Christina Cauterucci in XXFactor:

Graham Harman and Andrew Cole at Artforum:

THERE ARE SEVERAL strange elements in Andrew Cole’s recent polemic against speculative realism and object-oriented ontology [Artforum, Summer 2015]. First, in a piece written specifically for Artforum, Cole never bothers to address our views on art, choosing instead to treat the magazine’s readership to a long lesson on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Second, after trying to make us look disrespectful by likening us to vandals who spray-painted “Kant is a moron” on a house in Kaliningrad, Russia, Cole himself takes a crude and macabre dig at Kant’s personal life: “Yes, Kantian moral philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the philosopher exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine having sex near the gallows—easy to say for a person who never got laid.” It’s also strange that while Cole only cites one of my publications (The Quadruple Object [2011]) by name, he laments unanswered questions that are addressed not only in other publications, but even in the one book that he seems to have read.

Forgetting for now these unsettling signals, let’s briefly consider Cole’s argument, which is really an attempted counterpoint of two separate arguments. The first is that we have either misunderstood Kant or deliberately distorted his ideas to conceal the fact that we have stolen most of our insights from him. The second—always a crowd-pleaser—is that object-oriented philosophy is hopelessly complicit with capitalism and the “commodity fetishism” that Marx linked with the capitalist system. Cole handles the second point more impressionistically than the first, and a similar argument was already made by his sometime collaborator Alexander R. Galloway in a widely read but dreadful 2013 Critical Inquiry article entitled “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” In what follows, I will therefore focus on Cole’s remarks on Kant.

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Fiona Green at the Times Literary Supplement:

“What must it be to be someone else?” Gerard Manley Hopkins wondered. It is a question that has occupied Colm Tóibín before, whether the someone else was Henry James, or the mother of Christ. What must it be to be someone else in a book that is not a novel, and in which the someone else is a poet who specialized in solitariness, who could be “chilly” in person, and who did not hesitate to turn away uninvited guests. When Mary McCarthy threatened to visit Elizabeth Bishop, she replied: “I’d be grateful if you didn’t come over”.

Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop introduces the poet in new company – he likens her to James Joyce, and more persuasively to Thom Gunn – and alongside old acquaintances (Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore). Mostly, Tóibín recognizes in Bishop aspects of himself. Both writers are drawn to grey, muted coastlines; both invest feeling in “things withheld”. Like Bishop, Tóibín found himself returned to childhood by the experience of “elsewhere”: Bishop’s fifteen-year sojourn in Brazil prompted her to recall and reimagine Nova Scotia; having “escaped Ireland” to write his first novel in Southern Europe, Tóibín found his proper “melancholy tone” in memories of Wexford. These childhood haunts were, for both writers, places of profound loss. Tóibín is particularly good on estrangement, and puts his finger right on it when he says that Bishop’s life in Brazil – at least as retold in her letters and poems – seemed “a parody of ‘normal life’”, “a comedy she had invented”.

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Marilynne Robinson at the New York Review of Books:

There is something I have felt the need to say, that I have spoken about in various settings, extemporaneously, because my thoughts on the subject have not been entirely formed, and because it is painful to me to have to express them. However, my thesis is always the same, and it is very simply stated, though it has two parts: first, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind. As children we learn to say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” We learn that, after his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples, “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Christ is a gracious, abiding presence in all reality, and in him history will finally be resolved.

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Asher Mullard in Nature:

As the costs of genetic sequencing fall, oncologists are starting to prescribe expensive new drugs that target the genetic profiles of their patients’ tumours, even when those treatments have not been approved for the particular cancer involved. But such 'off-label' use is running ahead of the state of scientific knowledge, suggests the first randomized clinical trial to test the idea. The study, published in Lancet Oncology, found that using personalized cancer drugs off-label provides no benefit over conventional chemotherapy¹. “This study is important because many oncologists have already adopted the personalized approach,” says Daniel Catenacci, an oncologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, who was not involved in the trial. “Why have they abandoned the science?” Lead author of the study Christophe Le Tourneau, an oncologist at the Curie Institute in Paris, says that he sees such off-label treatments “quite often” in practice. “I understand why it happens: patients want to live and physicians want to offer help,” he says. But Le Tourneau adds that patients whose tumours have genetic alterations that might be targeted by a non-approved drug are better served by entering clinical trials.

Precision treatments

A small but growing number of personalized cancer drugs have been approved for treating particular cancers that involve specific mutations, but oncologists hope that these drugs will also work against related mutations in other cancers. By some counts, more than 30% of cancer drugs are prescribed off-label^{2, 3}. To test the benefits of off-label tailored drug regimens, researchers at eight French hospitals analysed their patients’ tumours to look for genetic or molecular abnormalities that might be amenable to precision medicine. The researchers randomly assigned 195 suitable patients either to one of 10 potentially relevant targeted treatment regimens, or to chemotherapy. There was no significant difference between the effects of the treatments.

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Stephanos Bibas makes the conservative case for prison reform, in National Review:

Two centuries ago, the shift from shaming and corporal punishments to imprisonment made punishment an enduring status. Reformers had hoped that isolation and Bible reading in prison would induce repentance and law-abiding work habits, but it didn’t turn out that way. Now we warehouse large numbers of criminals, in idleness and at great expense. By exiling them, often far away, prison severs them from their responsibilities to their families and communities, not to mention separating them from opportunities for gainful work. This approach is hugely disruptive, especially when it passes a tipping point in some communities and exacerbates the number of fatherless families. And much of the burden falls on innocent women and children, who lose a husband, boyfriend, or father as well as a breadwinner.

Even though wrongdoers may deserve to have the book thrown at them, it is not always wise to exact the full measure of justice. There is evidence that prison turns people into career criminals. On the one hand, it cuts prisoners off from families, friends, and neighbors, who give them reasons to follow the law. Responsibilities as husbands and fathers are key factors that tame young men’s wildness and encourage them to settle down: One longitudinal study found that marriage may reduce reoffending by 35 percent. But prison makes it difficult to maintain families and friendships; visiting in person is difficult and time-consuming, prisons are often far away, and telephone calls are horrifically expensive.

On the other hand, prison does much to draw inmates away from lawful work. In the month before their arrest, roughly three quarters of inmates were employed, earning the bulk of their income lawfully. Many were not only taking care of their children but helping to pay for rent, groceries, utilities, and health care. But prison destroys their earning potential. Prisoners lose their jobs on the outside. Felony convictions also disqualify ex-cons from certain jobs, housing, student loans, and voting. Michigan economics professor. Michael Mueller-Smith finds that spending a year or more in prison reduces the odds of post-prison employment by 24 percent and increases the odds of living on food stamps by 5 percent.

Conversely, prisons are breeding grounds for crime. Instead of working to support their own families and their victims, most prisoners are forced to remain idle. Instead of having to learn vocational skills, they have too much free time to hone criminal skills and connections. And instead of removing wrongdoers from criminogenic environments, prison clusters together neophytes and experienced recidivists, breeding gangs, criminal networks, and more crime. Thus, Mueller-Smith finds, long sentences on average breed much more crime after release than they prevent during the sentence. 

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Marilynne Robinson in the NYRB:

Calvin had his supernumeraries, great French lords who were more than ready to take up arms in his cause, which was under severe persecution. He managed to restrain them while he lived, saying that the first drop of blood they shed would become a torrent that drowned France. And, after he died, Europe was indeed drenched in blood. So there is every reason to suppose that Calvin would have thought his movement had lost at least as much as it gained in these efforts to defend it, as he anticipated it would. Specifically, in some degree it lost its Christian character, as Christianity, or any branch of it, always does when its self-proclaimed supporters outnumber and outshout its actual adherents. What is true when there is warfare is just as true when the bonding around religious identity is militantly cultural or political.

At the core of all this is fear, real or pretended. What if these dissenters in our midst really are a threat to all we hold dear? Better to deal with the problem before their evil schemes are irreversible, before our country has lost its soul and the United Nations has invaded Texas. We might step back and say that there are hundreds of millions of people who love this nation’s soul, who in fact are its soul, and patriotism should begin by acknowledging this fact. But there is not much fear to be enjoyed from this view of things. Why stockpile ammunition if the people over the horizon are no threat? If they would in fact grieve with your sorrows and help you through your troubles?

At a lunch recently Lord Jonathan Sacks, then chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, said that the United States is the world’s only covenant nation, that the phrase “We the People” has no equivalent in the political language of other nations, and that the State of the Union Address should be called the renewal of the covenant. I have read that Americans are now buying Kalashnikovs in numbers sufficient to help subsidize Russian rearmament, to help their manufacturers achieve economies of scale. In the old days these famous weapons were made with the thought that they would be used in a land war between great powers, that is, that they would kill Americans. Now, since they are being brought into this country, the odds are great that they will indeed kill Americans. But only those scary ones who want to destroy all we hold dear. Or, more likely, assorted adolescents in a classroom or a movie theater.

I know there are any number of people who collect guns as sculpture, marvels of engineering. When we mount a cross on a wall, we don’t do it with the thought that, in a pinch, we might crucify someone. This seems to be a little different when the icon in question is a gun.

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Brian Greene in Scientific American:

Einstein shot to fame within the scientific community in 1905, a year christened as his annus mirabilis. While working eight hours days, six days a week at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he wrote four papers in his spare time that changed the course of physics. In March of that year he argued that light, long described as a wave, is actually composed of particles, called photons, an observation that launched quantum mechanics. Two months later, in May, Einstein's calculations provided testable predictions of the atomic hypothesis, later confirmed experimentally, cinching the case that matter is made of atoms. In June he completed the special theory of relativity, revealing that space and time behave in astonishing ways no one had ever anticipated—in short, that distances, speeds and durations are all relative depending on the observer. And to cap it off, in September 1905 Einstein derived a consequence of special relativity, an equation that would become the world's most famous: E = mc².

Science usually progresses incrementally. Few and far between are contributions that sound the scientific alert that a radical upheaval is at hand. But here one man in one year rang the bell four times, an astonishing outpouring of creative insight. Almost immediately, the scientific establishment could sense that reverberations of Einstein's work were shifting the bedrock understanding of reality. For the wider public, however, Einstein had not yet become Einstein.

That would change on November 6, 1919.

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Martin Chulov in The Guardian:

For more than a century, Dabiq was one of northern Syria’s forsaken villages, a speck on a vast agricultural plain between the Turkish border and the deserts of Iraq, which hardly seemed likely to shape the fate of nations. A weathered sign at its entrance said 4,000 people lived there, most of whom appeared to have left by 2013, driven out over time by a lack of work – and lately by insurrection. For the first three years of Syria’s civil war, the arrival of a strange car would lure bored children to the town’s otherwise empty streets, scattering cats and chickens as they scampered after it. Little else moved.

Dabiq’s few remaining men worked on the odd building project: a half-finished mosque, a humble house for one local who had just returned after 10 years labouring in Lebanon, or a fence for the shrine that was the town’s only showpiece – the tomb of Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. The Ummayad caliph was buried under a mound of earth in 717, which over many centuries had somehow grown into a small hill. The war was happening elsewhere, it seemed.

That was until the jihadists of Islamic State (Isis) arrived in early 2014, an event that the Dabiq elders had feared from the moment the war began – and which the new arrivals had anticipated for much longer. To the foreigners, and the leaders of the new militant juggernaut who were beckoning them, the war had by then entered a new phase that would transform the tussle for power in Syria into something far more grand and important. For them, the conflict that was slicing the country apart was not merely, as the Syrian opposition had seen it, a modern struggle between a ruthless state and a restive underclass. The jihadis instead saw themselves at the vanguard of a war that many among them believed had been preordained in the formative days of Islam.

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Megan French-Marcelin at nonsite:

In 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sent a rushed note to then secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) George Romney. Unfazed by the backlash some four years prior to The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan, now Richard Nixon’s counselor on Urban Affairs, enumerated the obstacles city mayors were up against on the eve of the 1970s. Armed with a slew of new statistics, the academic-turned-policy wonk doubled down on his thesis that the disintegration of black family structure was at the root of urban poverty.1 However, as the impact of deindustrialization and stagnation came into focus, Moynihan now observed other discouraging elements at work in cities as well. In little more than a few years, the failure of antipoverty programs had contributed to a more serious urban crisis motivated now by two “opposing trends”: the flight of white families and “just as clearly, the social structure of the Negro poor [which] continues to deteriorate.”2 As antithetical sides of the same crisis, city administrators must now consider how dual threats—white flight and black poverty—undermined urban stability, the academician warned.

Over the course of the next decade, local administrators in New Orleans embraced these twinned crises as means to pivot focus from inequality to matters of urban demography—conveniently ignoring broader structural economic shifts. Planners argued that the consequences of this binary left local administrators with few achievable pathways to urban stability. The city, Mayor Moon Landrieu argued, had become a “city of minorities,” “poor” and “weak.”3 Consequently, the mayor said, the fiscal crisis with which American cities contended was exacerbated in New Orleans by the sheer number of residents who “require[d] services but who [we]re less capable of paying for them.”4

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Adam Morris at The Believer:

Though obscure in popular memory, the “cause” advocated by the Peoples Temple was nothing less than total revolution: the Jonestown agricultural settlement was intended as a utopian social experiment in communism. Jones adapted the notion of “revolutionary suicide” from Huey Newton’s autobiographical account of the early days of the Black Panther Party and his personal crusade against American imperialism and racism. The young Reverend Jones may have started out preaching in the McCarthy-era Midwest, but he claimed to have held socialist and communist convictions ever since he was a child. He was a notorious liar, but if this was one of Jones’s overstatements, it was only a slight one: his wife, Marceline, recalled that her husband had privately expressed his admiration for Mao Zedong just after they were married, in 1949, when Jones was only eighteen years old.

Peoples Temple was nominally a church that originated with a core of Pentecostal followers in Indianapolis. But the Temple’s classification as a religious organization overdetermined its representation in the American media in the 1970s. Indeed, the conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media complained that the group’s radical Marxist objectives were mostly lost in the general confusion surrounding the Jonestown massacre.

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Peter Marshall at The Point:

This May, after decades of steadily gaining acclaim in the English speaking world, the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. Even with this honor, and although he has packed venues in London and New York, Krasznahorkai’s reputation for difficulty will likely continue to limit his audience. Open one of his books and you will be greeted by pages of unbroken text that take readers into a labyrinth of ideas and minute details, contradictions and verbal energy that is unlike anything else in contemporary literature.

In contrast to the overriding trend in contemporary American literature, which can be crudely, though not inaccurately, generalized as being concerned with the psychological and emotional lives of individuals in specific sociopolitical settings, Krasznahorkai’s fiction is populated by ideas, and boiling through his flood of language is a very philosophic conflict with time. Teetering on the brink of madness, characters devise systems of meaning, devote themselves to art, follow charlatans and place their faith in absurd causes in the ultimately futile attempt to halt the onslaught of change.

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Paul Richardson in More Intelligent Life:

It is one of the great American sententiae, as sonorous and moving as the Gettysburg Address. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage. I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.

…Thoreau went to Walden out of conviction, but also out of necessity. In March 1845 the poet William Ellery Channing, his companion on the week-long boating trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers that would form the basis for his first book, wrote to him, “I see nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened ‘Briars’; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive.” At 27, Thoreau’s published writings had been limited to essays in the Dial, the in-house magazine of the Transcendentalists, and the Democratic Review. He was close to penniless, with no immediate prospects. Helping out in the pencil-making workshop alongside his father was far from a dream job. He was comfortable enough but feared the effects of his too easeful life. More than anything, he realised, he needed to strike out on his own. In the autumn of 1844 he had helped to raise the family’s new house on Texas Street. Now that he knew something about foundations, rafters and roofing, perhaps he would be able to build something much smaller by and for himself.

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Stephen S. Hall in Science:

On a blazingly hot morning this past June, a half-dozen scientists convened in a hotel conference room in suburban Maryland for the dress rehearsal of what they saw as a landmark event in the history of aging research. In a few hours, the group would meet with officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a few kilometers away, to pitch an unprecedented clinical trial—nothing less than the first test of a drug to specifically target the process of human aging. “We think this is a groundbreaking, perhaps paradigm-shifting trial,” said Steven Austad, chairman of biology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). After Austad’s brief introductory remarks, a scientist named Nir Barzilai tuned up his PowerPoint and launched into a practice run of the main presentation. Barzilai is a former Israeli army medical officer and head of a well-known study of centenarians based at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. To anyone who has seen the ebullient scientist in his natural laboratory habitat, often in a short-sleeved shirt and always cracking jokes, he looked uncharacteristically kempt in a blue blazer and dress khakis. But his practice run kept hitting a historical speed bump. He had barely begun to explain the rationale for the trial when he mentioned, in passing, “lots of unproven, untested treatments under the category of anti-aging.” His colleagues pounced. “Nir,” interrupted S. Jay Olshansky, a biodemographer of aging from the University of Illinois, Chicago. The phrase “anti-aging … has an association that is negative.” “I wouldn’t dignify them by calling them ‘treatments,’” added Michael Pollak, director of cancer prevention at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “They’re products.” Barzilai, a 59-year-old with a boyish mop of gray hair, wore a contrite grin. “We know the FDA is concerned about this,” he conceded, and deleted the offensive phrase.

Then he proceeded to lay out the details of an ambitious clinical trial. The group—academics all—wanted to conduct a double-blind study of roughly 3000 elderly people; half would get a placebo and half would get an old (indeed, ancient) drug for type 2 diabetes called metformin, which has been shown to modify aging in some animal studies. Because there is still no accepted biomarker for aging, the drug’s success would be judged by an unusual standard—whether it could delay the development of several diseases whose incidence increases dramatically with age: cardiovascular disease, cancer, and cognitive decline, along with mortality. When it comes to these diseases, Barzilai is fond of saying, “aging is a bigger risk factor than all of the other factors combined.”

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Roxana Robinson at Literary Hub:

Lolita stands as a monument to Nabokov’s resentment: it is not a novel of sexual consummation but of cultural contempt. Contempt is the true driving passion: the landscape, the characters, the narrator, the narrative are all drenched in it. Nabokov despises his characters and their bright vulgar world, with its populist architecture and cheap displays, its tawdry, ersatz culture. Lolita is a raging cry for the world Nabokov lost, which was one of refinement, perception and beauty. It’s a cry of rage at a world that represents his world’s counterpart: young, vulgar, unrefined and irredeemably seductive.

Lolita becomes the object of his perverted desire. Early in his life, in Europe, Humbert had an adolescent fling with a girl who died. Now that he has been exiled from Paradise, now that his first love is dead, America and Lolita are what Humbert must endure. Lolita herself is common, superficial and unintelligent, though Humbert ignores her mind and her sensibility. He despises the vulgar clothes and makeup, snacks and advertisements that entrance her, America’s cheap post-war offerings. He hates these philistine vulgarians for owning this huge green continent across which he drives his unwilling partner, full of meadows and mountains and sunsets, rich and open and empty, “end of the summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush… a last rufous mountain, with a rich rug of lucerne at its feet.” These people don’t deserve this place.

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Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

Of the scores of pieces that merit lengthy discussion, I’ll cite one: “Woman with Vase” (1933), a bronze of a plaster sculpture that, cast in cement, accompanied “Guernica” at the Spanish Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Paris, in 1937. She stands more than seven feet tall, with a bulbous head, breasts, and belly, on spindly legs. Her left arm is missing, as if ripped off. Her right arm extends far forward, clutching a tall vase. Seen from the side, the gesture suggests a tender offering. Viewed head on, it delivers a startling, knockout punch. What isn’t this work about? It conjoins Iberian antiquity and Parisian modernity, love and loss, hope and anger, celebration and mourning. Another bronze cast of it stands at Picasso’s tomb, in the Château de Vauvenargues, as a memorial and, perhaps, as a master key to the secrets of his art. Certainly, it overshadows the somewhat indulgent—and, now and then, plain silly—sculptural creations of his later years, such as the gewgaw-elaborated bronze “Little Girl Jumping Rope” (1950). Exceptions from that time include a stunning selection of his riffs on ceramic vessels, lively bent-metal maquettes for public art, and a group of six “Bathers” from 1956: flat figures, one almost nine feet tall, made of scrap wood and standing in a shared, beachlike bed of pebbles. Its éclat might well sink the hearts of contemporary installation artists.

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Greg Grandin in The Nation:

When I told friends and colleagues that I was writing a book about the legacy of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, many made mention of Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger. But I saw my purpose as antithetical to Hitchens’s polemic, which is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as the “devil theory of war”—placing the blame for militarism on a single, isolable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard argued, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried—and convicted—for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead, he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger.

Aside from assembling the docket and gathering the accused’s wrongdoings in one place, The Trial of Henry Kissinger isn’t very useful and is actually counterproductive; righteous indignation doesn’t provide much room for understanding. Hitchens burrows deep into Kissinger’s dark heart: The statesman was implicated in horrors in Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Vietnam, East Timor, Latin America, southern Africa, and Washington, DC (the assassination of Orlando Letelier), as well as against the Kurds. Readers are left waiting for Hitchens to come out and tell us what it all means (that is, besides the obvious: Kissinger is a criminal). But Hitchens never does. In the end, we learn more about the prosecutor than the would-be prosecuted; the book provides no insights into the “total situation” in which Kissinger operated, and makes no effort to explain the power of his ideas or how they tapped into the deeper intellectual currents of American history.

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John Gray in The Guardian:

Matt Ridley has made a discovery. The natural selection that Darwin described in The Origin of Species is only a particular example of a universal process. As he tells us at the start of this book, Darwinism is “the special theory of evolution”. But there is a general theory of evolution, too, and it applies to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality. The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they show “path dependence”; they show descent with modification; they show selective persistence.

In the course of the book’s 16 chapters, which deal with the evolution of everything from the internet to leadership, Ridley repeats this mantra many times: Darwin’s mechanism of selective survival resulting in cumulative complexity applies to human culture in all its aspects, too. Our habits and institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and “in some sense vaguely progressive”.

It’s curious that Ridley thinks this a new idea. There is nothing at all novel in theories of social evolution. I have a vivid memory of listening to the late FA Hayek, some 30 years ago, lecturing on what he called “the natural selection of religions” – a supposedly Darwinian process in which the religions that survive and spread are those that promote private property and market exchange and thereby support growing numbers of believers. I recall wondering how this account squared with the actual history of religion. The polytheistic cults of Greece and Rome didn’t die out in an incremental process of evolutionary decline; they were stamped out when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. If Tibet’s brand of Buddhism disappears from the country, or the Baha’i faith vanishes from Iran, the reason won’t be that these faiths suffer from any evolutionary disadvantage. It will be because state power has been used to destroy them.

More here.