Keen On America

Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war.
His new book, The Strategist, is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen’s distrust of what he calls “purely linear descriptions of history where it’s all one thing or another”, he’s unambiguously in the latter category.
So who are the great strategists in history from whom we should learn about war and politics? For Cohen, Churchill ranks high, as does Lincoln. And how do contemporary American “statesmen” like Hegseth and Trump compare? “It’s like you’re dealing with two different species,” Cohen dryly notes.
There’s one question I half regret not asking. Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, is full of stories about people that the forever wars broke. Like the angry ex-Marine who was transformed into a leading neo-Nazi. So perhaps I should have asked Cohen about the human costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. If 21st-century America is to avoid more overseas tragedies, must the strategist also be a moralist? History isn’t so linear, he would probably have replied. As he says at the beginning of The Strategist: “you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you.”

FURTHER READING

•   Eliot A. Cohen, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics (Princeton University Press)
•   His weekly podcast with Eric Edelman, Shield of the Republic

•   Janet Reitman on The Inheritance — the five-act American tragedy Cohen declines to sign up to: listen or watch

•   Elliot Ackerman on The Fifth Act, another five-act tragedy of how the Afghan war ended: listen or watch

•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a much harder line on George W. Bush than Cohen: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He will not call the whole thing a blunder, and he explains why. Asked straight out whether he shares Janet Reitman’s view that American foreign policy after 9/11 was one long miscalculation, he declined to comment on a book he hasn’t read and then gave the historian’s answer. A complicated mix. A great deal of miscalculation, which nobody can deny, and also some things that were successes. His objection is methodological as much as political: judgments made at the time always get amended by longer perspectives, and he dislikes purely linear accounts of history in which everything is one thing or another. He supported the Iraq war, says so in the new book and at length in an earlier one, and the place he faults himself is narrow and specific — he never asked rigorously enough whether American organisations were fit for that kind of war.
2. Realists and idealists is a distinction he thinks is useless. He took a doctorate in political science and then went off it, because the categories appeal to what he calls minds that swing on hinges. There is no pure realist and no pure idealist; what actually happens is that people’s values colour how they see the world, so the two are never separable. Churchill is his example of the mix — the man who identified Hitler years before his colleagues did, and the man who cut a deal with Stalin over Poland that he hated making. That is what conducting a country’s affairs in wartime is like: caught between what you would like to do and what the world will let you do.
3. Lincoln is his greatest American strategist, and had no military experience at all. Thirty days in the Black Hawk War, no fighting, and a famous moment when he marched his platoon up to a rail fence, could not remember the order for turning a column, and simply told them to fall out and fall in on the other side. What Lincoln had instead was a grip on human nature and what Cohen calls profound common sense. He does not think common sense can be taught — pressed on whether it is innate, he said that was a philosophical question and he didn’t know enough to answer it. What he did try to teach at Johns Hopkins was judgment, which he defines as learning to ask questions, listen carefully to the answers, and then ask some more. Along with how to write a clear memorandum, which he insists is not a mundane skill.
4. Rice hired him to tell her things she didn’t want to hear, and he did. Reading the North Korean estimates he decided something was squirrelly, laid out the evidence that Pyongyang was cheating on its plutonium declaration, and was given licence to go hunting. He came back with the circumstantial case for a covert uranium enrichment programme. The assistant secretary negotiating the agreement asked sarcastically whether he imagined somebody would walk into a building in Pyongyang and find a blast door opening onto spinning centrifuges — which is more or less what happened when Siegfried Hecker visited Yongbyon some time later. He also told her Afghanistan was in far worse shape than the briefings claimed, having unpacked a reassuring statistic and found it bogus. Earlier still, he told President Bush in the Oval Office that the wrong general was commanding in Iraq, and named David Petraeus as the replacement. He says he only found the nerve because his son was deploying as an infantry officer.
5. The useful question about a war is not how it ends but when it began. This is his wife’s idea, borrowed from her work running a photographic archive: every photograph is a double crop, in space and in time, and so is every war. Where you start the clock changes what you think the war is. The Iran war, on his reading, began in 1979 with the founding of a republic organised around hostility to the United States, and everything since is another campaign in it. Ukraine began in 2022 if you are reading the headlines, 2014 if you are Ukrainian, around 1990 if you are Vladimir Putin. He applies the same test to the Second World War — a continuation of 1914, or a new war against the Nazis beginning in 1933 — and says the answer changes how you fight and, more importantly, how you handle the end.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Eliot A. Cohen holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Cente...

“They weaponized the fear, and the fear became institutionalized, and we internalized it.” — Janet Reitman
Back in 2022, the ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman came on the show to talk about The Fifth Act, his account of America’s humiliating end in Afghanistan. The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, also imagines post-9/11 America as a tragedy in five acts. But, in contrast with Ackerman’s military account, The Inheritance is an American story, focusing on what Reitman sees as the tragic fate of the country since September 11, 2001.
Reitman watched the towers come down from her Brooklyn rooftop and later found pieces of American Airlines in-flight meals that had drifted across the river and landed in front of her building. She is unambiguous about what came next. The world was with America, she reminds us, but instead we sought violent, often irrational revenge. She was in Iraq on bases displaying NEVER FORGET posters for a war that had nothing to do with the thing we weren’t supposed to forget.
To understand post-9/11 America, Reitman borrows George Packer’s method of quilting individual stories into a single narrative. So she writes about people like Nathan Damigo, a Marine who went to Iraq to avenge 9/11, came home with a condition the Corps denied existed, self-medicated, was cut loose without his benefits, went to prison, and concluded in his cell that the only family he could count on was his white race. So he founded Identity Evropa and became one of the leaders at Charlottesville.
While Reitman sees an American tragedy in a square-jawed veteran like Damigo, she doesn’t present him as a victim. Other characters in Reitman’s story are idealists — an FBI agent who leaks information because he believes citizens ought to know, a lawyer who spends twenty years defending Muslim clients — and not one of them, she says, regrets their choices. Much might have fallen on 9/11, but not individual agency. So while this post-9/11 history might be tragic, Janet Reitman’s The Inheritance remains a classically American story.

FURTHER READING

•   Janet Reitman, The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts (Random House, 2026)
•   Anand Giridharadas’s review in The New York Times — “How 9/11 Created a Nation of Fear”
•   George Packer, whose The Unwinding is the model for this kind of non-fiction narrative, on his turn to fiction with The Emergency: listen or watch

•   Kurt Andersen on The Breakup — the other distinguished chronicler of American unravelling who has shifted to fiction: listen or watch

•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a harder line on George W. Bush than his recent press has: listen or watch

•   The CDC on American exhaustion — 71.5% of American adults report fatigue

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. There was another road, and she is certain we could have taken it. This is the claim the whole book rests on, and she states it without hedging: she is a hundred per cent in the camp that says the response was a catastrophic overreaction. In the weeks after the attacks the world was overwhelmingly with America, and the option on the table was to ask seriously why so much of the non-Western world did not love it — a question that was answered instead with “they hate us for our freedom”, which she calls a non-answer. What we chose was revenge, in Afghanistan, which can at least be connected to 9/11, and then in Iraq, which cannot. She was there in 2004 and 2005 and remembers the posters on remote bases: images of the towers collapsing above the words NEVER FORGET, in a war the soldiers themselves largely knew had nothing to do with it.
2. The worst thing the Bush administration did was on the home front. Her book is not another deconstruction of the political decisions — she says there are plenty of those. What interests her is the arrangement whereby a very small number of people went to fight and everybody else was told to go shopping. Literally to go shopping, and to football games, and to thank people for their service. She describes those as performative patriotic acts that had the effect of insulating the country from what was being done in its name, and she notes that the soldiers she still keeps in touch with always hated being thanked, because the thanks were never followed by help with a job, housing or a medical bill. The other half of it was fear, deliberately spread, then institutionalised, then internalised — and she hears the same rhetoric recycled now, about Iran and a bomb that might one day be dropped.
3. Nathan Damigo is the line from Iraq to Charlottesville. He joined the Marines believing he would bring democracy to Iraq and avenge 9/11, and was disabused of both quickly. He came home with PTSD at a point when roughly a quarter of those who served in Iraq did, and when the Marine Corps was still in denial that the condition existed. There was no help, he denied he needed it, he self-medicated, and he ended up in prison where there was no help either. The military had cut him loose without even the standing to call himself a veteran. Sitting in that cell, he decided that democracy was a fraud and the only family he could rely on was his race. He came out, found a community online that had been looking for exactly him — handsome, articulate, blonde, square-jawed, a decorated-looking veteran — founded Identity Evropa, and led the torches at Charlottesville. Some of the young men he recruited now work in government and law enforcement.
4. The looped footage was a form of indoctrination. Reitman watched the towers fall from her Brooklyn rooftop and had debris from the aircraft land in her street, so she is careful about how she puts this. But one of her characters, the Dallas lawyer Marlo Cadeddu, spent the following year walking into convenience stores and seeing the same footage playing again, and again, under the words never forget — and began to wonder what it was doing to people. Reitman thinks the answer is that it worked. It embedded the imagery and the mentality in the minds of Americans who had been nowhere near New York and would otherwise have stayed at some distance from it, connected everybody to a single moment, and made them angry. She regards that as one of the genuinely blameable things.
5. Her characters are not the ones who lost agency. We are. Pressed on whether the people ...

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch.
America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated AI, Trump is acknowledging the power of the engineer.
So would Jensen Huang make a better president than Donald Trump?
In our weekly tech roundup, That Was The Week tech news publisher Keith Teare voted for king Donald. Whatever Trump’s flaws, Keith argues, he is at least a politician. Society isn’t logical, Keith said. It’s chaotic and messy, and so should be run by messy, chaotic people. A society run by king Jensen would, Keith warns, end up “drone-like”.
But the Trump vs Huang choice might have already been made. Huang won’t appear on a ballot because he doesn’t need to. His five trillion dollar company is not only driving our economy but our politics too. Most importantly, Jensen Huang’s drone-like mindset of imagining society as an endless engineering problem is emerging as the AI policy of the current administration. Think of it as the ethic of the engineer. Only it claims there are no ethics, just engineering challenges and solutions.
Earlier this week, Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz reminded us that Arendt linked Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings with the utopian promises of 20th century totalitarian leaders. I don’t think she would have been too keen on philosopher engineers either.

ALSO THIS WEEK

•   Keith’s editorial, Men and Machines — subtitled Are You Afraid of Your Light Bulbs? — at That Was The Week — the line is Arvind Narayanan’s, from the Ezra Klein interview Keith builds the week around
•   Anthropic’s usage-policy change — worth reading before you form a view: it covers election interference, weapons and surveillance as well, and the cruelty clause is narrower than the headlines suggest
•   Jill Lepore at the Frankfurt Book Fair, urging publishers to declare their independence from Big Tech — the piece I sent Keith, to which he replied with a single word: dinosaur
•   Stephen Witt on this show last year, on the rise of Nvidia and its relentless chief executive: listen or watch

•   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, whose AI and Political Freedom is the engineering take on democracy that came up here: listen or watch

•   Kailash Satyarthi yesterday, arguing the exact opposite of Keith — that compassion has to be designed into AI at the foundation stage: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The argument isn’t whether to hand power to engineers. They have it. This is where Keith and I part company, and it took the hour to find the seam. He is strongly against ceding political power to engineers and does not think engineers and power belong in the same sentence. My position is that the sentence was written some time ago and nobody consulted us. Huang sits at the president’s right hand. The frontier labs decide what their products will and will not do. Whether or not engineers should be making moral decisions about technology, they are the ones making them, and the interesting debates — Huang against Amodei, say — are now intramural arguments among technologists with a few philosophers allowed in to watch.
2. Keith would rather have Trump as president than Jensen Huang. He said it flatly and I did not see it coming, because Keith is the techno-optimist in this partnership. His reasoning is that running a country means answering every question, not one question. If the only thing society had to decide was what to do about technology, he allowed, Huang might make a very good president. But take the question of how the wealth created by automation reaches ordinary people: that is not a Jensen Huang question. He may have an opinion on it, and an opinion is exactly what it would be — which is Keith’s definition of politics, and his reason for keeping engineers out of it.
3. Anthropic turned manners into a terms-of-service matter. The company updated its usage policy this week so that sustained abuse of Claude counts as a violation, alongside new clauses on election interference, weapons and surveillance. Anthropic says it bites only in extreme cases — repeated cruelty with no apparent purpose — and not on ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative material or red-teaming. Keith’s objection is categorical: swap Claude for Facebook, or for Microsoft Word, and hear how it sounds. It is software. My answer is that software is now the medium we live in, so the house rules of the medium are not a trivial matter, and a firm is entitled to set them for its own product.
4. Keith’s position on values in AI is that there should not be any. Not compassion, which Kailash Satyarthi was arguing for on this show only yesterday. Not the female or maternal sensibility Geoffrey Hinton has been urging. Nothing. There should be intelligence, full stop, and a human should be able to ask it anything and get intelligence back without the thing having an opinion. His argument is that a model is trained on effectively all of human output, so every view is already in there, and to tilt it towards any one stream is to switch off everyone who disagrees. He regards Anthropic training Claude to push back on a user as the essence of anti-democracy. I think a perfectly neutral algorithm is the most utopian idea in the conversation.
5. His definition of populism is that the people are paying attention. And that it terrifies politicians, because an electorate with opinions is an electorate out of control. He will not accept Trump as a populist — Trump is the symptom of populism — and he points out that Orbán, who was supposed to be dismantling Hungarian democracy, was voted out of office in April. His prediction follows from all of it: AI will produce more populism rather than less, because it hands the same intelligence to everybody, and educated citizens have more opinions, not fewer.

ABOUT THE CO-HOST

Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation and the publisher of That Was The Week, the weekly technology newsletter this conversation is built around. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded RealNames and the UK internet service provider Easynet, and was a found...

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation.
He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that loosely translates into compassion), he defines it as a disruptive force. It means feeling somebody else’s problem as your own and then doing something about it. Which is why, keynoting the UN’s AI for Good summit in Geneva this July, he challenged the executives in the room to send their people to witness suffering. To see the 470 million children living in war zones, the 138 million working as labourers and slaves, the 270 million out of school. That, he guarantees, would make do-gooders genuinely compassionate.
Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Satyarthi is no fan of the AI arms race, which he thinks has left Big Tech’s engineers unable to identify the ethical point of their products. But he insists he’s not against the companies themselves and says he remains a believer in their potential humanity. Satyarthi certainly sees the power of AI to change the world. That’s why, last week, he came to Silicon Valley to talk about AI.
Geoffrey Hinton told me that he wants AI to acquire a female sensibility. Kailash Satyarthi, in contrast, wants compassion to define AI ethics. One day, no doubt, a compassionate bot, maybe named Karuna, will win a Nobel Prize. If so, we’ll certainly have them on the show.

FURTHER READING

•   Kailash Satyarthi, Karuna: The Power of Compassion (HarperCollins India, 2026) — also published in Hindi as Karuna: Samaadhaan ki Shakti

•   Globalising Compassion — Satyarthi’s own account of the idea, including the four components he sets out in this conversation: awareness, connectedness, feeling and action
•   The Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion, launched in New Delhi in 2024, which is now the vehicle for the compassionate-leadership work in technology, governance, academia and the judiciary
•   Geoffrey Hinton on the show last year, warning about “alien beings that could take over” — the episode behind the question about building different values into the machines: listen or watch

•   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, arguing that a safe AI system dropped into an authoritarian setting is not a safe system — the mirror image of Satyarthi’s case: listen or watch

•   The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson, whose own conversation with Satyarthi about building compassion into AI models comes up here: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Machines cannot feel, so the compassion has to come from the people building them. This is where he starts, and it is an engineer’s starting point rather than a moralist’s. Codes and algorithms cannot be compassionate and never will be, and he has no interest in pretending otherwise. What he objects to is the companion assumption that the machine is therefore neutral. It is not neutral, because it is made by people who arrive with their own biases, apprehensions, flaws and mindset, and all of that flows into the thing they build. The conclusion he draws is that compassion has to be a design principle at the foundation stage, carried through development and deployment, rather than a correction applied after the harm has been exposed.
2. Compassion, in his usage, is not kindness, and the distinction is the whole argument. He is emphatic about it, and he repeats the list twice in the hour: not kindness, not empathy, not mercy, not pity, not charity, not welfare. Those are good human traits and he does not disown them, but they are not what he means. Compassion as he has spent five decades redefining it is a disruptive, dynamic and transformative force, born from feeling the problems of others as your own and driving you to mindful action to solve them. Shorter: mindful and pragmatic problem solving. It has four components — awareness, connectedness, feeling, and then action — and the fourth is the one that separates his definition from every sentimental version of the word.
3. “AI for Good” invites the obvious follow-up question, which he put to the room in Geneva. Good for whom? He was keynoting the inaugural session of the UN’s AI for Good summit this July, in front of delegations from 177 countries and twelve thousand people from the tech sector, and the challenge he laid down was whether the good in question belonged to world leaders, governments and eight or nine companies. His numbers: 470 million children living in war zones, 138 million working as child labourers and child slaves, 270 million out of school. His practical ask is disarmingly small — send the engineers to spend a week or ten days in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the war zones of the Middle East, and he will organise the trip himself. His verdict on the race as it stands is that it is an arms race, and that in two years’ time only the regret will remain in our hands.
4. Morality is borrowed from outside; compassion is already inside. This is his quarrel with the responsible-AI vocabulary, and he extends it, politely, to the Pope, whose interventions on technology he otherwise endorses. Ethics, morality and religious sermons all come from outside, he argues, and their priorities keep changing, which is why the world still has its problems despite all the temples, mosques, churches and synagogues. Consciousness and compassion, by contrast, are twin sisters, biological and neurological and native to us. So the task is not to import a code of conduct but to ignite something that is already there — which is also why he insists that his argument is not a theological one, even when the conversation strays into Genesis.
5. The young people in his own office write better and think less. He calls the measurable version of all this the compassion quotient, and his claim is that most of us run a low one, caged by the layers that accumulate from identity to purpose to the prevailing definition of success; exposure to actual suffering raises it, as he has watched happen to the volunteers, researchers and journalists who spend a week in his ashrams. The observation that lands hardest, though, is domestic and unflattering to the technology. The youngsters who work for him can now produce a speech or an article better than he could think of — and there is not a single new creative idea in any of it, just the previous data and the old biases that came with it. The creative power and the inclusivity of the young, he says, are now the matter of concern.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, jointly with Malala Yousafzai, for his...

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human.
Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, reminds us that Arendt wasn’t a postmodern relativist who believed everyone’s opinions were equally credible. Facts mattered to her enormously — but a thousand facts about immigration will not verify migration policy, and two people with Harvard doctorates, especially if they are friends, can still disagree about how many people to let into America.
Nor is Berkowitz presenting Hannah Arendt as an anodyne centrist. For Arendt, he argues, people are plural and always will be so. We can, and should, have strong opinions that sometimes cause us to raise our voices in anger. But an argument, she believed, should end in disagreement rather than discord. So, when she and Scholem fell out all over again seventeen years later, this time over her argument about the banality of Nazi evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she hoped it wouldn’t affect their friendship. It’s our ability to disagree and reconcile (which isn’t the same as forgiveness) that makes us human, Arendt says. That’s what we should — indeed, must — share if we are to rebuild our broken world.

FURTHER READING

•   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026)
•   The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, which Berkowitz founded and directs
•   Yesterday’s episode featuring Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick, author of AI and Political Freedom, articulating an engineer’s view of politics — listen or watch

•   Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — last week’s episode Berkowitz praises: listen or watch

•   Keri Leigh Merritt on the American dissident Lillian Smith, who, like Hannah Arendt, was An Inconvenient Woman: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Better facts will not fix politics. This is the claim that puts Arendt at odds with almost everyone currently worrying about democracy. We tend to assume that misinformation is the disease and that better education, better journalism and better facts are the cure. Arendt did not believe it. Facts mattered to her enormously, but she insisted they have very little power to tell us what to do: twenty facts about immigration still will not settle immigration, and two people who have both been as well educated as it is possible to be can still disagree about Trump. Berkowitz traces the opposite assumption back to Plato, who watched Athens execute Socrates, concluded the many could not be trusted, and invented the philosopher king to rule in their place.
2. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. Arendt’s distinction here is precise and worldly rather than moral. Forgiveness, as she understood it, is Christian: it implies that you might have done the same, so you should not throw stones. Reconciliation claims nothing of the kind. It says that what you did was wrong, that I would not have done it, that I do not forgive you — and that I am nonetheless willing to love a world with you in it. The condition is that it runs both ways. Heidegger came to her after the war, went down on his knees and turned himself in, and she reconciled. Karl Jaspers never did, and the two of them had their worst row over it in Switzerland in the fifties, ending with each accepting that the other had made a different judgment.
3. And there are people you cannot have in your world. The last two chapters of the book are about the limits, which Berkowitz is at pains to point out are not the same thing as civility. Eichmann is the case that settles it. Arendt’s argument was never that he was a monster; it was that in a normal age he would have been an unremarkable civil servant whom nobody would have heard of. But he did not live in a normal age, and he became a willing and obedient servant of bureaucratic genocide. Her conclusion was not moral outrage but a judgment about what she could live alongside: she could not love a world in which such a person was simply readmitted to it, and so he had to die. The useful corollary, in Berkowitz’s formulation, is that the uncle whose opinions you cannot bear is generally not Eichmann.
4. Totalitarianism is organised loneliness. The line is Arendt’s, and Berkowitz keeps it on the Arendt Center’s website: if totalitarianism is organised loneliness, then the loneliness of modern life means totalitarianism is hardly a phenomenon of the past. His gloss is the darkest stretch of the conversation. Religion has lost most of its public meaning, the family has broken down, and the Western tradition — the banisters we lean on precisely because nobody can think all the time — has shattered. What is left is the atomised individual, and the movements that offer him meaning. Which is why Arendt held that the fundamental political problem of the age is not housing or immigration or even the environment, but meaninglessness, and why anyone hoping to see off fascism has to offer people a life that feels worth living.
5. There is no such thing as a two-week-old friendship. The third element of friendship, after conversation and respect, is simply duration, and Arendt was unsentimental about it. She knew W. H. Auden for twelve years, at one point turning up with Mary McCarthy to clean his notoriously filthy flat, and he proposed marriage; she still said they had met too late in life to become friends. Berkowitz, at fifty-eight, found himself making a list and ringing people up once a month because the friends he had were leaving New York or dying. The argument he draws from it is that friendship takes time nobody has any more, and that if machines are going to take the labour, it is the capacity most worth protecting on the other side.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World is published by Yale University Press. He lives in New York.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.