The death of the phone call.

A letter to Elon Musk.

Dear Elon, I’d like to offer you some advice, if you don’t mind. A great deal has been written about you these last few years, and most of it agrees that you are something monstrous. A villain in a cape made of stock options. An emperor of bots. The internet, which is mostly other people who have not met you either, has decided you are a cartoon, and it has drawn that cartoon with such confidence that even people who should know better have stopped looking for the man underneath. I don’t believe it. Not because I admire you particularly, and not because I have access to some private version of you the rest of us are missing. I don’t believe it because I don’t believe it about anyone. I think people are mostly trying. I think the desire to do something good with a life is one of the most universal things human beings carry, even when the doing of it goes badly, even when the trying gets twisted, even when a person’s reach for goodness lands somewhere awful. You are not exempt from this. You are also not exempt from the rest of it: the loneliness, the fear, the longing to leave behind a thing your children might point to and say, that was him. So I write to you the way I’d write to anyone whose work I take seriously. As a person. You have said that for humanity to survive, we must become an interplanetary species. I think you’re wrong about that, and I’d like to explain why. Drive through certain blocks of San Francisco and the city does not look like a city. It looks like an old photograph of a city that has been left out in the weather. Tents lean against tents. A man without shoes walks slow along the curb. A woman in a doorway speaks to a child who is not there. The fog comes down off the hills and through the Civic Center and there is the smell of urine and the smell of weed and the smell of something burning in foil three doorways down. The buildings rise out of the fog with their windows lit and behind the windows are screens and behind the screens are other cities, and the people in those cities do not know that this one is still here. To see all that, and then to see what people do to each other with rifles and drones and artillery, to see the centuries of slaughter we have already authored and the centuries we have queued up for our grandchildren, to read the morning paper and find in it a liturgy of ruin, I do not blame any man for looking up at the sky and deciding that the door is here, the door has always been here, and we should walk through it before the house comes down. There is dignity in that impulse. There is even love in it. A father wants somewhere safe for the children of strangers. The atmosphere of Mars is not safe, but it is, at least, somewhere we have not yet ruined. What if leaving is not the answer, though. At least not yet. On Market Street, men warm their hands at a fire in a steel drum. A young man in a fleece vest walks by them like they’re a flock of gulls. In Washington, meanwhile, the legislature meets. It is still called a deliberative body, in the way a lapsed church is still called a church. It deliberates nothing. It passes the bills its donors have written and ignores the bills its voters have asked for, and the operative provisions of what it does pass are concealed in appendices that the members themselves have not read. So the people stay at the garbage can fires that warm their hands. The young man in the Patagonia keeps walking. The government, which has not decided much of consequence in twenty years, does not decide this either. So here is the question. What if the answer is for the first trillionaire to show moral leadership. And not because anyone asked him to. Because it was right. Because his children will read about him one day. Because in the long arc of how civilizations are remembered, the men who fled are not the men who are remembered. Let me propose something specific. Take five percent of one trillion dollars. Fifty billion. It is a number that ought to feel like a wound, and at the scale of one trillion it does not. Fifty billion, deployed over ten years, placed in a single instrument with a single mandate, governed by people who report to no political party and no quarterly earnings call. You seed it. You call the other nine men at your altitude and ask them to match. None of them wants to be the first, but once it starts all of them will want to be the second. The purpose is simple. To build, inside one American city, a self-sustaining ladder of productive work for the people who currently have no rung to put a foot on. The instrument does four things, in roughly equal measure. It anchors. It trains. It owns. It houses. It anchors by guaranteeing that the city’s largest institutions, its hospitals, its universities, its transit authority, its construction projects funded with public money, buy a steadily rising share of their goods and services from firms located within the city and employing residents at a living wage. The only reason something like this has not transformed San Francisco is that no one with the patience or the capital has bothered. It trains by funding, at full ride, a system of vocational and technical apprenticeships that pay a wage from day one and lead to certified work in trades the city actually needs. Electricians. Pipefitters. Eldercare workers. Solar installers. Childcare professionals. Marine technicians for the port the city has neglected for half a century. These are jobs that cannot be exported and cannot be automated away in the lifetime of anyone now living, and the city, which is aging faster than it is building, cannot function without them. It owns by seeding, through patient capital, a network of worker-owned firms in those same trades, so that wages stay in the city and equity stays with the workers, and the firms compound their value in the hands of the people whose labor created it, rather than draining upward to a holding company in a tax-advantaged jurisdiction whose name no one in the firm can pronounce. It houses by financing the construction of permanently affordable workforce housing on land held in a community trust, so that the people doing the trained work and the anchored work and the owned work can sleep within an hour of the work they do, and the cycle that has hollowed out every American coastal city since the 1980s finally meets a force strong enough to bend it. Fifty billion. Ten years. One city. A model another city can copy without permission. The philanthropy of the past thirty years has, for the most part, failed, and it has failed for reasons that were predictable at the outset. It funded programs, and programs, by their nature, consume the capital that sustains them and produce, in exchange, services that disappear the moment the capital is withdrawn. What I am proposing is structurally different. The capital is not spent; it is placed. It purchases assets, ownership stakes, land, training pipelines, contractual relationships, that continue to generate value after the initial deployment is complete and require no further injection to do so. The distinction is the one between feeding a man versus seating him at a table he owns a share of. Yes, this is the work of the state. And the state will not do it. A man may say what ought to be done and the saying is a kind of comfort to the one who says it. The man at the drum is not comforted. He stands in the cold and the cold does not ask whose job it was. The night comes on and the state is elsewhere and has been elsewhere a long time. Now consider, with the cold eye of a man who has built two of the great firms of his century, what this does for the billionaire who funds it. It buys him the one thing his money has not yet bought him. It buys him a country that will still have him in it when his children are grown. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. Societies that allow the gap between the man at the drum and the man in the lobby to widen past a certain point do not stay societies. They become something else, and the something else they become has never, in any century or on any continent, been kind to the holders of capital. The French knew this in 1789. The Russians knew it in 1917. The British, who learned it earlier and at lower cost, built the institutions of the welfare state precisely because they had read the relevant chapters. The American billionaire class has not read the chapters. It is operating, at this moment, on the assumption that the long American exception will hold. The long American exception is not holding. It also buys him a labor force. Every company in the Valley is fighting for the same engineers, the same machinists, the same skilled tradespeople, and losing them to cities where a person on a technician’s salary can still afford a bedroom. The billionaire who funds the housing and the training does not have this problem. He has built, at the cost of a rounding error on his balance sheet, the one recruiting advantage no competitor can copy without spending a decade catching up. The Romans understood the difference between charity and infrastructure. They built the roads themselves. And it buys him, finally, a place in the story human beings tell about themselves when they are honest. Mars will be settled, eventually, by someone. The man who funds the settling will be remembered the way we remember the men who funded the railroads, which is to say, in a footnote, and not always a kind one. The man who, possessing the resources to flee, instead turned and looked at the city he was standing in and said, this one first, this one before the other, that man enters a smaller and older tradition. There are not many in it. There is room. I won’t pretend you owe any of us this. You do not. You built what you built, through a kind of relentlessness most people cannot summon for an afternoon, let alone a life, and the money is yours under the laws as they are written, and Mars, if you can reach it, is yours too. I am not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is a poor engine and it burns out the people who run on it. I am asking you to consider that the deepest pleasures available to a human being come from staying. From turning toward the difficult thing and saying, this, too, is mine to attend to. The men I have known who seemed happiest at the end of their lives had stayed closest to what they loved, and had let what they loved become larger than themselves. The door in the sky will still be there next year, and the year after that. The man at the drum on Market Street will not. Start there. With love, Greg This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

In defense of the boomers.

My mother grew up in a house with five kids and almost no money. My grandfather made their lunches every day: two slices of Wonder Bread, one slice of bologna, repeat. The day she got into medical school she came home holding the acceptance letter, breathless, and showed it to her mother, who looked at it for a moment and said, “Oh. Okay. I’m going to bed.” What I remember most from school is how I felt walking home with a good grade in my backpack. The excitement was hers, really. I was borrowing it forward. My mother lit up when I showed her things, and that kind of light costs something to give, and not every house has it. Hers rarely had it. She did better than her mother did. And her mother had done better than hers. That is how this is supposed to work, when it works. My grandmother wasn’t cruel. Her parents came over from Italy with almost nothing and gave her what they had, which wasn’t much warmth, because nobody had given them any either. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather sold fruit on the streets of Newark after coming over from Sicily. His son sold insurance. My father became a doctor. Each one parented imperfectly, the way I do, doing the best with what they had. Lately my generation has taken up a kind of recreational dunking on the Boomers. I see it every day on social media. Someone posts a photo of a paid-off center hall colonial and writes, “they pulled the ladder up behind themselves.” Someone else, a thoughtful person, says her parents’ generation “ate the future.” I read these and I think of my mother and of the sandwiches her father made and the letter her mother would not look at and the long quiet years that came after. And I wonder if we know what we mean. I wonder if we ever have. “Boomer” is a demographic shorthand that has been quietly promoted to a moral category, and the promotion was illegitimate. Pew defines the cohort as Americans born between 1946 and 1964: nearly twenty birth years of people across every race, class, region, and circumstance this country contains. What I mean is that “boomer” isn’t a personality trait. Before we picture every Boomer on a paid-off patio with a margarita, it is worth noticing what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually says. Nearly one in five Americans sixty-five and older is still in the labor force. Of those working, close to forty percent are part-time. Some of that is preference, but a lot of it is rent. The next time you are at the pharmacy and the woman behind the counter is in her seventies, ringing up your prescription with hands that have done forty-five years of work, look at her. She is closer to a witness of your generation’s economic story than its villain. The Boomers inherited wounds, and their 20s were not a block party. American troop levels in Vietnam peaked above five hundred thousand in April of 1969. Later that year, more than half a million people marched on Washington against the war. The older Boomers were inside that rupture as young adults. They came of age under the draft, under assassinations, under the AIDS crisis that killed their friends in their thirties, under the slow dismantling of the unions and pensions their fathers had counted on. They also built things. The first Earth Day, in 1970, drew twenty million Americans into the streets and led, that same year, to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations and banned discriminatory employment practices. Much of the moral language my generation now uses to condemn the Boomers was built, marched for, voted for, or imperfectly absorbed by the Boomers themselves. In 1984, a twenty-five-year-old named Ruth Coker Burks was visiting a friend at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a single mother who sold real estate. She had been raised Methodist in a small Arkansas town where almost no one she knew had ever said the word gay out loud. Walking the corridor, she noticed that one of the rooms had a red bag tied to the door. The nurses at the station were drawing straws. She asked what they were doing. They told her: the man in that room had AIDS, and somebody had to bring him his dinner tray, and none of them wanted to. She walked in. His name was Jimmy. He weighed less than a hundred pounds and his eyes had retreated so far into his skull that you could not tell him from the linens. White upon white. He asked for his mother in a voice Ruth had to bend down to hear. She walked to the nurses station and asked for the number. His mother isnt coming, the nurse said. I would like to try, Ruth said. She took the paper and she dialed and she waited. A woman answered. Your son is dying, Ruth told her. The line went quiet. A long quiet from a house in some other county where the light was failing and a woman stood at her kitchen with the receiver pressed to her ear. My son died years ago, the woman said. He died the day he went gay. I dont know what is in that hospital but it is not my son. And she hung up the phone. Ruth went back into the room. She did not have the language of allyship or any of the words that would be developed, in the decades to come, for moments like this. She had her hand, and she gave it to him. She sat there for thirteen hours. She did not let go when he died. She set out to bury him and found that the town would not permit it. One funeral home after another refused the body, as if the disease itself had moral character, as if to touch what he had been was to be implicated in what he had become. She drove an hour and a half to find a man who would do the work, and she paid him out of her own money, because no one else would pay it and because someone had to. The ashes came back to her in a cardboard box, of the sort that holds office supplies or a pair of shoes, a container that announces by its ordinariness that no ceremony has been arranged for what it holds. She could not afford an urn. She walked into a pottery shop in Hot Springs and stood among the kilned bowls and serving dishes, and a man there, hearing what she needed and perhaps not hearing the whole of it, took down a chipped cookie jar and gave it to her. Into this she placed what remained of Jimmy. A cookie jar. The kind a grandmother keeps on a kitchen counter for visiting children, made to hold the small and pleasurable things of an ordinary life. He had been refused his mother, refused the rites of his town, refused even the dignity of an urn, and what he received instead was the vessel of a childhood no one had let him have. She buried him at night, alone, in her family’s cemetery, with a posthole digger she had thrown in the back of her car. She said a few words over the grave herself. She would do this many more times over the next decade. Word traveled fast through the quiet networks of dying men. There is a woman in Hot Springs. She is not afraid. She will sit with you. She had never heard the modern catechism of inclusion and there was no social media. She was a Methodist single mother in Reagan-era Arkansas, and the Ku Klux Klan would twice burn crosses on her lawn for what she was doing, and she kept doing it anyway. The Boomers, like every generation that ever drew breath, came into the world owing a debt no one had thought to explain to them; their twenties were the long humid corridor of a house their fathers had built and could not bring themselves to leave, full of the war their fathers had won and could not stop fighting, full of the wars their own sons would be sent to fight, full of the slow patient carnage by which a country becomes itself. The credentialed classes have spent a generation learning to treat fluency as a kind of virtue. To deploy the current vocabulary of suffering, to know its nouns and its cadences and the audiences at which it must be aimed, has become a moral performance in its own right. It is one of the more comfortable confusions of American life. The right words came late. They came after a working-class woman in Hot Springs walked through a hospital door no one else would open, and held a stranger’s hand for thirteen hours, and buried him in the dark, in a cookie jar, in a cemetery she would not speak of for thirty years. Her name is Ruth Coker Burks. She is alive. She is a Boomer. My generation is not wrong about the damage. Housing is scarce because zoning was designed to protect those who already owned. Student debt is crushing because policy allowed a lending architecture to expand faster than the wages of the young people it depended on. Health care extracts rent at every turn. Both parties are governed, on most days, by men and women who have held office for too long and acquired the habits of holding it. None of this is generational; it is only human. The country lost its compact with the young because, over the past four decades, American institutions learned to protect accumulated wealth better than they protected the young. Again, this is a policy that is supported today by young and old alike. Here is the spiritual cost of generational contempt, which I think we feel without quite naming. Every generation eventually becomes embarrassing to the next one. Mine will not lack for accusers. The easy charges are already being written: that we outsourced our attention to algorithms, that we treated our children as content, that we replaced therapy with chatbots without first understanding what therapy was for. The deepest charge, I think, will be that we were the first generation in human history to live our entire adult lives inside a system that recorded us, and we did not refuse it. We did not, in any meaningful sense, agree to it either. By the time we thought to ask whether it was a problem, we had already taken its shape. Then there is the matter of what we trained. Every confession, every grief, every cruelty we typed into a search bar in the small hours of the morning will have become, by the time our grandchildren are grown, part of the model that judges them. Gen Z will be blamed for something we do not yet have the language to name. They are being formed by whatever that is now, and one rarely sees clearly the shape of the thing forming you. And the unborn will look at all of us, Boomer and Millennial and Gen Z and the generations after, and they will ask the question that gets asked of every era that has ever ended, which is just what did you think you were doing? The honest answer, in our case, is that we were not certain we were doing anything in particular. We were checking our phones. The contempt we aim at the old is but a rehearsal for the contempt that will one day be aimed at us. My mother is seventy now. She still lights up when I tell her something I am proud of, the way she lit up when I came home with a good test, which is more than I earned, more than she ever got, and the only way any of this ever moves forward. She did better than her mother did. I am trying to do better than she did, which is hard, because she set the bar high. My children, God willing, will do better than I do. This is an inheritance, and it is a long, imperfect handoff, where each generation gives the next a slightly better version of the world than it received, by working harder than is fair, and loving more than is easy, and sometimes, often, by refusing to pass on what was passed on to them. I meant to post this on Mother’s Day, but I didn’t. Happy belated Mother’s Day, Mom. And to all of you, your mothers out there too. Even the boomers. Especially the boomers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The death of the phone call.

You sit at the desk in the basement corner you call your office. The window above it looks at nothing. Just a wedge of grass and the foundation of the neighbor’s house. The screen glows the pale blue of a thing that doesn’t sleep, and you have been staring at it long enough that your eyes have stopped registering the words. Behind you the house has settled into its night sounds. The refrigerator cycling. The heater ticking through the walls. A beam contracting somewhere over your head as if the house is trying not to wake anyone. From the kitchen comes the smell of the chicken your wife roasted at six, garlic and rosemary gone cold on the stovetop, the kind of smell that means a family ate and a woman cleaned up and a man was not there for either part. Your daughter is asleep upstairs. Your son is asleep in the room across from hers. Your wife has been asleep for an hour. You can hear her breathing through the floor if you listen, and sometimes you do. The phone lights up on the desk. It is your friend from before. From the unit, from the years you both ate the same dust in the Mojave desert, and slept under the same blanket of low grade stress. The screen shows his name and you look at it. You wanted to ask him whether he ever thinks about the young kid from second platoon platoon, the one with the sister, the one whose name you can no longer say without your throat closing. You wanted to ask him whether his father has died yet. You wanted to ask him if he was okay, which is the only question that has ever mattered between you, and which neither of you has ever once asked aloud. You let it ring. You watch the screen go dark. The house keeps breathing. In the morning you send him a text. Hey brother, saw you called. All good? What you meant to say was that you have been sitting at this desk most nights for a year and you do not understand why. What you meant to say was that last week at the gas station you saw a kid who reminded you of the kid from second platoon, and you sat in the truck for twenty minutes afterward and could not turn the key. What you meant to say was that you have not heard your friend’s voice in eleven months and you are afraid the next time you hear it will be at his funeral service, and you will stand there in a suit you bought for someone else’s funeral and not know what to do with your hands. The text said none of this. The text was four words and a question mark, a green rectangle on a piece of glass. He sent one back an hour later. All good brother. You? You wrote Same. You put the phone down and went and made the coffee. What was lost was the breath between the words. What was lost was the catch in his voice when he heard yours, the small involuntary thing the throat does when a man hears a man he has loved for twenty years. What was lost was the chance, the single chance, on a Tuesday night in October at twenty-three minutes past eleven, to be known by another man before the dark comes for them both. Two men can love each other their whole lives and never say it. What saves them is the hearing of it. And there is no hearing in a green rectangle. There is no breath. There is no man on the other end. There is only the silence after, which is the silence that will be there when one of them is gone and the other is left with a phone that does not ring anymore, and a question he never asked. The phone call as the last unedited medium. The dread is new. A phone rings on a desk at night and the person whose desk it is looks at it with the fixed expression of a man watching an animal he has not yet decided to feed. The name on the screen belongs to someone he loves. That is what makes the dread interesting. To be known by people who already know us, at a moment for which we have not prepared, is now the thing we are most afraid of. We did not used to prepare. We just picked up. The voice came out of us with whatever fatigue or irritation or grief the day had left in it, and the person on the other end heard it and made of it what they would. Now we draft. Voice memos can be re-recorded until the catch is gone from the throat. Texts can be edited until they say the thing we wish we felt. The little green dot beside our name can be turned off, so no one knows we are home. What we have built, over fifteen years and without quite meaning to, is a publicist’s job inside every friendship. We manage our image for the people who have watched us cry. We curate our availability for the people who held our children. The phone call is the last room we have not redecorated. This is why the ringing of it produces what it produces. This is why we let it go. What we lost is rhythm. Conversation has a tempo, which is to say it has pauses, and the pauses are where the meaning lives. A held breath before an answer means one thing. A laugh that arrives a beat late means another. The voice that drops a half step on a particular word, the cough that interrupts a sentence and then declines to finish it, these are the structures through which one human being learns what another human being is actually saying. They are also, almost without exception, involuntary. They cannot be drafted. Text removes them, and what remains is the sentence stripped of its weather. We send messages over hours that would have taken twelve minutes by voice and carried, in those twelve minutes, the entire emotional truth of an exchange the texts will never approximate. What looks like a pause in a text thread is an absence. Someone has put the phone down. Someone is in a meeting. Someone is choosing not to answer yet because the appearance of immediacy is socially expensive. A thread that ran across a Tuesday afternoon feels, in retrospect, like a long conversation. It was not a long conversation. It was a series of micro-performances separated by the silences in which we did other things. The twelve-minute call would have left us with the residue a real exchange leaves, the small ache of having been present to another person’s life. The thread leaves nothing. We scroll up the next week and cannot remember what we meant. A commander walks the line at the end of a long day. He does not have a clipboard. He does not ask the questions a survey would ask. He stops at a man and looks at him, and the looking is the thing. He sees the weight under the eyes, the small tremor in the hand that holds the rifle, the way the shoulders have begun to carry something the man has not yet told anyone he is carrying. He asks how the man is and listens to the answer, and then he listens to what the answer did not contain. This is how morale has always been taken. Face to face, in the failing light, by a man whose job is to know which of his men is closer tonight to breaking than he was yesterday. You cannot do this over text. A phone is a small thing on a desk. It rings or it does not. You answer or you do not. The choosing seems like nothing at the time. A man has only so many nights, and only so many friends, and only so many rings before the ringing stops. The window above the desk looks at nothing. The grass is the grass. The phone goes dark. The house keeps breathing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The inventory of an empty house.

Gender discourse has become stupid. I do not mean controversial, or incendiary, or even wrong, though it manages all three on a good day. I mean stupid in the technical sense, as a failure of the intellect to perform its basic office, which is to notice that the world is more complicated than one’s theory of it. The conversation is now carried on at a pitch of abstraction that would have been laughed out of any seminar or conference room at any point before roughly 1990, and it is sustained by combatants who appear to believe that millions of strangers, whom they will never meet, are fundamentally knowable by the team jersey they were issued at birth. The spectacle has the curious feature that its two warring camps, who cannot be in a room together without calling for the other’s excommunication, are in fact engaged in the same enterprise. Both insist that the category does the moral work. Both regard the opposition as so foundationally corrupt that engagement is pointless. And both have arrived, by opposite routes, at the same terminus, which is the decision to stop looking at the people the whole argument is supposedly about. Start with the feminists. Not the moderate kind you meet at dinner parties. The serious writers, widely read, whose arguments are quoted on social media every day and taught in women’s studies departments as canon. I mean people like Andrea Dworkin, who in her 1987 book Intercourse, argued that heterosexual sex cannot be disentangled from male domination, that the act itself is marked by occupation, that a woman cannot meaningfully consent inside a system built to extract her consent. Or Amia Srinivasan, whose book The Right to Sex became a minor sensation in 2021, arguing that who we find attractive is political, that the patterns of desire in any society are shaped by power, and that the erotic preferences of men are, in aggregate, one of the mechanisms by which women are kept in place. These arguments are not on the fringes. They are the water the daughters were baptized in and the air the sons learned to hold their breath against, taught on every liberal arts campus from Wesleyan to Sarah Lawrence, by women who had learned them from women who had learned them in their own turn, recited now with the unembarrassed fluency of a catechism, in seminar rooms where the tuition runs to eighty thousand a year and the central discovery of the semester is that the patriarchy has, once again, been found to be responsible. There is a woman on X, and I know her although we have never met, who posts at three in the morning about her ex-husband. She does not say it is about her ex-husband. She says it is about capitalism, or about the male gaze, or about a study from the University of Michigan which has found, to nobody’s surprise but her own, that men are slightly worse than previously believed. The thread runs to 15 posts. By the eighth she has mentioned a specific brand of running shoe. By the eleventh, a specific restaurant in Cambridge. By the thirtieth, you could, if you were curious and had an afternoon free, reconstruct the entire marriage and file for divorce on her behalf. I follow perhaps fourteen of these women. I have told myself, on several occasions, that I am going to unfollow them, and then one of them will post something like men will literally start a land war in Asia before going to therapy, and I will think, well, not this one, this one is different, this one is funny, and I will keep her, the way a man keeps a houseplant he has no business owning, out of a vague sense that letting it die would say something unflattering about him. And then at two in the morning she will post a thread explaining that to be reasonable itself is a tool of patriarchal suppression, and I will be alone in a quiet house, reading by the light of my phone about how men are, once again, the problem, and wondering, with some seriousness, whether I am. Then there is Andrew Wilson, the Christian populist who recently sat down with Konstantin Kisin on [https://youtu.be/RfVy9hUKa6c?si=dkU_jyT-3NKLow-A]Triggernometry [https://youtu.be/RfVy9hUKa6c?si=dkU_jyT-3NKLow-A]. Wilson says out loud what a growing constituency now believes, a constituency one encounters with increasing frequency at weddings, where a groomsman you last saw at a fraternity formal in 2010 will corner you by the bar to explain, with the patient condescension of a man who has recently completed a podcast, that the decline of Western civilization began the moment women were permitted to open their own checking accounts. Women should not defer their childbearing years for college, because their biological window is narrow and college ruins them for marriage. Women should not vote, or should vote as part of a household, which in practice means their husbands vote for them. The draft applies to men, not women, and until that changes, women have not earned the franchise. Rights do not exist; they are social constructions maintained by force, and since women cannot wield force at scale, they are always appealing to men’s benevolence anyway. Feminism, to Wilson, is a century-long error, and the correction is a return to the stakeholder democracy America had at its founding, when the head of a household cast one vote for everyone under his roof. Wilson’s argument is coherent in its own way, sure. Grant his premises and the conclusions follow. The premises are that morality is grounded in God, that Christian ethics produce the best outcomes, and that force decides everything in the end. The rest is just engineering. What Wilson shares with far left feminists like Dworkin, despite every surface disagreement, is the treatment of men and women as classes whose behavior is explained by their biology or their social function. He would be offended by the comparison, though he clearly should not be. The operation is identical. A particular man or a particular woman is a stand-in for a role the ideology has assigned in advance. The individual is a data point in a case the theorist has already decided. But here is an author you’ll seldom hear interviewed on podcasts. The psychologist Andrew Solomon has spent a career writing against this exact move. He wrote that identity has a vertical dimension, the traits we inherit from our parents, and a horizontal dimension, the traits we discover only by finding others like us. A deaf child born to hearing parents is their child and also something the parents cannot fully comprehend without effort. The parents’ job is to love what the child actually is, not what they expected, and to resist the temptation to dissolve the child into a category. He would tell them you’ve written well, and that much of it was true. Men’s power has disfigured the lives of women. You had seen that plain, and set it down, and the seeing was not the error. But you have built a theory in which good men cannot appear. You have built a theory in which the father of a disabled child, sitting up through the fourth night in a row to keep her from hurting herself, is functionally indistinguishable from a rapist because both are men. Your theory has no room for love that crosses the category you made central. And a theory that will not house love is not a theory at all, but an inventory taken in an empty house, and the inventory of an empty house, however precise, tells you nothing of the family that once dwelt there. And to Wilson I would say something harder. You want to return women to the household because you believe it produces flourishing. You say this with the confidence of a man who has never had to watch the plan come apart in his hands. I am a father. And my son, like every son, is not what anyone expected, because no child ever is. The plan does not survive him. The plan was never going to survive him. And I sit up some nights, in a house that is quieter than I ever thought a house of mine would be, and I think about him, and about his mother, and about the family we were going to be and the family we turned out to be instead, and I understand something I could not have understood at twenty, which is that flourishing is not the correct alignment of bodies to roles. Flourishing is the willingness of a parent to love a child who does not match the plan, and of a partner to love a partner whose life does not fit the template, and of a man, finally, to love himself as the thing he is and not the thing he was supposed to have become. Your system explains every family difficulty as someone failing to fit their role. It has no account of the harder case, which is the role failing to fit the person. That case is real, and common, and it is the case in which love is actually tested. Your theology is silent there, because silence is all it has. It was built to enforce the template, not to meet the person who cannot live inside it. The moral work, on both sides of this polarized debate, is designed to avoid the work of looking. Looking at the particular woman, the particular man, the particular marriage after the cameras are off and the categories have been dissolved by fatigue and time. Both of you offer a way to render verdicts on people they have never met, as if the categories did all the work. The categories do not do the work. Love does, attention does, the daily choice to take seriously the person you have been given. This is why the gender discourse is stupid, and why it is worse than stupid. It is an evasion, and the people conducting it would be embarrassed, I think, if they let themselves name what they were evading. They are evading the sight of one another. There was a time when a person’s church and a person’s marriage and a person’s town did the quiet work of requiring that sight, often clumsily and sometimes cruelly, but requiring it. That time has passed. We ended it ourselves, in installments, and for reasons that seemed sufficient. What rose in the vacancy is judgement, sold in bulk by the category and bought by audiences who have been relieved, at last, of the burden of looking at anyone in particular. Men and women are not interchangeable, and I have never wanted them to be. The difference between them is one of the great gifts of being human, and the places where that difference meets and holds and generates something neither could have made alone are among the places I have been most moved in my life. The category into which a person was born is the beginning of their story, never the end of it. Each soul carries inside it a history no other soul has lived, a grief no other soul has carried in the same shape, a capacity for love that was waiting for a particular person and will recognize that person when it finds them. To love anyone truly is to learn this history, slowly, and to be changed by the learning. There is no shortcut. There has never been a shortcut. And there will never be a theory, of the left or the right, that can do this work for us. Because the work is the point, and the work is what makes us, in the end, worth loving in return. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Phronesis

I recently walked around Princeton University’s campus on a Saturday afternoon. It was beautiful in the way old American campuses always are: stone buildings with ivy climbing the walls, oak trees filtering the light, the kind of place that was built to make you feel small in the presence of something lasting. And every single person I passed was taking a picture of themselves. Not of the buildings. Not of the trees. Of themselves, standing in front of the buildings and the trees, so that later they could prove they had been near something meaningful. The whole campus had become a backdrop, or a set. A place where people came not quite to think, but to be seen appearing to think. I sat on a bench for a while. I watched a woman in a cashmere sweater take over 20 photos of herself in front of Nassau Hall. Twenty. I went home and opened the New York Times, which is something I do when I want to know which direction the worry is blowing. There was a column about the crisis of modern masculinity. The author had been writing about the crisis of modern masculinity for what appeared to be most of her adult life, the way some people restore boats they never intend to sail. The prose was immaculate, the author fluent in the language of insight. If you’d read it out loud at a dinner party, people would have nodded and said, “That’s so true,” and then somebody would have asked if there was more wine. I finished it and sat there for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d just learned. The answer, I think, was that things were bad, and that the author had noticed. I closed the Times and opened X. A man with a jawline and a ring light was explaining to his followers that the key to surviving the age of AI was to “acquire assets.” He said this with the serene certainty of a man who has never been asked a follow-up question. Below him, another man was arguing with a woman he had never met about whether feminism had destroyed the family, conducting in public the exact argument he could not win at home. Below that, someone with a graduate degree in something important had posted a statement so detached from observable reality that reading it felt like being gently concussed. Everyone is talking. Everyone is performing a version of seriousness so convincing that it has become indistinguishable from the real thing, except for one detail: nothing is changing. The conversations circle, and the arguments repeat as the selfies accumulate. And underneath all of it, something has gone quiet that used to be loud. The Greeks had this word, phronesis. We translate it as “practical wisdom,” which flattens it a little. Phronesis is the capacity to perceive what a situation actually requires and to act on that perception. It doesn’t mean expertise. An expert knows what to do in general. A person with phronesis knows what to do here, now, when the textbook doesn’t apply and the stakes are real. Aristotle paired it with arete, which we translate as “virtue,” gutting it of its original force. Arete meant something closer to excellence aimed at the whole. A life organized around becoming the kind of person who could be trusted with responsibility. Not trusted because of their credentials. But trusted because of character, built through practice, tested through difficulty, refined in community over years. Greeks did not care whether virtue felt good. They asked what was owed. A Roman would have understood the distinction. The Roman concept of pietas, the debt you owed to family, city, ancestors, and the gods, was not a lifestyle preference. It was the architecture of civilization. Christianity added another layer: the idea that consciousness is not confined to the body. That something in us persists, connects, transcends. That we are answerable not only to each other but to something larger. Islam carried a similar conviction, that submission to the divine was the foundation of justice. Buddhism taught that the self was an illusion, and that liberation came from seeing through it. Hinduism mapped the interior life with a precision that Western neuroscience is only now beginning to approach, describing states of consciousness that modern researchers are rediscovering under fMRI machines and publishing as if they were new. I bring up these traditions not because I think we should live like them. Much of what they built rested on slavery and conquest. But they took a question seriously that we have almost entirely stopped asking: what kind of person should a human being try to become? They built institutions around that question. They organized education around it. They selected leaders, at least in principle, on the basis of it. We have no equivalent today. We abandoned the question when we abandoned the religious traditions that once carried it, and we never replaced it with anything that could bear the same weight. Some of what we abandoned deserved abandoning. The dogmas, the hierarchies, the weaponized certainties, the priests who turned out to be predators. Scientific rationalism arrived and offered something genuinely better: a method for distinguishing what is true from what is merely comforting. We needed that. Badly. But somewhere along the way, the method swallowed the worldview. We moved from “we should test our beliefs against evidence” to “only what can be tested against evidence is real.” And in doing so, lost the vocabulary for everything that makes life bearable: meaning, duty, grace, forgiveness, the sense that you are part of something that did not begin with your birth and will not end with your death. If we are not going to return to religion, fine. Maybe that’s for the better. But we cannot replace religious ethics with no ethics at all and expect the structure to hold. I say this because the structure is being tested right now, and it is failing the test. The systems we are building, the ones that will outlast every person reading this, will inherit whatever values we pour into them. Right now we are pouring in efficiency, optimization, engagement metrics, and quarterly returns. We are building minds without conscience. I’m not saying that to be cute. That is exactly what we are doing. And the market will not correct for this, because markets do not account for the soul. They never have. In the dust of this new age the tools we shape begin to shape us. The machines do not wait. They learn. They judge. And they do not pray before they act. In the old world a man’s conscience was his compass. In this one, it is the code he leaves behind. There is no virtue in speed without wisdom, and there is no mercy in power without restraint. We are not merely makers now; we are translators of our own soul into systems that will outlast us. And if we do not set the bones of those systems in ethics, in something older and truer than profit or pride, then they will speak in the voice of no one, and answer to nothing. This is where the selfies and the AI converge. The woman in front of Nassau Hall and the algorithm curating her feed are participating in the same economy: one that measures everything and values nothing that can’t be measured. She is responding rationally to a system that rewards visibility while punishing depth. The system is the problem. And the system is about to get a lot more powerful. An AI trained on engagement will optimize for engagement. An AI trained on profit will optimize for profit. An AI trained on wisdom would optimize for something else entirely, but we would have to know what wisdom looks like before we could train for it. And we have spent the last century systematically dismantling every institution that once tried to answer that question. People mythologize Elon Musk for his technical brilliance, equating that for wisdom. This is a category error as old as history. This is the gap, and it’s not technological, but moral. We have the tools to build systems of extraordinary power and no shared framework for deciding what those systems should serve. The engineers building these models are, in my experience, thoughtful people asking hard questions. But they are building on a foundation that the rest of us forgot to pour. The question we need to answer is a design question: how do you build systems, political, institutional, technological, that select for wisdom and moral courage rather than ambition? Every serious civilization before ours organized itself around some version of this question. We have stopped asking it, and the cracks in the walls are the predictable consequence of a civilization that scoffs at concepts like duty and integrity. Part of the answer to all of this involves taking consciousness seriously. Not as a new age branding exercise, but as the deepest unsolved question in science. The fact that anything is experienced at all, that there is something it is like to be you reading this sentence, remains unexplained by any model we have. Researchers who ask fundamental questions about the nature of mind should not be treated as if they’ve committed a professional indiscretion. They are working on the thing that matters most. Part of the answer involves rebuilding the practice of interiority. Not the kind found in TikTok clips, spoken by people with jawlines you could teach geometry with. I’m talking about the actual discipline of sitting with yourself long enough to discover what you think, rather than what the feed thinks, rather than what performs well, rather than what is safe. This is unglamorous work and it does not photograph well. And part of the answer might just be this, and I’m sorry it isn’t more complicated: try to get interested in other people. Actually interested. Use the phone to find out how someone is doing, not to watch a twenty-six-year-old in a rented apartment explain the universe to you while you lie in bed feeling like something the dog brought in. Choose depth over visibility, in the small ways, on the days when nobody’s grading you. Look, I know how that sounds. It sounds like the kind of thing someone writes on a bench at Princeton while feeling superior to the woman with the phone. I am aware of the irony. But the irony does not make it incorrect. Tonight, somewhere, in a room without a camera, someone will sit quietly and ask the only question that has ever mattered: what kind of person am I becoming? And whether anyone is watching will be, for once, not the point. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]