The allure of Eden on Earth
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-allure-of-eden-on-earth/
EXCERPT: But people in revolutionary groups did do all those things, and more. A few recent releases and reissues have me thinking about this mythologized period of revolution, and the hangovers that followed. Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, published this January, documents the various leftist groups that embraced violent resistance in the hopes of bringing on revolution. Many of the men and women who waged armed combat were true believers in socialism and the Palestinian cause, but some just got pulled in by charismatic leaders like Carlos the Jackal and Andreas Baader, and others were just enchanted by the violence and spectacle of it all, eager for an opportunity to blow up a shop or take a plane full of people hostage.
Principled people like Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist who abandoned her children and husband to join the Red Army Faction and fight for revolution, were outnumbered by the likes of her collaborator Baader, whom Burke describes as “spoiled, arrogant, and lazy.” Baader took credit for other people’s work, quoted Marxist rhetoric to get laid, and waged campaigns of humiliation and manipulation on fellow members of the group. Other groups were similarly run into the ground, starting off fighting for “revolution”—vaguely defined—and ending up in drug trafficking or assassination-for-hire schemes... (
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AI: a very human tragedy
https://unherd.com/2026/09/ai-a-very-human-tragedy/?edition=us
EXCERPTS: The King has had a word with the giants of the AI industry, so one assumes that all is now well and the Apocalypse has been called off for lack of support. Surely these CEOs wouldn’t turn a deaf ear to a bit of good old English common sense. They have flown back to the States in their private jets with the slogan “technology in the service of humanity” engraved on their hearts, and the rest of us, giddy with relief, can resume our search for a villa in Portugal for our twilight years.
[...] The word “Doomsday” suggests a punctual event, whereas one of the problems with alerting the public to the urgency of climate change is that it’s a gradual process. And we don’t tend to think of catastrophes as gradual. AI, however, is a different affair. There may come a world-shaking moment when a squad of terrifyingly brainy robots actually takes over, swarming our garden paths and emitting lethal rays, just as there may come a point in time when weapons of mass destruction are unleashed. Well, actually slightly more than a moment. It’s been estimated that such warfare could wipe out humanity in 17 minutes, time enough to try on a number of tweed suits, take the dog for a disappointingly brief walk or tell the boss what a contemptible little creep he is. The Apocalypse has traditionally been thought of as a dramatic event, an irruption of the timeless into time; in fact, some years ago, an American evangelical TV station drew up plans to broadcast Christ’s Second Coming, with cameras placed strategically at the poles and the Equator. It’s hard to know who would have taken out ads... (
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Revisiting Chekhov’s literary prescriptions for our divided times.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/anton-chekhovs-antidotes-prescriptions-age-unrest-yuri-corrigan/
EXCERPTS: “I AM A COMMUNIST and Rastignac,” Bernard Kouchner, the legendary French doctor, wrote at the ripe age of 23, referring to the young hero burning with idealism and ambition in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. A starry-eyed left-winger, Kouchner threw himself into the revolutionary circles of the 1960s student movement.
[...] Though far removed from Kouchner in space and time, the 19th-century Russian writer Anton Chekhov charted a parallel intellectual trajectory and arrived at similar conclusions, as Yuri Corrigan’s dazzling new book,
Chekhov’s Antidotes: Prescriptions for an Age of Unrest, shows. ... Like Kouchner in Nigeria, Chekhov discovered there a soul-crushing world of human want and decay.
He, too, thought that the intellectuals of his day—those heatedly debating the future of Russia, liberal radicals with a penchant for terrorism on one side and conservative imperialists flirting with religious fanaticism on the other—had vanishingly little to offer ordinary people, the true victims of Russia’s culture wars.
[...] Chekhov, Corrigan argues, returned from Sakhalin as a moral philosopher—a literary doctor who could diagnose and help heal the social pathologies of his troubled times. ... Indeed, like Kouchner, Chekhov was not an armchair intellectual: he built schools, donated books to provincial libraries, ran health clinics, and organized famine relief.
Chekhov believed in the transformational power of tiny acts of compassion divested of ideological abstraction and grand ambition. Far from being purveyors of gloom, irresolution, or misguided do-goodism, both Chekhov and Kouchner—these physicians turned philosophers—aspired to ameliorate the worst conditions of modern life without aspiring for utopian perfection, which always seemed to backslide into catastrophe... (
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