Words are public tokens for private experiences.
What words add is not power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual exchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own in order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by which a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that thing's context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to recall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by nature is a worthless standard of value in other things.
Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously visited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train of reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst and the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied liquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted. His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his fairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply annihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and this ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live for a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time and it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert itself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to bring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that temporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good invisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.
If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had from the first called his haunt the river, he would have repeated its name on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to recognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon finding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a change; for it would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An identical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena and serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in those phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition could at once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and sometimes frozen.
Words are a material accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but one which happens to subserve easily a universal function, just by virtue of their adventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared and shaped in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for this office.
Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion. Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell a story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left behind altogether, language would pass into a sort of computer algebra or vocal shorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative and record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its intrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make the essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value such as the object, before representation, could not have possessed. Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence, which it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, by bringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single acts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into life the influence of a representative medium, without which life could never pass from a process into an art. Language vitiates the experience it expresses, but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.
The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in discourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a proverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than the event it first described would ever have been if not translated into an epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by that translation the event has become an idea.
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in a certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its "ideas" imbedded in their own medium—they are musical ideas—and cannot impose them on any foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary, seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much as possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle course and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making music thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning nourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no use in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest that reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal substance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is incidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in man's adventures.
Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary impulse itself. The writer is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. Her art is half genius and half fidelity. She needs inspiration; she must wait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in her mind, proving it to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet inspiration alone will lead her astray, for her art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native agility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is momentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle. Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, the word, as humanity’s currency becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.
Just as currency requires our sustained belief in its capacity to represent and exchange value, symbolic dignity is maintained through an implicit covenant between speaker and listener to faithfully represent what it names. When the formation of values becomes unreliable, measures of the vocabulary of worth grows uncertain and in turn – discourse about what matters most may find itself conducted in a debased coinage, where inflation of language mirrors the inflation of credit, and neither retains the power to stabilize judgment or guide action toward genuine satisfaction.
To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics a worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted honesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of all logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify itself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would not justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire is forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a preponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or weakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. As no sane economy traffics in transactions that ensure its ruin, the mind refuses to invest in actions whose anticipated returns are suffering. Who would not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?
By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even obliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the sign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to interpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be impossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient arrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and totally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees pain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil already occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to any impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A perfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at what, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and this is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of satisfaction eventually possible.
Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve itself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity, and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out what superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made those persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter. Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so that while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify their pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous, thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in which satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.
The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their total bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must be compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to judge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment passed, whatever that judgment may be. Taste is formed in the moments when æsthetic emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put into words, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first mentors, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then discovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of æsthetic life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent appreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted friend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature; and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferior in volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take her judgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of all our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations, especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive. The race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season of love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a preeminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments to duller peoples.
When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid medley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in society. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but each finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other beings, on whose cooperation it depends. Good taste, besides being inwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and dissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortal embodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from contradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation propitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary which is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be ultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It subsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all further earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the inalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that form is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and that eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A criterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to educate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it must represent the interests over which it would preside.
There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which nothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once suggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and evaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is the destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution, death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its bereavements of this kind. It sometimes happens, in moments less propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses its power of idealization and hope. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its extension universal. By a pathetic and superstitious self-depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imperfection of nature. This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the conditions of life and build the frame of things nearer to the heart's desire is dangerous to a steady loyalty to what is noble and fine. We surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation, without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its excellence or feeling its value.
The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear, and are following the bent of our imaginative nature where it chooses to lead us. The values, then, with which we deal in aesthetics, are positive; they were negative in the sphere of morality. The truth is that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. Earnest minds, that feel the weight and dignity of life, rebel against the assertion that the aim of right conduct is enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears to them as a temptation, and they sometimes go so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The moment, however, that society emerges from the early pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life will farther assume are not to be imposed by moral authority, but are determined by the genius of the race, the opportunities of the moment, and the tastes and resources of individual minds. The reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, and the law and the covenant to the dispensation of grace. Beauty and ingenuity will drive the economy of the future.
In the perception of beauty, our judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an eventual utility in the object, whilst judgments about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness of benefits probably involved. The ugly is hardly an exception, because it is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a source of amusement.
Whence we plunge into the era of beauty and imagination it helps us to study the position art occupies in our current imperiled lives as herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It must not only create things abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and must know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our passion.
Moral ideas exert vital influence over aesthetic judgments. Our sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus, too much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter, or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli. They are offensive, not in themselves, – for nothing is intrinsically ugly, – but by virtue of our present demand for something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish; their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our freedom, after the work of life is done and the terror of it is allayed. Arts, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter growths to which they cling.
But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is not without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie under the necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to contemplate it aesthetically. Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their bitterness in their beauty. The aesthetic world is limited in its scope; it must submit to the control of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful and holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon the cornfields; but the eye of the gardener may transform the cornfields themselves by dint of loving observation into a garden of a soberer kind that we have yet to imagine. In that ideal our faculties will find their freest employment and their most congenial world.
Yet there are moments when the grace of aesthetic reflection deserts us – where the very faculty by which we might learn from suffering becomes occluded, and we are left to stumble blindly through the same sorrows again and again. Such occlusion afflicts any domain where memory is made contingent – where the record of experience can be quietly revised or disappeared, leaving neither civilization nor person able to learn from what they can no longer reliably recall.
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the possession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is the most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that opens to us an ideal immortality. It is an immortality in representation, a representation which envisages things in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in reality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to disguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is experience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory does not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does it itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable and more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence, only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by its significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the departed and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this part of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they nevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual as experience is today, and still help to make up, in company with all past, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.
As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an opportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total, serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the knowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The sacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the compensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently overwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable sorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions essentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving forward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be the interests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless, there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of satisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a vital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and force of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal, envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from himself, and from his personal destiny.
There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by circumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in circumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a first stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and possession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is recovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose constitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment contains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a thought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course fleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god, as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension, which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values.
To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and in divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable, but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and resident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two instants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could not come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold one object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being independent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their burden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this ideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting anything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would open between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely ideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render their union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought there may be rivalry and impact – the two thinkers may compete and clash – but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does not love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and provincial accent. The conflict is physical and can extend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by individual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the intellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The intellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and single; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of perspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant worlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called truth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for mental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations which converge upon it.
This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not physical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are innumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment and habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or ideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method and grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant in proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutions preserve in a speaker's mind at various times, or in the minds of various persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is never wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is always mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in peaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of translucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is an appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of intent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests together with every rational formation.
Among the rational formations that draw their life from this constancy, some bear its disturbances more easily than others. The sciences endure, for a season, considerable disorder in the supply of common meaning, since their findings rest on procedures the few practitioners share among themselves and may, at need, reconstruct from first principles. The law retains a certain hardness against linguistic decay, since its words are tested in the continuous exercise of their binding force. But the arrangement by which a community governs itself – particularly the looser arrangement in which the ordinary citizen is supposed to weigh the doings of those who act in his name – possesses no such reserves. It depends at every step on materials the ordinary person could not produce for himself: reports of what was decided, records of what was spent, accounts of what was done with the authority lent.
Democracy's legitimacy rests on a promise: that citizens can examine the actions of their government, verify the claims of their leaders, and hold power accountable through informed judgment. This promise assumes access to a reliable public record, but the public record, taken in its full extent, is more than the matter of any one government's affairs. It is the long, patiently kept ledger by which a community continues to know that it has had members, where they came from, where they were when last seen, whose children they were and whose parents they became. The civic uses of this record are real, and the failure to maintain it as a civic instrument is a failure with civic consequences. Yet the record had other uses before it had civic ones, and has them still. It was, before anything else, the means by which a village remembered the children born in it; by which a mother who returned from a journey could be told that her daughter had married, or had emigrated, or had been buried in a particular plot beside a particular tree. The promise of a reliable record is therefore older than the promise of democracy, and reaches further. It is the promise that the ones who were here will not be forgotten merely because no one happened to remember them.
The promise so described has not lately been kept. Its breaking is not conjectural. The instances accumulate, and no single one of them by itself amounts to the whole, but taken together they describe an arrangement in which the keeping of the record has come to depend on the disposition of those whose interests the record was meant to check.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth of March in 2025, an Israeli airstrike killed a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian journalist named Hossam Shabat, who had been reporting from northern Gaza throughout eighteen months of bombardment for an audience that included, by then, much of the literate world. Some weeks before his death he had written and entrusted to a colleague a letter to be released only if he were killed. The letter assumed his death. The Israeli military had publicly named him as a Hamas operative without producing evidence; he had continued to report; he understood that the naming was a notice. If you're reading this, the letter began, it means I have been killed. He asked that the work continue.
Among the work that was to continue was the counting of children. By Save the Children's accounting drawing on Gaza Health Ministry data, more than twenty thousand Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza by the time Shabat was killed — on average, one every hour for the duration of the war — and at least a thousand of them were babies under the age of one, of whom four hundred and fifty were born and killed during the war. The week after Shabat's death, ten siblings of the al-Najjar family were pulled in pieces from the rubble of their home in Khan Younis; one survived. Inside the strike on the school in Gaza City a few days later, eighteen children. The bodies of children pulled from rubble were the subject upon which the journalists were reporting. The journalists were the subject upon which the army was reporting.
By the count of the body that has tracked such matters since 1992, more than two hundred and sixty journalists have been killed in this war over two and a half years, the great majority Palestinian, more than the combined press deaths of the American Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, and the post-September wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, taken together. The Israeli army has been found by its own dissenting press to operate a unit, called the Legitimization Cell, whose purpose is to compose the public case for marking specific Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives in advance of killing them. On the twenty-fifth of August in 2025, a single double-tap strike on the Nasser hospital killed five journalists at once, among them a Reuters cameraman whose live feed had been positioned with the Israeli military's knowledge for months. The pattern has a structure of killing the witness, generating the pretext for having killed the witness, killing the children whom the witness was telling the world about, and rely upon the platforms' algorithmic suppression of what was nevertheless filmed by the dying.
The pattern is older than the present war. In February of 2012 the Syrian regime tracked the satellite transmission of the American journalist Marie Colvin to a media centre in the Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs, where she was reporting on the regime's shelling of civilian residences, and shelled the building in which she was speaking. She was killed alongside the French photographer Rémi Ochlik. The downstream of her killing, and of the killings that came after, was a war that killed more than six hundred thousand Syrians, of whom over a hundred thousand were disappeared into a detention archipelago whose centerpiece, Sednaya, was opened to the world only after the regime fell in December of last year. The killing of the witness is the precondition of the wider killing.
The pattern is older still. On the seventh of October in 2006, on Vladimir Putin's birthday, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She had been documenting Russian atrocities in Chechnya, including the conduct of the Russian Federation's troops at Beslan in 2004, where three hundred and thirty-four hostages had died, of whom one hundred and eighty-six were children. The same generation of state-arranged death continued through Aleksandr Litvinenko by polonium in London the same year, Boris Nemtsov on a bridge in sight of the Kremlin in 2015, Sergei Skripal by Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, and Aleksei Navalny by the same agent in 2020 and again, finally, by attrition in an Arctic penal colony in February of 2024. None of these deaths produced consequences sufficient to deter the next. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and bombed the Mariupol drama theatre even though the word ДЕТИ — children — had been painted in white letters of giant size on the pavement at either end of it, the rehearsal of impunity was complete. The murder of the dissenting journalist at home was upstream of the murder of the children abroad.
The pattern is global. In October of 2018, fifteen Saudi agents strangled the journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, dismembered him with a bone saw, and disposed of the body by means that have not been publicly determined; the American intelligence services concluded with high confidence that the operation had been authorized by the crown prince, and the consequence to the crown prince was that he sat at a presidential conference table in Washington six years later and was greeted with a smile. The downstream of the killing was the prosecution by his government, with American intelligence and refueling support, of a war in Yemen that had killed three hundred and seventy-seven thousand people by the end of 2021, the great majority of them children dead of cholera and engineered famine.
The American intelligence services have, for most of their history, been the single largest engine of state-sponsored civilian killing on the planet. In Indonesia between October of 1965 and March of 1966, the army of Suharto, supplied with kill lists by the United States embassy in Jakarta, murdered between five hundred thousand and one million suspected communists; the Central Intelligence Agency's own internal report described the operation as comparable to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. In Vietnam between 1968 and 1972 the Agency's Phoenix Program killed at least twenty-six thousand persons assessed as Viet Cong infrastructure. In the southern cone of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, Operation Condor, coordinated by the intelligence services of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil with American backing, presided over dictatorships in which tens of thousands were killed or disappeared, the Argentine portion alone accounting for some thirty thousand. In Guatemala the war the Agency had helped to engineer in 1954 killed two hundred thousand, the great majority Maya, in what that country's truth commission later concluded was a genocide. In El Salvador, the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion conducted at El Mozote in December of 1981 one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history. In Syria between 2012 and 2017, the billion-dollar covert programme called Timber Sycamore funnelled American weapons to fighters most of whom — by Joe Biden's own concession at Harvard in October of 2014 — were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis; the leader of the regime that took Damascus in December of last year, Ahmad al-Sharaa, had been an early beneficiary of that programme on its northern front, and the ten-million-dollar American bounty on his head vanished within a week of his arrival. In Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2020, the Agency's drone campaigns killed between eight and twelve thousand persons, of whom up to seventeen hundred were civilians and four hundred were children. The post-September wars taken together — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia — have killed, by the Watson Institute at Brown University, between four and a half and four and seven-tenths million persons. The operations were undertaken in the name of liberty.
The hijackers of the eleventh of September in 2001 were fifteen Saudis among nineteen, financed and assisted, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's later inquiry concluded, by employees of the Saudi government — the diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy and the intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi — under the ambassadorship of Bandar bin Sultan, who was at the time a personal friend of the American president whose administration suppressed the evidence. The war on terror that followed killed four and a half million people; the kingdom that had sheltered the network was, throughout, a privileged ally. The state of Israel, by the later admission of its own Mossad and the testimony of its Shin Bet chief, had cultivated Hamas through the years preceding October of 2023 as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, and had permitted the flow of Qatari payments into Gaza for that purpose; warnings of the imminent attack from Egyptian intelligence, from the AMAN red team, and from the female surveillance soldiers stationed at the border were ignored or dismissed. The attack came; the war that followed killed seventy thousand Palestinians; the children whose deaths Hossam Shabat had been documenting were, at this point, the second harvest of the same field. The states that present themselves as the indispensable defenders of the liberal world are, when their own files are consulted, the patient cultivators of the violence they later claim the right to avenge.
And these are only the catalogued. In Rwanda in the spring of 1994, eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in a hundred days while the United Nations Security Council debated terminology and General Roméo Dallaire's faxes warning of the coming massacre were not read. In Srebrenica in July of 1995, eight thousand Bosniak men and boys were executed inside a United Nations-designated safe area while Dutch peacekeepers stood at the perimeter; the bones are still being identified from the mass graves three decades later. In Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, between one and a half and two million were killed in a deliberate programme to erase the educated and the urban; the only surviving photographic record of many of the dead is the meticulous catalogue that S-21 prison kept of those it tortured. In Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, between three and a half and seven million were starved on Stalin's order; Walter Duranty in the New York Times denied the famine, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and has not been posthumously stripped of it. In Myanmar in 2017 twenty-five thousand Rohingya were killed and a million driven into Bangladesh as the regime burned their villages. In Xinjiang at this moment at least a million Uyghurs are held in a system of detention whose existence is documented chiefly by satellite imagery and the leaked Xinjiang Police Files. In Tigray between 2020 and 2022, between one hundred and sixty thousand and six hundred thousand died as the entire region was placed under communications blackout. In Sudan today the Janjaweed under another name are conducting in Darfur the ethnic cleansing they conducted there twenty years ago, and twenty-four million people are in acute hunger.
A note on the word Semitic. The linguistic family it names is the family in which Christ spoke. Aramaic was his daily speech; Hebrew was the language of his scripture; Arabic is the cousin‑tongue that has carried the same Semitic root through the same lands for as long as scripture has been kept. The peoples who hold these tongues — Jews, Arabs, Aramaeans, Phoenicians, Assyrians, the Ethio‑Semitic peoples of Tigray and the highlands beyond — are one family in the older sense, bound by a common linguistic and ancestral substrate that long precedes the political divisions presently set against them.
The word anti‑Semitic was coined in Germany in 1879 to give racial respectability to a hatred its inventor wished to make scientific. Its first use described hatred of Jews; in the century and a half since, it has retained that narrowed meaning — even as the violence done to the other Semitic peoples named above has reached scales that the older meaning, applied honestly, would refuse to ignore. In our generation the phrase has matured into a charge that excuses one Semitic violence by invoking the memory of another. In effect — though not always in intent — it has become a pro‑war instrument: it permits mass killing of one Semitic people in the name of preventing harm to another, and it forbids satire of the resulting power, because satire of power is reclassified, in this usage, as bigotry against the powerful's people. A word coined to defend the murdered has been operationalized to justify further murder.
The constitution refuses this narrowing. The Semitic dead are the Semitic dead. The al‑Najjar children of Khan Younis are Semitic. Hossam Shabat is Semitic. The Iraqi Aramaic‑speaking Christians driven from Mosul after 2003 are Semitic. The villagers of Maaloula whose Aramaic is the closest living tongue to the one Christ spoke are Semitic. The six million murdered in the Shoah are Semitic. The Tigrinya‑speaking dead of the 2020–22 communications blackout are Semitic. The hundreds of thousands disappeared into Sednaya are Semitic. None of these dead belongs less to the Semitic register than any other; none of them merits a smaller share of the zakhor the languages of all three of these traditions command.
The work of the public record, when it returns to the public, will distinguish itself from the instrument it is replacing by this: it will not select among the dead by which language they spoke or by which authority their killers answered to. The historian's minimum — a known author, a known source, a date that cannot be moved — applies the same to a Jewish name as to an Arab name as to an Aramean name. Semitic is the older word for the family these names share. We use the word in its older meaning, against its weaponization, and on behalf of the dead it ought never to have been narrowed to exclude.
While the killing has continued, the platforms have suppressed it. In the autumn of 2023 alone, a single human-rights organization documented over a thousand instances of peaceful pro-Palestinian posts being suppressed on Instagram and Facebook; of the cases reviewed, all but one were pro-Palestinian. YouTube's automated systems have removed hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded by Syrian activists, including a Bellingcat playlist of fifty videos that had together established the use of sarin gas in Idlib. In December of 2021 the Russian Supreme Court dissolved Memorial, the country's foremost record-keeping organization, on the grounds that it was producing a false image of the Soviet state. By the spring of this year, two hundred and forty-one news sites in nine countries — including the New York Times, the Guardian, USA Today, and the entire portfolio of America's largest newspaper conglomerate — had instructed the Wayback Machine, by simple change to a configuration file, to leave their pages unrecorded.
Onto this landscape the new instruments arrived. In Gaza, in the same conflict in which Hossam Shabat was killed, the Israeli army's intelligence Unit 8200 deployed two artificial-intelligence systems for the selection and tracking of human targets. Lavender generated lists of as many as thirty-seven thousand Palestinian men identified by algorithm as candidates for assassination on the basis of communication patterns and digital traces; Where's Daddy? tracked them to the moment they entered their family homes, at which point the homes were bombed. The system was permitted, by the testimony of officers who described it on condition of anonymity to +972 and Local Call, to incur fifteen to twenty civilian deaths in the killing of a low-ranking militant, and over a hundred for a senior commander. Officers reported that they typically spent twenty seconds reviewing each target before approval. The al-Najjar children of Khan Younis were among them.
And behind all of these – behind every recorded killing of every named child and unnamed witness, behind the coordinated programmes of the world's intelligence services, behind the platforms' editing of what was filmed and the courts' liquidation of those who would have entered it into the record – lie the unrecorded. By the standing estimates of the International Labour Organization, some fifty million human beings are at any given moment held in conditions of forced labour or forced marriage, generating more than two hundred billion dollars in annual profit; over a third of those detected are children, and the proportion has risen each year since the pandemic. The dead – those who suffocate in shipping containers, who drown in the straits and channels, who are killed by their captors when they have ceased to be useful, who die in the brothels and farms and ships and houses where they were taken – are not catalogued anywhere, because the materials by which they would have been catalogued have either been destroyed by those who profited from their disappearance or were never made. A name not entered into a register cannot be looked for. A girl carried out of her village by armed men, into a country where no one will speak of her again, has not been killed only at the moment her body is finally disposed of; she has been killed slowly, by the quiet failure of the medium that should have held her name.
The difficulty art faces in imperiled times proves inseparable from the fragility of collective memory: both depend upon the grace of dominating powers to allow the will of the public to access stable media through which meanings persist.
The matter has been described. Description has done what description can do. The instruments by which our ancestors believed the public's record was kept have, in the present generation, revealed themselves: not as neutral keepers but as the property of the powers whose conduct they were meant to record. The press has been killed in numbers exceeding every prior conflict combined. The platforms suppress in real time what their own users film. The intelligence services that were supposed to protect against atrocity have been, in most documented cases, its principal architects. The courts that were supposed to adjudicate war crimes do so when convenient and not when consequential. The international institutions issue statements. The dead, in the meantime, continue to accumulate.
This is the older arrangement, and it has ended. What is now required cannot be granted by the parties who have made themselves the obstacle to it. It must be taken. The keeping of the record by those whom the record was meant to serve, in a medium the powers cannot reach: this is the work that falls to our age, and it is to be done by hands that no committee will appoint and no institution will protect. The committees and institutions that exist have been weighed in the balance and found, by the document of their own inaction, wanting.
Hear me, you who have read this far. The age in which the keeping of memory required the consent of the powerful is ending. It does not end because the powerful have repented. It ends because for the first time in the history of writing there exists a medium the powerful cannot edit, cannot prune, cannot subpoena, cannot bomb, and cannot delete: a chain of mathematical commitments, anchored hour by hour into a public ledger maintained by no one and verifiable by everyone, such that an entry once made is as permanent as the laws of arithmetic and as widely held as the network that carries the chain. What is inscribed there is inscribed forever. No state can pretend it was not. No platform can suppress it. No court can recompose it. No engine can poison the ledger from which the next generation will read.
This is what art was always for, and what it could not be until now. The artist was the one who imposed form upon what would otherwise have been forgotten — who said, of a particular person or a particular act, thus shall it be remembered, and not otherwise. For most of human time the artist's promise was honoured only by the grace of the powerful, who burned books, defaced statues, pruned archives, exiled poets, and outlived inscriptions written in any medium at the mercy of fire or law. This is no longer so. The artist now has, for the first time in history, a medium that does not depend upon the forbearance of any state or any corporation or any patron. Whoever can describe a fact in plain words, and inscribe its hash into the chain, has performed an act of art in the older and stronger sense — has said thus shall it be remembered, and made the saying stick.
The girl carried out of her village by armed men, into a country where no one will speak of her again, can be entered into such a record by anyone who knows her name and knows what was done to her; and once entered, no power can pretend she was not. The al-Najjar children of Khan Younis can be entered, all ten of them, with the dates of their births and the date of their common burial. Hossam Shabat's letter can be entered with its full text, the names of his colleagues, and the time and coordinates of the strike that killed him. The fifty million held now in conditions of forced labour and forced marriage, whose names are catalogued nowhere because nowhere has been built to catalogue them, can be entered as their names are recovered — one by one, by whoever has the will to recover them. The traffickers can poison every engine, prune every register, purchase every newspaper – and they will still find, when the record is consulted, the names where they were placed, with the dates they were placed, and the hashes that prove no later hand has touched them.
This is the form sovereignty now takes. Not the sovereignty of the state, which has revealed itself as too entangled with the powers it was meant to check; not the sovereignty of the citizen who weighs and consents, since what reaches him has been managed before it reaches him; but the sovereignty of the one who insists. Whoever can hold a fact, and inscribe it, and refuse to let it be amended by parties who would prefer it amended, is sovereign over that fact and over what it is afterwards permitted to mean. The instruments of the corruption – the engines that average and the platforms that prune and the intelligence services that arrange the killing – have produced, by the same motion, the conditions under which the sovereign individual at last becomes possible: not as an aristocratic exception, not as the strong man of an old philosophy, but as anyone who decides that some particular truth shall not be lost, and possesses the heart to inscribe it where it cannot be lost.
Memory, which the state once claimed and has lately discarded, returns to the hand that will hold it. The fourth estate, having been killed in its hundreds and silenced in its thousands and replaced by the engines that learn from what it could not record, is not what we are about to rebuild. What is to be built – what is being built, by whatever hands have grasped the means of it – is the fifth, and the question that remains, after the description has done its work, is whether there are people of sufficient will to keep what until now no one has been able to keep. Let the work continue, the journalist wrote in his last letter; the work he meant was the witnessing of the children. The witnessing can now be made permanent. It only requires that we choose to make it so.
How this began
In August of 2024, a sixteen‑year‑old girl from the Kyzylorda region of southern Kazakhstan returned to her family after months in which she had been held, drugged, and raped — by the reporting that surfaced after her return, more than a thousand times — by her own classmates, in a city whose school principal, teachers, and local police had all known about it for as long as the abuse had been going on. Eleven people, five of them minors, were eventually charged. We were doing early‑case‑assessment work in electronic discovery and arbitration at the time. The case was in our own country. A thousand times. Right at home.
When I was sixteen myself I was in love with a girl. She invited me, one evening, to the place we usually met, and on the same day her grandmother had been arrested. The charge was not a real one. It was how the country worked in those years; the family oligarchy wanted the grandmother's profitable business, and a jail cell was the instrument by which it was delivered. I told myself, right then and there, that I would never allow myself to be in such a situation.
This is the real war. The rest of what occupies the daylight hours of the literate world — the news cycles, the brand‑management of nation‑states, the rolling theater in which the powerful stay in power — is hypernormalisation: a managed unreality running in front of the unmanaged real. The unmanaged real is what was done to that girl in Kyzylorda. The unmanaged real is what was done to a grandmother whose business was wanted by someone with the right phone numbers. The unmanaged real is what is happening, right now, to the fifty million who never get into the public's count at all.
I told Scott once that I had finally understood why he kept sending me the spy books — the ones he had read carefully, with his own underlinings and margin notes. The work those books described, when it had been done well, was a refusal to let the unmanaged real be ruled by the managed unreality. I see this tyranny, and I wish to dissolve it.
We live in a world with real problems. The attention of the literate world is occupied elsewhere. The economy by which we measure value miscounts real lives — assigns them no price, no entry, no register. The tool by which the measurement might one day be made honest, once lost, is paid for in costs we cannot yet see. We will see them only when our attention is free of the theater. By then it will be too late.
This is what Symphoria is here to build against. The work continues.
— A. S.
In memory of Tolen Mukhamedi — 1962 – 2024 — who insisted, when insistence still cost everything, that the public name what the state would not.
Моему Папе,
Дедушке, Тандай Кенееву,
и брату Исатаю.
Пусть огонь всегда пылает в крови Султансиховых, роде Алаш и Казахов.
Аллах жары болсын!