When society stops knowing how to know
https://blog.apaonline.org/2026/05/29/when-society-stops-knowing-how-to-know/
EXCERPTS: Over the past two decades, we have watched the pillars of public knowledge gradually weaken. John Stuart Mill is probably turning in his grave at this. From social media platforms creating echo chambers and filter bubbles to the flood of user-generated content drowning out expertise to online hostility and ideological policing driving censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), misinformation and disinformation abound. The epistemic principles that sit at the heart of Mill’s influential account of truth-seeking through public reasoning-the free flow of ideas, freedom from the “tyranny of the majority,” and the need for expert voices to rise to the forefront amidst the “noise and clamour of democracy”-are all under significant strain.
We have known about these epistemic “pathologies” for some time now, arising from the modern digital information environment. I am not usually someone who finds herself existentially alarmed by these kinds of technological harms [...] but a recent and otherwise unremarkable event nevertheless triggered a small epistemic panic in my own head. I woke up one morning to find myself paywalled out of the BBC News app... (
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Transcendence
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-stretch-of-a-soul/
EXCERPT: The language here feels almost therapeutic: personal recognition elevated as transcendence. But Carlisle is trying to suggest more than just a kind of expanded selflessness or epiphany. This recognition isn’t a surrender to something larger than individual interests. The experience of the moral and imaginative movement she describes points to an actual connection to a larger reality, including to Spinoza’s God. It involves expanded awareness, yes, but that comes through human interactions, through encounters with other lives that expand our sense that our own life is part of an interdependent cosmos: “Spinoza’s metaphysics suggest that we transcend our habitually circumscribed selves through our interconnectedness with other beings, which can flow into us and change our nature, and also through our connection to God.
These movements are a transcendence without dualism, without separation. They are possible precisely because we are all already in God.” On its own, this Spinozist understanding of transcendence feels frankly like a leap that doesn’t acknowledge it’s a leap. But Carlisle’s project is more interesting and novel than just this reframing of Spinoza and this criticism of dualism. [...] Not everyone is moved by the shared ecstasy of a rock concert or a religious rite. Sheer mad joy on its own is not superior to persistent love or quiet apprehension. And even in these different registers, Carlisle and Critchley and Smith share the belief that human fullness involves dependence on something outside the ego... (
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The century of Eric Hobsbawm
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-century-of-eric-hobsbawm/
EXCERPTS:
Hobsbawm was never a heretic, neither a Jewish nor a communist one. Born to an assimilated Jewish family, he was not subject to the constraints of Jewish orthodoxy. His Marxism-a product of his political experience in Berlin during the final years of the Weimar Republic-deeply shaped his entire life as an existential habitus. He belonged to the Communist Party Historians’ Group at Cambridge-created by a few talented young scholars such as Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and E.P. Thompson-and distinguished himself as one of its most Stalinist members.
In 1939, he coauthored a pamphlet with Raymond Williams, who had also been at Cambridge, in defense of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; in the early 1950s, he was “tremendously impressed” by Stalin’s Short Course (the official history of the Russian Communist Party), which he held to be a “beautiful, marvellous piece of popularisation,” particularly remarkable for its chapter on “dialectical and historical materialism.”
In 1956, he signed a petition denouncing the Soviet invasion of Budapest, but-unlike many other intellectuals, including most of his own friends-he did not break with the party. He wrote a letter to the party newspaper
Daily Worker, in which he characterized this military occupation as a “tragic necessity,” expressing the hope that it would be quickly followed by a withdrawal. A year later, along with the British cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Ralph Samuel, he participated in the creation of the journal
Universities and Left Review, but he later kept his distance from
New Left Review.
Nor was Hobsbawm a heretic in the academic world. [...] On the one hand, he was a Marxist historian, though certainly not a Stalinist; on the other, his dialectical skillfulness was of a very singular nature. Far from feeling torn, he appeared comfortable within both the Stalinist Communist Party and the British academic milieu, at a time when the latter was refractory, not to say hostile, toward Marxism... (
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