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Vox
10 hours ago
- General
- Vox
5 reasons to be grateful for air conditioning
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. A You're Hot, Stay Cool sign with an AC unit and fan posted to a street light during a heat wave on 86th Street in Manhattan, New York. Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Lee Kuan Yew, the iron-willed founder of modern Singapore, was once asked what the most important invention of the 20th century was. He didn't say penicillin, which has saved over 500 million lives, or the nuclear bomb, which has shaped geopolitics like nothing before. He didn't even say TV! Instead, Lee had a simple two-word answer: 'Air conditioning.' Without air conditioning, Singapore, where temperatures regularly reach into the 90s with tropical humidity levels, would never have developed from a tiny city-state with a per-capita GDP that was a third of Western Europe's in 1960 to one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Air conditioning is as essential to the modern world as the internet itself. But like the internet, A/C gets a bad rap. Cooling already eats up 10 percent of global electricity, and demand from air conditioners is expected to triple by 2050 without tougher energy efficiency standards. Many units still use refrigerant gases that produce a planetary warming effect that is thousands of times that of a similar amount of CO2. Air conditioning is also a physical manifestation of the energy gap between the rich who can afford it, and the poor who must sweat. It has enabled the development of energy-intensive cities in places where humans just shouldn't live, like Phoenix. Fundamentally, A/C is seen by some as an unnecessary luxury, a prime example of a 'harmful habit of consumption,' as Pope Francis once put it. I get the point. It seems morally wrong for so many of us to use a device that contributes about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — only so we can escape the effects of that warming. Related The air conditioning paradox But 'seems' is not the same as 'is.' Air conditioning has become far more than a luxury. So on this, the second day of summer, when the East Coast is about to be enveloped by a truly suffocating wave of heat and humidity, I offer five reasons why we should be grateful for air conditioning. It saves lives Heat isn't just uncomfortable. It's dangerous, killing more Americans in a typical year than any other form of extreme weather. Access to air conditioning can mean the difference between life and death. Seven hundred and thirty-nine people died in the great Chicago heat wave of 1995, but having a working air conditioner reduced the risk of death by 80 percent. Another study looked at cities in multiple countries between 1972 and 2009 and found that more air conditioning helped reduce excess heat deaths. As a 2021 review in the Lancet explained it, air conditioning 'is set to become the most prevalent strategy worldwide for coping with hot weather and heat extremes.' And while only about 8 percent of the 2.8 billion people living in the world's hottest regions have A/C at home, that's an argument for closing the A/C gap — not an argument against the very real value of air conditioning. It keeps us working If you struggle to concentrate when the heat and humidity is high, you're not alone. One study looked at office work and found that productivity begins to decline around 73 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, while at 86°F, performance falls by almost 9 percent. Another study found that every 1 degree increase in average classroom temperature over a school year corresponded to a roughly 1 percent loss in students' expected learning — but installing air conditioning eliminates about three-quarters of that effect. As temperatures continue to increase, the importance of air conditioning in schools and businesses will only grow. A 2016 working paper finds that widespread adoption of air conditioning — especially by the most productive plants — substantially offsets the heat-induced drop in US manufacturing output, making cooling a critical adaptation tool. It helps us sleep The more we learn about sleep, the more important it appears to be — and keeping cool is a key part of a decent night's sleep. Humans fall asleep fastest around 64–68°F, while temperatures above 75°F cause vital deep sleep and REM sleep to crater. A 2024 review of more than 50 lab and field studies found that bedroom cooling increased total sleep time 15 to 20 minutes and cut the total amount of time people spent awake after falling asleep by a third. It's given us everything from the movies to microchips Do you like going to the movie theater to catch a summer blockbuster? Well, you can thank air conditioning — before its invention, movie attendance always dropped during the hot summer months. It's no coincidence that the first public air conditioner was installed in a cinema, New York's Rivoli Theater, in 1925. But maybe you prefer to take in your movies in the comfort of your own home? Well, producing the microchips that go into your streaming TV or smartphone requires total precision in temperature control and humidity. In short: no A/C, no microchips. It lets millions live and travel where they want Look, my negative feelings about living in red-hot metros like Phoenix are a matter of public record. But I am clearly in the minority: Americans love to live in hot places. Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, added 1.2 million people between 2013 and 2023, more than any other county — and 96 percent of the new housing built to absorb those new residents comes with A/C. What US cities like Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta have in common with Singapore and Hong Kong is that none of them would exist as anything like they are today without the widespread use of air conditioning. Before A/C, the American South was mired in poverty, far behind the rest of the country. After A/C, the South more than caught up, and the otherwise uninhabitable Southwest became a magnet for people. If you think it's good that people can choose from a wider spectrum of places — and I do — A/C is one of the main reasons why that's possible. Air conditioning as it exists today is far from perfect. But it's also necessary, especially in an ever-warming world. What we need is not less air conditioning — unless you happen to work at an office where they keep the temperature at 60°F — but better air conditioning, with more efficient units powered by cleaner electricity. If you want to go without A/C, go right ahead (though I probably won't be visiting your house in the summer anytime soon). But either way, it should be a choice. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
6 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The stunning reversal of humanity's oldest bias
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl. Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially 'missing' — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren't. Sen's estimate came before the truly widespread adoption of ultrasound tests that could determine the sex of a fetus in utero — which actually made the problem worse, leading to a wave of sex-selective abortions. These were especially common in countries like India and China; the latter's one-child policy and old biases made families desperate for their one child to be a boy. The Economist has estimated that since 1980 alone, there have been approximately 50 million fewer girls born worldwide than would naturally be expected, which almost certainly means that roughly that nearly all of those girls were aborted for no other reason than their sex. The preference for boys was a bias that killed in mass numbers. But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios. Altogether, The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million girls. That's comparable to the number of lives saved by anti-smoking efforts in the US. So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society? Related The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies Success in school and the workplace For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits. Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men. Government policies have helped accelerate that shift, in part because they have come to recognize the serious social problems that eventually result from decades of anti-girl discrimination. In countries like South Korea and China, which have long had some of the most skewed gender ratios at birth, governments have cracked down on technologies that enable sex-selective abortion. In India, where female infanticide and neglect have been particularly horrific, slogans like 'Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter' have helped change opinions. A changing preference The shift is being seen not just in birth sex ratios, but in opinion polls — and in the actions of would-be parents. Between 1983 and 2003, The Economist reported, the proportion of South Korean women who said it was 'necessary' to have a son fell from 48 percent to 6 percent, while nearly half of women now say they want daughters. In Japan, the shift has gone even further — as far back as 2002, 75 percent of couples who wanted only one child said they hoped for a daughter. In the US, which allows sex selection for couples doing in-vitro fertilization, there is growing evidence that would-be parents prefer girls, as do potential adoptive parents. While in the past, parents who had a girl first were more likely to keep trying to have children in an effort to have a boy, the opposite is now true — couples who have a girl first are less likely to keep trying. A more equal future There's still more progress to be made. In northwest of India, for instance, birth ratios that overly skew toward boys are still the norm. In regions of sub-Saharan Africa, birth sex ratios may be relatively normal, but post-birth discrimination in the form of poorer nutrition and worse medical care still lingers. And course, women around the world are still subject to unacceptable levels of violence and discrimination from men. And some of the reasons for this shift may not be as high-minded as we'd like to think. Boys around the world are struggling in the modern era. They increasingly underperform in education, are more likely to be involved in violent crime, and in general, are failing to launch into adulthood. In the US, 20 percent of American men between 25 and 34 still live with their parents, compared to 15 percent of similarly aged women. It also seems to be the case that at least some of the increasing preference for girls is rooted in sexist stereotypes. Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth. But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls' lives saved. And maybe one Father's Day, not too long from now, we'll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.
Vox
07-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
We're secretly winning the war on cancer
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Thousands of people gather on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on September 26, 1998, to demand that the cause, the care, and the cure of cancer be made top research and healthcare priorities in the US. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst news imaginable: He had cancer — one that later tests would reveal as multiple myeloma, a severe blood and bone marrow cancer. Jon was told he might have as little as 18 months to live. He was 38, a thriving magazine editor in New York with a 7-month-old daughter whose third birthday, he suddenly realized, he might never see. 'The moment after I was told I had cancer, I just said 'no, no, no,'' Jon told me in an interview just last week. 'This cannot be true.' Living in remission The fact that Jon is still here, talking to me in 2025, tells you that things didn't go the way the medical data would have predicted on that November morning. He has lived with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for more than 20 years, an experience he chronicles with grace and wit in his new book An Exercise in Uncertainty. That 7-month-old daughter is now in college. You could say Jon has beaten the odds, and he's well aware that chance played some role in his survival. ('Did you know that 'Glück' is German for 'luck'?' he writes in the book, noting his good fortune that a random spill on the ice is what sent him to the doctor in the first place, enabling them to catch his cancer early.) Cancer is still a terrible health threat, one that is responsible for 1 in 6 deaths around the world, killing nearly 10 million people a year globally and over 600,000 people a year in the US. But Jon's story and his survival demonstrate something that is too often missed: We've turned the tide in the war against cancer. The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago. That adds up to over 4 million fewer cancer deaths over that time period. Thanks to breakthroughs in treatments like autologous stem-cell harvesting and CAR-T therapy — breakthroughs Jon himself benefited from, often just in time — cancer isn't the death sentence it once was. Our World in Data Getting better all the time There's no doubt that just as the rise of smoking in the 20th century led to a major increase in cancer deaths, the equally sharp decline of tobacco use eventually led to a delayed decrease. Smoking is one of the most potent carcinogens in the world, and at the peak in the early 1960s, around 12 cigarettes were being sold per adult per day in the US. Take away the cigarettes and — after a delay of a couple of decades — lung cancer deaths drop in turn along with other non-cancer smoking-related deaths. But as Saloni Dattani wrote in a great piece earlier this year, even before the decline of smoking, death rates from non-lung cancers in the stomach and colon had begun to fall. Just as notably, death rates for childhood cancers — which for obvious reasons are not connected to smoking and tend to be caused by genetic mutations — have fallen significantly as well, declining sixfold since 1950. In the 1960s, for example, only around 10 percent of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today it's more than 90 percent. And the five-year survival rate for all cancers has risen from 49 percent in the mid-1970s to 69 percent in 2019. We've made strikes against the toughest of cancers, like Jon's multiple myeloma. Around when Jon was diagnosed, the five-year survival rate was just 34 percent. Today it's as high as 62 percent, and more and more people like Jon are living for decades. 'There has been a revolution in cancer survival,' Jon told me. 'Some illnesses now have far more successful therapies than others, but the gains are real.' Three cancer revolutions The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn't happen by accident — it's the compound interest of three revolutions. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people's cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20–39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It's generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival, as Jon's own story shows. According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise. Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer, much of which can be tracked through Jon's own experience. From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people's lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient's own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see. 'CAR-T is mind-blowing — very science-fiction futuristic,' Jon told me. He underwent his own course of treatment with it in mid-2023 and writes that the experience, which put his cancer into a remission he's still in, left him feeling 'physically and metaphysically new.' A welcome uncertainty While there are still more battles to be won in the war on cancer, and there are certain areas — like the rising rates of gastrointestinal cancers among younger people — where the story isn't getting better, the future of cancer treatment is improving. For cancer patients like Jon, that can mean a new challenge — enduring the essential uncertainty that comes with living under a disease that's controllable but which could always come back. But it sure beats the alternative. 'I've come to trust so completely in my doctors and in these new developments,' he said. 'I try to remain cautiously optimistic that my future will be much like the last 20 years.' And that's more than he or anyone else could have hoped for nearly 22 years ago. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. 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 popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, , is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word 'astutia' — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Vox
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like The Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. 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 popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgements into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word astutia — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.
