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My favorite essays feel like strange chemical reactions: Their materials combine into something new and combustible. French philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling,” which examines the “development of monstrous masks” in (fake) professional wrestling, certainly fits this category. Likewise article in The Atlantic this weekwhere staff writer Gal Beckerman invokes Barthes’s essay to explain the symbolic significance of UFC 250, the lavish display of blood sport that Donald Trump hosted in front of the White House on Sunday. As Beckerman’s editor, I like the way he presents information through the writings of philosophers, making the clear case that they are less controversial—and more relevant—than some readers might think. So I decided to ask him to suggest some more thinkers who can shed some light on the confusing age we live in.
First, here are four recent stories from AtlanticBook Section:
Boris Kachka: Has the UFC fight brought you back to writers other than Barthes?
Gal Beckerman: Yes. Philosophers, even those who offer dense theories, have asked the kinds of big questions that can help us understand the two sweaty, bloody men on the White House lawn. Another book that came to mind at the end of last week was by Elias Canetti Crowd and Power, from 1960-especially when I took pictures of tens of thousands of men watching the fight from the screens installed in the Ellipse. Canetti saw the urge to join the crowd as part of the great human desire to erase the boundaries of the individual, to lose oneself and find a kind of emotional release, a sense of power, which comes with feelings often greater than your own individuality.
Kachka: So Barthes analyzes the spectacle, and Canetti gets into the viewer’s head. What? Who helps you understand the other forces behind the rise of Trump? What about, say, questioning vaccines?
Beckerman: Bruno Latour, who died in 2022, was a sociologist of science who argued that what we think of as scientific truth is actually shaped through many personal forces—such as funding and politics and personality. He meant to elevate the idea of science as this pure process, and instead to understand it as entirely humanistic. I’m not sure he expected Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but everyone can now understand Latour’s main point, which is that individuals influence the direction science takes and the kinds of truths it produces. One of his most accessible and important books is French Pasteurizationwhich examines Louis Pasteur’s achievements in making germs the main focus of public health in the 19th century—not as a scientific victory as the result of a subtle war, built on cooperation with various interest groups.
Kachka: Of course that revealed a time when many people seemed to believe that science was infallible. But specialization is down—and more people are getting their information from advertisers and influencers. Who could help us understand this change?
Beckerman: The change I am interested in is profound: the coming end of a very long historical period in which written culture has dominated the Western world. AI takes this a step further, because many of the fundamentals of human reasoning feel threatened by it. The best comparison we have with this type of seismic change is the opposite—a long time ago left in oral culture—and the best book I know of on this topic is Walter J. Ong’s 1982 work Speaking and Reading. It is a fascinating look at how the new technology of writing fundamentally reshaped human consciousness, moving us into more abstract and analytical ways but also eroding the great capacity humans had for memorizing and visualizing information. I don’t know what these new changes will do to our brains, but Ong’s work suggests that we may be moving towards a new experience of being human.
Kachka: Post-literacy and AI—now we’re getting into big ideas. What one author can give us an authentic galactic perspective on our brave new world?
Beckerman: I will take any chance to bring it Hannah Arendt in the chat. Although he is best remembered as a philosopher who criticized totalitarianism, he also wrote extensively on the paradox of modernity. He tried to explain what it was like to abandon traditional ways of life—religious, political, cultural—without yet having new models to replace them. On this topic, I would recommend his 1961 collection of essays, Between the Past and the future. He was looking at the meaning of living in that confusing time, from the perspective of education, power, freedom, culture, truth and politics. This should ring a bell. Such tasks do not have the clear and obvious answers of self-help books, but they give us something to think about andsomething we can most hope for as we blaze our way into the future.
The Theory That Explains Trump’s UFC Fight
Written by Gal Beckerman
By staging an “excessive demonstration” on the White House lawn, the president expressed the violent essence of his worldview.
What to Read
The dawnby Octavia E. Butler
Salvation and exploitation go hand in hand in this story by one of the all-time greats of science fiction. The dawnthe main character, Lilith, wakes up in the care of an alien species long after Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war. These beings, the Oankali, appear to be giants, but Lilith soon learns that they are not selfish; they function by biologically linking their genes with those of other taxa. Lilith is charged with preparing other awakened humans to help repopulate the revived Earth, but she knows that if she accepts and succeeds, future generations of her species will be very different from her. Hard and unyielding, The dawn explores thorny issues involving consent and power; more powerfully, the novel contemplates the true meaning of loving another being. – Alexandra Oliva
From our list: Six books that take you to space
It will be out next week
📚 Being George: The Invention of George Sandand Fiona Sampson
📚 Hot Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and the Secret History of Environmental Destructionby Matthew Wolfe
📚 Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trumpby Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Your weekend Read
Finally, an action film about Washington’s French and Indian War years
By James Parker
“Where shall we look for Washington, the greatest of men,” asked Parson Weems in 1800, “but in America—that great continent, which, rising from beneath the frozen pillar, stretches far to the south? Weems, Washington’s first biographer, was a brilliant publicist—but he may not even have known quite what an American he was when he wrote that line. A small country, it is implied—small geographically, and small soul—could not To carry the greatness of this man’s truck would be cracked or broken. Only America would be big enough.
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