Don’t we need another one of those today? Some brave doula to help the world-to-come through the birth canal and to offer it an ethical path? I keep wondering: What kind of new moral being—good or bad—might be born in our time? One way to understand the worst actions and attitudes of Donald Trump is to recognize that he is auditioning with a cold cynicism for just this kind of role. Not only does he lie without shame, dole out violence as a way to keep power and entertain a perverse crowd, maintain an unstinting disdain for the poor and the weak and the lonely, and manifest sheer glee at the sight of other strongmen getting their way—but, just as ominously, he pretty brazenly recommends these behaviors to the rest of us. He lights the bomb of hatred and contempt, then looks out at us, smiling, as the flame eats the cord.
In January, during his second Inauguration, an event I keep trying to forget, he grimaced and mugged constantly—smirked while taking the oath, making po-faced ad-libs when talking disingenuously about God. He wanted, I think, to be seen taking serious things lightly, making a joke of rituals and sensibilities that he’s glad to see fading away. What he presents, more than thin cultural and economic promises, is a bleak anthropology: The time of restraint and fair dealing and good will is over, kid!, he always seems to be saying, like a brutish “realist” out of a mid-century novel. Get yours or get left behind. He’s surveyed the scene and sees a world finally bending itself in his inhumane direction. He wants the Nobel Peace Prize because he’d like to redefine peace.
In April, upon the death of one of Trump’s most steadfast and charismatic foils, Pope Francis, a new Pontiff was elected in Rome. Leo XIV, an Augustinian priest named Robert Francis Prevost, was raised in Chicago and spent much of his ministry in Peru—one of las Casas’s intellectual battlefields in his campaign against the conquest. Prevost, a surprise to much of the Pope-watching public, stepped out onto the loggia wearing around his neck the ornate, blood-red papal stole that his predecessor had studiously eschewed, and, on his face, a modest smile. He had given himself a promising name. In 1891, Leo XIII—a fellow who used to go by Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, from Italy, where they used to make Popes—wrote a famous encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or “Of the New Things.” The letter was a response to the twinned hastenings of capitalism and industrial power, aimed at maintaining the dignity of workers in a time of uncertainty and upheaval.
The new Leo was entering the fray at a similar juncture, and, early in his papacy, he began to admit his anxiety over the development of artificial intelligence. In an address last May, with an understatement that has quickly become his signature, he spoke about the technology, predicting that it would “pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” He has continued to raise the issue, before groups of journalists and throngs of Catholic youth, always careful to avoid rote doomsaying but never seeming, either, to downplay its grave importance. In a similar way, in implicit counterpoint to Trump, he keeps speaking out on behalf of suffering people in Ukraine and Gaza and ICE detention centers and sundry other theatres of cruelty, articulating a hope that the swaddling clothes of the epoch to come won’t have to be studded with spikes. His ongoing performance, though subtle, is one to watch.
To fret over the future of human creativity is, eventually, to mourn lost artists. Back in June, Sly Stone—a great American genius by my lights—slipped off the scene at the age of eighty-two. What always impressed me about Stone was his interest in combination and synthesis, his strict disavowal, audible from one song to the next, of the idea of a “pure” music whose borders could be defined by genre, or by period, or, worst of all, by race.
Stone, raised in the multiculti Bay Area, came up playing music in the Church of God in Christ, a big Pentecostal denomination. He played in all kinds of bands and worked as a d.j. for a popular radio station. His eventual band, the Family Stone, was racially mixed—rare at the time—and, from the beginning, shone with evidence of its leader’s sophistication and restless ear. The name of the group’s début album sounded like advance notice of an impending birth: “A Whole New Thing.” My favorite song on that record is “Advice.” I love the menacing nonsense of its opening lyrics:
