Keen On America

“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath
 
A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
 
So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted.
 
Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries — the First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Rohingya, and Gaza — chosen not to rank horrors but to expose “the repetitive patterns and the processes that underlie genocide.” Walrath’s definition is Raphael Lemkin’s original, processual one, before politics narrowed the convention: the purpose is always a land grab, the apparatus always dehumanization, and precise academic definitions are often deployed “to keep some stories and histories out.” The book began as an interactive art installation with nine genocides and a tenth chapter on “the borders of genocide” — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine — until the violence in Gaza persuaded her to make the case outright, while insisting the aim is not to demonize her Jewish friends, Judaism, or Israel, but to show the system. Her hope: that a globally framed comic might open dialogue between Jews and Palestinians “trapped in enmity right now.”
•       Lemkin’s Last Train. The man who coined the word is the book’s tragic through-line. As a Polish law student, Lemkin followed the Berlin trial of a young Armenian who had shot one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — and found it ludicrous that the assassin faced justice for one murder while his victim had answered for none of his millions. His family farm had been seized in the First World War; his brother Samuel died in the forest. He escaped Warsaw on a train that was bombed, ran by night to reach his family, and failed to persuade them to leave (“they do this to us all the time”). Via Sweden, Russia, Japan, and Duke, he spent the war in Washington trying to make Americans see. His convention passed — then waited years for the US, UK, and China to ratify — and he died in 1959 penniless and friendless, UN officials fleeing him in the corridors. Walrath’s speculation: his great regret, looking down, may be refusing to support We Charge Genocide, the 1951 petition by Black Americans — “we can’t talk about something America has done” in the Cold War. Had America owned and repaired that crime then, “we’d be in a very different world.”
•       Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew’s pushback — if politicians can be “verging on genocidal,” does every Karen yelling at her kids get accused of it? — drew the hour’s most honest concession: “that’s the absolute spot-on critique of the approach I’ve taken.” Her defense is preventive: half a genocide is “too quantitative”; better to name things “on their way to massacre” and stop them, or repair them, than to litigate the label afterward. Genocide, she argues, predates modernity and Arendt’s industrial reading — it arrives with the first hierarchical, extracting, wealth-inheriting “so-called civilizations,” Sparta and Thucydides included. Slavery qualifies because the operational word is systemic: the transatlantic trade ran on thinking of humans as lesser. But she draws one line firmly: asked about factory farms as future genocides, “I would hate to see genocide get used over there. It is something that humans do to one another” — and, she insists, don’t have to: the literature on aversion to killing shows soldiers must be socialized into it. We’re hardwired for love and taught to hate.
•       Stanton’s Stages in MAGA America. Is there something genocidal in MAGA’s language about undocumented immigrants? “Absolutely.” Walrath applies the ten stages of genocide — the classroom heuristic Gregory Stanton first presented to the State Department in 1996 — and finds the United States “doing a heck of a lot of them”: polarization; dehumanization (people called vermin, “not worthy of life”); discrimination in the restriction of voting rights. “We’re on very, very shaky ground.” Homelessness, in the same frame, is the product of structures that disenfranchise some and privilege others — “we’ve got enough to go around; we just revere wealth.” Her model for how ordinary people let it happen is Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River: the fearful, the wounded, the disenfranchised, vulnerable to takeover — with parallels in MAGA voters spurned by the neoliberal machine and unable to see who is pulling the levers. Hence her claim for the book: it is resistance, but resistance that builds a coalition across horrors rather than policing which horror counts.
•       Springtime for Hitler. She didn’t read Maus until 2009 — “that’s when I found my medium and just went wild” — and pays it explicit homage in the book. Comics, she argues, let readers “come into” a history and think for themselves, and laughter is respite: an angry messenger gets no listeners. Her earlier Aliceheimer’s let people laugh about her mother’s dementia (not at it, she corrected sharply); telling audiences she’s working on her genocide jokes makes them relax enough to hear the rest. Andrew’s challenge — “do you really want to make it safe?” — produced the useful distinction: safe to enter, not whitewashed; hand-lettered so readers can bring the content in, every truth intact. The closing exchange landed on The Producers and Springtime for Hitler as a brilliant portrayal of the legacies of catastrophe. Her last word: knowledge must cross boundaries, “and the boundaries are all human made, so let’s unmake them.” Andrew’s: most will disagree with her list — and it may be a classic.
 
About the Guest
 
Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and on NPR. The Book of Genocide...

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West
 
Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we. This reminder of our mortality is the heart (if that’s the right word) of the new book by John West, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal computational journalist.
 
West’s The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is a kind of digital memento mori. His argument is metaphysical rather than political. Offline, he writes, our lives are marked by constraint. But we mistake the internet’s destruction of physical distance for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods,” he reminds us, “and we are not.” A Christian and a digital deconvert (not an uncommon combination in the technocrati), West wants us to import our mortality online. If we recognize that the internet will decay and finally die, he suggests, we will make it human. (Re)Make it, as us.
 
I’ve been making a version of this argument since The Cult of the Amateur in 2007. Only West’s version — by contrasting Bach, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver with the infinite scroll — is more poetic and musical. Politer too. Noli timere, as the poet Seamus Heaney texted before he died. Be not afraid. Of life, of death. But beware of YOU. Be afraid. Timere. Very afraid.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       We Are Not Gods. The book’s thesis: offline life is marked by constraint — you cannot talk to people farther than you can shout, or hug your child while she’s at school — while online we act at a distance and mistake that “foot-loosening technology” for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not” — the AI singularity being the theological version of the same delusion, and “a recipe for disaster, both interpersonally, but also within ourselves.” The fix is not logging off but bringing our mortality online: “this is where we live,” and the Internet’s magic only stays magical when tempered by limits — “in order for it to be magical, we need the flip side, which is that it can’t always be magic.” Andrew’s frame: in 2006, Time made YOU person of the year, promising digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years on, the internet is all-too-human — and so are we.
•       The Deconvert’s Meditation. “No one is more strident than the convert or the deconvert.” West’s digital utopianism began in a middle-school computer lab, where an unhappy kid discovered he could find friends and communities online — and it died by monkey’s paw: the same mechanism that found him anime fans now routes lonely kids into pro-anorexia TikTok rabbit holes (his own Journal colleagues’ reporting) and neo-Nazi forums. “That supercharging is something that I wished for.” He concedes the lineage Andrew has worked since The Cult of the Amateur (2007) and The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) — and goes further: “I actually think largely, Plato and Postman were right.” Culture must metabolize its technological ruptures. Or, per the Freudian slip Andrew gifted back to him for the next book: its raptures. Andrew’s verdict on the lineage: the same argument, more poetic and musical. Politer too.
•       A Few Thousand Weeks. On the Luddite summer, West channels past guest Brian Merchant: hatred of technology is usually hatred of lost control. The backlash against AI data centers is about being “completely removed from democratic control over that technology,” and the marketing — a magic box that will take your job — has backfired predictably. His arithmetic of dignity: we get only a few thousand weeks on this earth, and “our dignity demands that we have some say over what we do with our lives.” He cites Freddie deBoer’s Copernican principle — everyone believes they live at history’s hinge — then breaks it honestly: “but I also think this time, it might be right,” the elder millennial awestruck at the rupture he came of age inside.
•       Religious, Not Spiritual. West inverts the modern chestnut: “everyone says they’re spiritual and not religious these days. I actually think it’s important to be religious, and spiritual can take it or leave it” — religion being “a powerful technology” for binding people into the civic fabric. His Christianity runs to liberation theology: not storing up treasure for the glorious day, but making this world more just now. Hence Bach cantatas, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver as the book’s unnamed philosophies — and hence his verdict on the billionaires who struggle with finitude: it doesn’t shock him that men who earn millions while sleeping believe themselves gods, since “every dollar is like a little Iago whispering poison into the ears of the Silicon Valley elite.” The advantage belongs to us mere normals, unburdened by the whispering.
•       Noli Timere. The Latin on West’s X page — be not afraid — was Seamus Heaney’s last text message, sent by SMS before the surgery he didn’t survive, then carried by the Internet to thousands who found hope in it. That, West argues, is the network at its best: “it is about how you spend your time on the Internet, not what you can do on the Internet.” On memory, his formula is to remember “not more and not less, but rather differently” — choosing what we remember (the Odyssey’s oral re-membering, retold body to body) rather than having it forced on us (the red solo cup photos, the traumas that refuse processing). The great mismatch of the web: “the things that we think should be permanent are often the things that are the most impermanent online, and the things that I really wish would fade away are the ones that refuse to.” Andrew’s send-off inverts Heaney: be not afraid — of life, of death. But beware of YOU, the ultimate human conceit. Timere. Very afraid.
 
About the Guest
 
John West is a writer and technologist. He reports the news with code at The Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe called his first book, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, “lyrical and crystalline.” He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College, and lives outside Kingston, New York, with his partner, children, and unruly cat. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (Here Below, September 10, 2026) is his digital memento mori.
 
References:
 
•       The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age by John West (Here Below, September 10, 2026).
•       Lessons and Carols: A Meditati...

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar
 
Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, especially in what she calls “state terror” and “MAGA fascism.”
 
In 2023, Sonali Kolhatkar came on this show to talk about Rising Up, a book about the power of narrative. Three years later, her new book describes what she sees as the dying gasp of white supremacy. But to fully die, she argues, the community needs to rise up. So, like the perennial fascist threat, the ability to tell stories is a perpetual feature of politics. Thus Breaking ICE, Kolhatkar’s story of stories about community defense against MAGA fascism.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Narrative Is Everything. The crackdown, Kolhatkar argues, was built on stories: immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” — Hitlerian language, used repeatedly — recast a population of workers and families as criminals, justifying the funding, the raids, and the denial of due process. The counternarrative is her book’s project: the activists who retold the story of ICE agents as Gestapo-like masked thugs, and did it so successfully that public opinion has swung back. Trump, she argues, overplayed his hand — every day brings another story of a Trump voter whose spouse is deported at a routine check-in, protesting “this is not what we voted for.” The sequel to Rising Up thus practices what that book preached: narrative as the primary weapon of politics — a weapon, she notes via Springsteen and the protest singers, that artists have always wielded and the right has lately understood better than the left.
•       A Dying Gasp — With a Caveat. Asked flatly whether this is a repeat of the 1930s, Kolhatkar answers yes — and adds that the echo is deliberate, down to “homeland,” a favorite term of the Nazis that George W. Bush domesticated. But the deeper lineage is homegrown: her interviewees Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D. G. Kelley trace American fascism through Native dispossession and mass enslavement — authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist. ICE, on this reading, is simply race-based policing restored. Hence her verdict: “a dying gasp of white supremacy,” with the caveat that the dying depends on us. No magic bullets, no finish line: “democracy is an ongoing exercise. There is no resting when it comes to freedom.” Fittingly, the episode lands the day after Wendy Lesser’s Berlin hour — Kolhatkar making explicit what the cautionary mirror implied.
•       The Mamdani Lesson. The hour’s sharpest political analysis: flip the script on electoral politics. Politicians want elections as popularity contests — “this is who I am, who’s behind me?” — when voters should be saying “this is what we want, who will back our demands?” The not-Trump ad is the losing move: it was Hillary Clinton’s approach, Kamala Harris’s approach, and now Xavier Becerra’s in California. The winning move is Zohran Mamdani’s: voters could instantly name what he was for — free buses, city-run grocery stores, rent control, universal childcare, fixed potholes. Her model is the civil rights movement, which didn’t wait for a savior politician but marched and forced hands. And her defense against the radicalism charge: what the American left demands — healthcare for all — is centrist in Europe. If public schools are education for all, why not Medicare for All? And to Andrew’s pushback — doesn’t Abolish ICE alienate the persuadable middle? — her answer is the polling: majorities already oppose the raids, because Trump overreached.
•       What State Terror Looks Like. The subtitle’s claim, cashed out: downtown Los Angeles under curfew, freeways shut, armed National Guardsmen at the federal buildings — and the refrain she heard nationwide: who will save us from these masked thugs? The realization that the police belong to the same structure taught the lesson in her credo: only the people can save the people. The terror is bureaucratic as much as theatrical — green-card applicants seized at airports en route to see friends, families ripped apart, and 20,000 immigrant children stripped of legal representation in defiance of a law George W. Bush signed (“who we thought at the time was the fascist authoritarian and is now, you know, like a Democrat”). Against it, the book’s nineteen voices — from Maine to Georgia to LA — deploy whistles, bullhorns, patrols, documentation, and, in a civil-rights echo, holding hands and singing to bring the temperature down. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kendi, Kelley, and a foreword by Roberto Lovato supplying the long view.
•       Detention Centers & Data Centers. The conversation’s bridge to this show’s long Luddite summer: Kolhatkar sees the fight against immigrant detention centers and the fight against AI data centers as one struggle, since both, she argues, distract from and serve the same billionaire fleecing — “if we are busy blaming the day laborer at the street corner for stealing our job, we’re not gonna look at what Elon Musk has done.” Even MAGA voters, she notes, don’t want to live next to either. On movements that wither, her revision: Black Lives Matter didn’t fizzle, it was muzzled — Musk bought Black Twitter, its biggest bullhorn — and its abolitionist platform reads as current as ever: take the first four letters away from police, and you’re left with ICE. Her ask of journalism itself: solutions journalism — start with how people are fighting back, not one more story of how they’re being crushed.
 
About the Guest
 
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist and the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, the long-running television and radio show airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. A senior editor at YES! Magazine and writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, she is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and serves on the board of the Justice Action Center. Her books include Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, Talking About Abolition, and Bleeding Afghanistan (as co-author). Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press) gathers nineteen of her conversations from the front lines, with a foreword by Roberto Lovato.
 
References:
 
•       Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2026).
•       Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice — the book behind her first Keen On appearance, three years ago.
•       Among the book’s nineteen voices: Viet Thanh Nguyen, past Keen On guest Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G....

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser
 
“Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump.
 
Lesser’s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany’s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin’s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators.
 
Today’s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That’s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Our Own 1929 — or 1932? The book began as a love letter to the Berlin Lesser adopted in 2003 — the everywhere writer of Berkeley, New York, and Berlin, against Lampedusa the ultimate somewhere, who never left Sicily and carried Shakespeare through the coffee houses of Palermo. But as she wrote, America’s condition worsened: “We were not only in our own 1929, but perhaps in 1930, ’31, or even ’32 — verging on our own descent into frightening dictatorship.” Hence the subtitle’s cautionary mirror — though history, she insists, never exactly repeats itself, and the American analogies came unforced, surfacing every thirty or forty pages without hammering. Being an everywhere, she says, doesn’t make you write better — Lampedusa proves that — “but it improves your life,” and it gave her the subjects her native California never could.
•       Berlin Never Went Nazi. The episode’s revelation: the city of Weimar flamboyance never gave the Nazis a majority — Berlin voted left up to and including 1933, and “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” From which follows her sharpest argument: Nazism was not a backlash against Berlin’s sexual and artistic freedoms, “just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so-called wokeness or trans rights. Cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces do” — wealth gaps, regional deprivation, the east feeling second-class, then and now (the AfD’s heartland). The direct equivalences are rhetorical: America’s poisoned-blood language on immigrants comes “straight from the Goebbels playbook,” and the rights that flowered in twenties Germany were “instantly squished” in the thirties. As for today: the AfD polls high before Berlin’s September city elections, but the firewall holds — and the party is formally flagged by German intelligence as constitutionally dangerous. Andrew’s question stands: any vaccines for this thing?
•       1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Why that year: Grosz, Sander, and Otto Dix at their peak; Brecht and Piscator both premiering; All Quiet on the Western Front, the underrated Grand Hotel, and Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookshops — plus Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician, the novella that predicted fascism; Billy Wilder still a weekly-paper journalist shooting his first film; and Christopher Isherwood arriving on the first visit that became Goodbye to Berlin and, via Broadway, Cabaret. “Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.” The culture flourished beside economic and political chaos — “having a terrible government is not inconsistent with producing good culture. Look at nineteenth-century Russia” — and when the chaos won, the exiles washed up in the German ghetto of Los Angeles: Brecht (on the beach, per this week’s Baerwald episode), Döblin, Mann. Many went back — Brecht in 1949, Piscator after — because in Hollywood and New York they “couldn’t live on the thin slice of culture,” a homesickness Lesser saw again in Berkeley’s own Czesław Miłosz, watching Americans like children playing in a sandbox.
•       After Means 1989. The title’s twist: the After is not the Nazis’ arrival but the Wall’s fall. The dark half-century — twelve years of Reich, then “with barely a pause to take a breath” the divided city — is deliberately skipped: “the city is going to tell you what happened,” through what its monuments confess, like Bebelplatz’s memorial to the burned books of May 1933. Berlin now wears its freedom knowingly: graffiti flourishes precisely because speech was twice policed; May Day’s bottle-throwing is tolerated and swept up; Freiheit arrives like the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth — Andrew’s analogy, which she embraced with irony, since “nobody is totally free these days.” The Wall’s hothouse island remains separate from Germany half a century on. And the city stays cinematic to the point of unreality — Wings of Desire’s angels in the actual Staatsbibliothek (“I thought it was just a set”), Babylon Berlin’s set-choosers clearing away the present — with a thriller shelf to match: Deighton’s Berlin Game (freshly reread on his death), le Carré’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Herron, McEwan, Schneider’s Wall Jumper.
•       A Mirror That Might Become Useful. Berlin’s deepest lesson is for after the fall: it is the city that acknowledges its bad deeds — monuments and plaques saying this is where we did it — while America “likes to brush it all aside and act like we’re always the heroes.” Andrew’s pushback landed: Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson’s lynching memorial, the African American Museum — “You’re right. I’m not being fair.” But the qualification sharpens rather than sinks the thesis: “we do not have a history yet like Holocaust Germany or even Berlin Wall Germany… It’s a mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.” Meanwhile Berlin models the livable city: rent control the voters wanted to push all the way to expropriation, transit worth “ecstasies,” and a constitutional welfare clause promising a dignified existence — economic rights our Bill of Rights never mentions. The book ends aboard the M29 bus, top deck, regular fare, from the Maybachufer’s twice-weekly market (running since before 1929) across the old West to Grunewald. “Maybe you’re going to be made into a Berlin angel.” “A great fate.”
 
About the Guest
 
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, the celebrated Berkeley literary quarterly, and the author of a novel and twelve works of nonfiction, including You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (winner of the Marfield Prize), Why I Read, and Scandinavian Noir. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center — and the American Academy in Berlin, where her love affair with the city deepened. Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times (Harper, September 2026) is her portrait of the city in 1929 and now. She divides her time between B...

“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman
 
Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn’t celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch.
 
What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest.
 
It wasn’t just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there’s no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism’s octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Mind, Not the Material. Against Sven Beckert’s material history (which Adelman admired and reviewed in Foreign Affairs), The Capitalist Era studies how we think about capitalism — because the thinking sets the policies, creates the attachments, fuels the wars, and builds the institutions. Capitalism, on his dating, is an eighteenth-century invention that dawns with Adam Smith’s “commercial society”: the first economic system to tie strangers across the whole planet into one interdependent web — global from the very start. Its founding text is a thought experiment: Smith’s gentleman of humanity, drinking Chinese tea while reading of a Chinese earthquake, asked whether he minds the deaths of thousands as much as the pain in his little finger. The marketplace entangles our moralities — and the question of whether sympathy can keep pace with self-interest has governed the global mind ever since.
•       No Exit in Capitalism. For or against? A fair question with a layered answer: we are all heirs to the Marxist tradition — inequality and exploitation are inherent to interdependence, and “the propensity to be predatory coexists with the propensity to be empathetic.” But the trap is real: “there’s no exit in capitalism” — leaving is so punitive that every socialist revolution has paid catastrophically, a logic Adelman calls part of “the awful cunning” of the Trump administration’s economic statecraft. Keynes versus Hayek? When Andrew suggested it amounted to a family squabble — a storm in a teacup — Adelman largely agreed: both camps accept that we live inside capitalism, arguing only over how to live interdependently. No exit, though, doesn’t mean no alternatives: the argument worth recovering — lost since the globalization of the 1980s was “dumped on us” — is which form of interdependence we actually want. Gramsci’s interregnum, the time for monsters, is exactly when that argument matters.
•       The Veil Between Strangers. The book’s gallery: not only philosophers but artists — Picasso, the poets, Borges (“I have a hard time writing any book without” him) — and above all photographers, because how we think about strangers is mediated through media. Smith’s verb was to see: the stranger’s invisibility was the whole problem, and photography — cheap to reproduce, claiming realism — promised to remove the veil. Zola was obsessed with it; street photography made New York and London legible as cities of vice and poverty; and the Opium War photographs that reached London in the 1860s forced a scandal, because this suffering was inflicted by our own troops. But seeing bred a new problem Smith never foresaw: indifference — too many images numbing the sympathies they were meant to awaken. In today’s supersaturation of digital and artificially generated strangers, the early doubters’ warning compounds: market interdependence plus growing indifference between the interdependent is “a recipe for calamity.”
•       Earth Hunger. The charge that capitalism is eating the planet is as old as capitalism: the era of Hobson’s Imperialism named the West’s insatiable appetite to conquer and carve — “earth hunger” — after the Boer War. Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement traveled the Congo River together: Conrad turned it into Heart of Darkness; Casement wrote the first great humanitarian reports — rubber for Europe’s bicycles and tires, extermination for the Congolese and then Amazonians — before renouncing the crown, joining the Irish rebellion, and hanging for treason. Slavery runs through the same river: on Smith’s mind from the start, the plantation bonanza’s awkward foundation, with dehumanization as extraction’s precondition — a through line to the 1930s. To James Crawford’s vanishing earth (last week’s episode), Adelman offers a friendly dissent: the earth isn’t vanishing, but the accelerating metabolism of resources — extracted inhumanely for those who live there — is stressing the system. Alternatives exist; exit does not.
•       Hoard the Returns, Externalize the Burdens. Adelman refuses the apocalypse chorus: end-time arguments breed cynicism — grab what you can while you can — which is precisely what turned the 1930s murderous; and the great debate the 2008 crisis should have sparked was stifled by crisis management that worked too well. “Neoliberalism” he finds overblown — the world is a mixed, messy hybrid, China neither socialist nor neoliberal — and the Thucydides Trap is a “silly metaphor”: Sparta and Athens were never as interdependent as China and the United States. Hence the closing duel: Carney versus Trump as two arguments inside the global mind about how to need strangers. Trump, the Toronto-born historian argues, is no isolationist — his is a global vision that wants to “hoard the returns and externalize the burdens,” punishing the asymmetrically dependent (Canada above all) through a predator’s bilateralism whose 1930s pedigree Adelman names with discomfort. And China? Sitting on the sidelines, courting Canada, playing “an old game” of constructing and dividing markets — as old as the global mind itself.
 
About the Guest
 
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. Born in Toronto and educated at Toronto, the LSE, and Oxford, he has lived and worked in seven countries. His many books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of ...