are evident from the fact that the letter was published at all. Just a few decades earlier, no humble housewife—not even a badass like my great-grandmother—would have dared to address a bishop in such a tone, and no Catholic newspaper would have printed it.

A new Malthusian wind

Leaving aside the bishop’s sanctimony, what explains his sudden emphasis on “responsible parenthood”? The early 1970s were marked by growing anxieties about overpopulation. Only a few years earlier, the biologist Paul Ehrlich had published his runaway bestseller The Population Bomb, warning of impending mass starvation and resource depletion. Ehrlich also waged a merciless campaign against the Catholic Church’s taboo on contraception, memorably lampooning its favored rhythm method as “Vatican roulette” (whatever one thinks of him, the man could be funny).

These overpopulation fears had also reached Flanders, alongside a rising environmental consciousness. The Club of Rome’s 1973 report Limits to Growth hit the world like a bombshell and was swiftly translated into dozens of languages, putting the Catholic Church on the defensive. My late friend and mentor Étienne Vermeersch—one of the most influential Belgian philosophers of the late twentieth century—became a prominent advocate of Malthusian concerns about population growth. And, like Ehrlich, the famously outspoken atheist railed against the Church’s irrational strictures on contraception.

We now know that such predictions of catastrophe were premature. Like Thomas Malthus before them, the new Malthusians underestimated human creativity and problem-solving, including dramatic gains in agricultural productivity that averted mass starvation. Ironically, we are now confronted with something that would have been unthinkable to them half a century ago: a shortage of babies. Not overpopulation but underpopulation is shaping up to be one of the defining challenges of this century.

Fertility rates are nosediving across the globe and have reached catastrophic levels in countries such as South Korea, Italy, and Taiwan, with no bottom yet in sight. At current rates, every hundred South Koreans will collectively produce just six great-grandchildren. That is not decline but collapse. This baby bust will not only produce an inverted population pyramid—too few working-age adults supporting too many elderly—but also threaten economic productivity, innovation, and ultimately human progress itself. In my Quillette essay on the looming threat of underpopulation, I ended with a begrudging concession: “As a die-hard atheist, I never thought I would find myself agreeing with the Old Testament injunction to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…’.”

A cautionary tale

Still, the life of my great-grandmother is a cautionary tale. The very last thing we should do is sacrifice hard-won women’s rights on the altar of technological or economic progress by pressuring women to have as many children as possible. None of my great-grandmother’s ten children, after having escaped the Church’s crushing authority, had more than three offspring of their own—a pattern that seems far closer to people’s intrinsic preferences.

I’m often reminded of a Substack piece my friend wrote two years ago, bluntly titled “I’m Not Going to Have Kids Just to Save the Economy.” Elle is a Roots of Progress fellow, like me, and few people believe more strongly in the boundless potential of human progress.

The Elysian

I'm not going to have kids just to save the economy

Birth rates are declining in the developed world and there is every reason to believe that will continue as countries continue to develop. By 2086, we expect the global population to peak at 10.43 billion, then start falling…

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2 years ago · 38 likes · 29 comments · Elle Griffin

But that doesn’t mean she wants to sacrifice half her adult life to parenthood. Within the progress community, there is much discussion of financial incentives to boost birth rates—free childcare, free education, tax breaks, or even direct cash payments per child. But as Elle writes, she is not going to be coaxed into having children by a handful of carrots, and she’s far from alone:

Hypothetical sultan-like riches notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be enticed to have children because I do not want children.⁠ [...] ⁠⁠My husband and I didn’t make our decision to not have children because I didn’t want to be pregnant, or because the childcare was too expensive, or because the education wasn’t good enough. We quite simply didn’t want to spend 20 years of our lives (and more) as parents.

Of course, we should still provide generous financial resources to make parenthood more viable for those who want it. There is solid evidence that people’s actual number of children tends to fall short of their preferred number—to enable those people to meet their preferences would already be a major achievement. at writes that “simply removing prosaic real-world barriers to having children can help people have more of them.”

But as Elle insists, we should do so “because we think the most valuable thing we can do is invest in the next generation, not because we need more people to grow the economy.” I do think she underestimates how much compounding economic growth affects the well-being and happiness of future generations, but I completely agree with her that we cannot coerce or cajole women into having children simply because babies confer large positive externalities on society.

One thing I’ve realized along the way is that much of the hand-wringing over declining fertility rates—and the pro-natalist policy proposals it inspires—comes from men, who, shall we say, have a little less skin in the fertility game. I plead guilty on that count myself. This point was driven home by an essay from (not coincidentally) another female progress writer, . After listing a series of progress thinkers fretting over the baby bust, she writes:

These are all smart guys with good intentions. But they are also…all guys. They tend to downplay some crucial facts about the world in which women make child-bearing decisions. Men know these facts intellectually—they’ve heard the term “biological clock”—but too often don’t put two and two together.

She goes on to outline some hard facts about women’s narrow fertility window and their inevitable career sacrifices. Raising a family often comes at a high cost to your career—especially in “greedy jobs” that demand long hours, on-call flexibility, and frequent travel.

Virginia's Newsletter

Three Basic Facts that Affect Fertility

Worries over falling birth rates have replaced fears …

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2 years ago · 60 likes · 42 comments · Virginia Postrel

Of course, neither Postrel nor Griffin is suggesting that men in the progress community harbor Handmaid’s Tale-style fantasies about turning women into breeding machines, or about exerting control over their bodies as the Catholic Church did in my great-grandmother’s youth. But alarmist talk of an impending population collapse can create subtle social pressure on young women to “do their part.” (Heck, I already feel like a hypocrite writing about population decline without having any kids of my own, and not really planning to.)

I agree with economists and progress-oriented writers that falling fertility rates are a serious concern: all else equal, they risk unsustainable dependency ratios, economic decline, and technological stagnation—outcomes that would harm future generations. But I do not see these challenges as insurmountable, nor do I think higher fertility is the only solution. If the AI revolution lives up to its promise by delivering large productivity gains per worker, it could offset the shrinking number of human workers. In short, I’m not as pessimistic as from the , who argues that “an exponentially growing base of researchers” (and thus babies) is the only way to ensure the continuation of progress. Perhaps, ironically, Jason may be underestimating future technological innovation.

As far as I’m concerned, a planet with an exponentially rising population is not inherently better, from a moral point of view, than one with a stable population. I’d rather have a global population of one billion people living free and fulfilling lives, with or without children, than ten billion people who feel compelled to have as many kids as possible, whether they want to or not. As Elle writes, “it is incredible progress that we finally have the choice not to have kids if we don’t want to”. For cultures that endured centuries of pro-natalist religions and traditions, without access to safe and reliable contraception, the word “finally” is exactly right. It would be intolerable if my great-grandmother’s generation had shaken off the shackles of Catholic dogma, only to find some other character knocking at the door: “Have you contributed your share to future economic growth yet?”

Or buy me a coffee!

This includes academics who should have known better—people familiar with the legal definition of genocide, who understand why the Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin coined a term for this “crime of crimes” in the first place. Some are even scholars of the Holocaust and other genocides in human history.

In my view, once the dust has settled, the “Gaza genocide” will be recognized as the most egregious case in recent years of what calls “highbrow misinformation”—worse even than all the nonsense we were subjected to during the COVID era. And it was dangerous misinformation, akin to a modern-day blood libel, stoking antisemitism and anti-Zionism across the globe, and endangering Jewish and Israeli lives everywhere.

This is also why I stopped donating to NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, despite the invaluable and admirable work they still do. The level of ideological capture has simply become too extreme. All of these organizations irresponsibly parroted the “genocide” libel, relying on the same bogus arguments, the same willful ignorance about urban warfare and Hamas’s cynical tactics, and the same regurgitated lists of distorted or fabricated “quotes” from Israeli leaders. Doctors Without Borders even lied about Hamas’s systematic presence and extensive tunnel network beneath the al-Shifa hospital, where the NGO has operated for decades, effectively giving cover to the terrorist group. I now donate exclusively to effective charities that have a proven track record of solving real-life misery without engaging in ideological grandstanding.

The same applies to Wikipedia, another noble project I once donated to. Given the website’s leftward drift over the past years, it’s no surprise they have now “taken the oath” and officially endorsed the Gaza genocide, defined as the “ongoing, intentional and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people” by Israel (in reality, the population has ballooned for decades). Even Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales has blasted the article as “one of the worst Wikipedia entries I've seen in a very long time” and a “particularly egregious example” of ideological bias.

None of this means that Israel should not be criticized, including for plausible war crimes committed by the IDF in Gaza. I do so myself in my Quillette piece. But the charge of genocide (i.e., the deliberate extermination of a whole people) remains as absurd and obscene as when it was first leveled—mere days after the October 7 massacre, which in itself reveals how deeply unserious this accusation was.

I have already lost too many friends over this horrible conflict, so I promise I won’t hold it against anyone personally. I think my friends are woefully wrong; they think the same of me, and are probably also very disappointed. So be it. But I can’t hide my own disappointment and frustration.

Anyway, I’ve now removed the paywall to my essay on the genocide calumny:

See also my interview in the French magazine Atlantico, in which I explain why, for large swaths of the Left, endorsing the “genocide” in Gaza has become a rallying point and a loyalty test, akin to the myth of the stolen 2020 election for the Trumpian Right. You can read the full text (in French) here for free.

Some announcements

Some of you may have had a déjà vu while reading the above, as I posted an earlier version as a Substack note two weeks ago (notes don’t land in your inboxes). Since it clearly resonated with people—garnering over 200 hearts—I decided to share it here as well. As a reminder: if you want new posts in your inbox, be sure to click Subscribe, not just Follow.

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In the meantime, I’ve just finished another essay on eco-misanthropy for , with the working title “How the West Learned to Hate Humanity: From Modernity to Misanthropy.” It is inspired by Cixin Liu’s sci-fi trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which is absolutely mind-blowing and highly recommended. My essay will appear at Quillette first and be reposted here about a week later.

I’m also working on a new piece about the spiral of silence in academia on Israel and Gaza, drawing on dozens of pages of anonymous testimonies I collected from academic colleagues who privately agree with me—or at least hold heterodox views on the topic—but are afraid to speak out for fear of professional and social consequences. That, in a nutshell, is the current state of academic “freedom.”

As the new year approaches, my temporary contract with Ghent University draws to a close, meaning that in 2026 I’ll be fully independent and able to focus more on non-academic writing and speaking. I also have another exciting project in the pipeline: I’m proud to serve on the Advisory Board of the brand new 451 Institute, alongside luminaries such as psychologist and sociologist .

The aim of The 451 Institute is to nurture disagreement and protect critical institutions against ideological capture—both from top-down government control and from bottom-up activist pressure. And yes, that includes selective and one-sided boycotts on ideological grounds (looking at you, Ghent University).

You can think of it as a European counterpart to the , except that our scope extends beyond academia. We believe that other forms of critical infrastructure in our societies—hospitals, airports, major banks—must also become resilient to ideological capture. The new institute was founded by my friend Yohan Benizri. More to come!

In the meantime, I wish you all a splendid new year. If you want to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber or fueling me with some caffeine (see below), to get the creative juices flowing. And if that’s not in the budget, simply liking or sharing a post works wonders too. ☕️

Buy me a coffee

Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history.
~ , The Atlantic

In my previous essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

But there is a more literal sense in which the hand of modernity feeds its critics. When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his diatribe against the pursuit of knowledge, science had yet to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary people. In the 17th century, visionaries like Francis Bacon were predicting that the accumulation of knowledge would eventually improve the conditions of human life, but at the time, most people still lived in abject poverty, children died in droves, farmers relied on muscle power and draught animals, and even the wealthiest king could succumb to a simple infection that is now treatable with cheap, insurance-covered antibiotics.

By the mid-to-late 19th century, however, the hand of industrial modernity began feeding everyone at an ever-declining cost. This food surplus, in turn, created new opportunities for intellectuals to make a career out of biting it (the supply side again). One of the earliest and most famous examples was Karl Marx. While he railed against the evils of capitalism in hefty tomes, Marx survived on handouts from his wealthy comrade Friedrich Engels, who in turn got his money from his father’s cotton factories in Manchester. In other words, Marx was living off the profits of the very capitalist system he was denouncing. As historian put it in his 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest: “No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.”

At least Marx also appreciated the accomplishments of bourgeois capitalism and modernity at large—he just believed it was a transitional stage of human societies. As people grew increasingly prosperous and accustomed to prosperity, however, they began to forget the misery from which their ancestors had escaped. This gave rise to a quintessentially modern phenomenon: indulging in romantic fantasies about the blessings of a primitive and pre-modern life, without turning down the nourishments and comforts bestowed by modernity.

Perhaps the earliest practitioner of this hypocrisy was the American philosopher and nature enthusiast Henry David Thoreau. In his celebrated book Walden, Thoreau describes the life he spent as a recluse in a humble cabin in the wilderness, creating the impression that he was completely self-sufficient and cut off from civilisation. In reality, he could walk from his cabin by Walden Pond to his home in Concord in twenty minutes, a journey he made on a regular basis to dine with friends and enjoy the cookies his mother baked with industrially produced sugar and flour.

Walden Pond was anything but “wilderness.” During the summer, the place bustled with picnickers and day-trippers; in winter, it filled with skaters and icemen. Thoreau received frequent visits from his sister and friends, and he hosted gatherings of up to thirty people, who brought him unspecified amounts of provisions. This wealthy, Harvard-educated intellectual also relied on industrial printing presses and modern transport networks to spread his Puritan sermons against civilisation to the world at large.

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You Can’t Understand Poverty

In Pulp’s Britpop classic “Common People,” a privileged art student from a wealthy Greek family (rumoured to be the current wife of radical left-wing economist ) asks the working-class singer what it’s really like to live the life of “common people like you.” The song is a biting critique of what we would now call poverty tourism. “Pretend you’ve got no money,” Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker begins dryly, before relating what it means to live in a shabby home and worry about making it through the end of the month. But the young lady seems to find it all very amusing, and in the end Cocker despairs that she will never get it:

But still you’ll never get it right,
’Cause when you’re laid in bed at night,
Watching roaches climb the wall,
If you called your dad he could stop it all.

Can anyone ever truly understand poverty without having suffered it? Even the narrator of that song would struggle to grasp what absolute poverty as defined by the World Bank means—the miserable predicament of nearly all of humanity before 1800. We should all be grateful that we will never understand poverty, but the problem is that this ignorance provides fertile ground for romantic illusions. Millions of well-fed Westerners gush about the simple life of medieval peasants (no smartphones! organic vegetables from your own garden!) or the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers (no material possessions! living in harmony with nature!). Those who extol the virtues of pre-industrial farming without fertilisers or mechanised tractors are those who never had to survive on it.

It takes a privileged 21st-century degrowth scholar like to imagine that medieval subsistence farmers were “quite happy,” enjoying “abundant commons” and never having to work for wages. And it takes a well-fed climate activist like Greta Thunberg in a well-heated house filled with fossil products—the cement in the walls, the steel in the girders, the aluminium in their laptops, the hundreds of plastics in their appliances and clothes, the food in their refrigerators, the glue with which they affix themselves to paintings—to lecture the world about its “addiction” to fossil fuels. Industrial modernity produces the calories that allow us to indulge in such anti-modern fantasies, as economist observed:

With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past—pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements.

In a capitalist society, the greater the surplus production, the more career opportunities exist for anti-capitalist intellectuals to revel in such fantasies, secure in the knowledge that thousands of market-tested machines will meet their material desires, and that they can freely sell their anti-capitalist tracts in bookstores, competing openly with other anti-capitalist authors.

The Invisibility of Progress

Some of modernity’s blessings are so obvious that even the biggest curmudgeons must grudgingly acknowledge them. In his 2003 book Straw Dogs, even the arch-pessimist John Gray admitted that flush toilets and dental anaesthetics are an “unmixed blessing” of modern life. When anti-modern academics extol earlier ages from the comfort of their well-heated lecture halls, I suspect they are partly disingenuous. Few people would be prepared to step inside a time machine and trade their modern life for any previous era.

Still, progress tends to erase its own tracks, as I noted in my piece on “The Seven Laws of Pessimism.” Vaccines work so well that we forget how terrible the diseases they nearly eradicated once were. Food has become so abundant and cheap that we can no longer grasp what it means to starve to death. Peace and prosperity have become so normal that we forget that poverty and war were the norm for most of human history.

We are all a bit like the little fish in David Foster Wallace’s story who wonder: “Water? What’s that? Never heard of it.” The infinitely complex machine of industrial modernity is always humming in the background, quietly and unnoticed—until something goes wrong and you have to call the plumber. As engineering professor Deb Chachra notes in How Infrastructure Works, a good definition of “infrastructure” is simply “all of the stuff that you don’t think about.”

With a flick of a finger on the wall, we control giant turbines dozens of kilometres away, sending an instantaneous stream of electrons into our living rooms. With another simple gesture, we summon clean and chemically purified water, regularly inspected by benevolent authorities. With a few mouse clicks, we command a globe-spanning colossus, delivering our favourite trinkets via massive container ships. And with a simple push of a button, our bodily excreta vanish out of sight, channelled through intricate sewage systems and treatment plants, so we never have to think about them again.

A small but striking example of the invisibility of progress comes from Hans Rosling, one of the patron saints of the progress movement. During a visit to a private hospital in Kerala, India, his group was waiting by the elevator for a student who had arrived late. Just as they decided to press the elevator button and go ahead, she rushed down the hall and stretched out her leg to keep the elevator doors from closing. But the doors didn’t reopen, they simply crushed her leg and then the elevator began to move up. Luckily, the Indian host hit the emergency button, and they managed to pry the doors back open. He turned to Rosling and said: “I have never seen that before. How can you admit such stupid people for medical training?” But she wasn’t really stupid, she just naively assumed that any elevator includes a sensor that reopens the doors if something is in the way. I might have made the same foolish mistake under the same circumstances.

Even if we try to remind ourselves of all the invisible blessings of modernity, we will still under-appreciate them. You can look at Our World in Data graphs about the decline of poverty and disease until you’re blue in the face, but it remains abstract knowledge and never fully registers. At some level, even the most ardent believer in progress tends to undervalue it, because the horrors we have escaped are almost beyond comprehension. I’m a big fan of the blog series “The Grim Old Days” published by , which walks us through a historical House of Horrors while you recline on a comfy sofa, sipping a latte macchiato made with ingredients from across the globe.

I’ve been reading about human progress for years, and yet I am still discovering new ways in which the past was more horrific than I ever imagined. One post by about the “Worst Ways to Cure Everything” discusses the early-modern craze for ground-up corpses, steaming with vaporised mercury, and the reuse of “everlasting pills” recovered from latrines and handed down as family heirlooms. Or see if you can stomach the story about medieval famines in which the starving rip open the stomachs of the dead or dying to “draw at the entrails to fill their own bellies.”

What to Do About It?

So what can we do to combat our ignorance and under-appreciation of progress? The war in Ukraine has reminded Europeans of the privilege of living without conflict, and of the tremendous success of the European project in eliminating the possibility of war between European nation-states. Still, we can’t start a war once in a while just to impress upon people the value of peace.

Some TV shows attempt to recreate the experience of living with the primitive technology of earlier ages. One early example—and a precursor to reality TV—was the 1978 BBC series Living in the Past, which recreated an Iron Age settlement where volunteers “sustained themselves for a year, equipped only with the tools, crops, and livestock available at that time.”

Other examples include the 2005 series Tales from the Green Valley, in which historians and archaeologists lived and worked on a 17th-century Welsh farm using only period tools and methods, and the self-explanatory Channel 4/PBS series The 1900 House. In his new book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, proposes that an education in “industrial literacy” should include hands-on activities from the pre-industrial past, giving children first-hand experience of life before modern technology. To drive the point home, Crawford also suggests a touch of self-mortification: “They could try going a day eating only food they had grown themselves, wearing only clothes they had sewn, or using light only from candles they had dipped.”

And yet, though valuable, such sobering lessons barely scratch the surface of what life was really like in the past. As has noted, if TV producers truly wanted to recreate historical living conditions, participants would be permanently malnourished, infested with lice or tapeworms, have rotten teeth, freeze to death in winter, slowly starve during bad harvests, live amid unbearable stench, and watch half their children die. Nothing even remotely close to these horrors would be suitable for television—not even in the 1970s. It’s just poverty tourism without skin in the game. As a result, the average viewer probably comes away thinking that life back then “wasn’t so bad,” with its simplicity and sense of community.

What else can we do to boost our imagination? , in a gem of an essay for Less Wrong titled “Mundane Magic,” suggests a method for transforming the ordinary into something wondrous as a way of cultivating gratitude: make “a list of abilities you have that would be amazingly cool if they were magic, or if only a few chosen individuals had them.” Yudkowsky focuses on our biological endowments, with examples like this:

Vibratory Telepathy. By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts. As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates.

But the point can easily be extended to technological invention:

Telekinetic fire. By flicking a switch on the wall, you can instantly summon a clean, odorless fire that lights up an entire room.

Magic fountain. A simple knob produces an inexhaustible stream of pure water at any temperature you desire.

It takes some mental effort to feel genuine amazement at the mundane, and even then, the sense of wonder will always be transient. In ’s famous routine about flying, he rants about the spoiled brats we have all become, complaining about malfunctioning Wi-Fi or flight delays:

Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?! [...] Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!”

He’s right, of course, but no one can sustain that level of childlike excitement all the time. Inevitably, there comes a point where you simply take flying for granted and start complaining about bad Wi-Fi or seats that don’t recline far enough. Or if you’re a progress aficionado and you read J. Storrs Hall’s Where’s My Flying Car?, you might grumble that cruising speeds haven’t increased in fifty years, that we never got the supersonic flights we were promised, and that we still waste time traveling to crowded airports—squeezed like sardines with sweaty and overweight people—instead of taking off from a VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) right on the roof of our own home.

Cultivating Gratitude

I was raised Catholic in Flanders, and although I’ve been an atheist for three decades and I don’t hold an especially favourable view of religion, I’ve retained one moral value from my upbringing: gratitude for life’s blessings. Before every meal—especially when my devout grandmother was around—we would hold hands and thank the Lord for the food on the table. I still cherish that spirit of gratitude. Today, many of us seem to have lost it, mindlessly wolfing down fresh and delicious produce of which our ancestors could only dream. My Catholic grandmother also had a sharper sense of gratitude because she had endured rationing during the Second World War.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a beautiful essay called “Thank Goodness” after recovering from a double bypass operation, in which he expressed his deep appreciation for modern medicine, for kind doctors and nurses, for medical insurance and healthcare programs. (Had all that goodness not existed, I would never have met and been mentored by Dennett, as I describe in my obituary of the great philosopher).

If you’re an unbeliever and feel no compulsion to thank a supernatural being for your food, why not thank human ingenuity as a kind of secular prayer—the inventors of assembly lines, artificial fertilisers, diesel engines, and container ships? Thank the invisible hand of the market rather than an invisible creator. As Michael Magoon writes:

Coming to a deeper understanding of how our ancestors created progress and kept it going can give us a sense of gratitude. Our ancestors worked really hard, and we are all beneficiaries of their efforts.

Take a look at a stack of ordinary pineapples in the supermarket through the eyes of someone from earlier centuries. Not so long ago, as writes, pineapples were an exotic sensation in Europe, and they were so prohibitively expensive that they were displayed as luxury items rather than eaten, or rented by the hour. For a while, there was even a pineapple craze among architects, as the shape of the fruit was used to “decorate everything from sports trophies to cathedrals.” Now we’re so blasé about pineapples that we buy them pre-chopped in fruit salads and barely notice their presence.

The Works in Progress Newsletter

From the vault: King of fruits

This piece is from Issue 18 of Works in Progress, released last week. You can read this article on our website and the rest of the issue here…

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a year ago · 55 likes · Étienne Fortier-Dubois

As late as 1989, Boris Yeltsin, visiting the US as part of a Soviet delegation, toured a Randalls supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was profoundly shaken. The sheer abundance, variety, and affordability of all that food shocked him. Nothing like it existed in Moscow, with its scarcity and long food queues.

In his later biography, Yeltsin wrote about that life-altering experience:

When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.

Presumably, the shock wore off eventually even for Yeltsin after the Wall fell. But with a bit of imagination, we can see the supermarket shelves through Boris Yeltsin’s eyes and be eternally grateful for modern technology and capitalism.

[This essay was first published at Quillette.]

As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, enduring relentless self-criticism in a way unfree societies largely escape. An old Soviet joke captures the point better than I can:

An American says to a Russian, “In the U.S., we have freedom of speech. I could even walk up to the White House and yell, ‘Ronald Reagan, go to hell!’” The Russian answers, “Oh, but we have that too — I could walk up to the Kremlin and yell, ‘Ronald Reagan, go to hell!’”

But there is another and more literal sense in which the hand of modernity “feeds” its critics—and this one is more recent. When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau ungratefully denounced the pursuit of knowledge, the sciences had yet to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary people. Most people lived in grinding poverty, children died in droves, farmers relied on muscle and draft animals, and even the mightiest king could be felled by a routine infection—one you can now treat with cheap, insurance‑covered antibiotics.

By the mid 19th century, however, the “hand” of industrial modernity began quite literally feeding everyone, and at ever-declining cost. That food surplus created novel opportunities for intellectuals to make a career out of biting it (the supply side again), which gave rise to a quintessentially modern pose: waxing lyrical about the virtues of a primitive and pre-modern lifestyle, while never passing up the nourishment and comforts modernity provides.

That’s the theme of my latest essay for , which you can read here.1

In fact, that brings me to an announcement: Quillette has invited me to become a regular columnist, publishing one essay every month, and I’ve accepted the offer! I’ve written for them on and off for years, and I’m genuinely honored to join the roster, following in the footsteps of excellent writers like , , and .

Why we need Quillette

The magazine was founded a decade ago by Australian journalist . I don’t remember exactly how I first stumbled across their corner of the internet, but given Quillette’s stalwart defense of free thought and its early focus on ideological capture in academia, it’s no surprise it appeared on my radar quickly. My first piece for them was an interview with Canadian-Pakistani ex-Muslim in 2017, under a headline that captured one of my long-standing hobbyhorses: “Liberals Have Compromised on Their Own Values.” Since then, I’ve written on progress and pessimism, nuclear energy, mind viruses, Israel and the Middle East, the baby bust, and threats to academic freedom.

What I’ve come to admire about Quillette’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann is her steady and consistent defense of liberalism, and her resistance to audience capture (even if that would generate more revenue). Launched amid the Great Awokening, Quillette was prescient and clear-eyed about the spread of a stifling new ideology across campuses and other progressive spaces. In fact, around that time, it was one of the few places you could find level-headed, empirically grounded critiques of transgender ideology, Critical Race Theory and other forms of wokeness.

But a lot has shifted since. Trump has now been elected twice. Elon Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it X, and turned it from an illiberal-left playground into a haven for right‑wing populists, racists, and conspiracy cranks. Many universities have dialed back or quietly shelved DEI initiatives (or at least have pretended to on the outside). Criticism of transgender activism has made its way into establishment outlets like the New York Times. And the radical campus activists no longer seem to wield the outsized influence they once did.

Through all that, Quillette hasn’t wavered in its defense of classical liberal values. Unlike some of its fellow travelers in what was once described as the Intellectual Dark Web, it has proven an equal‑opportunity offender willing to call out illiberal tendencies wherever they show up. As the Right has escalated its attacks on liberal norms, free speech, and universities, Quillette has taken them to task too. In that respect, it has an edge over other heterodox outlets like The Free Press, which, while publishing plenty of excellent pieces, tends to go softer on Trumpism, as well as on religion.

Heterodox conference

As it happens, I met Claire Lehmann last Spring at the Heterodox Conference in Buckingham organized by . Amusingly, some left-wing media in my own country (and later abroad) used a photo from that event featuring Claire and me to engage in some third-rate guilt-by-association based on a few other attendees (most of whom didn’t even give talks). I can’t resist posting the “incriminating” picture myself here.

This kind of ideological witch-hunt against heterodox researchers and anyone who even dares to come near them is symptomatic of the Left’s slide towards illiberalism. In case you’re wondering, the reason why I attended that conference was that it had a fantastic lineup of speakers, many of whom contributed to Quillette or adjacent magazines: , , , , , , and Claire herself.

Here’s another conference photo of Claire with our mutual intellectual hero, Steve Pinker. If that’s the crowd I’m supposedly “tainted” by, I’m flattered. As Mark Twain put it: “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

Some lagniappes

Since Quillette remunerates me for my writings, I’m unable to share the full text of my new piece just yet (don’t bite the hand that feeds you!). However, we’ve agreed that I can republish my pieces on my own Substack after a week. And here’s an appetizer:

Perhaps the earliest practitioner of this hypocrisy was the American philosopher and nature enthusiast Henry David Thoreau. In his celebrated book Walden, Thoreau describes the life he spent as a recluse in a humble cabin in the wilderness, creating the impression that he was completely self-sufficient and cut off from civilisation. In reality, he could walk from his cabin by Walden Pond to his home in Concord in twenty minutes, a journey he made on a regular basis to dine with friends and enjoy the cookies his mother baked with industrially produced sugar and flour.

Walden Pond was anything but “wilderness.” During the summer, the place bustled with picnickers and day-trippers; in winter, it filled with skaters and icemen. Thoreau received frequent visits from his sister and friends, and he hosted gatherings of up to thirty people, who brought him unspecified amounts of provisions. This wealthy, Harvard-educated intellectual also relied on industrial printing presses and modern transport networks to spread his Puritan sermons against civilisation to the world at large.
[…]

We are all a bit like the little fish in David Foster Wallace’s story who wonder: “Water? What’s that? Never heard of it.” The infinitely complex machine of industrial modernity is always humming in the background, quietly and unnoticed—until something goes wrong and you have to call the plumber. As engineering professor Deb Chachra notes in How Infrastructure Works, a good definition of “infrastructure” is simply “all of the stuff that you don’t think about.”

With a flick of a finger on the wall, we control giant turbines dozens of kilometres away, sending an instantaneous stream of electrons into our living rooms. With another simple gesture, we summon clean and chemically purified water, regularly inspected by benevolent authorities. With a few mouse clicks, we command a globe-spanning colossus, delivering our favourite trinkets via massive container ships. And with a simple push of a button, our bodily excreta vanish out of sight, channelled through intricate sewage systems and treatment plants, so we never have to think about them again.

If you’re impatient to see what I have to say, you can subscribe to Quillette. In fact, even if you couldn’t care less about what I have to say, I wholeheartedly recommend getting a subscription to this excellent magazine. You can also follow them on Substack:

Quillette’s Substack

TEN YEARS OF IDEAS

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In the meantime, here’s an immersive video essay based on my previous piece “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers”. Produced by Quillette and narrated by my own editor, the mellifluous Iona Italia, I think it turned out beautifully. I’m very grateful to Quillette for bringing it to life—I can only imagine how many hours it would have taken me to create something like this on my own!

Or see my interview on Quillette’s podcast about Israel and the academic boycotts.

I.

During a public address in October 2023, as Israel was preparing to launch its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted a verse from the Bible that would echo through countless NGO reports, and would feature prominently in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague: “Remember what Amalek has done to you.” To those uninitiated in Biblical mythology, the phrase may not sound particularly ominous, but Israel’s critics knew better. In the Bible, the people of Amalek are the ancient foes of the Israelites, and in the book of Samuel, Yahweh commands King Saul to “smite” the Amalekites, leaving no one alive—not even women and children.

One snag in this Biblical interpretation is that Netanyahu was quoting from the Book of Deuteronomy, which recounts a (mythical) tale from centuries earlier. As the Israelites fled Egypt, they were ambushed from the rear by the Amalekites. Following this treacherous attack, Yahweh tells the Israelites: “Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind.” Perhaps Netanyahu was simply reaching for a cultural reference that would resonate with his audience, still reeling from the horrific events of 7 Oct, and found in Deuteronomy a story that was poignant in its resemblance?

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But Israel’s critics were not satisfied by this explanation. “Amalek” could not possibly refer to Hamas, they reasoned, because Hamas is an organization, not a people like the Amalekites. Therefore, when Netanyahu spoke about “Amalek,” he clearly implied the Palestinians as a whole. And since the Amalekites are being smitten elsewhere in the Bible, the obvious inference is that Netanyahu was calling for the annihilation of the Palestinians. Put two and two together, and “remember Amalek” becomes a dog whistle for genocide.

Before we get bogged down in more Bible exegesis, let’s back up for a moment. Just a few hundred meters from the ICJ, there is a memorial commemorating the Holocaust. It bears a bronze plaque, inscribed in Dutch and Hebrew with the same verse Netanyahu quoted: “Remember what Amalek has done to you. Don’t forget.” This time it cites the correct source: Deuteronomy 25:17–19.

If Israel’s critics had bothered to check, they would have found the same verse at the entrance of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

It is a well-established motif in Jewish culture, symbolizing the duty to record and remember the persecutions that Jews suffered at the hands of mobs and regimes throughout history. By the critics’ logic, the monument in The Hague incites genocide against the German people (not against the Nazis, who were just a party and not an ethnic group). I wonder if the German ambassador to the Netherlands has already expressed his dismay at this open genocidal incitement?

These facts about the history and meaning of the Amalek verse are easily verifiable, and they were pointed out early on in the Gaza War (by ) when accusations about Netanyahu’s use of allegedly genocidal language first surfaced. And yet, newspapers and NGOs have kept repeating this inflammatory canard without ever issuing a correction.

There are countless examples of similar distortions. In an impromptu speech delivered days after 7 October, former defense minister Yoav Gallant told his soldiers that “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” A widely circulated clip of this speech—which appeared on the BBC, and in the New York Times, the Guardian, and South Africa’s ICJ case—dishonestly omitted the middle sentence, making it look as if Gallant had pledged to eliminate “all of Gaza.” Gallant was also accused of calling Palestinians “human animals.” He didn’t—he was referring to Hamas, the “ISIS of Gaza.”

And Netanyahu never said that “Gazans would pay a huge price,” as even once-reputable scholars have claimed; he said Israel would “exact a huge price from the enemy,” meaning Hamas. Nor did he threaten to turn Gaza into a “desert island”—a complete fabrication born of a mistranslation by Al Jazeera, which is funded by the same regime that bankrolls Hamas.

And then there is Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely untrue. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.” Herzog’s phrasing was unfortunate and liable to be misunderstood, although it should be noted that historians such as Daniel Goldhagen have made identical claims of collective responsibility about the German people under Nazi Germany.

In any event, during the same speech Herzog went on to clarify that “there are many, many innocent Palestinians” who will not be targeted by the IDF. He subsequently stated:

For the State of Israel, and of course for me personally, innocent civilians are not considered targets in any way whatsoever. There are also innocent Palestinians in Gaza. I am deeply sorry for the tragedy they are going through. From the first day of the war right until today, I have called and worked for humanitarian aid for them—and only for them. This is part of our values as a country.

Needless to say, these remarks by Israel’s president did not make it into South Africa’s ICJ case, or into any of the NGO reports. Nor did the endless stream of official statements in press conferences, IDF briefings, and social media posts from 8 October onwards reaffirming that Israel’s “military operations in Gaza are solely directed at Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups,” that the IDF “does not intentionally target civilians or seek to harm the civilian population,” and that Israel “does everything possible to limit civilian casualties.”

I can’t recall another instance of such arrant dishonesty making its way into serious reports and court filings—at least not from my own political camp. Every single report regurgitates the same litany of misquoted, misinterpreted, or fabricated statements by Israeli officials, sometimes just a few words strung together, as if they somehow constitute the equivalent of the Wannsee conference. To be sure, some Israeli figures did make abhorrent statements in the overheated wake of Hamas’s massacre, but these were people without military decision-making power, such as extremist rabbis, Knesset members, retired military officers, and media personalities (and Israel is arguably not doing enough to prosecute these people).

And though horrific, such statements are typical of the belligerent rhetoric in every war, a far cry from the explicit instructions and chain of command needed to establish actual genocidal intent. Even the hateful remarks by the far-right ministers of finance and national security, though reprehensible, do not come close to establishing genocidal intent, as these people did not have a seat in the war cabinet and do not dictate military strategy. They are mostly extremist rabble-rousers riling up their political base.

II.

Leaving aside rhetoric and incitement, is there any evidence on the ground that the IDF acts with the intent to annihilate the entire Palestinian population, women and children included? I’m not a military expert, but as far as I can tell, there is none whatsoever. If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Time and again, the IDF has warned the civilian population about impending attacks and offered them time to evacuate, by distributing millions of flyers, text messages, voice mails and QR codes with military maps—thereby suffering a clear military disadvantage (because Hamas fighters can also read a map). If your goal is to kill everyone, warning people beforehand where you will strike and giving them a chance to escape is about the stupidest thing you can do.

Despite temporary blockades, Israel has enabled the delivery of tens of thousands of trucks with food and medical supplies, organized humanitarian pauses and aid corridors, and even facilitated a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of the war. In the Spring of this year, Israel also set up its own aid delivery system through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, distributing millions of meals to Gazans funded by Israeli taxpayers. It has used advanced AI technology to identify targets—Hamas operatives, tunnel entrances, weapon storages—and to assess the presence of civilians to determine the best timing for attacks. None of this makes even the slightest bit of sense if your goal is to exterminate the whole Palestinian population.

Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Or they could do what Hamas did on Oct 7, methodically going from house to house and massacring every living soul. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and include many natural deaths, casualties are predominantly male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).

Israel also enabled the delivery of tens of thousands of trucks with food and medical supplies, organized humanitarian pauses and aid corridors, and even facilitated a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of the war. This is not the behavior of a state attempting to wipe out a population group. Even the provisional ruling from the ICJ acknowledges that Israel delivered water, food, and medical assistance in Gaza throughout much of the conflict, behavior inconsistent with charges of deliberate starvation.

From the very beginning of the conflict, Israel’s war objectives were unambiguously clear: recover its hostages and secure the surrender and disarmament of Hamas. Now that Hamas has released the surviving hostages it held in Gaza and has agreed to release the remains of the Israeli dead, the fighting has ceased. If Hamas disarms in accordance with Donald Trump’s peace plan and plays no further part in Palestinian governance, the war will end, just as Israel always said it would once it achieved its objectives.

Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? There are two major reasons, both consistently ignored by all the genocide reports: Hamas’ cult of martyrdom, and the perverse incentives created by its unwitting enablers. Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometers of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracize, delegitimize, and boycott Israel.

In fact, to any reasonable observer, it is undeniable that the Israeli army cares more about the lives of Palestinian civilians than Hamas. While Hamas invites civilian deaths as part of its strategy, Israel attempts to avoid them. Whereas the Israeli government urges Gazan civilians to evacuate combat zones, Hamas prevents them from escaping or from seeking shelter in their tunnel network. When Israel set up its own system of humanitarian aid, Hamas threatened anyone who dared to collaborate, killed multiple humanitarian workers, and punished Gazans who collected GHF food packages.

The absurdity of the genocide charge should not obscure valid criticisms of the mistakes Israel made during this conflict. Particularly in the last few months, Israel’s miscalculations have been infuriating at times. The decision to wrest humanitarian aid from Hamas’s control and establish an alternative distribution system seemed to make sense at first, but the eleven-week aid blockade employed to put the screws to Hamas was a moral and strategic error. Israel should have known that an enemy steeped in a cult of martyrdom would readily call its bluff, confident in the knowledge that Israel—and the international community—would fold first. In any event, the GHF’s operations were mired by inexperience and incompetence, and the mismanaged attempts at crowd control spiraled into deadly chaos, with potential war crimes committed by trigger-happy IDF soldiers.

Nevertheless, nothing Israel has done over the past two years reveals an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—as the UN definition of genocide stipulates. It is fine to criticize Israel for taking insufficient steps to protect civilian lives in a particular operation, or to question the proportionality judgements made before executing a strike. But the very framing of these criticisms implies that the avoidance of civilian deaths is integral to the moral calculus of the IDF. The only genocidal party to this conflict is Hamas, which fantasizes about the eradication of Jewry in its apocalyptic foundational covenant, and which has openly vowed to repeat the 7 October pogrom as soon as the opportunity arises.

During the Second World War, the Allies carpet-bombed German and Japanese cities without issuing evacuation warnings, sometimes killing 30,000 civilians in a single night. These casualties were not merely collateral damage, they were a strategy intended to “demoralize” the populations of the Axis powers and turn them against their regimes. The Allies never supplied German citizens with food, water, and electricity, and they imposed a naval blockade on Germany, restricting supplies of minerals, fuel, and food. The naval mining operation against Japan was codenamed “Operation Starvation.” The Allies’ tactics were far more brutal than anything Israel has done in the Gaza Strip, but no one has ever retrospectively accused the Allies of committing “genocide.” As the political scientist has told me, there is no sensible definition of genocide that would encompass the current military campaign in Gaza while excluding the Allied bombings during World War II.

III.

The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?

The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.

Like the stolen-election lie, there are reasons to suspect that many of the people who repeat the Gaza genocide lie don’t actually believe it. The more informed critics of Israel—those who understand the definition of genocide—should recognize that an army issuing evacuation warnings and facilitating humanitarian aid is pursuing a different project altogether. And anyone seriously interested in the ethics of warfare should be able to acknowledge a moral distinction between civilians who die as the unintended consequence of military action—and in spite of imperfect attempts to protect them—and those who are deliberately and systematically murdered.

Many of those who have accused Israel of committing genocide were strangely unenthused by the US–Israeli peace proposal. Some condemned it outright as a “neo-colonial” scheme tantamount to “surrender,” and they urged the Palestinians to reject it. UN special rapporteur denounced the proposal as the “trap of the century,” and endorsed a thread on X arguing it “should be opposed and rejected.”

It is as if the Nazis had proposed to immediately halt the operation of the extermination camps in 1943 and the Jewish community (or their allies) had rejected it on the grounds of some technicalities about post-Holocaust self-determination. The word “trap” implies that Israel secretly had something worse in store for the Palestinians. Worse than the actual extermination that Albanese alleged was already taking place?

A similar incongruity was evident from the start of this conflict. Anyone who believed the Gaza War was a cover for genocide ought to have been pressing for Egypt to open its border and let civilians escape into the Sinai. But activists did no such thing, and many even reacted with outrage to the mere suggestion that Egypt open the Rafah crossing to Gazan refugees. When Egypt reinforced its borders, despite diplomatic overtures from Israel, and boasted that they were “ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody would approach a grain of sand [in Sinai],” activists backed the Egyptians and condemned Israel. Why, they asked, should Egypt participate in Israel’s “ethnic cleansing”?

To illustrate the absurdity of this position, consider an analogy: imagine that, after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the Polish government had closed its border and told the world, “Why should we open our border to Ukrainian refugees? We don’t want a bunch of Nazis in our country.” Bad enough. Now imagine Western activists and NGOs applauding that stance—insisting that Poland bore no responsibility for Russia’s aggression, and that admitting Ukrainians would amount to “ethnic cleansing” because Moscow might never let them return.

It is interesting to consider how many Republicans really believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election—and how many truly buy into the urban legends about suitcases of ballots hidden under tables or secret late-night dumps of fakes. As has written, the “Big Lie” seems to be “more about social posturing than making sincere truth claims.” It is clear, however, that there is no future in the Republican Party for anyone unwilling to at least pay lip service to the “Stop the Steal” myth with sufficient fervor. In a similar way, the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza has become an ideological litmus test—a shibboleth that every progressive of good standing must utter with the expected conviction. No dissent or equivocation is tolerated, and no other form of condemnation of Israel’s conduct will do. The rector of my own university recently warned that any researcher who dares to question the genocide narrative is “crossing a red line” and will not be protected by academic freedom.

That leaves a psychological question: of all the possible falsehoods progressives could have used to signal tribal loyalty, why have they chosen this one? A clue lies in the recurring allusions to the Holocaust. Long before 7 October, many on the far-left displayed a perverse urge to accuse Jews of the very crime they had suffered. They often did so in the crassest ways, coining portmanteaus like “Zionazism” or “Gazacaust.” This eagerness betrays what the legal scholar Matthew Bolton has called a “taboo-breaking thrill of inverting, and thereby finally cancelling out, the Shoah.” This desire long predates 7 October 2023. As the historian Norman Goda has documented, charges of genocide have been directed at the Jewish state throughout its existence.

According to the Manichaean victim/oppressor binaries that dominate contemporary progressive discourse, Jews are “white-adjacent” and therefore burdened with all the sins of the colonial West. This logic is reinforced by academic theories of settler-colonialism. As Adam Kirsch notes in his book On Settler Colonialism, these theories consider genocide to be intrinsic to the settler-colonial project itself. Within that framework, Israel’s very existence becomes genocidal: “If Israel is a settler colonial state, and settler colonialism entails genocide, then it is ideologically necessary for Israel to be committing genocide.” As one academic paper on the Gaza war recently expounded, “Genocide is a fundamental feature of the structure of settler colonialism. It is a process and not an event.” Even though the war now appears to be over, Israel will still be committing genocide simply by continuing to exist.

After 7 October, this pathology metastasized, moving from the margins of the academic Left to the progressive mainstream. At European universities, questioning the claim that Israel is committing genocide has become a cancellable offense equivalent to Holocaust denialism. Many of my own colleagues are now afraid to speak their minds on the topic of Gaza. Fortunately, some are starting to push back. Hundreds of scholars recently signed an open letter arguing that “to dilute the legal standards [of genocide] for ideological ends is a form of moral violence.” Yet they remain a small minority. That such an obvious falsehood now enjoys near-unanimous assent across universities, media, civil society, and the NGO ecosystem—with dissent incurring severe social costs—is a damning indictment of the supposed rationality of our liberal institutions.

Buy me a coffee!

Then there was this drawing on the wall showing a shiny electric dream car from Mercedes-Benz, parked on a Bolivian salt flat and flanked by sturdy cacti.

As an unabashed nuclear bro, I have to say my favorite prosperity biotope featured a futuristic small modular reactor (SMR) by Rolls-Royce, nestled deep in the Congo Basin rainforest. Its sleek, hulking form resembles a steel caterpillar, glistening scales half-buried in the earth, like a metallic version of Frank Herbert’s giant sandworms in Dune. It’s the kind of utopian vision ecomodernists love: high-density technology surrounded by untouched natural beauty.

By fusing the natural and the artificial, Samson invites us to think about the relationship between civilization and wilderness. Must we choose between the splendor of wild nature and the marvels of cutting-edge technology, between majestic redwoods and soaring skyscrapers? Or is it possible to have our cake and eat it too?

Even more striking than Samson’s prosperity biotopes were the reactions from the art world. Some curators and art critics assumed his art had to be ironic and subversive. Was he slyly mocking our consumer culture and its tacky product placement? Or was he calling out the encroachment of technology on Mother Nature? And wasn’t there a hint of capitalism critique beneath the surface? Art experts couldn’t wrap their heads around the notion that Samson’s work carried a sincere, non-ironic message: we don’t have to choose between nature and comfort—we can totally have both.

When Samson applied for subsidies from the city of Rotterdam, he got an unintentionally hilarious response. The city’s cultural committee had decided that his art project was “preposterous.” Why? They felt that the artworks “lacked critical reflection” and would have much preferred a “socially critical perspective on welfare.” Loosely translated: if you want to make art in a 21st-century European welfare state, your work better attack modern welfare, technology, and consumerism. And if you’re hoping to snag some government subsidies—milk from the capitalist cash cow—then you’d better declare yourself an enemy of capitalism.1 An insolent artist celebrating modern technology and consumption? No dosh for this buffoon!

What happened?

As a believer in progress, I’m loath to admit that anything was better in the past. After all, as the American journalist Franklin P. Adams once said, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” But in recent years, I’ve reluctantly started to recognize that something has really changed for the worse. Pessimism and doom-mongering have always been with us, but over the past half century we seem to have completely soured on the idea of progress. Even so-called “progressives”, as I write in my book The Betrayal of Enlightenment, have turned their backs on progress. Socialists like Karl Marx and Sylvia Pankhurst dreamed of a world of abundance for all and infinite growth, celebrating plentiful energy and denouncing the scarcity mindset. By contrast, many progressives today warn that economic growth is a dangerous fetish, that “technofixes” won’t save the climate, and that the best energy is the “energy not consumed.”2

Plotting the evolution of the Zeitgeist is no easy task, but from the has recently made a valiant effort. If we look at the frequency of terms related to progress, improvement and the future over time, we see a decline by about 25% since the 1960s, while “those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common”.

And indeed, the arts seem to reflect this waning belief in progress. If you dive into the art and popular culture of the past, it seems our ancestors were genuinely more optimistic about the future and more confident in modernity. At least our recent ancestors—because belief in progress is itself a recent invention.

How belief in progress started

The belief in progress started to take shape in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, when the steady accumulation of knowledge and innovation first became noticeable within the span of a single generation. For the first time, history felt like an arrow pointing forward: new innovations built on the old ones, and the old ones were never lost again. This naturally raised the question: how much better could the future be?

Dreams of paradise were not new, but they had usually been imagined as a golden age in the distant past. Now, for the first time, people began to believe that human ingenuity itself could create a perfect—or at least vastly better—society in the future. If human knowledge continues to expand, our descendants will surely live in a world of abundant prosperity, freedom, and beauty. The first futurists were, not coincidentally, also pioneers of the scientific revolution. In his 1626 book New Atlantis, published posthumously, the English philosopher Francis Bacon describes a society on the fictional island of Bensalem in the Pacific Ocean. The harmonious community on this island is centered around the House of Solomon—a kind of research institution dedicated to investigating the world to obtain useful knowledge that can improve the lives of its inhabitants. The Bensalem islanders excel in “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit.”3

When Bacon wrote New Atlantis, a society of abundance and unlimited freedom was still only a distant dream—a promissory note grounded in philosophical first principles. With the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, however, ordinary people began to enjoy the fruits of progress. For the first time in history, living conditions improved noticeably within the span of a single lifetime. Before long, there was a whole cottage industry of utopian novels, envisioning futures of technological perfection, abundance, and universal brotherhood or sisterhood. The most popular title in that genre was Looking Backward by the American writer Edward Bellamy, published in 1888. The main character falls into a hypnotic sleep and wakes up 113 years later, in the year 2000, to find the society of his dreams. No one has to work anymore, everything is free, and hunger and poverty have been eradicated. 19th-century Europeans were thrilled: Bellamy’s utopian novel became one of the best-selling books of the century.

The poetry of progress

Have you ever read poetry singing the praise of industrial machines? It sounds quaint today, but was quite common in the past, as from has documented. The eighteenth-century poet and Enlightenment thinker Erasmus Darwin—grandfather of Charles—wrote epic poems in tribute to steam engines, grain mills, and blast furnaces. Darwin senior even predicted the invention of locomotives and airplanes—and was quite chuffed about the prospect. In the 19th century, Rudyard Kipling wrote an ode to the steamboat, likening its mighty machines to a symphonic orchestra. Walt Whitman gushed about railroads, canals, telegraph cables, and praised their “noble inventors”. Here are the bracing first lines of his Passage to India:

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied)

In the Old World the east the Suez canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,

The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;

Likewise, painters often depicted industrial machines—furnaces, mills, iron forges, coal mines—in a positive light. Rather than appearing dark or foreboding, they are shown as heroic and noble, sometimes even in harmony with their surroundings.

And why indeed shouldn’t there be beauty in technology, in using our wits to improve the human condition? “Poetical,” wrote the British journalist and philosopher G.K. Chesterton in 1908, are “things going right.”

The most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars—the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

This upbeat spirit persisted well into the 20th century. Some readers might still have childhood memories of it. In the visual arts, you had movements like Art Deco and Futurism, which glorified industrial machines, assembly lines, and monumental skyscrapers. Or a movement like Pop Art, which celebrated mass production and consumerism.

The 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were also the heyday of World Fairs, or Universal Exhibitions, which celebrated technological innovation with an optimistic eye toward the future. Millions flocked to these fairs to marvel at the latest inventions and share in the excitement of human ingenuity. Even in the 1930s, when dark clouds gathered over the world, the World Fairs in Chicago and New York still projected hopeful visions of the future. In 1933, the exhibition in Chicago was dubbed A Century of Progress, with the tagline: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

In New York in 1939, visitors left the fair sporting cheerful blue-and-white pins on their shirts that read, “I have seen the future,” apparently without feeling ridiculous.

Postwar progress

Even after the Second World War, that sense of optimism rebounded quickly. In 1955, Walt Disney opened his theme park Tomorrowland with these stirring words:

Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.

The 1960s is probably the last decade when optimistic visions of the future dominated popular culture. In the high-tech future of the iconic TV series Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, problems on Earth like poverty and war had been solved for good, making them unsuitable for plot material. The storylines in the original Star Trek seasons are mainly driven by curiosity and a thirst for adventure, with the universe as an endless new frontier beckoning intrepid space travelers. As the famous tagline of the starship Enterprise puts it: “To boldly go where no man has gone before!” Star Trek exudes the prevailing belief of the time in a bright future and a positive attitude toward technology.

In the same decade, millions of people tuned into The Jetsons, a futuristic TV series where folks zip around in flying cars and float on hovering platforms. Work was a thing of the past, every family had a robot housekeeper, and if you were hungry, you just pressed a button for a delicious meal! In 1967, CBS aired The 21st Century, a series where the iconic news anchor Walter Cronkite takes viewers on a tour of a twenty-first-century home. We see shiny kitchen robots, devices for medical self-diagnosis, and picture phones for video conversations. (Moral progress proceeded at a somewhat slower pace, as women were still confined to the kitchen.)

Newspaper ads from electric utility companies promised a “higher standard of living” tomorrow, all thanks to abundant power generation. Soon, we’d be gliding through the skies on “flying carpets,” powered by batteries. Just hop on, push a button, and off you go—no more parking problems! “They’re working on it,” the ad boasted. In a 1966 New York Times article titled “A Glimpse of the Twenty-First Century,” leading scientists predicted a world without deserts, dirty smog, or industrial noise. The human population was expected to swell to 25 to 50 billion, living in unprecedented luxury thanks to nuclear power and other futuristic technologies. Incredibly, this tenfold increase in global population was seen as a hopeful vision, not the impending catastrophe that later environmentalists would make it out to be. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, also captured that belief in the uplifting power of modern technology. Sure, the spaceship’s computer, HAL-9000, goes haywire and tries to kill off the crew, but in the end human intellect prevails.

When the future looked bright

This positive attitude towards technology and unbounded optimism about the future seems very alien today. When Donald Fagen from Steely Dan sang about that radiant optimism of the post-war era on his 1982 album The Nightfly, it already sounded nostalgic. In his song about the ‘International Geophysical Year’ (1957), Fagen reminisces about the good old days when the future seemed to be glorious and free, thanks to the advancement of science and technology:

The future looks bright

On that train all graphite and glitter

Undersea by rail

90 minutes from New York to Paris

What a beautiful world this will be

What a glorious time to be free, oh

To a twenty-first-century observer, the future no longer appears so “glorious.” Stories of a bright tomorrow powered by technological progress are often dismissed as, at best, naive—or, at worst, as the self-serving utopias of Silicon Valley moguls seeking only to enrich themselves.

Earlier inventors like Samuel Morse or Thomas Edison were hailed as cultural heroes. Today, figures like Sam Altman or Bill Gates are more often met with suspicion or outright hostility. Whenever some new technology like GPT arrives on the scene, most people can only fret over the horrors that lie ahead: an explosion of deepfakes and misinformation, the disappearance of human relationships, the demise of intelligence and of human civilization, or even humanity’s enslavement by predatory robots. When Jonas Salk discovered a vaccine against polio in 1955, people poured into the streets and hugged strangers in joyous celebration. Bells rang across America, factories closed, and parades were held. But who among us danced in the streets in November 2020, when Pfizer announced its highly effective COVID-19 vaccine—a breakthrough that would save 20 million lives within a year?

Depictions of the future in popular movies and TV series are like a tale of a thousand-and-one nightmares. If we’re not wiped out by AI, then maybe it’ll be those predatory aliens. If nuclear war isn’t laying waste to the planet, then climate catastrophe will finish the job. And if, by some miracle, a few of us survive all this mayhem, we’ll probably wake up in a totalitarian hellscape—either trapped in a world of miserable enslavement (the tradition of Orwell’s 1984) or stuck in a soulless, hedonic culture where every desire is fulfilled with a pill or the push of a button (Brave New World’s tradition).

Here are just some of the most influential examples. In Blade Runner, the future is a smog-choked and polluted hellscape, where technological progress has created a dehumanizing society dominated by mega corporations. In The Hunger Games, a totalitarian world government forces people to fight to the death in sports arenas by way of entertainment. In The Matrix, a race of super-intelligent robots have enslaved humans as living batteries. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are enslaved as breeding machines under a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.

The sci-fi series Black Mirror is the most inventive, as it explores a completely different future in every episode. I should confess that I’m an apocaholic myself and big fan of the series. Who doesn’t like to be creeped out by dystopian visions now and then? Still, of the 27 episodes in the first six seasons, only one can truly be called utopian, with its straightforward happy ending (San Junipero, by far the best one in my opinion).4 All the other episodes are pure nightmare fuel, usually involving some novel technology—from virtual reality to killer drones, from brain chips to surveillance cameras.

The most “hopeful” future is one where we just avert some catastrophe or another. A great example is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most popular sci-fi novels of recent years about the threat of global warming. Robinson’s book stands out because, rare among climate novels, it has a happy ending of sorts. But don’t get too excited: the ending is “happy” only in the sense that we stave off total catastrophe —after tens of millions of climate deaths and a wave of gruesome eco-terrorist attacks—before finally resetting the planet to the so-called “stable” pre-industrial climate (which wasn’t stable at all).

And what about other art forms? Step into any museum of contemporary art and you’ll encounter a relentless litany against modern technology, the ravages of capitalism, and “consumerist culture” (otherwise known as prosperity). If we are to believe contemporary art, industrial capitalism produces every conceivable ailment: loneliness, alienation, commodification, mental stupefaction, spiritual emptiness, loss of authenticity. The diagnoses vary and often contradict one another: is modern man a docile herd animal, or a hyper-individualistic narcissist? Do we live in an emo-cracy reigned by feelings, or in a neoliberal order dominated by cold numbers and rational calculations? Positive appraisals of prosperity have become so rare, as my friend Daan Samson has discovered, that any artist celebrating progress is met with bewilderment or disbelief.

Yes, I know we should be careful to avoid the temptation to cherry-pick in this walk through modern history. Even in the glorious 19th century, as Jason Crawford admits, you could definitely find poems about the impending collapse of civilization and the horrors of the “dark satanic mills,” as the English poet William Blake famously described coal factories. Likewise, there was no shortage of technophobic art during the Golden Years after World War II, or critics who abhorred consumerism. And yet, I’m pretty sure that a century ago, an art committee would have been less shocked by Daan Samson’s cheerful odes to prosperity. As the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin once said, “The future used to be better, too, in the old days.”

A self-fulfilling prophecy?

Losing faith in progress—and in ourselves—might come with dire consequences. Public surveys show something that should alarm anyone rooting for progress: in most Western democracies, less than 10% of people think the world is on the right track. What’s even more startling is that, in developing countries like China and Indonesia, the optimists make up a solid 41% and 23% of the population. A Pew survey from 2014 confirms that people in emerging economies are much more optimistic about the future of their children than in rich countries. John Burn-Murdoch’s graph above suggests that belief in progress was at similarly high levels in the West until half a century ago.

So, what happens to a civilization that gives up on its faith in progress? One theory is that we fall into the trap of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the French-German polymath Albert Schweitzer once said: “Real progress is closely linked to the faith of a society who considers this progress possible.” It’s tough to measure the Zeitgeist over time, but if you just look at metrics like GDP growth, economic productivity, and innovation rates, you start to notice some pretty clear signs of stagnation. The economy is still growing, but it’s moving at a slower pace than in previous decades—especially in Europe. We’ve got more PhDs than ever, yet fewer groundbreaking discoveries.

If people lose their belief in progress and no longer see technological innovation as something worth striving for, then stagnation is what you’ll get. People will oppose new construction projects, governments will stop planning for rising energy consumption, companies will no longer invest in research and development— and art committees will snort at anyone who tells a positive story about technology and human prosperity.

Isn’t it time we renewed our faith in progress and innovation? To build a better world, we need not only scientists and inventors but also people like Daan Samson—artists who reveal the beauty and poetry of modern industrial technology and who dare to imagine even better futures. What kind of paradise might we wake up to in 2125, after another century of hypnotic slumber?

Or buy me a coffee!

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[This is a heavily revised version of a piece that was originally published at and in ’s TERRAFORM collection]

Reading that first piece, you might think that my aim was simply to mock organic food enthusiasts, and that I myself wouldn’t touch an organic vegetable with a ten-foot pole. But that would be wrong. In my hometown of Ghent, I often buy fruit and vegetables at the local fresh market, which mostly sells organic produce. I don’t subscribe to their ideological strictures against fertilizers and pesticides, yet I appreciate the small scale, the convivial atmosphere — and, if I’m honest, I think organic meat and cheese simply tastes better.

Is it rational to indulge in irrationality?

I’ve actually had a change of heart about this. For years, the spurious claims of organic food enthusiasts irritated me, much like other forms of pseudoscience and superstition (I was active in the Belgian skeptics’ movement for a time). But gradually I let go of that judgmental stance — after reading about a psychological experiment that made me wonder: might it sometimes be rational to indulge in a little irrationality?

In the experiment, subjects had to choose between two pieces of chocolate. One is shaped like a cute heart, but smaller. The other was much larger, but shaped like a cockroach. Which would you pick? Surprisingly, 68% chose the roach-shaped sweet. And here’s the twist: most admitted they didn’t actually enjoy eating it! So why on earth did they choose it? Because people hate thinking of themselves as irrational, as if something as trivial as a chocolate’s shape could sway them. Their reasoning likely ran something like this: “Aha, I see what you’re trying to do. You want me to pick the tiny heart so you could laugh at how easily I’m manipulated. Well, I’m no sucker — hand me that giant bug!””

Or buy me a coffee

So here’s the million-dollar question: who’s really being irrational? The participants who grabbed the bigger cockroach-shaped chocolate but were disgusted by it, or the ones who followed their gut feeling, settled for the smaller heart, and actually enjoyed what they ate? My point is this: some emotional responses are so deeply rooted, and so resistant to overriding, that it may be perfectly rational to indulge them.

Or take food neophobia. There’s a narrow developmental window in early childhood when kids are open to new flavors, but after age two or three the shutters come down. Suddenly, anything unfamiliar is treated with suspicion. As for me, I’ve never eaten insects, though I know they’re considered delicacies in many cultures. And yet I happily devour prawns and scampi — which, rationally speaking, are arthropods just like grasshoppers or beetles. So why the reticence? Still, the thought of sinking my teeth into a plump land-dwelling bug makes my stomach turn. And if I go through life without ever crunching such a critter, I won’t be sorry. Irrational? Maybe. But irrational in a way I can live with.

The future of food

So what does all this mean for the future of food — especially meat and dairy? At WePlanet’s Reboot Food festival in Helsinki, I encountered a parade of fascinating ideas: solar-derived proteins, precision fermentation, and farm-free meat from cultivated cells. As a staunch believer in technological progress, I find these developments thrilling, and I can’t wait for the day when such superior alternatives are widely available (full disclosure: I invest in some of these companies myself). The case for them is strong. Meat and dairy carry an outsized environmental burden, which comes down to simple math: before you can eat an animal, you first have to feed it and keep it alive for months, which means that only a modest fraction of the calories in its fodder are converted into edible tissue — with beef having the worst “conversion factor” of all.

But what if we could produce meaty proteins without the detour of raising a whole animal first? Imagine taking a few cells from a cow and growing the tissue directly in a petri dish or bioreactor. Or enlisting microbes like yeast and bacteria to churn out the proteins we want — a trick we already rely on for cheese, wine, pickles, and countless other fermented foods. For a lively introduction to the radical innovations on the horizon, I recommend Regenesis by science journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot.

In Helsinki, I had the privilege of sitting down to a three-course meal made with solein — a protein grown from ancient bacteria that live by oxidizing hydrogen. The dinner took place at the headquarters of Solar Foods, where the company treated our WePlanet delegation to both a presentation and a menu showcasing solein in different forms. Remarkably, the energy pathway for producing this protein is about a billion years older than photosynthesis. Which means that the vegetables in your ratatouille, when compared to the hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, are just evolutionary newbies! So tell me what’s really “natural” or “traditional” food?

I can’t predict which substitute for meat or dairy will ultimately win out, but as a techno-optimist I have little doubt it’s only a matter of time before most people won’t be able to tell the difference between “real” and “fake” meat. And why should innovation stop at simple imitation? Eventually we’ll have animal-free products that outdo the originals in taste, texture, nutrition — and at a fraction of the cost. When that happens, will the meat industry be ripe for the slaughter?

Don’t end up like Kodak

Just a few weeks ago, I gave a keynote to the Belgian meat industry on the future of livestock production. My final slide carried a simple warning: “Don’t end up like Kodak.” For most of the 20th century, Kodak dominated photography, holding a near-monopoly on film and cameras. Ironically, it was Kodak itself that built the first digital camera back in 1975 — and then buried the idea, afraid it would cannibalize its film business. As digital technology took off in the 1990s and 2000s, Kodak doubled down on film while rivals like Canon and Sony surged ahead, and smartphones finished the job. By the time Kodak finally pivoted to digital, the moment had passed. In 2012, the onetime giant filed for bankruptcy — a textbook case of disruptive innovation meeting corporate inertia.

So does the meat and dairy industry today look a bit like Kodak on the eve of digital photography? Like Kodak, they see new technologies looming on the horizon — farm-free proteins such as precision-fermented dairy or cultivated meat — that pose no immediate threat but could one day upend their business model. And just as Kodak downplayed digital cameras to shield its film sales, many livestock companies are only half-heartedly dabbling in alternatives, hoping to keep the status quo intact. And indeed, the alternatives are still inferior to real meat in many respects. But what happens if technological progress continues and consumer preferences suddenly tip toward farm-free proteins? Could the new industry capture the market as swiftly as digital photography did, leaving legacy producers scrambling too late to adapt?

There’s one crucial difference, though: most people don’t carry strong emotions or intuitions about photography, which is itself a relatively new technology. Sure, some feel nostalgic for the days of darkrooms and chemical baths, and a few still cling to old cameras — but it’s nothing like meat, which has ancient evolutionary roots and is a rich source of deeply-rooted intuitions.

Whether we like it or not, humans have been consuming slaughtered animals for at least 2.6 million years. Many languages even have special words for meat craving — “ekbelu” among the Mtubi tribe, “eyebasi” among the Yuquí of Bolivia. In his book Catching Fire, anthropologist Richard Wrangham has argued that cooked meat was pivotal in our evolutionary coming-of-age story, and even resculpted our anatomy. Since it’s easier to digest and richer in nutrients than raw meat, cooking allowed our ancestors to shrink their jaws, reduce canine size, and even slim down the gut.

Some people think the world’s obsession with meat is a peculiarity of the so-called “Western diet,” now exported elsewhere — but they’re mistaken. The reason many people outside the West eat little meat is simple: they can’t afford it. When people escape poverty, one of the first things they do is eat more meat. That’s why there’s a very strong correlation between meat consumption and GDP per capita:

Vegetarianism has existed for centuries, often motivated by religious or ethical beliefs. Yet the proportion of vegetarians and vegans has changed little over time, and meat-eating remains the cultural norm across the globe:

Intuitions about what is “natural” seem to bode well for the future of the meat and dairy industry, but another psychological force pulls in the opposite direction: growing moral unease with animal slaughtering and especially factory farming. According to a survey by the Sentience Institute, a majority of Americans feel uncomfortable with animal farming as it exists (or is perceived) today. Remarkably, 47% even agreed with the radical statement, “I support a ban on slaughterhouses.” Think about that for a moment — vegetarians surely don't make up 47% of the population, more like one tenth of that. Do these respondents realize that without slaughterhouses, they wouldn’t have any meat on their plate (except, perhaps, hunted game)? As Walt Whitman once wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

It seems that at least these people are eagerly awaiting the arrival of vegetarian alternatives that match real meat in taste and texture — provided they can overcome their resistance to “unnatural” foods. So what gives? Will the meat industry end up like Kodak, or not? If truly superior alternatives hit the market, we could see a tipping point and a massive shift away from conventional meat and dairy. Still, because many people cherish and cultivate “naturalness”, I’d bet good money that meat eating will never vanish entirely. More likely, real meat will persist as a niche product. Connoisseurs and meat lovers will insist that the steak on their plate is “real” and “authentic,” meaning it was once alive — no cultured steak allowed. Think of it like biodynamic wine today: in blind tests most people can’t tell the difference, yet they continue to buy it and pay a premium, simply for the sense of authenticity.

Don’t mention the production process!

During my visit to Solar Foods, the company’s representative inadvertently offered yet more proof of how tenacious our intuitive food preferences can be. Both on their website and in the presentation, Solar Foods emphasized that their solar-produced protein is entirely “natural,” “unmodified,” and even “GMO-free.” I understand the desire to appeal to consumer preferences, but I have mixed feelings about this strategy. It reinforces the idea that anything artificial or modified is inherently suspect—especially GMOs, which, for the record, are perfectly safe and healthy.

Moreover, I doubt that this kind of spindoctoring will reassure consumers with strong “natural = good” intuitions. Sure, you can brand solein as perfectly natural — or even more “traditional” than photosynthesis, as I joked earlier — but at the end of the day, it’s still produced in stainless steel vats and tubes, with the help of solar panels.

A similar perception problem arises for cultured meat. In one sense, it is more “natural” than other meat substitutes, since it’s grown from real animal cells. But it’s still cultivated in a clinical vat, not a living, breathing animal. If anything, its closeness to real meat may backfire, potentially landing it in the uncanny valley and triggering stronger negative reactions. Several U.S. states and European nations have already banned cultured meat, with the Texan administration tapping straight into intuitions about naturalness: “It's plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives."

A 2018 study confirmed that most participants experienced disgust toward cultured meat because they perceived it as “unnatural.” The paper’s final recommendation is telling: “It is important to explain cultured meat in a nontechnical way that emphasizes the final product, not the production method, to increase acceptance of this novel food.” In other words: don’t mention how it’s made! Of course, the same applies to real meat. As Otto von Bismarck allegedly said: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

Meat as a niche product

The good news is that humans are highly adaptive, constantly habituating to new foods, even when we don’t notice it. People like to think the traditional recipes in their favorite cuisines are centuries old, passed down through countless generations — yet most are surprisingly recent. After all, Italians didn’t have tomatoes before the 16th century, so no pomodoro, pizza margherita, or melanzane existed in the “old days.” Individually, humans are often food neophobes, but collectively we can adapt to novelty. The last thing we need is the intergenerational version of neophobia that food writer Michael Pollan once advocated: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Had our grandmothers — and their grandmothers — followed that rule over the millennia, we would never have discovered cheese, wine, beer, pickles, potatoes, or corn.

Even if livestock consumption remains a niche cultural practice, the rise of superior meat and dairy substitutes could bring substantial benefits once they capture a significant market share. As and the folks at Our World in Data have calculated, these include less deforestation, lower greenhouse emissions, reduced eutrophication, and a smaller risk of zoonoses and pandemics.

And what about the remaining livestock? If meat becomes an expensive niche product, with consumers willing to pay a premium, farmers could afford to continually improve the quality of life of their animals — or regulators could enforce higher ethical standards. This leads to a curious consequence, one that perhaps deserves a post of its own: in the future, the lives of domesticated animals may be far preferable to those of their wild cousins, much like many of our household pets already live lives of leisure and comfort.

The food scientist Louise Fresco, author of Hamburgers in Paradise, recently told me this is already true in some respects. Wild animals constantly face parasites, predation, and the risk of starvation. By contrast, their domesticated cousins never go hungry or cold, are vaccinated, dewormed, treated with antibiotics, and never experience the stress of predation. Fresco even notes that, counterintuitively, chickens in battery cages can have “lower levels of stress hormones in their blood” than free-range chickens, who are exposed — or think they are exposed — to predators. And while humans romanticize cattle grazing on open meadows, the cows themselves often prefer the comfort of indoor housing if given the choice.1

It’s hard to say which life is preferable overall, as this depends on a host of other factors, but domestication is already winning out in some cases, simply because life in the wild is so harsh. So what if we continue improving the conditions of our domesticated livestock, in the same way we have dramatically improved the lives of our own species? Fresco offers an even more provocative suggestion in her book: “Should we, again with or without genetic modification, breed animals that manufacture so many endorphins in their brains that their well-being in factory farms can be guaranteed forever?” For anyone concerned with animal welfare, this perspective suggests that the plight of wild animals may soon become a more urgent issue than that of domesticated livestock.2

Bucolic fantasies

There’s one final irony in this story: the advent of high-tech innovation often makes pre-modern luxuries more accessible. Furnishing most of your home cheaply at IKEA leaves room in the budget for artisanal chairs and cabinets. Fast fashion keeps wardrobes full at low cost, letting people occasionally splurge on handwoven scarves, bespoke tailoring, or traditional fabrics.

Similarly, if most of our “meat” comes from mass-produced, farm-free proteins that are indistinguishable from the real thing, we free up disposable income to buy expensive niche products, like organic, grass-fed lamb chops. If meat becomes a luxury indulgence, what’s to stop us from turning farms into pleasant, bucolic fantasies that ease our moral conscience? Why not rationally indulge in a little irrationality?

If we want, we can create farms that resemble the idyllic pastoral scenes of classic paintings — or some of the more misleading advertisements for the meat industry. Like this:

Or this:

In a marvelous essay called Can We Love Nature and Let It Go?, science writer Emma Marris argues that “decoupling” our food production from nature — something we must do to protect the environment — does not mean estranging ourselves from nature or rural life. In Marris’ envisioned future, we can have our organic, artisanal, hand-kneaded cake and eat it too:

While most of our food is grown on super-high-yield farms by highly trained farmers or in cultured meat factories, we will keep our urban P-Patches and demonstration farms and backyard vegetable gardens and chickens [...] not because they are making a materially meaningful contribution to our food supply, but because we like them.

Simply “liking” something doesn’t require a rational justification. If pastoral fantasies appeal to you because you feel a romantic attachment to all things natural, then indulging those preferences is perfectly reasonable. Or would you rather reach for that cockroach-shaped chocolate instead?

Buy me a coffee

Woody Allen once joked that the brain was his “second favorite organ.” Yet like every other organ in the body, it was sculpted by natural selection to handle the recurring challenges of our ancestors. The heart pumps blood, the lungs supply oxygen, and the stomach and intestines break down food to draw out nutrients.

And Woody’s runner-up favorite? It’s reductive to pin the brain to any simple job, but one of its most important roles is building an approximately accurate model of the outside world. Emphasis on “approximate”. Our brains didn’t evolve to unravel the structure of the cosmos, but to deliver a quick-and-dirty roadmap to navigate the kinds of environments our ancestors were likely to encounter—telling edible from toxic foods, tracking animals, and steering clear of predators, parasites, precipices, and other routine hazards. As the philosopher W.V.O. Quine once delicately put it: “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind".

But while false beliefs about these recurrent dangers may be highly detrimental to your fitness, evolution does not care about truth in and of itself. At the end of the day, the only currency of natural selection is survival and reproduction. If some creature can achieve reproductive success more efficiently through a false belief, then those misguided individuals will thrive and multiply.

Psychologists and philosophers have floated various such “adaptive misbeliefs” that evolution might directly have favored, but the list is not very extensive: belief in free will, inflated self-confidence and optimism, mind/body dualism, moral realism. In any event, evolution rarely selects for specific beliefs, whether true or false. Instead, it equips us with certain mental habits that mostly deliver true beliefs, but may produce some inaccurate ones as an unintended, yet tolerable, side effect. Or with thought patterns that produce mostly accurate beliefs in our ancestral environment, but lead us astray in a modern one that evolution never anticipated.

A rich source of such deeply-ingrained intuitions and habits of mind is food—which should of course not surprise us, given how central it’s always been to survival. Let’s zoom in on one of these that still shapes how we think about what we eat: essentialism.

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Invisible essences

If you're looking to entertain an infant or toddler, a picture book filled with animals is a surefire hit. Kids absolutely love flipping through pages of adorable creatures and proudly naming each one—putting every animal into its rightful category. Even when illustrations are abstract or whimsical, they rarely get confused—a giraffe is still a giraffe. As long as it has a long neck, four legs, and big spots, they’ll call it right every time.

Young children take great delight in sorting animals into the “right” boxes, guided by firm intuitions about what belongs and what doesn’t. Psychologists call this essentialism: the tendency to divide the world into fixed, non-overlapping categories—often arranged in a neat hierarchy—and to believe that membership comes from some invisible essence.

Experiments reveal that children grasp, even at a young age and without any formal teaching, that an animal's true essence does not lie in its superficial appearance, but is tied to some invisible quality inherent to it. In one classic experiment by the psychologist Susan Gelman, kids were shown a picture of adorable piglets swaddled in tiger fur and nursing from a tiger mom.

What will happen to piglets that are raised by a tigress? Will they start growling and hunting down prey? Most kids understand, without explicit instruction, that the piglets will still grunt, oink and wallow in the mud. Each piglet has an invisible porcine essence that can’t be swapped out by a costume change or an unfamiliar setting. By the same token, children know that a walking stick, leaf-like though it may appear, is still an insect and it will act like one, foraging for food and dodging predators.

This essentialist mindset, which is deeply ingrained and exists across human cultures, was quite helpful to navigate in the environment of our hominid ancestors. By sorting a variety of objects into fixed categories, you can quickly predict what to expect in any given situation. It’s not just this particular striped and whiskered animal that might pounce on you—it’s any creature that falls into the same category.

Psychological essentialism sheds light on various illusions and misconceptions about the living world, beginning with the theory of evolution itself. Evolution by natural selection can feel counterintuitive because it requires us to accept that gradual, imperceptible changes can eventually lead to differences that bridge the boundaries between different species. In the Darwinian worldview, there are no rigid species categories, only populations of organisms (or genes) that are in a constant state of flux. When two populations diverge enough to become reproductively isolated, we label them as different “species”. Still, there’s no essential definition for any species, and even reproductive isolation comes in degrees.

For someone with an intuitive essentialist mindset, common ancestry is a tough pill to swallow. It’s not just that we share a distant ancestor with chimps and bonobos—we’re also related to giraffes, tapeworms, cucumbers, and cockroaches. One of my favorite illustrations of this mental hiccup is the infamous “crocoduck” you see below, a fictional creature creationists like to trot out to mock the idea of intermediate species.

How could any creature be halfway between a crocodile and a duck? Preposterous! If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If not, well, then it might be a crocodile—or something else entirely.

The crocoduck is a particularly glaring example of essentialism in action, but there are plenty of subtler versions out there. Even people who accept the theory of evolution are often tempted to ask whether a given hominid fossil was “already human” or “still simian”. But this question is wrongheaded because it implies that there’s a rigid and timeless divide between “human” and “ape,” and each fossil can be categorised as either the one or the other. In reality, human evolution shows a continuum: species blend, overlap, and branch in intricate and messy ways, making species boundaries little more than arbitrary labels we attach to a gradual evolutionary process. And let’s not forget the antiquated belief in distinct human “races”—fixed, non-overlapping categories with inherent traits. That’s another prime example of intuitive essentialism running wild.

So far we’ve been talking about factual misbeliefs about nature, but intuitive essentialism also gets under our skin morally and emotionally. As the history of racism makes painfully clear—see for instance the various anti-miscegenation laws—the notion of “mixing” races was cast as polluting, disgusting, and shameful. It’s not just that nature is imagined as neatly divided into separate kinds; it’s that people think this is how it should be. Any attempt to transgress these natural boundaries is perceived as deeply wrong.

Frankenfood

And now we get to our intuitive “gut feelings” about food. A prime reason why GMO foods (Genetically Modified Organism) remain so controversial, and are still banned in many countries, is the pervasive sense that this technology violated Nature’s boundaries. Genes and DNA have come to be regarded as an organism’s inviolable essence, so tinkering with them feels inherently suspect. Not coincidentally, that unease peaks with transgenesis—the insertion of genes from one species into another to create a desired trait, such as adding an antifreeze gene from a fish to a tomato.

Why are so many people terrified of GMOs, and why do so many food companies trumpet “GMO-free” labels, even in places where GMOs are already banned? If you’re looking for a proximate cause, then of course you have to look at the steady drumbeat of fear-mongering propaganda from environmental NGOs and activists. But the deeper question is why those campaigns hit the psychological jackpot in the first place. In many ways, the success of these campaigns took even the campaigners by surprise. Almost by accident, organizations like Greenpeace discovered that buzzwords like “Frankenfood”, and lurid images such as the ones below, were extraordinarily potent—both as propaganda and as fund-raising hooks (“Give us your money so we can protect your children from those horrible genetic freaks!”).

A few years ago my friend and colleague Stefaan Blancke co-authored a paper in Trends in Plant Science along with GMO pioneer Marc Van Montagu and some other colleagues from the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology. Their focus? The intuitive allure behind public opposition to GMO foods. As they point out, anti-GMO groups have cleverly “tapped into people's intuitions to promote their cause,” making their campaign all the more compelling to our essentialist minds.

It is also striking that GMO food encounters far more opposition than other applications of GMO technology. Medical insulin used to be extracted from the pancreas of pigs or cows (which required inordinate numbers of animals), but nowadays almost all insulin is synthesized by genetically modified yeast. Millions of diabetes patients don’t seem to be bothered by this. Likewise, almost all our bank notes contain Bt-cotton, a GMO variant that protects the plants against a nasty pest called bollworm. This means that your average hipster ends up paying for his organic and GMO-free veggies with GMO bank notes. Most people are simply not aware of this, but even if you would point out the irony, I suspect some activists would just shrug it off. As long as it doesn’t end up in their mouths, it won’t raise any alarms.

So why then do we get such a strong and visceral reaction when GMOs end up on our plates? The clue is in the emotion itself. For a lot of people, GMO food is simply disgusting. Disgust is one of our most powerful emotions, which evolved to help us avoid pathogens and poisons. When it comes to GMO foods, the intuition that kicks in is that inserting tampering with DNA makes a plant or animal impure—and therefore unsafe to eat. Insulin injections, by contrast, don’t trip those ancient wires because they are a modern medical practice our brains haven’t built any automatic reaction to. If anything, the idea of shooting up some pig-derived pancreas extracts probably sparks more of a “yuck” response than the thought of using clean, lab-synthesized insulin.

Harmony with nature

Religious believers sometimes object to GMO technology on the grounds that it is akin to “playing God”—as if we’re claiming the divine right to create new forms of life. But this argument is not exclusively tied to specific religious doctrines and commandments; it's a sentiment shared even by those who don’t adhere to any faith. Many modern environmentalists, despite being atheists, still maintain a quasi-religious belief in a natural order that we tamper with at our own risk. Some personify this order as Mother Nature or Gaia, but the underlying theory remains the same: nature is a harmonious whole, a complex and delicate web where every element has its role. Disturbing this balance isn't just reckless; it feels fundamentally wrong.

It might be too generous to call this belief in natural harmony a “theory”, a fully fleshed-out set beliefs. It’s more of an inchoate sentiment—vague and poorly defined—that can take shape in different ways. In some versions, nature (or even the Earth itself) was in a state of delicate equilibrium until Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. In others, humans lived in harmony with nature until the advent of agriculture changed everything, or until Christianity burst onto the scene. Or at the very latest, until the industrial revolution. The details vary, but the story always follows a similar arc: once upon a time we lived in paradise, but then we reached for some forbidden fruit and everything fell apart. And the underlying moral equation is always as follows:

● Natural = good, pure, innocent, authentic, wholesome, harmonious

● Unnatural = evil, corrupt, spoiled, fake, dangerous, discordant

The most famous expression of this moral division is the opening sentence of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Emile: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Still, it would be too simple to pin the blame for one of philosophy’s most consequential fallacies on Rousseau alone. (Come to think of it, doing so would replay the very moral fable we’re trying to retire: “Once upon a time, everything was great, but then a French philosopher came along and everything went down the drain!”).

Instead, we should consider why Rousseau’s stark contrast resonates with so many people. Why are millions of consumers drawn to anything labeled “organic,” “all-natural,” “wholesome,” “eco-friendly,” or “holistic,” even if they aren’t quite sure what these terms really mean?

A modern luxury

If you’re living as a hunter-gatherer, some versions of the view that "natural = good" and "unnatural = bad" might actually make sense. The very idea of “adaptation” suggests that an organism has evolved to thrive within a specific ecological niche, and straying too far beyond that can be risky. You want to consume the foods your body is designed to metabolize and stick close to the environment where your ancestors thrived. We shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss people who wish to respect the time-honored traditions of their forebears, while saying: “We’ve always done it this way; this is our tradition, it’s just the natural order.”

In pre-modern societies, however, the tendency to idealize all things “natural” is often tempered by, well, reality. Pre-modern and indigenous peoples understood that nature is both awe-inspiring and perilous, filled with dangers ranging from bloodthirsty predators to flesh-eating parasites, from the capriciousness of extreme weather to the threats of infectious disease. Nature isn’t a nurturing mother or a benevolent goddess—not even metaphorically. To survive, you had to either tame her or keep her at arm’s length. Nature commanded respect precisely because she could take your life in an instant or or starve you by degrees. In nearly every corner of the globe, there are several months per year when, without clothing and campfires and shelter, a few hours of exposure to the elements amounted to a death sentence.

In affluent societies, by contrast, the urge to romanticize nature is allowed to run unchecked. Industrialized westerners like to think that indigenous people are the ones who truly know how to live in harmony with nature, but that’s mostly projection on our part. It isn’t the so-called “primitives” who romanticize nature; it’s modern folks, precisely because we no longer face its hardships. The more we’re buffered from the dangers of the natural world, the more estranged we become. With all the comforts of contemporary life at our fingertips, it’s all too easy to indulge in the fantasy of an original harmony with nature that we lost somewhere along the way.

As a kid, I was heartbroken over the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and I used to stare despondently at the deforestation maps in my Greenpeace or WWF magazines (“Twenty football fields per minute!”). I loved drawing the rainforest, but lacking any real artistic chops, I often used an artwork called “Rainforest, Endangered” as my model—a lush tapestry of brightly colored animals, each having its proper place in a harmonious ecosystem. And then, of course, came the evil humans with their chainsaws, wreaking havoc on this beautiful world!

Little did I know as a kid that a rainforest is a Darwinian inferno of death and suffering, where every creatures is engaged in a fierce competition, and where even the majestic trees only exist because they are locked in a pointless arms race to shoot skyward and steal some sunlight from their competitors. Having never seen a rainforest up close—let alone tried to survive in one—I was free to indulge my childish fantasy of a harmonious whole. That tradition of idyllic portrayals lives on, as in this more recent children’s drawing, where the animals look even more happy-go-lucky than they did in my youth:

Freaks of nature

Now we’re starting to grasp why so many people—especially in modern societies—crave foods that are perceived as “natural” and “uncontaminated.” But is any of our food truly natural? Advocates of organic farming may claim so, but the reality is that all forms of agriculture are extremely recent—evolutionary speaking—and extremely “unnatural”, despite what marketing may suggest. Every acre of cultivated land is dominated by artificial monocultures—usually a single crop or just a handful of varieties—that simply don’t exist in the wild (which is precisely why we had to invent farming in the first place). Plus, nearly all our domesticated plants and animals are genetic freaks, looking nothing like their wild ancestors. And yes, that includes so-called “organic” food.

Take the wild ancestor of corn, for instance, which is called teosinte and not exactly what you’d call popcorn material. Its seeds are encased in tough, hard shells that are a challenge to digest, and the cobs are much smaller than modern corn.

Likewise, the wild ancestor of the banana isn’t the sweet, mushy treat kids adore today; instead, it’s quite bitter and has very little flesh.

Another fun fact: cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower all belong to the same species—Brassica oleracea—selectively bred into wildly different shapes for standout traits.

The same goes for our domesticated livestock. Just take a look at the aurochs, the extinct ancestor of all cattle, compared to the striking Belgian Blue cow, known for its unusual double-muscle mutation. Quite the transformation, right?

Agriculture may be the epitome of the unnatural, yet our gut-level faith in “natural harmony” has been artfully grafted onto it. Slap a label like “natural,” “authentic,” or “organic” on food and it’s halfway to public approval, while anything that hints at artificiality is eyed with suspicion. Organic farming, in particular—no synthetic fertilizers, no chemical pesticides, and certainly no genetic modification—is cast as “natural” and therefore inherently good. Despite its relatively small market share, organic enjoys near-universal goodwill. Restaurants and supermarkets never tire of touting “organic” and “100% natural”—claims that are often wobbly—because they know that’s what customers want to hear. Even people who almost never set foot in Whole Foods (because it’s pricey) tend to assume organic is somehow purer and healthier. And it’s not just marketing: Europe’s Green Deal even sets official targets for organic agriculture, aiming to make it at least a quarter of all farmland by 2030. This is despite the fact that organic farming typically has a larger environmental footprint and a worse impact on the climate, along with no verified health benefits for consumers. When it comes to food choices, even Europe—the birthplace of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment—remains deeply entrenched in irrationality.

So, what does all this mean for the future of our food, particularly meat and dairy? Are we poised to embrace lab-grown meat and farm-free proteins in the near future, or will we hit insurmountable intuitive roadblocks? Stay tuned for the next installment of this essay.

And then someday a new mayor arrives in town, eager to look tough on crime. In a big show of force, he has the entire neighborhood raided. Dozens are arrested, including plenty of people who did nothing wrong. Shops are shut down, and community leaders are strong-armed into accepting harsh, sweeping measures against anything that looks even remotely suspicious.

Now, what would you think of someone who blamed the internal whistleblowers as follows:

“Why did you bad-mouth your own neighborhood when a much bigger threat was looming on the horizon? You kept harping about some petty crime that may or may not have happened, while the police were gearing up for a massive crackdown. You didn’t see where the real danger was coming from.”

That, in a nutshell, is the reaction from a lot of left-leaning academics and journalists to The War On Science, a new collection edited by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to which I contributed a chapter along with 38 others (including , , , , and ).

The collection, written and assembled before Donald Trump’s re-election, argues that scientific institutions have been increasingly captured by left-wing ideology: prestigious journals announcing the screening of submissions on political grounds; activists canceling and deplatforming speakers who stray from orthodoxy; Ivy League universities punishing students for using the wrong pronouns or other speech violations; professional societies embracing progressive doctrines on sex and gender that clash with their own disciplines’ evidence, and so on.

In short, we’re describing an internal assault on science, largely waged from within academia—a contemporary version of what student leader Rudi Dutschke once called a “long march through the institutions.”

In the time between the writing and publishing of our book, however, Donald Trump was re-elected as president, and started to launch a very different kind of “war on science” of his own: cracking down on prestigious institutions, slashing research funding on anything that smacks of progressive causes, and threatening scientific journals to scrap DEI initiatives and reinstate strict meritocracy.

So, is it true, as the kids say, that our book “didn’t age well,” becoming cringe-worthy and out of touch even before it hit the shelves? How could we have been so oblivious to the looming right-wing assault on science while we were preoccupied with left-wing critiques? In fact, many left-wing critics were already singing this tune long before they even had the chance to read our work. For instance, this post from April, shortly after our publisher announced the title and list of contributors, racked up nearly 10,000 likes on Bluesky (which is pretty huge for this relatively small platform). Likewise, Jonathan Howard at Science-Based Medicine wrote that, because the whole lot of us was so “ensconced in their pundit fantasy world” we had the “luxury of pretending that the real threat to science came not from Trump and his minions, but rather from “cancel culture, DEI, gender, and race’.”

This isn’t just an annoying bit of whataboutism, where critics scold us for not having written an entirely different book on a different topic. The little story in my intro makes the point: when there’s rampant crime in a neighborhood and the community leaders look the other way, it creates the perfect opening for a sweeping police crackdown. In the same vein, the incursions of left-wing ideology in universities and other academic institutions have helped to turn them into prime targets for the populist Right. If you turn universities and academic journals into partisan lobby groups, don’t be shocked when you find yourself in the political crosshairs.

Yes, it is true that Trump’s assault on universities is both reprehensible and unconstitutional, that his professed concern about antisemitism is just a pretext for “owning the libs”, and that his sudden embrace of academic freedom is disingenuous—he just wants to swap one orthodoxy for another. But that is exactly why we should have cleaned our Augean stable before it came to this. As sociologist and physician says in this interview about our book: “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets.”

, the editor of the book, has openly acknowledged that Trump’s assault on science poses a more immediate and pressing threat in the U.S.: “By attacking the work of the best, brightest, and most productive scientists in the country, this new war on science being waged by the administration is, at least in the near term, far more damaging than the woke attacks.” However, the point is not that we’re facing two separate attacks on science from different directions and are now trying to determine which one deserves more of our attention—the point is that the more severe external assault was motivated by the internal war, marking a further escalation in the politicization of science. Conversely, these Trumpian attacks now risk radicalizing left-wing ideologues in academia even further, convincing them that science must become an even stronger fortress of progressive ideology.

You can already see it playing out. Thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted attack on DEI and campus antisemitism, anyone criticizing DEI programs now risks being lumped in with the Trumpian Right. Case in point: this hatchet job posing as a book review in New York Magazine, with the subtle-as-a-brick title: “How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science”.

The reviewer claims that we—the book’s authors—weren’t merely blindsided by the MAGA assault on science, but have actively contributed to it. By “railing against DEI, critical race theory, and social justice for years,” the argument goes, we supposedly “provided fuel and ammunition” to Trump and his allies, in effect joining their camp.

This line of reasoning is strikingly similar to the argument, endlessly repeated by progressives (mostly in Europe), that we shouldn’t discuss the negative consequences of mass migration, as doing so might “help the Far Right”. The reality, however, is quite the opposite—it’s precisely the unwillingness of progressives to engage honestly with these uncomfortable truths that drives people toward the Far Right. Similarly, many academics’ reluctance to call out the ideological antics within their own circles has led to a widespread perception that universities have devolved into left-wing boot camps (which is still a wild exaggeration).

By the way, I’m flattered that New York Magazine has singled out my chapter for special scorn, devoting a whole paragraph to it.1 The author even manages to hand me a backhanded compliment: “There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde.” I’ve long admired Hitchens’ virtuosity and acerbic wit, so being compared to him is about as high a compliment as I can imagine (never mind that Hitchens was actually quite critical of Zionism, a detail our intrepid critic seems blissfully unaware of).

Finally, many of the book’s critics are so fixated on Trump that they treat the U.S. as the center of the universe. If you’re an academic in America, fair enough: the aggressive right-wing attack on science is likely to give you more headaches than the left-wing assault, at least for the time being. But there are plenty of countries where Trump isn’t president and where universities are not sued by a right-wing government. If you’re an academic in one of those places and you’d like to avoid becoming the target of a politicized backlash, it’s worth asking what provoked it elsewhere. If you don’t want to end up like Harvard or Columbia, then don’t go down the road they traveled.

That is exactly the advice I give at the end of my own chapter: restore institutional neutrality, cultivate viewpoint diversity, and halt the ideological rot that’s been spreading for decades. If you continue to politicize science, then sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost.

I previously published my chapter here on Substack, including all my sources (ignored by New York Magazine). And here’s my own interview with Lawrence Krauss about my chapter:

If you want to read the whole thing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or just buy the whole book of course, and you’ll get 38 other perspectives on the ideological attacks on science! 😉

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1

The criticism in that paragraph is quite fatuous. My point was not that anyone at Harvard has explicitly called for a genocide of Jews—though chants to "Globalizing the intifada" come perilously close, if you know what the last intifada looked like—but that Harvard applies an egregious double standard when treating different minorities. As for Israel being the "only liberal democracy" in the region, she retorts: "by what metric, he never says". Better question: by what metric not? See the democracy index of Economist Group or Freedom House. I thought this was so well-known that it didn't need a citation. Apparently not at New York Magazine.

I really hope this isn't a head-scratcher for you. Any morally sane person should want to eliminate extreme poverty if given the opportunity. Despite tremendous progress in combating poverty over the past decades, 800 million people are living on less than $3 per day, a miserable condition most of us can barely fathom. Ramping up efforts to eliminate poverty once and for all should be the world’s top priority.

And yet, many people harbor such a visceral aversion to extreme wealth that they might hesitate when given our magic wand—or even make the wrong choice. Particularly among progressives, some behave as if extreme wealth is the greater of the two evils, and seem prepared to jeopardize the fight against poverty if only they could get rid of billionaires.

The mindset is encapsulated in slogans such as “Abolish billionaires” or “Billionaires should not exist”, which many have turned into the core of their political identity. In the words of Zohran Mamdani, the rising star on the American Left and presumtive nominee for the mayor of New York City: “I don’t think that we should have billionaires”. Yes, you can also buy T-shirts:

A slightly more subtle version was put forward by Dan Riffle, advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Every billionaire is a policy failure”. And then there is the historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman, who went viral a few years ago at Davos with his rant against billionaires and their “stupid philanthropy schemes”. Rutger’s rallying cry? “Taxes, taxes, taxes, and all the rest is bullshit”.

Well, I beg to differ. How about “Poverty, hunger, disease, and all the rest is bullshit”? Sure, government intervention provides one possible route to ending these evils, but so does private philanthropy. (Bregman himself recently wrote an inspiring book extolling effective philanthropy, I wonder if he stands by those words today.)

But can’t we just kill those two birds with one stone? What if, in the real world, abolishing extreme wealth and abolishing extreme poverty really amount to the same thing? Except it doesn’t. Contrary to deeply rooted intuitions, wealth creation is not a zero-sum game in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. In the grand sweep of history, extreme wealth and extreme poverty show an inverse relationship. The very capitalist system that slashed extreme poverty to the lowest levels ever recorded has pushed up extreme wealth to unprecedented heights. If wealth creation were truly zero-sum, we'd expect extreme poverty to rise alongside extreme wealth, but the opposite is true.

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In fact, extreme wealth can be seen as a catalyst for poverty reduction: the lure of immense riches drives entrepreneurs to innovate and bring new products to market, spurring economic growth that benefits everyone. Economist William Nordhaus estimates that billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos capture only a tiny portion (about 2%) of the surplus value generated by their technological breakthroughs—the rest is shared among us as we use their products. As has pointed out, “we’re all billionaires now” in terms of access to technologies developed through billion-dollar investments. Today, we can buy “a pill that required $1 billion to develop for $2.00 if a billion other people have the same medical problem”.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a bad bargain, though some very smart people seem to be confused about this. Writing in The New Republic, Yale historian Samuel Moyn lamented the inequality resulting from economic growth: “How much does it matter… that growth has skyrocketed, if the one percent captures so substantial a part of the gains?” Well, for starters, it matters immensely to the billions of people who have been lifted out of poverty thanks to that very growth. If you genuinely believe that the near eradication of poverty is not such a big deal given that some people ended up with a (much) larger slice of the pie, then you’re essentially suggesting that extreme wealth is a greater evil than extreme poverty.

The clearest sign that those advocating the abolition of billionaires don’t have their priorities straight is that they rarely pause to reflect how, once billionaires have been taxed out of existence, all those tax dollars will actually be spent. Even before Donald Trump, the U.S. allocated less than 1% of its GDP to foreign aid, and not always to the most cost-effective programs. So, what are the chances that an upcoming U.S. administration will start investing billions in the world's poorest, even with the most progressive Democrat at the helm? Back in 2019, Bernie Sanders invited his followers to imagine a scenario where people like Bill Gates would be “taxed $100 billion”. With that money, Sanders gushed, “we could end homelessness and provide safe drinking water to everyone in this country.”

In other words, even a socialist like Sanders would channel Gates's billions to people who are already living in one of the richest countries on earth. If that’s the plan, I’d rather have Bill Gates keep his fortune to himself and spend it as he currently does, combating neglected global causes such as malaria or tropical diarrhea in far-flung countries. The bottom line: taxes are a means to an end, not an end in themselves—unless you think eradicating extreme wealth is more important than eradicating poverty.

Another sign of skewed priorities is the often-heard view that billionaire philanthropy is merely a clever PR strategy to uphold the very system from which the super-rich profit, or to burnish their images as generous benefactors. Take Anand Giridharadas, an American writer and author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He argues that wealthy philanthropists “seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix,” suggesting that “their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm.” Now we can surely have a debate about the downsides of an economic system that allows people like Bill Gates to amass such vast wealth, but how could this ever add up to a “greater harm” than the evils Gates is helping to eradicate?

Imagine the reverse. What would we think of a radical libertarian who is bent on destroying a highly successful government initiative aimed at combating HIV and malaria in impoverished countries, simply because it bolsters the allegedly undeserved reputation of Big Government and perpetuates the “greater harm” caused by bloated bureaucracies? In fact, we don’t need to imagine this—it’s essentially what Elon Musk has been up to. According to the New York Times, the slashing of USAID funding under Musk’s short-lived DOGE has already resulted in about 300,000 deaths from HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition—mostly children. So, before we rush to “abolish billionaires” just because their existence rubs us the wrong way ideologically, we should stop and consider whether doing so might undermine the effective charities they support.

Of course not all billionaires are as generous and impactful as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, but if you’re not being careful, you might end up hurting the extremely poor just to spite the extremely rich.

As Giridharadas writes, extreme wealth does have downsides for society. While it’s become trendy in academic circles to pin every conceivable social ill on inequality, often backed by shoddy theories and spurious correlations, it’s still fair to worry about the widening wealth gap and its potential to undermine democracy. Those with massive fortunes can exert disproportionate influence over election campaigns and legislation through lobbying and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

However, many of these issues can be addressed in a more pragmatic way, such as by capping campaign donations. Even if some negative effects of extreme wealth are unavoidable, we need to consider them alongside the potential fallout from abolishing billionaires. Plus, we shouldn’t exaggerate the impact of money in elections. In the 2016 campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton spent nearly twice as much as Donald Trump—$565 million compared to his $322 million—often money donated by ultra-rich people who were afraid that Trump would behave as an unpredictable wrecking ball to the economy. But all the money in the world couldn’t buy Hillary a victory.

The most charitable version of the argument against billionaires is that the mere existence of extreme wealth is distasteful as long as others are stuck in dire poverty. In this view, extreme wealth isn’t inherently bad, but for it to exist alongside extreme poverty feels unbearable. I definitely have some sympathy for that argument. More billionaires should follow in the footsteps of Gates and Buffett and sign the Giving Pledge, a promise of the ultra-wealthy to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity during their lifetime.

But notice that this argument carries moral weight not just for billionaires, but for the rest of us, too, as philosopher Peter Singer has argued for decades. If you’re reading this piece, chances are that you’re among the top 1% richest people on earth (or at least the top 3%), in terms of income and wealth.

Compared to the 800 million people surviving on less than $3 per day, all of us are obscenely wealthy. Many of those who rail against “the one percent” should take a good, long look in the mirror. Even if you’re not a billionaire, you have the ability to transfer some of your wealth to the very poorest with a few clicks of the mouse, through effective programs such as GiveDirectly, which I can highly recommend.

As the late Hans Rosling wrote, our generation has the unique opportunity to end poverty once and for all: “to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph”. So, rather than raging against billionaires and waiting for the government to tax them into oblivion, why not chip in right now and make the world a little better?