[C]ritics should not be “in the prediction business.” Neither, in our view, should philosophers, artists or historians, no matter how many have volunteered for such roles in recent years. From Silicon Valley to Substack, we have no shortage of prophets or pamphleteers these days, each of them eager to tell us why utopia or apocalypse lies right around the corner. What we lack, oddly enough, is thinking and writing that makes us more attentive to the world right in front of us—the here and now in all its mystery, strangeness and often tormented reality. Thinking and writing that helps us not to predict the future but to act as self-conscious citizens, who are both in touch with our historical moment and capable of determining our own course within it.
