Vox Editor-in-Chief & Publisher Swati Sharma announced that senior correspondent Joshua Keating has been named a 2025 Outrider Fellow, joining a distinguished cohort of journalists supported by the Outrider Foundation.

The fellowship, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, includes a grant to fund Keating’s continued reporting on the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear weapons.

As part of the fellowship, Keating will report a series of stories on the intersection of nuclear weapons and AI over the next year, and will work with Vox’s Today, Explained podcast team to produce an episode connected to one of his stories. Future story topics will explore whether the automated battlefield could go nuclear, how AI could be used to fight a nuclear war, and what happens when we introduce AI to the world’s most powerful computer for nuclear weapons.

Keating will also cover news on the nuclear beat as it arises. His work will seek to illuminate the potential risks posed by emerging technologies, how world powers are responding, and what this means for the future of global stability.

“Eighty years ago, the invention of nuclear weapons transformed armed conflict and international relations in ways that were little anticipated at the time. AI could have a similarly profound impact today,” Keating said. “I’m very excited to spend the year exploring the connections between these two transformational technologies, telling unexpected and surprising stories, and separating the genuine threats from the hype.”

Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He has previously worked as a writer and editor at Slate, Foreign Policy, Grid, and The Messenger.

He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. His work has appeared in publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Politico. He has reported from Russia, China, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti, among other countries.

“The intersection of artificial intelligence technology and nuclear security is a beat that is ripe for investigative journalism,” said Robert K. Elder, President and CEO at Outrider Foundation. “Keating‘s work has been an essential, thoughtful source for exploring technologies and their impact on humanity.”

The Outrider Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin, is committed to engaging the public on global security and climate issues through rigorous journalism and compelling storytelling. The Outrider Fellowship supports leading journalists who are investigating critical intersections between technology, policy, and global safety.

Keating’s work as an Outrider Fellow will appear throughout 2025 and 2026 across Vox’s website and other platforms.

For more than half a century, the American right has preached the virtues of free markets and low taxes and deregulation. But a new wave of conservative thinkers are now arguing that Republicans have been wrong — or at the very least misguided — about the economy.

This new economic thinking represents a break from what we’ve come to expect from the American right. Its proponents argue for a new strain of economic populism, one that departs from the GOP’s past allegiance to big business and focuses instead on the working class.

The question is, is it for real?

Oren Cass is the founder of the think tank American Compass and the editor of a new book called The New Conservatives. He’s also one of the most influential advocates of this conservative economic populism.

Cass thinks the Republican Party has been too captive to corporate interests and market fundamentalism, and that conservatism needs a major reset, one that embraces American manufacturing and empowers workers.

I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about this new right-wing populism, what distinguishes it from the left, and whether the Republican Party is serious about adopting it. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Back in 2018, you wrote: “Our political economy has relied upon the insidious metaphor of the economic pie, which measures success by the amount of GDP available to every American for consumption. … But the things America thought she wanted have not made her happy.” Let’s start there: What did we think we wanted, and why hasn’t it made us happy?

You’re very perceptive to start there. We were just putting together this new book called The New Conservatives, which is an anthology of everything we’ve been doing at American Compass over the last five years. And I actually went back and grabbed that essay and made it a prologue to the book. Because exactly as you said, it is a starting point for the way I think about a lot of this.

In my mind, what we saw go wrong in our economics and our politics is that we did come to think of consumption as the end unto itself. And to be clear, I love consumption as much as the next guy. I’m not saying we should go back and live in log cabins, but I think we assumed that as long as we were increasing consumption, as long as material living standards were rising, everybody would be happy and we could declare success. And it’s important to say that, from a formal perspective, that is in fact how our economic models operate.

Economists will tell you their assumption is that the goal of the economic system is to maximize consumption. And so that’s where that economic pie metaphor comes from. Something that was so widely embraced across the political spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum, was this idea that as long as you’re growing the economy, you’re growing GDP, you don’t really have to worry too much about what’s in the pie or where it’s coming from. You can always then chop it up and make sure everybody has lots of pie.

And I think it’s important to say that — and this is the point, that we got what we thought we wanted — it’s important to say that that worked. That for all of the problems we have in this country, if you’re only looking at material living standards, if you’re asking how much stuff people have, how big their houses are, whether they’re air-conditioned, even how much health care they consume, at every socioeconomic level, consumption is up.

We did that. And yet I think it’s also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn’t correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there’s obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn’t that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it?

The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you’re rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you’re fighting for now?

There’s a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks.

And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides.

From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world.

And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present.

I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits.

I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it’s just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative?

There’s a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there’s a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we’re actually building toward. And what you’re seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of?

I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — “Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?” — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly.

At the national level, you’re also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases.

Part of the case you’re making is that there’s an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction?

We’re definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they’re addressing, the direction they’re trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better.

But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it’s extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic.

The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic.

Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can’t take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It’s the same Republican Party. It’s jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities.

It’s not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It’s more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction?

I’ve been extremely critical of the “big, beautiful bill” — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what’s happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago.

And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what’s actually moving within a party or what’s going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do.

The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It’s not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture.

There’s a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers.

Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that’s underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they’ve taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they’ve chopped it up.

And they’ve said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don’t agree with. And we’re going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That’s a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party.

I think you’re seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward.

On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it’s clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it’s a very different set of appointments.

If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it’s a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time.

Like I said, I’m not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don’t know what it’s going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney.

I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don’t know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you’re working with Democrats?

We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance.

It’s one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.

Close your eyes and think of the word “summer.” What comes to mind?

Is it long days at the beach, a drink in one hand and a book in the other, letting the sun fall on your face and the waves tickle your toes? Two weeks of vacation in some remote destination, piling up memories to keep yourself warm through the rest of the year? The endless freedom you remember in those July and August weeks of childhood, set loose from the confines of the classroom? Hot dogs and ice cream and roller coasters and ballgames? John Travolta’s falsetto at the end of “Summer Love”?

Well, I have bad news for you, my friend. You are yet another victim of the summer industrial complex, that travel industry-concocted collection of lies designed to convince you that June, July, and August are the three best months of the year.

The beach? That sun will literally kill you. Vacation? Just don’t look up how much plane tickets cost, and don’t even think of leaving the country with the way the dollar is dropping. Freedom? Unless you are an actual child, a schoolteacher, or an NBA player, you’re going to spend most of your time in summer working as hard as you do the rest of the year.

Hot dogs are honestly the worst way to eat meat. Your ice cream is already ice soup. Roller coasters kill an average of four people per year (you can look it up). If you want to drink beer, you don’t need to sit through a baseball game while doing it. Grease is fine, but its success led to John Travolta one day being allowed to make Battlefield Earth, a film so bad that as of this writing, it has a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Summer is the triumph of hope over experience. Every Memorial Day weekend, we begin our summers full of expectation, sure that this will be the season we create the summer to remember. And every Labor Day weekend, we emerge, sweaty and mosquito-bitten, wondering what precisely happened over the past three months. Then next year we do it all over again, fruitlessly chasing that evanescent summer high — even though deep down inside, you know it’s probably going to be a disappointment, and secretly you’re counting the days until September. If you were able to control those hopes, you might be able to control that disappointment.

But don’t you dare air those feelings out loud. When I suggested this essay to my fellow Vox editors, they reacted as though I were about to commit a war crime on paper. Doesn’t everyone love summer? Isn’t summer the best? How dare you look askance at the gift that is the three months when our hemisphere happens to be titled toward the rays of our life-giving sun? What kind of monster are you?

As it turns out, I am precisely that kind of monster. So what follows is why this is our most overrated season — and unlike summer itself, which really is getting longer year by year, I’m going to be brief.

You will not be surprised to learn that I don’t like the heat. Maybe it’s genes — my ancestors come from Ireland, a small, charming, rainy island where for most of the year, the sun is little more than a rumor.

I realize this makes me unusual. The US county that has added the most people in recent years is Maricopa, Arizona, home to Phoenix. Phoenix has a lot of things going for it: relatively inexpensive housing, a fairly robust labor market, and a vibrant population of wild parrots, which is absolutely something I knew before researching this article.Phoenix also has sun — lots and lots of sun. Just look at what they named their NBA team. And with that sun comes unfathomable summer heat. Across the full 2024 calendar year, the city logged a record-breaking 70 days of temperatures over 110 degrees, obliterating the previous record of 55 days set in 2020. It also set a record for the most days straight with temperatures in the triple digits, with an unfathomable 113 days in a row.

Yet every year, apparently tens of thousands of Americans take a look at those numbers and think, “Yes, please, I would like to see if they have any available lots left on the surface of the sun.”

Look, I get it. The tremendous growth of the Sun Belt in recent decades is one big piece of evidence that, if given the choice, most Americans would rather boil than freeze. Or even be slightly cold. And sure, historically cold temperatures have had a bad habit of killing large numbers of human beings. No one in Game of Thrones was warning that “summer is coming.”

But while it’s still true that extreme cold kills significantly more people globally than extreme heat by a large magnitude, heat is catching up. And there’s one thing you can count on with climate change: It will continue to get hotter. Summer — that season you love so much — is where we’re going to feel it.

You may have heard the line: “This could be the coolest summer of the rest of your life”? It’s true! Just to take one example: A study found that by 2053, 107 million people in the US — 13 times as many as today — will be living in an extreme heat belt where they could experience heat indexes above 125 degrees.

So sure, Americans like the heat just like they like summer, though I can’t help wondering if that has to do with the documented connection between extreme heat and cognitive impairment. (Summer! It makes you dumber!) But I doubt you will like it when your body is no longer able to cool itself through sweating and you begin suffering multiple organ failures.

Let’s flip through the major events of autumn. You have your Halloween — everyone loves candy. Thanksgiving — by far the best American holiday, even if we have all collectively decided to eat a bird we wouldn’t otherwise touch the rest of the year. Christmas and Hanukkah — presents and several days off.

Spring has Easter, a festival of renewal and chocolate. Winter has…okay, to be clear, this is an argument against summer, not a defense of winter.

Summer has Memorial Day (cookouts, beaches); Fourth of July (cookouts, beaches, and ooh, a chance to blow off my finger with fireworks); and then two utterly endless months before Labor Day, where we also have cookouts and beaches. And in between, there are just…days.

This is the secret problem with summer. After school has let out and Independence Day has passed, we enter a tepid sea of indistinguishable days, with little to no events to break them up. July 12? July 27? August 13? I challenge you to tell the difference. Time becomes a desert that stretches out to every horizon, without even the false hope of a mirage to break it up. The Catholic Church, which I grew up in, calls the entirety of summer “Ordinary Time” in its liturgical calendar, which always seemed fitting to me. Nothing special, nothing to wait for — just all the Ordinary Time you can take.

And while the calendar is no help, there’s also what I call the collective action problem of summer. Everything slows down and even shuts down, either because people go off on vacation or because they haven’t but almost everyone else has so what’s the point of doing anything. All the big cultural events — the books, the (actually good) movies, most of the good TV — won’t arrive until the fall. (Except The Bear. The Bear is great.) The sports landscape is as barren as your office, and this summer we don’t even have the Olympics.

I’m sure someone will tell me I’m missing the point of summer, when the very formlessness of the days reminds us to slow down and appreciate these moments out of time. Sure, great, whatever. Personally, I can either be hot or I can be bored — not both.

Technically this should be a subcategory of the previous section, but even Auxo, the Greek goddess of summer, would get impatient with August. Why does it have 31 days? Who voted for that? August is the worst parts of summer concentrated and then wrung out over the course of more than four sweaty, sticky weeks. I am positive that I have experienced August days where time begins to move backward.Slate had it right back in 2008: Let’s get rid of August. We’ve gone to the moon, we’ve mastered the genome, we’ve somehow made Glen Powell a movie star. If we can do all that, we can remove one measly month from the calendar. Or we could, except that August is the month when all motivation goes to die.

It has vacations…in August

I’ve got a great idea. Let’s have most of the country all go on vacation during the same few weeks. And then let’s ensure that those few weeks are set during one of the hottest, muggiest months of the year. What could go wrong (other than ridiculous travel costs, heat stroke amid the capitals of Europe, and the better-than-average chance of getting hit by a tropical storm)?

It’s probably not true that everyone is having more fun than you this summer, all evidence on social media notwithstanding. But it will feel that way.

Let me give you one last piece of advice. If you encounter someone who uses the term “summering” in a sentence, get far, far away. You are dangerously close to getting into a conversation about the best way to clean linen pants.

I realize I’m not going to change a lot of minds here. There’s something deep in our biological clocks that can’t seem to help but welcome the days when the sun stays up past 8 pm and the air temperature reaches equilibrium with our bodies. Add that to the enforced summer love that comes from all the industries that capitalize on this seasonal affliction. We summer haters are few and rarely invited to parties, but at least we see the truth.

The truth is that you might actually enjoy your summer more if you lower your expectations. It’s not the summer of your life — it’s just three months in the middle of the year.

And please, put on some sunscreen. That big thing in the sky really is trying to kill you.

Update, May 26, 9 am ET: This story was originally published on July 8, 2024, and has been updated with new data on heat waves in Phoenix.

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand times?

Like all cliches, it sticks because it’s rooted in truth, but it’s worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying. If you read the history of philosophy, you don’t find all that much interest in the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth, which is assumed to be a universal human impulse.

That’s not entirely wrong, of course. But denial and avoidance are also human impulses, often more powerful than our need to know. So these drives — a need to know and a strong desire never to never find out — are often warring within us, shaping our worldview, our relationships, and our self-image.

Mark Lilla is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and the author of a new book called Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. It’s short, elegantly written, and maybe the highest compliment I can give is that it reads like a book that could’ve been written at almost any point in modern history. It engages one of the oldest questions in philosophy — to know or not to know? — and manages to offer fresh insights that feel relevant and timeless at the same time.

So I invited Lilla on The Gray Area to explore why we accept and resist the truth and what it means to live continuously in that tension. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The book opens with a kind of parody of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In the original story, there are prisoners who spend their whole life bound by chains in a cave looking at shadows being cast on a wall, and they mistake those shadows for reality because it’s the only reality they’ve ever known. What’s your spin on it?

In Plato’s edition, a stranger comes in and turns one of the prisoners around so that he realizes that he’s been living in a world of shadows and is invited to climb up to the sun and then lives up there until he’s told to come back down and get other people.

In my version of the story, he’s got a little friend with him, a young boy who also goes up. When it comes time to go back down, the man tells him he can stay up staring at the forms and being in the pure sunlight and seeing what is, and it turns out he’s desperate to return. It’s a cold life. All of his fantasy and imagination have dried up. He misses his virtual friends and eventually he’s taken back down. And so I start the book saying it’s an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing.

We want to know the truth, we want to see the world as it is, but we also need to be ignorant of certain things and we really, really hate to admit our own ignorance. So we’re constantly playing this game of hide and seek with ourselves. This is a weirdly untenable dance for humans, don’t you think?

It is. People don’t want to feel that they’re incurious and holding things at arm’s distance and not thinking about them. I think part of it is that our opinions are not things that we just have in a bag that we pull out when they need expression, but rather they feel like prostheses, like an extra limb, and if someone refutes our argument or mocks it, it feels like something quite intimate has been touched.

And so that is an incentive to not admit your ignorance and to build up all sorts of defenses and appeal to bogus authorities in order to remain convinced of your own rational capacities and your independence. It becomes a kind of perverse thing where you’re constantly trying to patch things together to show to yourself and others you understand, and in the meantime, you can start pulling in some preposterous things that become part of your worldview.

Is there a good model of a wisely ignorant person, someone who climbs the mountain of knowledge and says once they reach the peak, You know what? I like it better down there in the cave!

I think you’re leaving out an option, and that option is something that Socrates explores in the other Platonic dialogues, which is learning from your own ignorance. That is to recognize that you’re genuinely and generally ignorant about things and to continue inquiring with the understanding of what you come up with is tentative.

Especially right now, we live in a world where we’re more and more aware of the uncertainty of our knowledge because things changed so quickly. It was very striking to me during Covid just how frustrated people seemed to be by the fact that the public health authorities kept changing their advice. First they said it was all about washing your hands, and then they said it was all about masks and so on, and they get angry about that, but that’s the way science works.

But people don’t like to live that way. They like to hear from an authority that this is what you do. They want a doctor who doesn’t hem and haw and doesn’t constantly change the meds and say, “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” It’s very destabilizing. And so I think we have a yearning to live standing on solid ground, but we don’t stand on solid ground.

Do you think that ignorance also has a power that we overlook?

Yeah. I began the book with a quotation from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, saying that we thought a lot about the power of knowledge, but we haven’t thought about the power of ignorance. And what she means is the power of people who are ignorant to mess things up in life, that it’s a kind of social force out there, which is certainly the case.

But ignorance is also power if not knowing certain things or leaving certain things unexamined permit you to continue in your life and not be paralyzed. I use an example at the beginning of the book: What would happen if we each had an LED screen embedded in our foreheads and we could read the thoughts of everyone around us?

Social life would grind to a halt because you can’t control your thoughts, right? We would constantly be looking to see how people are thinking about us, and we could never develop a stable sense of ourselves.

There are lots of people who are willfully ignorant, and there are lots of people who are ignorant of their ignorance, but then there’s this other species of cynicism you talk about in the book that knowingly exploits ignorance. What’s the political significance of this?

People need certainty, and they will demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues in particular, can provide simple answers to things that seem very complicated and that stir people in a way that can be directed. That’s classically how a demagogue works and how a demagogue becomes a tyrant.

Especially now, I’m not surprised that we’re facing aggressive ignorance among populists and those who are moved by populists. Making sense of things right now is very difficult because we just don’t know various things because our experience is so new. For example, what do you do about the fact that the state of any nation’s economy depends on an international economy and that no country has a full say in how that international economy operates, and it will continue to affect everyone in every country?

It’s hard to accept the fact that our political leaders do not control the economy. And so you go to whoever says he’s the answer, or whoever says she’s the answer. It is very hard, for all of us, to confront the present with an open mind and a deep sense of the tentativeness of our understanding of it.

At some point, we have to ask: What’s the point of knowledge? Do we want knowledge for the sake of knowledge because it’s inherently good, or is knowledge only valuable if it’s useful? And if knowing something isn’t useful or if knowing something is actually painful, why would we want to know it?

The question that you’re asking, for me at least in the book, is really a question of different kinds of human characters. There are some people for whom something quickens within whenever the opportunity of new knowledge presents itself. Why that happens, why the soul responds like that, is a mystery, and Socrates tells various myths about why that might be, but it just seems to be a fact and not everyone has it.

Do you think there’s anything worth knowing regardless of the cost?

Self-knowledge can be harmful if it’s partial. That’s the story of Augustine in the Confessions at the moment where he says, “God ripped off the back of me,” which was this other face and everything that everyone else could see, but I couldn’t and then God holds it in front of me, and I see myself, and in that moment I’m so horrified that something clicks and I give myself over.

So there could be limits to this kind of thing, but Socrates assumes that all self-knowledge is in the end going to be helpful because you are now clear to yourself and that knowing itself makes people good. Once you know, the power of your ignorance is no longer holding you hostage.

Do you think that’s true? I don’t think so.

No, I don’t. And it’s hard to believe that Socrates really thought that. You can see it in the way he deals with other people in the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has a lot of knowledge about how people fall short of that.

Yeah, I could definitely see a case being made for always wanting to know abstract truths and truths about the external world. But when it comes to self-knowledge, sometimes when you peer inward, what you find is that you’re just a bundle of contradictions that can’t be squared, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily good to be intimately acquainted with that and to get hung up on that.

There is one way in which it is, and that’s the Montaigne option. The picture Montaigne gives of us in the essays is that we’re exactly what you just said, and his advice is to live with it. Just go with it. You’re a contradiction.

I think that’s easier said than done, though it’s probably wise. But do you think there’s a link, maybe even a necessary link, between self-knowledge and knowledge of the external world? In other words, on some level, do we have to know ourselves in order to know the truth about the world outside ourselves?

I can think of a couple answers to that. I’m not sure which one would be mine. One is that these things are detachable. I remember spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, and I would sometimes go and sit in this place where the scientists and mathematicians were, and you could tell these people just had no self-awareness in terms of how people reacted to them. Perhaps they were just wrapped up in their problems and they were discovering things.

On the other hand, one barrier to us in knowing things about the world is to know what constitutes knowing, and that requires an analysis of ourselves. And then the third sense, while not strictly necessary, the exercise of trying to know oneself is a kind of training exercise for inquiring about the world outside.

I do want to talk a bit about nostalgia, which you’ve written about before and again in this new book. At what point in our journey of knowledge, as individuals and societies, are we overtaken by nostalgia? At what point are we just longing to go back to a previous time when we didn’t know what we now know?

When it comes to whole societies being nostalgic, I think that it has to do two things: One is illegibility. When the world becomes illegible, the present becomes illegible. That means you don’t know how to act, and if you don’t know how to act, it’s deeply disturbing because you want to be able to control your environment and control things so you can reach your own ends.

And so a dissatisfaction with the present and an absence of knowledge about how to improve things are spurs to imagine that, just as being 8 years old seemed less complicated and easier than being 68 years old, that there was a time when life was ordered in a better way in which we knew less about various things or certain changes hadn’t happened, and maybe we can reverse the machine or reverse the train.

I do wonder what the upshot of all this thinking and writing was for you personally. Have you changed your relationship to your own ignorance as a result of this project?

I would hope so. I think I have a better understanding of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do —

What is it that philosophy can and can’t do?

Philosophy that is aware of our ignorance is a step forward. The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings is getting to maybe.