In the garden of Athens

Or, growing basil at the end of the republic

“So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” – Revenge of the Sith

In writing this, I had four quotes pinned to the wall of my mind. In the Republic, Socrates says democracy always ends up destroying itself by elevating freedom as the highest good. Think of it this way, freedom is like the growth of a plant. I like to grow most of the herbs I use in my cooking, and one of my favorites is basil. Naturally, I don’t want anything restricting the growth of my basil plants. But I also don’t want the formless growth of a slime mold. Basil, like any other plant, follows a genetic blueprint guided by morphogenic pathways — hormone auxin signals where to grow leaves, and chlorophyll makes those leaves green instead of any other color. Freedom within the architecture of that blueprint produces basil that not only adds enjoyment to a meal, but also nutrition. Similarly, a healthy human society requires the blueprint architecture of shared values, without which growth becomes a sprawling slime mold, choking itself and everything around it. Consider feminism’s path from women’s suffrage to Susan Brownmiller saying rape is how “all men keep all women in a state of fear.” All men. Or, as

Andrew Sullivan

recently wrote, how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way. Or how black liberation went from MLK to BLM, from “I have a dream” to an NC State professor saying he wants to exterminate all whites and a Yale psychiatrist saying she “fantasizes of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person … wiping my hands as I walked away … with a bounce in my step like I did the world a fucking favor.” By the way, her full quote is even worse. In each case, what once was a basil tuft, sweet and rare, mutated into a slime mold.

Slime mold (Physarum polycephalum), Scott Camazine

Second, I thought of Benjamin Franklin. After the Constitutional Convention adjourned, a woman named Eliza Powell asked Doctor Franklin whether the delegates had given the people a republic or a monarchy, and he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” If you can keep it. Shortly after, in 1814, John Adams wrote in a letter to his friend John Taylor, the senator from Virginia, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” And, in his Lyceum address, delivered in 1838, a young lawyer in Illinois named Abraham Lincoln warned that without sufficient law and order, mob justice would destroy the nation. He was referring to lynch mobs killing black men in the state, but the same principle applies to the BLM riots and the $1 billion in damages they inflicted on the nation. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Each of these men understood that the most likely cause of our undoing would be ourselves, our failure to know when to put our foot down, enforce the law, and insist upon certain fundamental values.

The united slime molds of America

American democracy is in decline. But it isn’t collapsing under the weight of a single catastrophe. It’s dissolving from the inside out, through forces that look disturbingly like the natural byproducts of progress, and in many instances, actually are. What we’re living through is not an enemy-at-the-gates story, though that is one of the major chapters, but a civilizational paradox in which the very things we celebrate, such as technological liberation, pluralism, and moral awakening, are eroding the very institutional scaffolding that made American life sustainable. On the one hand, we have democratized information with the internet, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT, though most folks still lack the academic training or intelligence to make great use of these wondrous tools. On the other hand, we have smashed our own institutions like a toddler, or sat back complacently as a festering ideological pestilence ate its way right through them, and so now we mistrust medical science, our finest universities, our best news sources, our government, our legal system, our own elections. Our own well-intentioned but horribly misguided compassion has convinced us to let the lunatics run the madhouse, and one consequence is that we’ve shattered the shared narratives that once allowed a sprawling and diverse republic to cohere.

For years, the left has lectured us about systemic inequality, only to burden the entire nation at every turn with a double-dose of it the second they got any real power, but their bigotry and hate, you see, is actually a good thing because it happens to come in the flavor of Wokeberry Blast or Inclusion Fusion Bubble-Yum. Still, some of their critiques have sharpened demands for accountability, and in some cases, they’ve genuinely advanced justice. But the unintended consequence has been to hollow out the very legitimacy of liberal-democratic governance itself. People no longer merely distrust who runs institutions, now they question whether such institutions should exist at all. The problem is, when every issue is an existential test of who you are, when every political question, however small, places you before the jackal-headed god to have your heart weighed against a feather, then compromise ceases to look like civic virtue and begins to feel like tribal betrayal. Layered atop this cultural unraveling, we’ve got two major structural stress fractures. First, the erosion of our democratic norms. Second, epistemic fragmentation. Digital platforms have replaced the old town square with algorithmic funhouse mirrors. The result isn’t just fake news, but the phenomenon of one screen, two films. It’s competing realities, incompatible epistemologies, the breakdown of our greatest medium of information transfer — language — to the point that we can’t even agree on the most brute facts of our species, such as the geology of our literal physical being, like that we all die or that biological sex isn’t something you can alter with a delusional fixation on your genitals and a pair of Mayo scissors.

We no longer even argue about what facts mean. We argue about whether they even are facts. People popularly like to pin this on Trump, but the term post-truth politics goes back at least back to a 1992 essay by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich. Sure, the concept entered mainstream discourse when Kellyanne Conway defended Trump’s false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd in a 2017 interview, using the idiotic phrase “alternative facts,” but as noted above, the left has no greater claim to facts. Besides, Trump’s perfunctory dismissal of mainstream media was never entirely baseless, indeed he perhaps simply had more experience dealing with the press, became understandably jaded, and has developed a censorial opposition to the media that is now, frankly, unhinged and unconstitutional. All together, these dynamics form a feedback loop. Norms erode, which deepens mistrust, which fractures our knowledge base, which entrenches structural unfairness, which triggers unrest, which leads to radical movements on the left and right, which erodes norms, which deepens mistrust, and the whirligig goes round and round. It’s a Möbius strip of democratic decay, self-reinforcing, difficult to escape, and largely powered by our own apparent victories. America is being undone not by the failure of its ideals, but by their unchecked success. Welcome to the united slime molds of America. We are officially the victims of our own triumph. We have become the Axiom humans of WALL•E. But unlike in the movie, we’ve been led astray not simply by laziness and convenience, but also by the better angels of our nature, hijacked by cultural Marxism.

Pouring ourselves out for bread and circuses

I don’t much care for the muscular verse of the Roman satirist Juvenal, but it can be instructive to read him. He lived from about 55 to 130 in the year of our Lord, which puts him under emperors Domitian through Hadrian, the period of the so-called High Empire, the era of the Five Good Emperors, including everyone’s favorite cuck Caesar, Marcus Aurelius. Just kidding, he wasn’t really a cuck, and actually, it was Juvenal who started the now-famous rumor that the wife of a certain philosopher-emperor, wink wink, lusted after a gladiator. This was the height of Roman power. Rome controlled the largest extent of its empire, its economy was relatively stable, and the army was strong and largely successful in its campaigns. Yet Juvenal paints Rome as if every corner is caked in filth, every building collapsing, every city and town filled with crime, every official corrupt, every patron cruel, and every foreigner an enemy. So yes, it’s bullshit, but what was false then rings true now. Listen to him lament the loss of his republic, not at the hands of an enemy, but as a consequence of its own success:

The people have poured out their cares, for those who once gave us this imperium, our power, our legions, everything, now restrain themselves and eagerly long for only two things: bread and circuses.

The United States is similarly at the peak of its powers, but we hold ourselves back, even as far weaker enemies nip at our limbs, eating us alive, because we believe it would be racist to honestly confront China or the Islamic world, or the problem of immigration, or the black community, and besides, did you see that TikTok of the shark wearing three blue Nike sneakers? We’ve gone from the Roman poets to Italian brainrot within the lifespan of a single olive tree, and the most any of us can muster is a dark chuckle or some iteration of “wheeee!” In pursuing “the good life” without guardrails, and affirming identity over virtue, we have poured out our cares for a life that is genuinely good, because that path is steep, and the rocks scattered over it are sharp, and what we seek is not the Good, but the Easy. So here we are. Axiom humans watching Italian brainrot as Athens crumbles around us.

But decline is not destiny. I never met a serious gardener who was a bitter, hopeless pessimist. Something about nurturing life, even in its simplest form, curves you away from that path. Just as basil needs pruning to flourish, republics need renewal to endure. The very fact that we can name our failures, I would like to believe, means we have not yet lost the capacity to correct them. Athens crumbled, Rome fell, but America is not fated to follow, so long as enough of us still care to keep the good Doctor Franklin’s republic. Our institutions can be rebuilt, our common language rediscovered, our values nourished back to life. We are not yet slime molds, though some of our most noble causes have turned that way. The hardest part, I think, will be regaining a sense of fraternity and civility. Honestly, sometimes I have to force myself to be optimistic. But we will never have shared values again if we cannot sit down and hammer those values out together, the herbs we wish to tend in our garden.

But also, we have to learn, as a society, that fun is not the point. Enjoying yourself is a lovely thing, but also, it’s a child’s conceptualization of the good life. Even my daughter, who is not yet 3 years old, understand that many important things in life, indeed many that are of the highest good in life, are frequently not fun. And many other things, which are not of the highest good, nor fun, are still absolutely vital, like learning to use a poddy instead of your pants. So if the decline angers you, good. Like the Terminator said, anger is more useful than despair. But be grateful we aren’t yet the United Kingdom, which I think it not coming back to us, and channel your anger not into hating, but strive to be a good gardener. Get into the soil. Get your hands dirty. We still have good roots, capable of bearing fruit. And if, as the ancients warned, our destruction is doomed to come by our own hand, then so too is our salvation. Happy Sunday.