“We all believe in some goofy shit.” So said Trey Parker and Matt Stone a couple of years ago during their promotional appearances for The Book of Mormon. In other words, if the Latter-day Saints believe in the Angel Moroni, the golden plates, and Utah as the Promised Land—well, shucks, don’t we all accept things that are equally absurd? No, I thought, we don’t. That’s just the kind of brainless, PC split-the-differencism that forbids us from applying our intelligence to people’s belief systems, reducing the whole topic of religion to a bland, tepid, homogenized mush.

But lately I’ve been wondering if maybe they weren’t right. The physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has a sideline in antireligious skepticism, was on Bill Maher earlier this year. Tina Brown was also on, and Maher and Krauss spent several minutes ridiculing her for a cover story she had run in Newsweek. An excerpt of Eben Alexander’s best-selling Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, it was called “Is Heaven Real?” Never mind Alexander’s Gospel-according-to-my-coma, which is bad enough. What really stunned me was a remark that Krauss let drop in arguing his unbelief. “Lots of people have spiritual experiences,” he said. “I have one when I look at the Hubble Space Telescope images and see galaxies that are 10 billion light-years away with civilizations that are long gone.”

Hold on there just a minute, slugger. Civilizations that are long gone? Is there any proof of that? Krauss would no doubt claim that the probability is overwhelming that we aren’t the only civilization in the history of the universe. But we don’t have any way of knowing, and besides, that isn’t what he said. “Civilizations that are long gone” appears to be his own little piece of unexamined belief: comforting, irrational, a reprieve from the idea of a cold, indifferent universe, devoid of intelligence or feeling.

I’m also reminded of Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos. Nagel—an esteemed philosopher and, yes, an atheist—argues that scientific materialism cannot account for the existence of consciousness. Instead he posits a teleological explanation: the universe possesses an innate tendency to move in that direction. The cosmos wants, as it were, to become aware of itself, which it does through creatures like us. As for the idea that consciousness emerged through natural selection, Nagel simply says that it flies in the face of common sense. Well, science is built on the corpse of notions of what counts as common sense. Meanwhile, Nagel makes no attempt to explain how his teleological principle arose or might operate. It sounds a lot to me like God.

Krauss and Nagel’s views are hardly in the same league as the planet Kolob or the Book of Abraham, but they confirm our inability to rid ourselves of mystical beliefs. We just can’t seem to accept the fact that this is all there is. That’s what really needs to be explained.

I have a confession to make. I used to feel a bit of sympathy for Goldman Sachs—a flicker of indulgence, a little soft spot, a gentle tug of identification, even. I know, it’s ridiculous. I’m supposed to be a lefty, and Goldman is the worst of the worst. It’s just because I have a friend who worked there once. For a year or two, whenever I heard the name “Goldman,” I automatically thought of her. Over and over the connection was forged, creating an association that lingered for years: after she left, after the crash, even after CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s infamous remark about “doing God’s work.”

Susan worked at Goldman, went the thought, so it can’t be as bad as the others. Or not the thought—the feeling, the reflex. The thought was, you’re being an idiot. And the most ironic part is that she loathed the place—couldn’t stand the macho competitive bullshit, got out as soon as she had the opportunity. We were once discussing the report that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are psychopaths (a finding, I should say, that’s been debunked). That may be true, she said, but 90 percent of those 10 percent are at Goldman.

So why do I disclose this shameful secret? Because it furnishes some insight into the workings of the oligarchy. If I’m susceptible to the influence of a personal connection within the business community, then what must it be like for politicians, who are virtually marinating in them? You can be as analytic as you want (as our president famously is), but relationships inevitably play a role in shaping your sympathies, and thus your policies. The bankers got a bailout, but homeowners didn’t. Washington is focused on the debt, which merely threatens the bondholders, but not on unemployment, which is doing active harm to workers.

One expects no different from the GOP, which makes a point of branding itself as the party of business. Dick Cheney is close personal friends with the former head of ExxonMobil. Mitt Romney was unable to imagine that there are college graduates who can’t just borrow money from their parents to start a business. That much is no surprise. But the meritocracy is such that Democratic leaders tend to travel in environments that are almost as circumscribed. Of the last 10 major-party presidential nominees (going back to the first Bush), nine went to elite colleges; of the previous 14 (going back to Harry Truman), only five did. The ranks of appointed officials are undoubtedly, if possible, even more homogenized. We talk about the dangers of groupthink in Washington, the fact that our policymakers dwell within a tightly bounded, self-reinforcing intellectual universe. But what about their emotional universe? What about, as we might call it, groupfeel, which leads to the assumptions that the people you know are basically decent and that what’s good for them is good for everybody? New ideas aren’t enough. We also need new sentiments.

In a recent column, David Brooks extolled the virtues of life in the Orthodox world. Communities are strong; existence is ordered; everyday acts are infused with a higher significance; the burdens of modern individualism are lifted in favor of commitment to collective purpose. It all sounds really great, especially the part about the upscale kosher grocery store.

As a refugee from modern Orthodoxy, I have almost too much to say about this, and certainly too much to feel. I won’t pretend to be objective. But I do have a slight advantage over Brooks and other secular Jews who idealize Orthodoxy from a safe distance. (The sentimental celebration of traditional life on the part of those who’d never touch it in a hundred years is not confined to Jews, of course.) I actually know what existence is like within those paragons of harmony.

Brooks quotes a prominent rabbi to the effect that following the thousands of regulations that govern daily life within Orthodoxy is akin to learning the piano. At first it seems like drudgery, “but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs.” I wish that Brooks had pushed a little on the metaphor, because I’ve no idea what those “new songs” are supposed to be. The point of learning the rules, in Orthodoxy, is not to adapt or improvise upon them, the way it is in art. It is to follow them exactly and unstintingly. You don’t “create new songs”; you sing the same ones over and over and over. And they aren’t songs.

Brooks remarks that the laws of Orthodoxy “moderate religious zeal” by “making religion an everyday practical reality.” The statement is astonishingly thoughtless. Never mind the zeal that’s on continuous display, to disastrous effect, in Israel. The Orthodox are no less immune to competitive virtue than other religious (or nonreligious) groups. The laws are the objects of the zeal, which means they have a tendency to grow increasingly strict. As it has responded to the threat of secular modernity, Orthodox Judaism, like other traditional religions, has drifted inexorably rightward. And as in those traditions, the ones who bear the greatest brunt are women. Men compete to heap restrictions on their wives and daughters.

But the greatest limitations are those on the mind. Jews are constitutional lawyers, says another rabbi Brooks refers to, endlessly litigating the divine commandments. Lawyers, yes, but not philosophers. Debate revolves around the minutia of practice; broader questions of meaning and purpose—the ones that naturally arise when people think about the world—are out of bounds. Orthodox Judaism, by and large, is a spiritually undernourished place (one reason, it’s been said, that Jews have been so drawn to Buddhism). I didn’t even understand what spirituality is until many years after I had left that world and discovered my own form in the arts. “Warmth” is not spirituality. Lighting candles is not spirituality. If you ask an Orthodox Jew what the meaning of Passover is, chances are they won’t say freedom, certainly not freedom understood as a general human concept. They’ll say the meaning is that God took us out of Egypt. The meaning is we don’t eat bread. Orthodox Jews, in my experience, tend to have incisive minds but stunted personalities. What’s finally off limits, in the tradition, are major portions of the self.

Gazing at the families at the grocery store, Brooks tells us, “I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.” Why? Because although only a third of New York Jews are Orthodox, over 60 percent of Jewish children are. Soon the Orthodox will predominate. But fertility is not an argument, and smugness is not self-confidence. I have no doubt that Orthodoxy is a source of great joy and comfort for many of its adherents. But modernity happened for good reasons. The kinds of restrictions that Brooks professes so much admiration for (but would scarcely tolerate a single Sabbath of) are exactly what we sought to leave behind. Let’s not kid ourselves about them.

The first annual Breakthrough Prizes were announced in February: 11 awards of $3 million each to researchers in the life sciences. The prize is funded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sergey Brin of Google, and several other Internet zillionaires. In March came the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, $9 million in awards to five cities selected in a national competition. Last year, when California announced that it was going to be closing 15 state parks (that is, for good), one of them, southeast of San Jose, won a temporary reprieve thanks to the generosity of a Silicon Valley businessman.

I think it’s great when rich people do good things with their money. I think it’s appalling that we need them to. To put it bluntly, the money that the Brins and Bloombergs have to shower down on a fortunate few—that money, and a great deal more besides—should be taxed away and allocated by democratic means. The cities wouldn’t be starving, the parks wouldn’t be closing, science funding wouldn’t be falling if the wealthy paid their share.

But the problem goes beyond taxation. Markets allocate resources, but governments structure markets. Never mind that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes. (And as we know, it isn’t even that they don’t pay more than the rest of us. In a lot of cases, they pay a great deal less.) They shouldn’t be in a position to make that kind of money in the first place. You want to tell me that they earned it? Earned is a moral term. How do you measure the share of the money that somebody gets that they actually “earn”? From 1978 to 2011, the average worker’s pay went up by 6 percent. The average compensation of a CEO went up by 727 percent. Do you really believe that executives earned a raise that’s 120 times greater than their workers did?

I don’t believe austerity is unavoidable. We’re still a very wealthy country in the aggregate. The problem is the way that wealth has come to be distributed. The share of national income that accrues to the top one percent, which had stayed at about 10 percent from 1954 to 1980, has risen to about 23 percent. In a $15 trillion economy, the difference represents a premium of almost $2 trillion a year, or more than twice the current annual federal budget deficit. As far as I’m concerned, that money belongs to the rest of us, especially the bottom 80 percent, whether in the form of increased pay or higher public spending. By manipulating the legislative and legal systems—which is to say, by buying them—the rich have simply stolen it.

The outcome is the lottery society that’s with us now. Social mobility has slowed to a crawl. If you work hard and play by the rules, it probably won’t make a damn bit of difference. The only other choice is to wait around for lightning to strike. I put those acts of philanthropic deus ex machina in the same category as Indian casinos, competitive reality shows, and the fantasy of going viral on the Internet. In the documentary Waiting for Superman, where a few kids are chosen at random, out of hundreds, for places in charter schools, the lottery is all too literal. Some lines from Leonard Cohen come to mind: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.” The American Dream is dead. What’s left is American Idol.

Downton Abbey, that orgy of noblesse oblige and ladies’ hats, has revived the commonplaces about America’s love affair with the English aristocracy. But why is it always the same aristocracy? Why always the Edwardians, as it was in Upstairs, Downstairs, in The Forsyte Saga (the book your parents had in the living room), in those Merchant Ivory E. M. Forsters? Why never the Victorians, never the Georgians, never anything (other than the Austen cult) from the wide field of the 19th or 18th or earlier centuries?

Things are a lot more fun with motorcars and decent plumbing, but I don’t think that’s really the heart of it. The Edwardians have history on their side—which is to say, on the other side. Because it’s almost never only the Edwardians. We start in that Indian summer of Empire, but then comes the war, and the crash, and the slump—the whole procession of decline and fall. Upstairs, Downstairs started in 1903 but ended in 1930. Downton Abbey, which is basically Upstairs, Downstairs with better production values, saved time by starting in 1912. Even when the story stops before the guns of August, a sense of what’s to come hangs over the proceedings. The Edwardians possess that priceless dramatic asset: the pathos of dying aristocracies.

Power breeds wealth. Wealth refines itself, in the course of generations, into leisure, into culture. But from leisure it is just a step to idleness, and thence to decadence and weakness and collapse. The slow old civilization is devoured by a vigorous upstart, as Troy gives way to Greece in the Iliad, Carthage in the Aeneid and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra to Rome, Europe to America in Henry James, the upper to the middle class in Downton Abbey. But the culture that has flowered in that age of leisured ascendancy is enormously appealing, not least to the arrivistes: elegant and gracious and refined, an ideal image of freedom and beauty. Hence the pathos of its death.

Hence the self-pity, as well, of which there’s quite a bit in Downton Abbey. Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator (or Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL, to grant him his full name and title), is said to be developing a kind of American counterpart, to be set (speaking of Henry James) in Gilded Age New York. I doubt that it will catch; Americans are much less interested in our own aristocracy, for the simple reason that we don’t like to acknowledge that we had one. But we did, and it also had its mournful decline, albeit somewhat later. I think of The New Yorker in the days of William Shawn, during the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, as the WASPs, in all their prep-school glory, were slowly buried by the multicultural horde—of writers like E. B. White and J. D. Salinger and George W. S. Trow, with their elegiac charm, their glamorous fatalism. So sad, so sad. But then the Jew in me rears up and makes me think, tough shit, you had your chance. The fact is that the threatened fall of Downton Abbey leaves me cold. Step aside, you lazy toffs. Time to give somebody else a turn.

Like any language pedant, I take a grim pleasure in observing the decline of the English tongue. All the old, interesting meanings seem to be dying off. Vagaries now means, vaguely, “vague bits.” Penultimate, of course, means “really ultimate” (to go along with “very unique”). The adjective now is cliché, not clichéd. Petard (as in “hoist with his own,” from Hamlet) is “rope,” not “land mine.” Hoi polloi is the upper crust, rather than its opposite, presumably by assimilation of hoi (Greek for “the”—polloi means “many”) to “high.” Beg the question is a lost cause; the universal definition now is “raises the question,” not “takes the answer for granted.” As for disinterested, that lovely not-quite-synonym for “impartial,” forget it.

But I especially enjoy the errors of the experts—the blunders committed by well-known writers and/or authoritative cultural outlets. Writing in The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, used locus classicus to refer to a person (though one would think that locus would be clear enough). The New York Times has given us probative to mean “representative,” full boar in a column by Maureen Dowd that was not about pigs, and apologist to signify “one who apologizes” (in an editorial, no less). Like everybody else, The New York Review of Books believes that bemused means “amused” (not “confused”) and willy-nilly “higgledy-piggledy” (not “by compulsion”)—the latter appearing in an article by Lorrie Moore. NPR has perpetrated notoriety for “fame,” misnomer for “misconception,” and per se for “so to speak”—the first two now apparently ubiquitous. The Nation has offered bugaboo for “taboo”; Sandra Tsing Loh, in The Atlantic, has used wax as a synonym for “talk” (an increasingly common howler that comes from “wax eloquent”); and Ann Beattie has contributed reticent for “hesitant,” which is well on its way to becoming the standard meaning. I told you I’m a pedant.

There is a lesson here. Idiomatic mistakes, at least the ones that stick, are not produced by the hoi polloi. They happen when people try to sound educated—or to be precise, when educated people try to sound more educated than they actually are. A little learning is a dangerous thing. You hear a word like vagaries or misnomer, you think it sounds impressive, you think you know what it means, and you deploy it the next chance you get. And then somebody who has less cultural capital than you, and who looks to you as an authority, picks it up and uses it in turn.

On the other hand, we all do it. I used to think noblesse oblige just meant “nobility,” for some reason, until I saw the wince on a colleague’s face when I used the phrase that way. Now I look things up if I’m not sure, but the problem is precisely when you are sure, and if I’m sure of anything, it’s that I’m sure more often than I have any right to be. Besides, this is one of ways that the language evolves. There are many words and phrases that I use without a thought that once meant something else, sometimes not so long ago. (Look up nice in the OED, if you want to see the process in especially vigorous action.) Semantic drift is partly the record of educated stupidity, and at a certain point you simply must surrender to it. “The hoi polloi,” for instance. A truer pedant would have blanched at that, since the “the” is redundant. But I’m speaking English, not Greek, and “the” has long been standard. I’ll keep on using it, even if it makes me part of hoi polloi.

I was in Decatur, Georgia, for their big annual book fair Labor Day weekend. Decatur is a suburb of Atlanta, prosperous and educated. Agnes Scott College is there; Emory is right nearby. But the South is the South, and as I am reminded every time I go, the South is memory. At the courthouse in the center of town is a Confederate monument erected in 1908 “by the men and women and children of DeKalb County.” “After forty two years,” it says, “another generation bears witness to the future.” I thought about that “men and women and children,” the resonance of each word, when “people” would have done as well and spared the mason 16 letters—got an image of the men that day of dedication, their womenfolk beside them and their children in front, taking in the lesson. Seven years later the Klan was refounded on top of Stone Mountain, 10 miles away. Cross burnings were regular there until as late as 1970, a couple of years before they finished carving on its side a monumental bas-relief, three acres in extent, of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee.

Around the courthouse are several freestanding panels, put up in the 1950s, that each narrate some minor skirmish or other during the siege of Atlanta. They go on at exorbitant length—some 250 words, in one case—like pages torn from a history book, and each recounts some temporary, partial, piss-ass little victory within the larger debacle. (“Wheeler’s men … drove Sprague’s troops … to the public square where, outflanked, they withdrew with the wagon trains to the North Decatur Road.”) A friend who lives there now, with whom I was discussing it all later, reminded me of Faulkner’s famous lines on Pickett’s Charge, the so-called high-water mark of the Confederacy: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863 … and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time.” My friend also noted the shape of the courthouse monument, an obelisk—made me realize to what extent the South is driven by a sense of permanently wounded masculinity, how much its macho culture constitutes an endless compensation for defeat. It’s like fucking Kosovo, I thought, that battle in the 14th century that the Serbs are still obsessed with. Winners move on; history belongs to the losers.

I thought of all this again because of the gun debate, and it made a different sense of one of its strangest claims: that the Second Amendment is intended to enable citizens to take up arms against the government. It’s ridiculous, of course, on two counts. The part of the amendment no one ever quotes is the second phrase, right after “A well regulated Militia”: “being necessary to the security of a free State.” The security of the state, not its overthrow. Making war against the government? The Constitution calls that treason, the highest crime it contemplates. And then there is the sheer absurdity of thinking you can go against a modern army with your little rifles.

I had always assumed that the gun people, in making the argument, were evoking the Revolution. But now I wonder if some of them, at least—not most, and not outside the South, but some in that heartland of states’-rights true believers—don’t have a different war in mind. Tyranny, rebellion, just resistance to an unjust federal government, small arms against small arms in a fair fight, not to mention, recently, Obama’s insistent invocation of Abraham Lincoln. They are stockpiling guns for a battle they’ve already lost. They are dreaming of a second chance. Save your Confederate dollars, boys, the South shall rise again. We’re going to take the country back. Give a boy a gun and you make him a man. This time. Maybe this time.

Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, by the labor historian Jefferson Cowie (an acquaintance, I should say), chronicles the collapse of the working class, across that dim, grim decade of decline, as both a fact and idea in American life. After its emergence through the 1930s and its zenith during the heyday of postwar unionism, the working class, as a political and cultural presence, fell victim to a mixture of recession in the economy, institutional sclerosis on the part of organized labor, and the politics of white resentment as practiced successively by George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. The Republicans turned to social issues, the Democrats to issues of identity, and that is pretty much where things have stood since then. We’ve gotten used to thinking of ourselves in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and/or our positions on abortion, guns, the flag, and so forth. If Reagan’s victories have given way to Obama’s, that’s largely because, as everyone’s been pointing out, the demographics have inexorably shifted.

The result is that now that we are finally waking up, 40 years later, to inequality, wage stagnation, and stalled social mobility, we lack an adequate vocabulary with which to talk about them. “The 99 percent” is powerful, and valid to an extent, but it isn’t enough. The depredations of the plutocracy are only part of what’s been going wrong. Put it like this: everybody talks about the creative class, the knowledge workers, how you need to be educated, innovative, and entrepreneurial if you want to do well in the new economy. And that may indeed be true. The question is, what becomes of everybody else—the uncreative class, let’s say, the bottom two-thirds? They are just as important as ever—the people who work in retail, health care, agriculture, construction, manufacturing—but they are getting less and less.

Richard Florida himself, the man who coined the term “creative class,” has talked about this recently. His suggestion is to raise wages in the service sector by finding ways to raise productivity—which is what we did, he said, in manufacturing a century ago. But is that all “we” did? At least as crucial is what they did: the workers themselves. They organized. They started unions. They came to think of themselves as the working class, and the power they achieved through the bargaining table and the ballot box was essential to creating the postwar prosperity, whose most remarkable feature may have been how widely it was shared. Productivity is great, but as the last few decades have demonstrated, it isn’t necessarily distributed fairly.

So what now? I no longer believe in a union revival, if only because the government will never let it happen. But there is a large mass of people in this country between the abjectly poor and the comfortably upper-middle-class, and we all seem to be at a loss as to how to think about them. Are they middle class? Working class? Working poor? Obama talks about “strengthening the middle class,” but he also talks about “building ladders into the middle class”—an index of the confusion. The old white working class, the Nixonian Silent Majority that became the Reagan Democrats—stereotypically ethnic, Catholic, blue-collar, and unionized—has more or less ceased to exist. The rump of the white working class, concentrated in the South, has become the Republican base, but it should be obvious they constitute an ever-decreasing share not only of the country, but of the working class itself. Workers now are women, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, but as long as we continue to think of them, as long as they continue to think of themselves, in those terms alone, they will never be able to mobilize as a coherent political force. The party that creates that new vocabulary, that finds a way to talk about the working class again, may inherit the future. Since one of the parties is finally doing very well with the politics of identity and the other fears for its survival, it just might someday be the GOP.

We were coming back from Crater Lake National Park, heading home to Portland after three nights in a cabin in the mountains, and we planned to stop in Eugene to get ourselves a nice meal. We had decided to wing it. Instead of asking around or doing research online—we had never been there before—we were just going to drive into town and find our way to a good place. But the closer we got, the more preposterous the plan began to seem. Eugene has over 150,000 people; did we really think that we could just show up and figure it out on the spot? The civilized lunch that we’d been salivating over looked more and more like it was going to end up being a cheeseburger.

Once we got off the highway, we followed the signs for downtown: past auto dealers, strip malls, midrange motels, fast food joints. Nothing, so far. The colors were still too loud, the traffic too fast. Finally it looked like we were getting close. The blocks grew shorter; the streets got narrower; trees and people began to accumulate on the sidewalks. A café with some tables outside, a guy with a guitar: we were clearly in the zone. But how far did it go, and in which direction? Could we really find the place—the right place? It looked like we would have to settle for merely okay.

We saw a sandwich board for an organic café around the corner and figured, with a heavy heart, that that would have to do: alfalfa sprouts and avocado, hopefully some decent bread, that sort of thing. We took a quick right into an alley behind an old brick building—there, that was it. But wait. Two doors down, a wine store with some bottles of olive oil in the window. He’ll know, we thought—the guy who runs the place. He’ll know it all. He’s going to be our native guide. We went in—it was a sleepy summer afternoon; the store was empty—and laid our troubles at his feet. Oh yes, he said, there’s a bunch of really good places. This one, and that one, and this other one, but my favorite place, he said, is a French bistro a couple of blocks away. Stop right there, we said; that’s the one for us.

And a very good meal it was, exactly what we’d had in mind. Potato-leek soup, grilled fava beans, pasta carbonara, a couple of glasses of wine, and the sweet taste of victory. We had stalked our food through the thickets of the American social system, and by God, we had bagged it. I thought about an Amazonian tribe I read about a couple of years ago. So attuned are they to their surroundings that a man can walk into the jungle naked and empty-handed and emerge a few hours later with baskets of fruit and game. Apparently, we were equally well-adapted to our niche, even if we hadn’t realized we have a niche. Drop us in a small city, and we can find our way to a bistro in under half an hour. The thought is equally flattering and disturbing. Turn us loose in a red state, and we’d probably starve.

Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. It will be interesting to see, if we note the day at all, what kinds of justifications the war’s apologists come up with now. For a remarkable thing about this adventure is that not even its proponents have been able to agree about its purpose—not before, during, or after.

We were going in because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We were going in because he had links to Al Qaeda. But for many in or near the Bush administration, a grander purpose was afoot: to remake the Middle East in America’s image (and make it safe for Israel). Everybody wants to go to Baghdad, the saying went; real men want to go to Damascus and Tehran.

Others suspected different motives. Maureen Dowd pushed the Oedipal line: Bush was finishing the job his father had started. Geostrategists saw the issue in terms of oil. Forget about democracy, one of them said, we’re going to end up installing another strongman, another Saddam, only this time he’ll be our Saddam. Never mind the cynicism there—Saddam was our Saddam, until he got his own ideas.

Other things were going on, as well, I think, mainly to do (“real men”) with the crisis of national masculinity. Vietnam had left us feeling weak. The antidote became a series of little wars, whenever we were getting the vapors again, against absurdly inferior opponents. Margaret Thatcher showed the way with the Falklands Campaign in 1982. Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, the following year, two days after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. Bush I, who had a “wimp” image to deal with, gave us Panama in 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991. The spectacles were tailored to the new age of media saturation, though it might have given pause that each was bigger than the last. Like an addict, we kept needing to increase the dose.

In any case, even the architects of the Iraq War were unable to agree upon a motive. Once the idea was floated (literally the day after 9/11), it seems to have become a policy upon which everyone was able to project their own agenda. After it became clear that no WMDs would be found, the story changed again. We were there as liberators, come to free the Iraqi people. The world was better off without Saddam; you wouldn’t want to have him back in Baghdad, would you?

Actually, I would. More than 4,000 American service members died in Iraq. Tens of thousands were wounded. Hundreds of thousands suffered psychological damage. The war will end up costing well over $3 trillion by the time the bills are finished being paid, decades in the future. If we could undo all that, I’d throw Saddam a tickertape parade. As for the Iraqis, maybe they are better off and maybe they are not, but since when is it a goal of American policy to rescue foreign nationals from their own governments? Only when it provides an excuse for something we want to do anyway. If we’re really so concerned about other people, why don’t we invade Zimbabwe?

Now that the troops are coming home, we’re onto a new dodge. Not the one about the Arab Spring—I’m not sure even Condoleezza Rice believes that. No, something still more obscene. “The New Greatest Generation,” Time proclaimed from its cover a couple of years ago, a phrase that’s since been echoed by Obama. The original term was bad enough, as a piece of sentimentality. At least that generation really was a generation, in the sense that everybody sacrificed. Now the idea seems to be that for the lucky 1 percent who served, Iraq was actually a killer job training program. The skills! The work ethic! The leadership abilities! See, it really was all for the best. Forget about the PTSD, the substance abuse, the suicide—the broken bodies, lives, and families. The war began as a massive act of self-delusion, and it is petering out in exactly the same way.

There are those words that everybody loves, the ones that come from other languages and express concepts that seem at once uniquely characteristic of their culture of origin and universally relevant. The most celebrated, these days, is schadenfreude, but think of some others we’ve assimilated relatively recently: chic, macho, karma. The traffic flows in the other direction, as well. The most successful word in history, it’s said, is okay, an index of the reach of both American power and American sensibility.

I’d like to nominate another term for cross-cultural adoption: the Yiddish word naches. It means “delight,” but it’s used specifically to name the pride and pleasure that parents receive from the achievements of their offspring. “Your son’s a doctor? And he went to Harvard, no less? What naches!” (The word is pronounced with a fricative sound, as in the German nacht, not the English “ch.” The second syllable is “iss.”) The verb that goes with naches is shep, “scoop.” You scoop naches—like a big bowl of ice cream, or maybe chicken soup. And once you’ve had enough, you kvell: beam, glow, gloat. “Your daughter married a doctor? And he went to Harvard, no less? You must be kvelling!”

Let’s just say the word is rather fraught for me. For Jewish parents, naches is the ultimate reward. For Jewish children—well, it’s more like the ultimate punishment, and it reminds me of the one the gods inflicted on a certain disobedient mortal. You push the boulder up the hill, but it never stays put for long. “You went to Harvard? You became a doctor? You married a nice Jewish girl? Nu, so where are the children? I’m not getting any younger, you know.” For the Jewish child, it’s clear from an early age that your job in life is to make yourself into a naches machine. When you fail, another Jewish word comes into play: guilt. Naches-expectation lodges somewhere in your chest. As Saul Bellow said in a different connection, “Ladies, I find it very hard to breathe.”

So why am I recommending the word to my gentile brethren? Because we’re all Jews now, in that respect. There are no hereditary places anymore. Meritocracy decrees that everybody must achieve, achieve, achieve. Status derives from the college you attend and the other institutions to which you are able to attach yourself, then later, the ones your children do. (When I got a job at Yale, my father practically printed up cards to hand out at shul.) Naches-mongering is what they do in Greenwich now, as well, and on Park Avenue and Beacon Hill, not to mention every upscale neighborhood or suburb in the country, the West, the world.

I asked a couple of East Asian friends whether there is an analogous word in Chinese or Korean. They both said no; the operative concept there is filial piety, a bedrock Confucian virtue. We speculated about this. Filial piety is certainly a value in Jewish culture—it’s the Fifth Commandment, after all—and the notion of parental pride, my Korean friend remarked, is “almost too deep a concept to even be reflected in language,” and yet there is that difference in relative emphasis. It seems to come down to anxiety. East Asian parents do not typically worry that the child will fail to do his duty. But naches is forever shadowed by the fear of its absence. Filial rebellion and parental disappointment are major themes in the Jewish imagination, often figured (think of the Golden Calf) through the vexed relationship between the Children of Israel and God Our Father. These kids—such tzuris!

I’ve written several posts recently (this one, this one, and this one) about the difference between science and the humanities. Rub those terms together, and you inevitably engender a third: C. P. Snow’s famous notion of the “two cultures,” first articulated in 1959 and a commonplace of educated discourse ever since. Literary culture on the one hand, and scientific culture on the other, Snow lamented, are failing to communicate. A scientifically trained civil servant who also wrote novels (rather bad ones, apparently), Snow left no doubt as to who was to blame: “Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.” A scientist would be ashamed to admit that he hadn’t read Shakespeare, but where’s the humanist who can explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

The breasts have been abeating ever since. If only humanists weren’t so obtuse! If only we could “bridge the two cultures”! The trouble with that noble desideratum is that no one’s ever known what it means, least of all Snow. Never mind the objections raised by F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, two of the leading literary critics of Snow’s day. There aren’t two cultures, Leavis pointed out; there are many—not only beside and between science and the humanities (most notably that habitually slighted tertium quid, the social sciences), but within each one, as well. As for that alleged literary culture, Snow seems to have meant traditional upper-class English culture—the culture of people who might have studied literature at Oxford or Cambridge but were hardly in the business of creating it. The latter, Trilling notes in response to Snow’s charge that the great English writers failed to adequately respond to the Industrial Revolution, could hardly have been more aware of the changes that science had brought to society (think of Blake or Dickens or H. G. Wells), an observation that can be extended to the writers of our own day.

No, the biggest problem with Snow—the problem he bequeathed to all who’ve taken up his cry—is that he doesn’t have the vaguest idea what “bridging” or “bringing together” the two cultures would actually entail. His essay contains not a single solid suggestion—not even a liquid or gaseous suggestion—as to how he thinks contemporary science should, as he puts it, “be assimilated” into art. As for higher education, a major part of his concern, his famous jibe about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is not the beginning of a program; it is the whole of it. But why should humanists be taught the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (It’s the one that talks about entropy, by the way.) To ingest a particle of “cultural literacy” in the pointless, superficial, E. D. Hirsch sort of fashion? Anyone who sees that as something worth spending one’s time on is not a person to whom I would entrust the “Shakespeare” part of education, either.

The idea of “bridging the two cultures” is a solution in search of a problem. They don’t need to be bridged. They’re both doing fine on their own, because they each do very different things. But “bridging the two cultures” is not really an idea at all. It’s a feeling, and the only reason Snow’s formulation has persisted is that the feeling has. Actually, it’s two feelings: the anxiety on the part of humanists and artists that science has rendered them irrelevant, and the smugness on the part of technologists that the arts and humanities ought to shut up and let them get on with the business of running the world. Both are inane, and both reflect misguided notions about the roles of the respective disciplines. We don’t need to solve the “problem” of the two cultures; we need to stop talking about it.

Once more into the food wars. I’ve written recently about the way that food has displaced art as the content of culture, and why, nevertheless, it isn’t art. The second half of that elicited a little blowback, to say the least, and I don’t intend to continue to argue the point. There isn’t any term, apparently, that the proponents of food-as-art aren’t willing to deform in order to defend their position: “idea,” “story,” “symbol,” “performance,” “representation,” “meaning.” People clearly take this food stuff very personally, invest a huge amount of feeling in it, which only strengthens my conviction that it has become a kind of new religion. People believe in food, the way they used to believe in art. The question is why.

The answer may have as much to do with what has happened to art as with what has happened to food. In the old, Romantic dispensation, art was understood to be salvific. “The priest departs,” said Whitman, “the divine literatus comes.” Art took you from the dark and brought you into the light. Its purpose was transcendental; its effect, transfigurational. But who believes that anymore? First high culture was dethroned by a popular art that asserted equally exalted claims—think Dylan or the Beatles—then that itself became so commercialized, so commodified, that it lost its position, as well.

Now we’re on to something new. Art has become a kind of DIY affair that’s felt to be in anybody’s reach. Think of the number of people who fancy themselves to be writers or visual artists in these days of technologically assisted narcissism—all those would-be novelists and memoirists, those photographers and videographers. How easy it is to reach an audience now, or to think you’re reaching one. How easy to receive approval for your work, since friends will never tell you what they really believe. And in the case of the visual arts, with all the new technology, how easy to create a beautiful image. I’m reminded of something I heard a music teacher say about electric guitars: that he tries to keep his students away from them until they know how to play, because they make it too easy to produce a sound, to feel as if you’re making music. The new digital cameras are the electric guitars of the visual media; they give you the impression that this art thing really is no sweat.

Whereas food is not and almost certainly never will be easy. Technology can help—those blenders and slicers and so forth—but only up to a point. A decent cook can do a decent job, but great achievement still necessitates great skill. Food is molecules, not bits—which also means it can’t be digitally copied, shared, pirated, or sent across the Web. And that may be the secret of its status now. The more virtual our experience becomes, the more we value the tangible, the sensual, and the immediate. Food is very intimate; we put it in our bodies. It creates and affirms our intimacy with others. Not for nothing do families gather around the table, dates begin with dinner, and religions use food as the symbol of communion.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benjamin famously argued, works of art have lost their aura of the sacred, their irreducible uniqueness and presence. One can only imagine what he would have said about the age of electronic reproduction. Forget about posters or vinyl or film; now we can be anywhere, to look or listen. But food is always unique. You have to be there, have to be present, have to be in contact with the thing itself. You have, in other words, to be here now. If the purpose of religion is to bring us into relationship with reality, perhaps it’s no surprise that food is our religion today.

I will say only this to its acolytes and votaries. Religions don’t stay innocent for long. Churches, dogmas, heresies, schisms, senescence: you have all this to look forward to.

More than half a century ago, two dystopian satires posed, in strikingly similar terms, a central problem of our own time. Player Piano (1952), Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, and The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), by the English socialist Michael Young, envisioned futures where the mass of people had been made superfluous by automation. Both described societies ruled by a cadre of highly trained (and highly paid) technocrats, while everybody else lived boring, meager, meaningless lives of quiet desperation. I needn’t stress the renewed relevance of these visions. But Vonnegut and Young were writing during the rise of the welfare state. They assumed the fruits of automation would be distributed to all, however unevenly and with whatever cost in dignity. They imagined people feeling useless, but they didn’t imagine them starving.

But that’s the prospect that we face today. It’s fine to talk about the virtues of creative destruction, but from now on we are likely to see a lot more destruction than creation, at least when it comes to jobs. Go to a postindustrial city like Detroit or Camden, N.J., if you want to know what the social consequences look like. As for the political consequences, we’re already seeing them. Those “aging white men” people were so keen to sneer at after the election have not been rendered obsolete in cultural terms alone. The Republican base is concentrated in regions and demographics that the new economy has left behind. Our technocratic president was right: they cling bitterly to guns and religion—the illusion of power, the old certainties—because they have so little else. Xenophobia and vigilantism, conspiracy theories and demagogues: this is how people are apt to respond when they feel that they’ve been left behind by history.

So what then? Are people to be cast aside like worn-out pieces of machinery? Will we continue to allow the gains in productivity that automation is enabling to go exclusively to the few? The welfare state reproduces on a societal scale the reciprocal obligations of feudalism, the idea that we have a duty to take care of one another. The dilemma of automation, of human beings made redundant by machines, comes down to Vonnegut’s question: What are people for?

But Vonnegut and Young could not foresee another looming crisis: resource depletion. We can’t sustain a system that is predicated, as capitalism is, on endless expansion. But do we have to? A hundred years ago, even 50 years ago, economic growth was still a moral issue. But now, in the developed world, at least, it’s hard to say that we really need more, as opposed to sharing what we have more equitably. In any case, it looks as if we won’t be able to have much more, not for much longer.

So our long-term survival depends on overthrowing two of the main pillars of our economic morality: that how much you get should be proportional to how much you work, and that a growing GDP is the ultimate measure of social health. Whether we can free ourselves of these convictions is a different question.

I suggested “upper middle brow” not long ago as a name for the level of cultural production that embodies the sensibility of the so-called “creative class,” or as David Brooks memorably dubbed them, the Bobos, bourgeois bohemians. Think Stewart/Colbert, The New Yorker, a lot of HBO and NPR and indie/Sundance-type movies, etc. I said that while there is a lot to recommend such smart and stylish work, it fails to rise above a certain level because it stays within the bounds of what its audience already believes. The problem is encoded in Brooks’s formulation: How do you make art that transgresses the assumptions of people who think that everything they do is transgressive? How do you create an avant-garde if everybody sees themselves as a rebel? How do you dissent when dissent is already commodified?

Brooks traces the roots of Boboism to the 1960s—the very decade, as Louis Menand has pointed out, when the old Masscult/Midcult/High Culture distinctions were being overrun in Pop art, rock ’n’ roll, and the New Hollywood. The culture of the ’60s really was an avant-garde, and not only for its formal innovations or its violation of stylistic decorum, but because it embodied the moral revolt of the time: the sexual rebellion, the contempt for institutional authority, the insurgencies of socially marginal groups.

But all that’s long since ossified by now. The baby boomers have become the Establishment; their morality has become the mainstream; and the sensibility of ’60s art has become the upper middle brow, the house style of the upper middle class. Irony is taken for granted. Formal innovation is expected. A mixture of aesthetic registers is de rigueur. Ridicule is aimed at what’s left of the cultural enemy. Nothing shocks, and nothing is intended to shock. Beneath the gestures of transgression there exists a moral consensus that is every bit as unexamined, as immobile, and as self-congratulatory as that which girded the ruling class the Bobos displaced. Somehow, the rebels of half a century ago have grown up to become the new Victorians. There’s a right way now to eat, vote, laugh, think.

Which means it really shouldn’t be that difficult to make an avant-garde. Here are some of the pieties that it might undertake to profane. That people are basically good. That freedom is the chief ingredient of happiness. That we control our fates. That society is slowly getting better. That we are more virtuous than those who came before us. That the universe coheres in a mystical whole. That it all works out in the end. In short, the whole gospel of self-improvement, progressive politics, ethical hygiene, and pantheistic spirituality. The upper middle brow is as committed to the happy ending as is Hollywood. Tragedy is inadmissible: the recognition that loss is loss and cannot be recuperated, that most people’s lives end in failure and emptiness, that the world is never going to be a happy place, that the universe doesn’t love us.

A new avant-garde would be not only experimental, but difficult. The upper middle brow is always inventive, but it is never difficult. Difficulty tells us there is something that we do not know, something that evades our mental structures. Instead of cutting the world to our measure—rendering it manageable, comfortable, and familiar, as the upper middle brow is meant to do—difficulty makes us recognize the narrowness of our experience, here on our little island of middle-class American normalcy. It starts with the truth and seeks to bring us to it, not the other way around. It isn’t fun, it isn’t soothing, and it isn’t marketable. It is only art.