Rehabilitating Fate

My daughter was born in the backseat of our car three weeks ago. Some thirty minutes later, “Rehabilitating Fate” was published after a lengthy process of writing and revision. Tending to a healthy, fast-growing newborn has prevented me from writing much since then, but I want to share the news with you all anyhow.

The essay starts with de Tocqueville surveying the wreckage of the aristocratic order in the early 1800s:

“Each feels the ill, but no one has the courage and energy needed to seek something better . . . we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and having stopped complacently amid the debris of the former edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.”

I continue:

As Teslas glide past tent cities in Los Angeles, the West still stands paralyzed at the end of history…Like all who came before us, we too are bound; but unlike our ancestors, we cannot see our chains. To find them we must reckon with the myth that built the modern world.

Click here to read the piece in full