Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Since 2001, suicide rates increased by around 40% and religious identity fell by 25%. These seemingly random statistics are data points in a web defining America’s postmodern malaise. Within a generation a nation that had been a global model of a modern society has imploded. Old demons like racism have come roaring back in a country that is more divided than ever. Another civil war, once a farfetched science fiction tale, now seems almost inevitable. In nearly every statistic that touches on our social bonds, America has become a disaster area. From individuals to our families to our cities to our nation, we are coming apart. Suicide rates, drug overdoses, urban collapse, crime waves, hate, violence, fear and economic decline are everywhere. The majority of Americans don’t believe that the future holds anything better. There are many explanations for what is happening, but a basic one is that we are the plane plummeting from the sky after all the rivets holding it together had come out...

Cancel culture, like most of our contemporary cultural revolution, began in China. In the aughts, rural Chinese migrated to massive mega-cities whose impossible population densities were matched by the growing interconnection of the internet. While three quarters of China’s population is now on the internet, in 2006 it grew by a quarter to encompass only 10%. In these cramped quarters, physical and social, there was no room for the individual. The Chinese internet, unlike its American counterpart, was always centered around social media which is one reason why TikTok is eating Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s lunches. It was also always mobile. Chinese commuters on public transportation tapped in their grievances against neighbors, friends, family and random strangers. And mobs formed to take sides. What we call cancel culture, the Chinese called “internet hunting” by “morality mobs” who were enforcing a street-level Confucianism in Maoist fashion by destroying the lives of the offender...

“Abortion is sacred,” Planned Parenthood declared. Biden told Dylan Mulvaney that banning transgender child mutilation is “immoral”. The head of the Public Religion Research Institute preaches about the “sacred work of white discomfort” in defense of critical race theory. It is a mistake to think of the Left as a secular movement. People don’t throw their lives away for a set of ideas. They don’t turn on their parents, societies and entire way of life over abstractions. Only something that touches their deepest selves and offers them that sense of purpose and meaning in a broken world that religious people call revelation and holiness summons that fire. That leftists don’t believe in a central deity is confusing to monotheists, but what they believe in is far older, a hybrid of primitive mysticism, laboriously revived by western romanticism, and theoretical acadamese nurtured by over two centuries of dilettante students, professional radicals and assorted megalomaniacal cranks who litt...

In Flatland, a mathematical satire, a being who exists in two dimensions experiences the arrival of a three-dimensional being as the extrusion of a flat surface into his world. These days we all live in Flatland. The internet connects and accommodates us at the expense of flattening our reality. Networks are based on common standards. To connect different things together is to reduce them to the lowest common denominator. The internet hasn't made our culture richer and deeper: it has simplified us.  The flattening effect of the internet equates and simplifies everything. Its standards lower the barriers and in the process eliminate the complexities. This isn't a simple dumbing down. To dumb something down is to lower access, but to also offer the possibility of following that to a more sophisticated understanding. What is pervasive about flattening is that it eliminates the third and fourth dimensions entirely. In the physical realm, the third dimension provides depth. In the r...

Around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon. Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King". After the "Peace of the King" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." Bentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain "power over mind" a reality. In a "quantity hitherto without e...