Raymond Geuss is one of the most erudite political philosophers of our day. Entering his ninth decade this December, Geuss’s modest 1981 book The Idea of a Critical Theory has had an outsized influence on how we understand (from an analytic perspective) the power of Continental philosophy. Today, Geuss may be better known for his indictment of liberal political ideas and his revulsion at moralizing of any kind, especially that proffered by titans like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, who see justice or rational deliberation as desiderata of the open society. Power and ideology play a far more decisive role in Geuss’s analysis, as does political realism.
In his essay for The Ideas Letter, originally presented as a talk in China, Geuss argues that all this yammering about the polycrisis is missing what’s at stake: Western civilization is undergoing a systemic breakdown. This is not some series of overlapping crises but a general dissolution of the Western way of life, in which the ideational “carapace” of Western civilization is “fatally cracked.” Is there any hope left? Or, as was once prophesied by the Sex Pistols, is there “no future, no future, no future for you?”
After Geuss’s stiff drink, JS Tan and Emily Mazo restore our faith by explaining that resistance is alive in the belly of the beast—corporate AI. And this isn’t your mother’s tech-workers’ resistance, but a new form of labor politics taking shape in an industry reshaped by layoffs and starkly unequal bargaining power. Instead of a unified tech worker movement, two distinct labor politics are now forming: one rooted in deteriorating material conditions and the other in the catastrophism stoked by generative AI.
Noortje Marres, a student of Bruno Latour, uses the philosopher Hans Blumenberg to reframe contemporary debates about AI and religion. Her central provocation is that Pope Leo’s recent encyclical critiquing AI as Promethean hubris is a strange spectacle, because the world-transforming ambitions of technoscience are hardly a revolt against Christianity—on Blumenberg’s account, they are an emanation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition itself.
Randy Weston is a great pianist and composer who should be a household name. His music set precedents for the integration of African rhythms and sensibilities into modern jazz. Writer and scholar Hisham Aidi marks Weston’s centenary in this tribute, tracing how Weston’s music became caught up in the political and intellectual battles of Pan-Africanism, above all in Morocco, where he helped create what came to be called Gnawa-jazz.
For our curated section, we lead with an essay from Textual Practice that recovers the great literary critic Raymond Williams’s understanding of growth as an alternative to both capitalist growth-worship and contemporary degrowth. Williams sympathized with critiques of economic growth but refused to abandon the word “growth” because of its deep etymological bond with culture—from the Latin colere, “the tending of natural growth.”
We also have a wonderfully edifying video discussion of the particularities of South Indian classical music. All you wanted to know about this expansive tradition but were afraid to ask—performance included.
Finally, we are thrilled that Hisham Aidi is also the guest music curator for Issue 72, a musical tribute to, natürlich, Randy Weston! Here are Hisham’s recommendations:
These tracks trace the arc of Randy Weston’s musical life, from his early explorations of jazz to his deepening engagement with Africa and Morocco. “Hi-Fly” (1958) is the pianist’s most enduring composition, and likely one you’ve heard before—a seemingly simple, quirky melody covered by vocalists and big bands alike. “Portrait of Vivian” (1960), written for his mother and later made a standard by tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, reveals the tender side of Weston’s writing.
With “African Cookbook” (1969), the pan-African dimension of his music comes into full view: Weston used the piece to fuse African rhythms and instruments directly into jazz, closing nearly every concert with it—including performances during his 1967 State Department tour of Africa—and often stretching it well past twenty minutes, as he memorably did in Cairo. Then there is “Blue Moses (Ganawa),” the title track of his Tangier-inspired album Blue Moses (1972), a smooth, electric production that became Weston’s best-selling record despite his own ambivalence toward the song. The piece shows a specific spiritual connection to Morocco: it is adapted from “Sidi Moussa,” the blue spirit invoked in Gnawa ritual music, with which Weston felt a deep affinity. Two decades later, “Chalabati Blues” (1993), from the Volcano Blues album with Pharoah Sanders, arranged by Weston’s longtime collaborator Melba Liston, makes the dialogue between Moroccan music and jazz even more explicit.
—Leonard Benardo, vice president at the Open Society Foundations
The Carapace Cracks
Raymond Geuss
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Geuss argues that the crisis of Western societies is more fundamental than political dysfunction or economic decline: the ideological architecture of Western civilization is coming apart along fault lines built into it from the start. Tracing its development from the ancient Greek priority of politics over economics through Christianity’s self-abnegation to the modern embrace of limitless production, liberal democracy, and universal rights, he argues that these commitments contain contradictions that have become impossible to ignore. The deeper problem, he suggests, is not that Western societies have failed to live up to their professed ideals, but that pursuing those ideals under existing conditions produces outcomes that undermine their claim to moral and political superiority.
“At a certain point, a population can no longer avoid looking past the beautiful words used to praise its social arrangements and values, and sees instead their cash-value—that is, what really happens when those values are pursued under existing conditions. In the West we are moving toward a situation in which we recognize that the more we try to realize the underlying ideals of modern Western civilization—the closer we cleave to the thought of Locke, Smith, and Mill—the more we create either inept failures or moral monsters, or both (like Epstein, Trump, and Netanyahu). What happens when a whole society can no longer look into the glass it holds up for itself and see itself as good? This is not a situation that can be remedied by piecemeal social reform or by returning to a philosophically ‘purified’ version of our existing values and ideals, just as the GDR would not have been helped by moderate reform or a return to a more ‘correct’ form of Marxism. In our own case, our problem is that we have internalized and realized the reality of those values all too fully and correctly.”
Syndicalist Valley
JS Tan and Emily Mazo
The Ideas Letter
Essay
The tech-worker movement that emerged in the 2010s has been transformed by layoffs, higher interest rates, and the enormous investment flowing into AI, which have eroded the bargaining power of ordinary software engineers while creating a small, highly paid elite of AI researchers. Tan and Mazo explore how these changes have produced new forms of worker organizing, driven by very different sources of leverage and discontent. They argue that these nascent movements could become considerably more powerful if they converge, combining the numbers of the broader tech workforce with the leverage of elite AI workers to demand greater control over how AI is built and deployed.
“What we are seeing is not one undifferentiated movement, but multiple movements, with varying goals, whose differences are easily overlooked or occluded. At OpenAI and DeepMind, in-demand workers with high amounts of individual labor market power are speaking up about their bosses enabling the use of the technology they have built for harm. At Meta, the majority of signees of the 1,600-person open letter against screen-recording software were non-AI workers, who felt at risk of imminent layoff, and who were protesting the degradation of their everyday work. These non-AI workers are beginning to resemble the populations that the US labor movement is used to organizing: workers who want to bargain over job security and working conditions. Meanwhile, workers in AI labs have begun organizing around military contracts, AI safety, and other issues beyond the workplace.”
The Second Creation and the Destruction of Worlds
Noortje Marres
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Marres returns to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg to uncovers the origins of tech elites’ ambition to remake the world. Blumenberg traced that ambition back through modern experimental science to Christian ideas of a Second Creation, in which humans overcome their alienation from nature by constructing an artificial world—a history that, Marres argues, illuminates the grandiose promises surrounding AI and other transformative technologies. Blumenberg’s work also reveals what’s at stake politically: in transferring autonomy from nature and society to technology, the contemporary tech revolution threatens the institutions and collective arrangements that allow people and communities to govern themselves.
“Efforts to impose an ideological vision on society and government through the backdoor of technology adoption take shots at more than the political-legal arrangements of liberal democracy. They attempt to weaken the existing societal structures that support individual and communal autonomy, such as social rights, the welfare system, and local democracy. Crucially, these collective arrangements were realized during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries precisely to counter the destructive consequences of that other technological revolution: industrialization. The efforts of today’s tech elites to dismantle the conditions for self-governance amount to a wider attempt to turn back the clock on fundamental accomplishments of the solidarity movements of centuries past—namely, the invention of society and the social individual as autonomous entities, separate from the state, industry, and the family.”
Rhythm and Revolution
Hisham Aidi
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Randy Weston arrived in Morocco in 1967 already deeply committed to Pan-Africanism, but he encountered a North Africa riven by competing ideas about African identity, decolonization, race, and the place of the Arab world within the continent. Aidi follows Weston through those battles—from the divide between Frantz Fanon and Léopold Senghor to the rise of an American Afrocentrism increasingly hostile to Islam and Arab influence—and shows how he navigated these competing visions of Africa. His decades-long collaboration with Morocco’s Gnawa musicians, meanwhile, became one of the most enduring expressions of the expansive Pan-African vision he embraced.
“North Africa’s broader turn to the right helped give rise to a distinctly American strain of Afrocentrism, one that was pushing back against Malcolm X’s Islam-friendly Black nationalism. In this newer telling, Islam had done as much damage to Africa as Christianity had, if not more, and Arabs were recast as ’white invaders’ on African soil—the moral equivalent of European settlers in the Americas. (The Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka became perhaps the best-known proponent of this view.) It was a minefield that Weston navigated with remarkable grace.”
Raymond Williams
Principles for a revaluation of growth
Harry Pitt Scott
Textual Practice
Journal Article
Cultural theorist Raymond Williams recovered an alternative meaning of “growth” obscured by its now-dominant association with expanding GDP, production, and capital accumulation. Although Williams engaged with critiques of economic growth in the 1970s, he resisted abandoning the concept itself, drawing on the older meaning of culture as cultivation to understand growth as the collective development of human capacities. Scott argues that this redefinition offers the basis for an ecological and democratic socialism, in which human flourishing is shaped through collective decision-making, attention to livelihoods rather than production alone, and recognition of the ecological conditions in which different communities live.
“Williams remained attached to a vision of (non-capitalist) growth for two reasons. Firstly, because of his understanding of language. Williams argued that certain keywords are active, practical, and historical mediations of social processes, which means that a contested but shared vocabulary is a primary way that we discuss the central processes of our common life. Words of such central importance to social life are not simply to be abandoned, but to be received and re-created, in the struggle for socialist power. Secondly, Williams retained an important concept of human growth because of his unsurpassed investigation into the historical semantics of ‘culture.’”
Demystifying South Indian Classical Music
Supriya Nagarajan, Duncan Chapman, Sumie Kent and Ranjan Vasudevan
York Ideas
Video
Nagarajan, a Carnatic vocalist, introduces South Indian classical music as a tradition shaped by the raga system, oral transmission, and a strong devotional inheritance, with lyrics deeply connected to the Hindu pantheon and the Bhakti tradition. Yet that continuity has not precluded change: the violin entered Carnatic performance through British colonial influence, ragas move between northern and southern traditions, and Nagarajan’s own practice draws on her multilingual upbringing in Mumbai and collaborations with Japanese classical, Western classical, and electronic musicians.
“The question that was utmost in my head was: how do I reach South Indian traditional classical music to an audience that, one, doesn’t speak the language; two, doesn’t understand the way the music flows, the vocabulary, the nuances? How do I actually do that? And that is when it suddenly struck me that music has seven notes. So what I should seek to do, instead of trying to impose my rigid idea of strictly what Carnatic music should be, is to actually collaborate and work with a wide range of musicians, using the raga system, or the melody system, that Carnatic music offers—singing the music that I know and I’ve learned, but exploring different instrumentation and different kinds of collaboration—to actually bring that alive so everybody can enjoy the music without having the barrier of having to understand how the system of the music works.”