The Barbell Shape of Modernity

Why we live in the best of times and the worst of times simultaneously—and how to live a good life in a world of extremes.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,” wrote Dickens in the famous opening A Tale of Two Cities.

It’s the most Girardian opening to any novel ever written. René Girard, the great social theorist who first articulated the phenomenon of mimetic desire in human society, realized that we are living in a world where things are simultaneously the best they’ve ever been and the worst they’ve ever been — yet very few people seem capable of holding this paradoxical coincidence of opposites in their mind at the same time.

Instead, there is knee-jerk absolutizing of almost everything: things are quickly labeled either “the best” or “the worst”. (It seems to be a national pastime, for instance, for journalists to label every American President either “the best” or the “the worst” in history after about six months in office. This absolutizing tendency has now extended to everything from Bitcoin, sports teams, education, start-ups, restaurants.)

In his book Evolution and Conversion, which is written in the form of a dialogue, Girard is pressed by his interlocutor to admit that the market is a broken system which produces a ‘tolerable’ amount of victims. The interviewer sees the market as a sacred center which requires sacrificial victims in order to function. “Econometrics is the calculation of the tolerable number of sacrifices in a given market,” he claims.

Girard answers:

“But it also saves more victims than any previous historical moment ever did! One cannot balance these accounts, and balance them against what? It is the first time in world history that a society cannot be compared with any other, since ours is the first to encompass the whole planet.”

Girard knew that markets have lifted more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time than any other era in history. Modern…