I glanced at Google Maps to see just where we were. We were in the heart of Kabul, in the area once reserved for government elites and foreign diplomats, and thus with the highest concentration of hotels, restaurants, and government offices. Next to the mall was the office of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, now shuttered. The new Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, charged with ensuring compliance with Taliban social regulations, had claimed the building. Half a mile away was the house where the leader of al-Qaeda had been pulverized by an American drone strike a few months before I arrived; Google still marked it as the “Ayman al-Zawahiri Residence.”

Our rice pudding arrived and I looked out the window. In the daytime, Kabul is anything but pretty: millions of people—no one really knows just how many—arranged chaotically in dense and disordered enclaves, sprawling endlessly, with beige hovels nestled into the mountains that ring the city. But at night, the hills of Kabul can be surprisingly beautiful, unfolding endlessly, sparkling with the lights of amusement parks and Indian-style wedding halls, curiously reminiscent of Los Angeles.

As we ate our rice pudding, the conversation turned to the things I was yet to see in Afghanistan. I had spent most of my time in Kabul, and was preparing for a trip into the rural countryside. My Afghan friends were suggesting a few places to see: Bamiyan, which hosted what remained of the massive Buddha monuments destroyed in the 1990s, and Band-e Amir, with its extraordinary blue lakes.

But I was in a more adventurous mood. I wanted to see something much less scenic, with none of the natural beauty of rural Afghanistan. And I had a particular spot in mind. I had passed it the night before, on my way to have dinner with the grandson of a prominent warlord who liked telling me about Habermas: it was the bridge that Kabulis call the Pul-e Sokhta—“the burning bridge.” It traversed a certain stretch of the city’s Kabul River, one that was really more of a dried and odorous riverbed. Stray dogs guarded the trickle of brownish water. It was not a pretty spot.

But there was a reason people knew about it: underneath the bridge lies a zone of concentrated and perfect misery. In the years of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the Pul-e Sokhta became the most popular site for the city’s drug addicts, who would go to the bridge to get high and, not infrequently, overdose and die. Sometimes, the authorities would fish out the bodies. Other times, they left them to rot.

Usually, their drug of choice was opium, Afghanistan’s main export; in the late 2010s, the country produced 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply. But increasingly they preferred methamphetamine, which had made a disruptive market entrance in the 2010s. First, it was produced using cheap cough syrup—you can buy anything in an Afghan pharmacy, no questions asked—and exported into Pakistan and Iran, where prices are higher. Then someone figured out how to manufacture meth using a wild mountain shrub called ephedra, which grows in central Afghanistan. Soon scores of Afghans were hooked.

For years Kabul was full of these addicts. One could find them in alleys, in parks, nestled in strange places inside ancient monuments. They are less visible now. The Taliban has made a point of rounding them up and placing them in drug treatment centers, where they undergo harsh methods of rehabilitation—forced detox, dunking in cold water. But you can still see some addicts smoking and trading drugs on the side streets and in the parks, and even a few addicted children begging outside stores. A lot can be learned about a society, I reasoned, by talking to its drug addicts. So I suggested to my friends: what if we finish our tea, make a late-night excursion to the bridge, and interview them?

The Afghans with me represented a cross-section of the country’s plugged-in youth. They described things as “based” and joked that people were “triggered.” When they were teasing each other, they used the term “soyboy,” which was by now a couple of years out of date in America. One was a YouTuber with a large audience in the Middle East, who produces Arabic-language content about Afghanistan; another was an ambitious entrepreneur, born in a refugee camp over the Pakistani border, and now a successful saffron exporter with side ventures in journalism and cryptocurrency; another, my first contact in the country, was an influencer whom I’d grown to trust over games of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

None of them wanted to go. The YouTuber had gone before for a video, but he wasn’t in the mood to go tonight. The entrepreneur demurred as well. I accepted that we wouldn’t go that night. “It’s fine if you’re scared,” I teased. But the entrepreneur said safety wasn’t the reason. It was just late. Wasn’t Afghanistan, against all odds, now shockingly safe?

Earlier that day, we had been talking about his relatives in the West, and what they made of their new homes there. They were horrified by the alcoholism of the locals, the alienated families (some saw their parents and uncles only twice a week, unthinkable in Afghanistan), the danger of the streets at night, and the random disorder that they said was so frequent in American cities. But my Afghan friend reassures me: that type of thing, the random crime and violence, isn’t a concern in Kabul anymore. The Taliban had dealt with it.

“Nobody is going to hurt us, dude,” he said, curling his lips into a smile. “We’re not in San Francisco.”

Welcome to the Islamic Emirate

Who in their right mind would go to Afghanistan today? It is hard to think of a country with a more negative reputation. For years, Afghanistan was one vast abattoir, jostling with Somalia and Syria for the title of Most Dangerous Nation on Earth. The State Department still advises U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the country at all costs, due to “armed conflict, civil unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping.” The name alone invites a string of unsettling associations—suicide bombings, backward customs, wretched poverty—that drive away anyone sensible. Afghans recognize and detest this reputation, but it is hard to escape. Even I, curious enough to make the journey there, spent a few anxious days before my trip researching the current market rates for foreign hostages.

It is not hard to see why. A few weeks before I arrived, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP)—the Islamic State’s local affiliate, and a bitter sectarian rival to the Taliban government—attacked a school for Kabul’s Hazara Shia minority, killing more than 50 young girls. The specter of another attack hung over the entirety of my trip. I was lucky that none occurred while I was in Afghanistan. But a few weeks after I left the country, the hotel where I’d stayed—nicknamed “the Chinese hotel” by Kabulis for its ostentatious marketing to visitors to PRC nationals—had been bombed and stormed by ISKP.

But the sense of danger didn’t drive me away. There is a reason why generations of Westerners, bored by a rather sedate and comfortable world back home, have found themselves fascinated by this remote, mountainous country—Kipling and Kafiristan, Byron and Oxiana, Newby and the Hindu Kush. To those that can tolerate the danger, Afghanistan offers a certain mystique: enigmatic, rugged, romantic, and undeniably violent. Beyond the highlands of Papua New Guinea or the jungles of the Amazon, few places seem so exotic.

I was fascinated, above all else, by the force now so closely identified with the country’s fate: the Taliban itself, which has governed Afghanistan since its spectacular reconquista in the summer of 2021. In the West, “Taliban” is a byword for all that is brutal, primitive, and fanatical, the ultimate antithesis of the tolerance and progressive attitudes of the civilized world. I wanted to see for myself how they were doing in power.

Their government—still “the Taliban” to outsiders, “the de facto authorities” to foreign governments, and “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in their own words—is, without a doubt, the most unusual regime on Earth. It is a near-perfect hermit kingdom: no country has recognized the Taliban government, with only a few countries operating embassies inside Kabul. The Islamic Emirate is denied representation in all global bodies, widely sanctioned, and shunned by multinational banks and corporations. The United States still offers a $10 million dollar bounty for its interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, whom it classifies as a “specially designated global terrorist.” Even as the government of a large nation, the Taliban acts as a secretive armed brotherhood, opaque to outsiders. Many of its officials still operate under their noms de guerre from the insurgency, though they no longer tend to bring their AK-47s to the office. The government does not have a constitution, written or unwritten, and there are no plans to create one.

The final say on all government decisions lies with the emir, “prince of the believers”—the cleric Hibatullah Akhundzada, an alumnus of the Taliban’s first government in the 1990s. Akhundzada is, much like the Taliban’s founding emir Mullah Omar, nearly hermitic in his reclusiveness. Akhundzada refuses to have his photo taken, such that there is only one undated image of him available. He communicates policy decisions through written letters from Kandahar—having refused to relocate to Kabul—and makes only a few public appearances a year. More irreverent Afghans will speculate, probably wrongly, that he is dead.

Strangest of all, however, is the extraordinary degree of ideological sovereignty the Taliban seems to possess. It disdains the “blind imitation” of the West—taqlid is the Islamic term—that, in one way or another, characterizes other Islamic regimes. Unlike almost every other government in the world, it makes no reference to democracy, representation, or “the will of the people.” Its mandate comes from more ancient things—conquest, negotiation, and the will of God.

Loosed from the restraints that seem to fetter other regimes, the Islamic Emirate is emboldened to do more or less as it wishes: of any Islamist government, it advances perhaps the most stringent version of Sharia law. Music has been banned in public; images of sentient beings, even store mannequins, have been veiled or defaced; corporal punishments, mainly public floggings, have been reinstated. Most controversial of all, however, are the Taliban’s policies on women’s education. In early 2022, by the decree of the emir, girls were banned from attending school from grades six through twelve. At the end of the year, after months in which Taliban officials promised the ban would be reversed, Akhundzada extended the policy to cover universities as well.

The backlash to the Emirate’s education policies—from Westerners and bodies like the United Nations, but also from groups like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, many Afghans, and even some prominent Taliban supporters—has not dissuaded the Taliban leadership. In one of Akhundzada’s rare public appearances as emir, he said that Afghanistan is “sovereign,” and not in place to fulfill the wishes of others. “You are welcome to use even the atomic bomb against us,” he continued, “because nothing can scare us into taking any step that is against Islam or Sharia.” On walls throughout Afghan cities, the regime has emblazoned a slogan representing its remarkable confidence: “First Islam, then Afghanistan.”

Yet these otherworldly aims stand in sharp contrast with the mundanity of everyday life in Afghanistan. I had been trained to view the Taliban as a sort of Islamist variant of the Khmer Rouge, intent on a total transformation of Afghan life, a movement that presided over a country whose situation the United Nations had described as “near apocalyptic.” But I found few hints of the apocalypse in Afghanistan. Mostly, life was ordinary: families sat in restaurants; kids rode around on bicycles affixed with little flags of the Islamic Emirate; street vendors sold produce and clothing. It was obviously a desperately poor and undeveloped country, and it was hard to ignore the young children—almost toddlers—selling trinkets or begging for change on the streets. But this poverty, though made more severe by the country’s economic isolation, was not new. Nor was it unique to Afghanistan.

On most issues, in fact, Taliban governance has had a much lighter touch than most imagined. In the bookstores of Kabul, at least, one can still find books by Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama; contraception and tobacco are available, and the Taliban has yet to regulate internet access like other Islamic governments. One can find gyms and restaurants that play Western music, sometimes with young Taliban guards as cautious patrons. Every woman wears a veil of some kind—as was the case before the Taliban took over—but the blue burqas so associated with Taliban rule in the West are worn by only a minority of women. Almost every man in Kabul has a beard, but the Taliban do not bat an eye at the clean-shaven.

Ordinary Taliban guards are prohibited from enforcing rules about Islamic personal conduct. For now, the Taliban has mostly confined itself to the path of “suggestion,” like putting up signs in government offices praising men who choose to grow a beard. More blunt confrontations, usually over insufficiently modest clothing, are left to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. But this morality police is severely understaffed: in the entirety of Kabul, a city with more people than Rome or Berlin, they have just two hundred agents. Thus they are often invisible—I did not see a single one during my time in Afghanistan. The poor logistical capacity of the state has proven the most important limit on the Taliban’s ability to reshape Afghan life.

In truth, Taliban rule seems to have done surprisingly little to change the contours of everyday life. Once it took power in Kabul, the Emirate declared a general amnesty, promising protection not only for minorities like the Shia but also for employees of the previous government, including soldiers who had fought against it. This extended even to high-level figures like Hamid Karzai, the Republic’s first president, who continues to reside in Kabul. Bureaucrats of the former regime have been retained in their posts, with Taliban mujahideen installed above or beside them. The animosities of the war years have simmered, at least for now. In a cafeteria in the Islamic Emirate’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I enjoyed a simple meal of rice and bread alongside both holdover bureaucrats and the Taliban officials who worked beside them—thinking, the whole time, that they had been trying to kill each other a few years ago.

In most areas of public administration, the new government is largely continuous with the old one. On signs for government offices, “Islamic Republic” has been hastily painted over and replaced with a handwritten “Islamic Emirate.” For prosaic matters unlikely to excite the special interest of Taliban clerics, government policies have simply been carried over from the Republic. Even visa stamps still read “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” and carry the Republic’s official colors.

At these practical arts of governance, the Taliban has proven itself surprisingly adept. Dishonest officials, whose venality had defined the previous regime, have been disciplined or removed from office; even critics of the Islamic Emirate’s policies will acknowledge its success in reducing corruption. With less corruption, tax collection has grown more efficient: increased revenue from taxation prevented a fiscal crisis after the withdrawal of foreign aid, which made up three-quarters of the previous regime’s budget. This has allowed the Islamic Emirate to maintain most government services undisturbed and continue paying government employees, including some who have refused to return to work since the takeover. They have even commenced new infrastructure projects: Afghanistan’s road system, which had degraded significantly due to the war, is being refurbished and expanded.

Taliban officials thus find themselves reborn as ordinary bureaucrats. The Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues statements on climate change summits, Malaysian elections, and International Women’s Day. My own discussions with Taliban diplomats betrayed a clear eagerness for foreign acceptance, investment, and, if at all possible, official recognition. In their public communications, Taliban officials can seem comically similar to bureaucrats from any other government: they trumpet their success in increasing tax revenues and expanding fruit exports.

The longer I stayed in Afghanistan, the more the contradiction between the Islamic Emirate’s otherworldly aspirations and the compromises demanded for stability and development became evident. The telos of the Taliban governance project remained indeterminate. Was their project a religiously-inspired developmentalist nationalism, conservative but conciliatory, a tempered “Taliban 2.0”? Or was it, as Akhundzada and the hardliners around him seemed to want, a vision of total purity, a complete rejection of Western influence—an outpost of medieval Islam, permanently segregated from the outside world?

For now, the emir’s vision is winning. But his program is hegemonic neither in Afghanistan, where even many Taliban supporters have criticized his most hardline edicts, nor within the Taliban itself. Most Taliban officials will do little to hide their unhappiness with Akhundzada’s policies on girls’ education. Powerful leaders within the regime have offered thinly-veiled criticisms of the emir’s approach, remarkable in an organization that places such high value on deference: these include not only known moderates among the Taliban leadership, like the deputy foreign minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, but also figures as influential as Sirajuddin Haqqani—previously thought to be the most hardline among the Taliban elite—and Mullah Yaqoob, the defense minister and son of Mullah Omar.

Seeing these disagreements, many Afghans, prone to rumor in a country whose politics are often mysterious and conspiratorial, will speculate about a factional conflict within the upper ranks of the Emirate. There is talk of palace intrigue, coups, even a return to civil war. But the divide within the Taliban is unlikely to get so far. Outsiders have long predicted factional splits within the Taliban that have not come to pass. The Taliban has thrived precisely because of its culture of loyalty.

Instead, the likely outcome is a sort of deadlock. Akhundzada’s policies preclude broader international acceptance or the alleviation of the country’s economic isolation, and thus much in the way of meaningful development or durable stability. But there is no mechanism for his decisions to be challenged; the emir’s power is absolute, and the Taliban are bound to obey him. It is thus not hard to imagine the country limping along in its current state, a long stasis interrupted only by occasional attacks from ISKP—isolated, peripheral, and wretchedly poor, but functioning.

Even the triumph of the emir’s program represents only a fleeting victory. It harkens back to a rural Pashtun culture that is fading, even in a place as anachronistic as Afghanistan. It has little to say to younger Afghans, or even to younger Taliban—often more exposed to global culture and prolific in their use of social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.

I had observed these rank-and-file Taliban—toting AK-47s, sitting at traffic junctions, walking through Kabul holding each other’s hands—with a sociological intensity. But among these mujahideen, much feared in the outside world, I found none of the hostility or inflexibility I had expected. For all the ideological baggage that had been attached to them, the Taliban I met were hardly threatening—just scrawny teenagers and twenty-somethings from the mountains of rural Afghanistan, men who saw Kabul as a city of cosmopolitan wonders, who had joined what they saw as a war of liberation against an enemy whose technologies were so superior as to render them almost on the plane of aliens. They regarded the outside world not with hatred, but with a rich and earnest curiosity; they bore no ill will toward the West. As a guest in their country, they treated me with deep warmth.

One evening, as a local friend and I stood on a hill overlooking Kabul, we watched some Taliban perform an attan—the traditional victory dance of the Pashtuns. A young Talib, overhearing us talking, approached us and asked, in Pashto, where I was from. I had come in on a German passport, which I gave to him for inspection.

The mujahid found this exotic and fascinating. He told me his name was Hakmal and peppered me with questions about my strange country. Did they speak Pashto there, he asked, or Persian? (Something else completely, my friend told him in Pashto.) Were the Germans Sunnis, or were they Shias? (Something else again, my friend said.) All of this piqued Hakmal’s curiosity. Could he come back to Germany with me, he asked, and see the country for himself? It sounded so fascinating, he said. I smiled. I hardly had the heart to tell him that the Germans probably didn’t want him as a tourist.

The Balance of Terror

Afghanistan was as different from the West as I had hoped. This was true materially—even in the center of Kabul I saw carriages drawn by donkeys, and men pulling rickshaws filled with fruit—but also culturally. Afghans, loyal to social forms extinct in the West, dazed me with their immediate and overflowing generosity: the guest right enjoys enormous strength in Afghan culture. Perfect strangers would beg me to join them for dinner, and—after the feast—to sleep over and have tea with them in the morning. Walking through the western city of Herat with a local friend, we found ourselves in an unfamiliar area around the evening. My friend muttered to himself in Persian that we were lost. A random passerby intervened: “You are never lost. Join me for tea.”

That was urban Afghanistan. Rural Afghanistan, meanwhile, was like an alien world. Four-fifths of the population resides in the countryside, in innumerable small villages of unimaginable archaicity: places untouched by modernity, where life is not so different than it was a few centuries ago—rough-hewn peasants with near-toothless smiles, farms employing oxen and plow. Traveling through this strange world requires tremendous patience: a trip between Kabul and Bamiyan covered only about a hundred miles, but took most of a day. The roads were gashed by old IED blasts, requiring us to halt every minute; we drove past endless villages nestled into the mountains of the Hindu Kush, playing American rap as musical accompaniment. We switched to a Taliban nasheed whenever a checkpoint approached.

That I could enjoy these things in a country still called “the most dangerous in the world,” and do so with little thought of imminent death, was owed to the fact of Taliban rule. Afghanistan is the safest it has been in decades. The withdrawal of American troops, rather than pushing the country into a new sequence of slaughter, preceded a quick and largely bloodless succession. Now, for the first time since the late 1970s, a single government controls the entirety of Afghanistan. There are no more U.S. soldiers, and no more midnight raids or drone strikes, save the solitary killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri. There are far fewer insurgent bombings. The mutating war that had deformed Afghan life for decades is over.

It is hard to overstate just how significant this state of peace is to ordinary Afghans. Nearly every Afghan lost something in the war years: everyone has family members who were killed, often on both sides, and it is common to encounter people throughout Kabul who lost limbs in the war. This was the case with a man I met named Didar, a shy clerk working for a tailor: as a child, he had picked up a brightly-colored Soviet land mine, thinking it was a toy. It blew his right arm off, and would have killed him if not for the skillful intervention of a local doctor. And Didar was not alone: the country is full of people who lost limbs in one bombing or another. The most unfortunate lost both legs, and now live out of small red wagons as paraplegics. For these people, and the many others with horrific memories of the war, peace is nothing less than a godsend.

The more mundane species of disorder that predominated in Afghanistan have also been corralled. This, too, is a major improvement. Hobbled by corruption and persistently weak state capacity, the government of the Republic had proven unable to control its own country: power was effectively ceded to a network of regional warlords—from Abdul Raziq, strongman of Kandahar, to the infamous Abdul Rashid Dostum, pasha of the Uzbek north—who straddled the line between statesman and crime boss.

In the cities, a rapid and anarchic urbanization, driven by rural chaos and lavish foreign aid spending, created vast lawless realms governed by gangs. In the countryside, opium production swelled, turning heroin into the country’s leading export and the cornerstone of its rural economy. Afghans became not just producers but consumers themselves, with nearly ten percent of the population addicted to drugs. The cities became unlivable: kidnapping, robbery, and murder made going outside at night a suicidal endeavor.

But the Afghanistan of today could not feel more different. Now, I found, the streets of Kabul and other major Afghan cities were remarkably safe to walk: even as a foreigner, speaking neither Pashto nor Persian, I felt comfortable strolling through the sketchier precincts of Kabul, often alone and after dark. My ethnic ambiguity—olive skin, large eyebrows, dark eyes, not so out of place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—may have helped. So did wearing an all-black kurta. Many Afghans, including a few Taliban mujahideen, told me that I looked like a Pashtun, except for my not having a beard. But whatever my looks, the result was the same: not once was I pestered or harassed, let alone robbed or kidnapped.

The cities were safe for a reason. After coming into power, the Taliban initiated a hard-edged campaign for public order which has yielded undeniable results. Their methods had been fierce. Not long after taking power, the Taliban had asked neighborhood elders for lists of known criminals; within a few weeks, they had killed all the consensus nominees. Punishment for serious criminals has been swift and vicious. Extrajudicial discipline is common. For certain severe crimes, the regime has started imposing corporal punishments; in December, the Taliban held its first public execution, with a murderer shot to death by the father of his victim in front of a large crowd. Now crime is much scarcer, and the state is far more present: Taliban guards can be seen throughout the cities brandishing AK-47s. (Sometimes they have more intense weaponry. At a checkpoint outside Kabul, I met one Talib carrying a rocket launcher.)

For less severe malcontents, the Islamic Emirate has found more leniency. Beggars, whose ranks had swelled during the war due to the presence of deep-pocketed Westerners, have been collected and assessed as to whether they are “deserving” or “professional.” At least for now, the regime has refrained from banning opium production—a policy it had embraced in the 1990s, before opium became so central to the livelihood of rural farmers in the Taliban’s southern strongholds—and has instead focused on drug abuse. Drug addicts have been taken off the streets, and placed into hard-handed rehabilitation clinics. The anti-drug campaign has, it seems, paid dividends: not long after I left Afghanistan, the Taliban announced that the Pul-e Sokhta bridge had been rehabilitated and cleared of its addicts. To celebrate the renovation, the Emirate hosted a book fair in the area.

These efforts have substantially increased the day-to-day security of Afghan streets—and in such a short time period that nearly everyone has noticed. In Herat, I paid a visit to a young doctor—a well-educated non-Pashtun from a local elite family, fluent in five languages, who was well-acquainted with American culture through years spent on 4chan. He was far from the Taliban’s natural constituency, though his politics were complex: he counted a few friends among the Taliban’s ranks, though he was furious about the policies that prevented his sisters from being educated.

As we walked around Herat in the early evening, he told me that this was the most significant change in Afghan life: even something as simple as walking around in the dark would have been unthinkable before the takeover. Later that night, as we had tea at his house, we heard a few gunshots outside—a few Taliban officers were chasing down a robber. The doctor smiled: ever since the Emirate had taken over, he had begun to miss the sound of gunfire. He had grown so used to the noise that it helped him go to sleep at night.

If there are two highly visible challenges to this state of peace, they come from the Islamic Emirate’s left and right flanks. To the left is the “National Resistance Front,” which seeks to restore the Republic. These fighters were the last holdouts after the Taliban’s triumph until they were routed from the northeastern Panjshir Valley in September. Now based in Tajikistan, it is bankrolled by sympathetic Europeans and the anti-Taliban Afghan diaspora. In terms of support, it coasts on nostalgia for the late warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Afghan Napoleon”—his far less charismatic son is its leader—and seeks to build a base among Afghanistan’s Tajiks. But despite the group’s prominence on Twitter and appearances in the media, the Resistance Front is irrelevant in Afghanistan, with paltry support and no actual presence in the country itself. The younger Massoud is more a punchline than a viable force.

A more lethal challenge comes from the regime’s right flank, in the form of the Islamic State Khorasan Province. ISKP, founded by disgruntled Taliban commanders, accuses the Islamic Emirate of being insufficiently Islamic, tolerant of Shias, Sufis, and other supposed takfiris to the point of heresy, and far too eager for foreign acceptance. ISKP propagandists latch onto any sign that the Emirate is intent on acting like a normal regime, from news of cooperation with China to the regime’s approval of restoration efforts for an ancient synagogue in Herat. But the group reserves particular ire for Afghanistan’s Hazara Shia community. The Hazara had fought in huge numbers against the Islamic State in Syria, on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, at the invitation of their Shia sponsors in Iran. Many of ISKP’s attacks target the Hazaras as a form of payback.

ISKP, unlike the Taliban, is decidedly a minority phenomenon. The Taliban has its roots among Pashtuns, the country’s dominant ethnicity, and is broadly aligned with the popular Hanafi school of Sunni Islam. But in its bid for national supremacy, it showed a surprising degree of flexibility: it included members from all the country’s ethnic groups, built warm relations with Sufi clerics, and even incorporated a few Shia from the Hazara community. ISKP has no such flexibility. As a franchise of the Islamic State network, it is committed to a Salafist vision with little indigenous basis in Afghanistan outside the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar.

This allegiance serves as a structural limitation on ISKP’s appeal: while the Taliban was always a mass movement with an enormous social base in the rural areas, ISKP is too religiously marginal to hold territory beyond a few remote eastern mountain outposts, let alone to ever govern the country. Its insurgency is limited to organizing underground cells to launch terror attacks in urban areas, with the aim of destabilizing the country and profiting from chaos.

At this, however, ISKP has certainly succeeded. Focusing on targets that will harm the Taliban’s global public image—like a school for Hazara girls, Sufi mosques, hotels, and foreign embassies—ISKP has undermined the Taliban’s narrative of security. In turn, the Taliban reserves a fierce and unalloyed hatred for the Islamic State—“Khariji rats,” as one local called them, in reference to a medieval Islamic sect known for its cruelty toward fellow Muslims. When the Taliban captures an ISKP militant, they will typically torture him for information before a swift and brutal execution. The emptying of a canal in Nangarhar in the summer of 2022 uncovered the bodies of more than a hundred slain ISKP militants.

Tea With the Mujahideen

Apart from the widely-hated ISKP, the Taliban faces virtually no organized opposition. The entire elite of the Republic era has fled abroad. Unlike the 1990s, when the northeast was always controlled by the Northern Alliance led by Massoud and Dostum, the government has unchallenged control of the entire country. Nor does any foreign power have the desire to involve itself in Afghan politics after the American experience. Even Pakistan, which has long meddled in Afghan affairs, has sought to extricate itself. There is no force inside Afghanistan strong enough to displace it, and no force outside Afghanistan that cares enough to interfere. It is hard to imagine a more complete resolution to the struggle over Afghanistan’s future.

Thus the Taliban has cemented its place in Afghan history. By dissolving the patchwork of warlord fiefdoms that made up the previous regime and uniting the country under one government, the Taliban had—for all its backward-looking inclinations—already done much to modernize a still-archaic country. Theirs was a golden opportunity: if anyone could transform a country so impervious to intervention from above or outside, it was them.

And yet I could not help but detect a surprising fragility to Taliban rule. The Taliban had intrigued me because they, alone among the regimes of the global periphery, seemed capable of articulating an alternative civilizational vision, one that was not merely an antithesis or restatement of Western modernity. I had come to Afghanistan because I wanted to see something truly different from the West. But even in the Islamic Emirate, I could sense a creeping Westernization.

I saw it, above all else, in many local Afghans whom I met and befriended. These were not Western liberals: they had friends among the Taliban, and were quick to defend regime decisions I found abhorrent, like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. But these subjects of the Islamic Emirate could not be kept from watching Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or Japanese anime; they had a better knowledge of Breaking Bad than I did. On Twitter—they, like so many Afghans, were avid users—shared soyjack memes and called themselves “sigma males.” They talked about feminism, “LGBTQ,” and pronouns—strange things to complain about in a country where women can’t go to school. They were becoming Westerners: culture war, America’s most successful soft-power export, was their induction. The younger members of the Taliban, online enough to follow Andrew Tate, were not immune.

And while these young men were still a tiny minority, they were also the bleeding edge. Social modernity is not kept out by the barrel of a gun: the internet is the ultimate vector of Westernization. Status flows downward, and ostentatiously so in a country as peripheral as Afghanistan. The U.S. was gone, but American culture was still the thing to imitate. In “the best steakhouse in Kabul,” the chef mimicked Salt Bae, and my friends joked with me about whether I could be in Manhattan. In the cafés, we could play Mortal Kombat while drinking coffee and listening to Western music. On Valentine’s Day—the celebration of which is forbidden in Islam—peddlers in the streets of Kabul were selling heart-shaped balloons. It wasn’t America, but it was trying.

The Taliban won the war; but in the long run, the social modernity they so bitterly resisted is on its way. Even as my Afghan friends professed their conservatism and religiosity, they were yet to get married or have children—at ages long past when their parents were doing so. The direction of things to come seemed obvious. For decades, the age of first marriage has been inching upward, particularly in the cities; since the late 1990s the fertility rate has fallen drastically. The literacy rate among young women, just 11 percent in 1979, had grown to 42 percent by 2021.

The more time I spent in Afghanistan, the more I doubted that the Taliban had an affirmative social vision to counteract this Westernization. The jagged conservatism of Akhundzada, spiritually situated in the Pashtun hinterlands of the twentieth century, was a purely negative answer. Beyond that, the Islamic Emirate seemed to offer nothing that could match Western culture for charisma. When they tried to emphasize normalcy and functionality, it was by showing that they, too, could meet Western norms.

It hasn’t been enough to win long-run loyalty as people vote with their feet. Young Afghans see little future in the country: nearly anyone with a chance of getting out is trying to leave. Classes for English, German, and Turkish are full of young men and women trying to secure a foreign university scholarship; signs advertising help with asylum cases and visa applications are easy to spot throughout urban centers. Desperate Afghans will flood toward the airport at the slightest rumor that they can leave the country. Many educated Afghans will try to get political asylum in the West by claiming that the Taliban will kill them, often on dubious grounds. The poorest and most desperate, meanwhile, will simply be trafficked into Pakistan or Iran as cheap and expendable labor.

On my last Friday in Afghanistan, I was nervous: attacks tend to occur on Friday morning during prayers, and—with a few weeks having passed since ISKP’s attack on the Hazara girls’ school—Kabul seemed overdue for a bombing. Some of my companions, feeling the same way, were joking about finding a good corner in the prayer congregation to avoid an attack. Not being a Muslim, I was happy to walk around the less-populated parts of the city and read.

An American who had been in Kabul during the U.S. occupation told me an urban legend, probably false, about suicide attacks: on Thursday night, the planners would give the martyr-to-be—usually some teenager—a potent drug, perhaps meth, to induce agitation and excitement. Then they would have him stay up all night, driving him into a frenzy with talk of jihad and martyrdom. In the morning, they would release him to detonate himself in a populated area. This was initially the story whispered about the Taliban. Now it was being whispered about ISKP.

It wound up that I did encounter suicide bombers that Friday. But circumstances were such that I was their guest, not their victim: we were sharing tea and crackers at their group house. I had been invited to interview them, since I had expressed a desire to meet some suicide bombers. As a matter of fact these were “inactive” suicide bombers—not very successful if they’re still alive, I joked with them—who had signed up during the war but hadn’t gotten the chance to kill themselves.

Even as the mujahideen told me of the various methods for carrying out a suicide attack—the car bomb, the vest bomb, the rare turban bomb—they regarded me with curious eyes. They were members of the Haqqani network, the only part of the Taliban classified as a terrorist group by the U.S. The network is known for its links to al-Qaeda, its military sophistication, and its authorship of the most lethal suicide attacks of the war.

Thus, these men were among the Emirate’s warrior elect: one was missing a leg, sacrificed in a skirmish in which five Americans had died. They hailed from the southeastern province of Ghazni, an area known for producing suicide bombers; accordingly, they had all signed up to detonate themselves during the war. Now they were all bureaucrats in the interior ministry, which had been granted to Sirajuddin Haqqani’s men. A solitary Dell computer sat in the corner of their room like an heirloom. It did not look like they had much use for it.

What was it like, I asked, to make the transition from mujahid to bureaucrat? The one who spoke the best English—he had given himself the moniker “Mr. Young”—responded quickly. “Very boring,” he said. “We are happy for peace, yes, but we miss the thrill of fighting. The feeling of the ambush, the moment of waiting for the American convoy, the excitement of the battle. We miss it.”

I asked if he wanted to go back to fighting. “Yes,” Mr. Young said, “the moment we get the opportunity. We still want to martyr ourselves, and we would do it at this very moment if we could!” Now he was getting excited. “Martyrdom,” he said, “would make me much happier than being a bureaucrat and working in the ministry. On the word of Sirajuddin Haqqani, we would happily blow ourselves up tomorrow!”

Hearing his words, it was hard not to feel the sense that something had passed away. It was like listening to a cowboy reminiscence about the closing of the frontier. The Taliban had won their revolution, and had everything they’d ever wanted. But now they confronted the truth that all successful revolutions face: winning a state is a lot more glorious than managing one. To their new world—a world of responsibility, a world that demanded a different sort of synthesis—they seemed to have little in the way of an answer.

Soon my tea with the mujahideen was over. The suicide bombers walked me to their car, offered me their WhatsApp contact information, and thanked me dearly for coming to Afghanistan. Mr. Young turned to me. “If you ever want to stay with us, then you are always welcome.” He smiled and laughed. “And next time,” he said, “we can show you our weapons.”

If this remote farm has any fame, it is for two reasons. First, for Lewis, its idiosyncratic and voluble owner, both an autodidact rancher and lightning rod of local controversy. In the words of one Essex resident, “there’s not a dinner party within 50 miles where conversation doesn’t turn to Sandy Lewis.” Second, the farm is known for producing some of the highest-quality, healthiest beef in the United States—tasty enough, Lewis says, that it is good to eat plain, unlike the “tasteless” beef that populates grocery store aisles.

On a recent summer weekend, on an assignment for Palladium, three friends and I took the four-hour drive from New York City to Essex to pay Lewis a visit. We were investigating one of the central, unspoken stories of modern health—the disintegration of the human gut microbiome, the complicity of the American agriculture industry in its undoing, and its catastrophic consequences for biological functioning. We were met in Essex by a film crew. (The nonprofit that publishes Palladium is separately working to produce a forthcoming short film on the topic with financial support from the Lewis Foundation.)

For Lewis, the story started a few years ago, when two of his bulls gored each other to death. The veterinarian Lewis worked with said he didn’t know what killed them, but that two more of the bulls “didn’t look good either.” Lewis wanted to pin him down. What exactly did the veterinarian mean by “either”?

After some prodding, the vet told him that he thought the bulls had anaplasmosis. This was serious: related to Lyme, it’s a tick-spread bacterial disease that causes cattle to become anemic and feverish. Left untreated, it leads to aggression and eventually sudden death.

Lewis shipped the other two sick bulls to a lab at Cornell University for testing. Both arrived dead that night, and the livestock veterinarian there, Dr. Belinda Thompson, drew blood and confirmed that the cows had anaplasmosis. But according to Lewis, Dr. Thompson then made a strange request: “Mr. Lewis, you’re known for doing things right. Can I come see you?”

Lewis invited her to come to the farm to help him deal with the problem. Once they met in person, Lewis says, she told him that the right way to deal with the issue was to test all his cows, isolate the sick, and treat them through subcutaneous injections of small amounts of the antibiotic tetracycline, with testing and injections repeated until they had recovered. Lewis followed through, and treated his herd as Dr. Thompson had suggested; the cows made a full recovery. He also made a note to himself to investigate further: what was standard practice for treating anaplasmosis, and why was Dr. Thompson’s prescription different?

As Lewis understood Dr. Thompson’s advice, taking antibiotics orally would disrupt the cow’s gut bacteria; subcutaneous injections were superior because they bypassed the gut biome. Dr. Thompson spoke at a symposium Lewis funded at Bard College in 2019, where she said that she does not “have enough information to know” whether she agrees that there is an effective difference in health impact between oral and subcutaneous antibiotics.

While declining to answer specific questions about her treatment program and subsequent comments, Dr. Thompson told Palladium that she stands by “all the comments I made at the Bard College Symposium” and that her treatment program was “correct and effective in eradicating the infection in the herd.” Lewis, who did not attend the Bard symposium he sponsored, said Dr. Thompson told him that putting antibiotics in the water or feed would affect the microbiome and immune system of the animals.

For most farmers, the story would end there. But for Lewis, it was the beginning of an obsession with the role of antibiotics in animal agriculture. 

Lewis is no ordinary farmer, and it is his nature to investigate things with skepticism. As a scion of Wall Street royalty—his father, the legendary Salim “Cy” Lewis, ran Bear Stearns for three decades—he was rowdy and troubled, spending much of his youth in a mental institution in Chicago. He is still difficult, brash, and confrontational; but these skills would turn out to be advantageous in the path he chose.

After dropping out of the University of Chicago, he made his own way on Wall Street, where he earned a massive fortune as an arbitrageur and investment banker in the 1980s. Lewis engineered several prominent mergers, one of them immortalized in a book called The Year They Sold Wall Street, and developed a reputation as a combative critic of Wall Street wrongdoing. But a prosecution by Rudy Giuliani in the late ‘80s spelled the end of his finance career, though he would later receive a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton and was found to have acted “out of pure reforming impulse” by a federal judge.

As a result of this colorful past, Lewis—for whom farming is half retirement vocation, half ideological statement—is immune from the financial pressures that are so powerful on most family farms. He is free to farm as he sees fit. Accordingly, he raises his cattle in the healthiest way he can: his herd lives outdoors year-round on organic pastures. Lewis does not use chemical fertilizers and does not compact his soil. His cows consume no grain feed, and he avoids oral antibiotic treatment at all costs.

And he is also free to draw the lines connecting his own experience with the broader changes in human health over the last decades.

After the visit from Dr. Thompson, Lewis was intrigued: he had a hunch that the veterinarians were not telling the whole story about the use of antibiotics in farming. So Lewis applied the information gathering techniques he had honed in his Wall Street days.

After calling multiple experts for corroboration of the reasons for Dr. Thompson’s treatment protocol, he put out job postings for a farm manager everywhere he could. He used it as a pretense to hold candid interviews with farmers across the country. He asked them a series of ordinary questions to get them comfortable, and then hit them with what he really wanted to know: “We have anaplasmosis in our herd. How would you treat that?” He says they all told him that many herds had anaplasmosis, and the usual treatment was to dispense tetracycline—“the stuff from China”—in the cows’ water troughs.

But this raised a disturbing question: why did industry practice contradict what Dr. Thompson, backed up by other experts, had told Lewis was the right way to treat anaplasmosis? And why were so many farmers using antibiotics to excess, potentially endangering the health of their cattle and the humans who would ultimately eat them?

Lewis has come to believe—in line with an emergent scientific consensus—that the mass use of oral antibiotics in animal agriculture is a key factor in the mysterious and malign human health trends of the twenty-first century. Destroy the smallest living things with antibiotics—everything from gut bacteria to the microbes in the dirt and water that many insects eat—and you throw everything else out of balance, too.

Micro Origins, Macro Problems

Strange things have been happening to the human body over the last few decades. Our biology has changed, without us quite knowing how or why. Why have human body temperatures declined in the United States over the last 150 years? Or why has the age of first puberty been declining among teenagers since the mid-nineteenth century, from 16.5 years in 1840 to 13 years in 1995?

Or—to take a more troubling and immediate case—why have rates of autism been increasing so dramatically? After having been very rare a few decades prior, the rate has grown from about 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 44 in 2018, according to the Center for Disease Control. The standard explanation for this increase—changing diagnostic criteria and increased awareness—simply does not explain how sustained the uptick has been, nor does it explain the first-hand accounts of the increase by teachers. In fact, studies have found that changing diagnostic criteria account for only one-fourth of observed increases. Something else is causing the rest.

Or consider something as seemingly straightforward as obesity. In 1975, about 12 percent of American adults were obese; now that figure sits above 40 percent. The standard explanation of the remarkable increase in obesity over the last few decades—the “big two,” more calories and less physical exertion—have an intuitive appeal, but they do not seem to capture the full picture. Between 1999 and 2017, per capita caloric intake among Americans did not change, while the rate of obesity increased by about a third. The increase is so dramatic that a drop-off in physical exertion in so brief a period is unlikely to be the sole explanation, especially since the majority of human energy expenditure is non-behavioral.

Obesity thus remains, in the words of an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, an “unexplained epidemic.” This is why many scientists have sought to locate contributing factors to the secular increase in obesity, from the decline in cigarette use to increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.

There are many conditions like this: allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, and autoimmune conditions like juvenile arthritis are other notable examples. These are not the well-known “diseases of modernity,” like heart disease or Type 2 diabetes, whose causes are reasonably well-known. Disturbingly, there seem to be connections between all of these conditions: the “autistic enterocolitis” gut disorder that resembles Crohn’s disease in autistic children, the obesity-asthma link, the irritable bowel syndrome-eczema link, the eczema-allergies link. These “diseases of postmodernity” appear to be a package deal: autistic children report higher rates of stomach pain, and obese people are more likely to develop eczema-like skin diseases. There is some common root underlying these conditions.

A wealth of scientific work mostly done in the last decade by scientists like Martin Blaser of Rutgers may point to the answer. The origin lies in the extraordinary pressure we have been placing on a part of the body about which we know and think little: the microbiome of the human gut. It is an ecosystem of microbes like bacteria, archaea, and microeukaryotes that is central to a wide variety of biological functions—from regulating metabolism and sex-hormone levels to combating pathogens. There is plenty of research still being done about forms of “crosstalk” between the gut microbiome and various organs like the “gut-lung axis” or the “gut-brain axis,” which seems to play a major role in mental health.

The microbiome is invisible to us. Though it plays a role in practically every biological function, it does not have the obvious physical importance of the lungs or the heart. Yet it functions like an organ all its own. It was only a few decades ago that we began to understand just how evolutionarily integrated we, as organisms, are with the microbes that live with us. It is no longer obvious where “we” end and “they” begin; just as we have begun to adopt an ecological view of our relationship with nature, we have begun to understand our bodies as part of a “superorganism,” an ecosystem all its own, with the microbiome playing the role of a “second genome” with 150 times as many unique genes as our own genome. 

The sheer size and diversity of this microscopic world is hard to fathom. There are certainly dominant species in various regions of the body: in the mouth we have Streptococcus, in the gut Bacteroides and Firmicutes; on the skin we have Propionibacterium, Corynebacterium, and Staphylococcus. But there is little unity in these microbial “kingdoms.” They are closer to patchworks of small principalities, where a few days of walking lands you somewhere with a different language. The microbes that live at the duodenum, the start of the small intestine, are very different from those of the rectum; on average, left and right hands on the same individual share just 17 percent of phylotypes. 

Crucially, a wide variety of conditions including the “postmodern” ones like autism, autoimmune disorders, and obesity—Blaser originated the “postmodern” framing in his 2014 book Missing Microbes—are accompanied by changes in the microbiome. Study after study has found that obese people tend to have severe dysbiosis in their gut microbiomes, with a significant reduction in the prevalence of Bacteroidetes and a proportional increase in the abundance of Firmicutes, another bacteria. Legions of studies have found similar relationships for autism, autoimmune diabetes and other autoimmune conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, for asthma, for allergies, and for all the other conditions that constitute the postmodern disease package.

Much of this has only become known in the last few decades, with microbiome work only becoming fashionable in the 2010s. In fact, it is just as we have discovered the importance of the microbial world that we have realized how much damage we have done to it. Bacteria that we once vilified for their associations with disease, like the gut-dweller Helicobacter pylori—“the only good Helicobacter pylori is a dead Helicobacter pylori,” one scientist wrote in The Lancet in 1997—have been discovered as important in their own right: H. pylori is beneficial for preventing reflux and esophageal cancers.

But it was too late. As Blaser would write in a 1999 dirge for the bacterium, this discovery was made only after H. pylori had virtually disappeared from the microbiomes of children in the developed West. And because these microbiota are passed from generation to generation, whether through birth or breast milk, they are likely to become rarer with time.

A microbial history of the twentieth century would reveal a campaign of microscopic devastation. In effect, we have been at war with our gut flora to make it conform to our demands, and we now find ourselves in a societal microbiome crisis, with each generation more affected than the last by a process of cumulative microbial depletion. And our main weapon in this war has been the antibiotic.

Animals in the Antibiotic Age

Antibiotics like penicillin, tetracycline, doxycycline, ciprofloxacin, and colistin are the central miracles of modern medicine. They are highly effective in destroying pathogens that otherwise would pose severe risks to human health. Next to mass vaccines and antiviral drugs, they are perhaps the single most important health intervention of the twentieth century.

But antibiotics accomplish their assaults on the targeted microbes by acting as a defoliant for the gut flora. The drugs inhibit the growth of some species of bacteria and encourage the growth of others, often altering the balance of the microbial ecosystem in perverse ways. This is why antibiotic regimens, especially long ones, have been shown to cause huge imbalances in the microbiome.

The link between antibiotics and a condition like obesity is not far behind: we have known for a long time that antibiotics induce rapid weight gain in everything from mice to humans. The specific dynamic—antibiotics cause gut dysbiosis, and gut dysbiosis leads to obesity and other diseases—is now becoming increasingly clear. Similar studies for conditions like asthma or juvenile arthritis, all conducted only in the last few years, have found the same link.

This is especially worrying because antibiotics are everywhere. The modern age is the antibiotic age; since Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was put to mass use in World War II, we have lived amid a free-for-all of antibiotic consumption. Fleming himself warned of an “era…of abuses” that would reverse all the progress he and other scientists had made by fostering highly resistant “superbugs.” Recent decades have seen programs of “antimicrobial stewardship” in the rich world that aim to reduce antibiotic usage, in order to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance.

But for those concerned with the harms of antibiotic overuse—whether due to antimicrobial resistance or microbiome dysbiosis—there is a big problem. Most of our interactions with antibiotics do not come through medical prescriptions for drugs like penicillin or doxycycline: instead, they come from what we eat and drink. And because antibiotics have become so ubiquitous, inadvertent antibiotic consumption has become a major neglected crisis.

Consider animal agriculture, the main force for antibiotic pollution in the United States. Antibiotics are now crucial to the industrial production of chicken, pig, and cow protein; in recent years antibiotics have even begun to be used in aquaculture. The reasons are simple: antibiotics used prophylactically can prevent and suppress infectious diseases, like bovine footrot and anaplasmosis, that are common in the claustrophobic quarters of concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs). More insidiously, antibiotics can make livestock larger by disrupting their gut biomes and metabolisms, allowing them to be slaughtered at younger ages and at greater weights. In 2019, of the antibiotics sold in the United States, only about a third went to humans, with the rest consumed by livestock.

Antibiotics have been used in American animal agriculture since the late 1940s. It was then that Thomas Jukes, a biologist for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, discovered that treating chickens with even trace amounts of the antibiotic chlortetracycline—a drug that had been discovered in 1945 at Lederle—caused them to gain much more weight. The more chlortetracycline the birds got, the larger they were; the chickens that had gotten the highest doses weighed two and a half times more than the ones that hadn’t gotten anything.

The discovery set off a revolution in how animals were raised. The New York Times announced that the drug “has been found to be one of the greatest growth-promoting substances so far to be discovered;” antibiotics in animal feed soon became a major research focus at nearly every drug company. “Here is good news for both farmers and meat eaters,” Fortune magazine announced in 1952: “antibiotics provide more meat with less feed.” By 1955, farmers were already treating their animals with 490,000 pounds of antibiotics a year.

The antibiotic revolution in agriculture—along with more innovations like Vitamin D supplementation that made windowless CAFOs feasible, logistical optimization to make slaughter faster and cheaper, and the selective breeding of more “meat-type” chickens through events like the “Chicken of Tomorrow” contests of 1948 and 1951—powered the remarkable cheapening of chicken, with one poultry producer dubbing it “meat for the price of bread.” Soon, chickens were much larger and slaughtered at much younger ages.

But the economic results of this biological experiment were unmistakable. Per capita consumption of chicken—once a rare and expensive kind of meat, typically consumed as a Sunday treat—more than tripled between 1960 and 2020, growing from a relatively marginal part of the American diet in the first few decades of the twentieth century into the country’s premier staple protein.

All of this put other animal protein products—particularly beef and pork—on the defensive. By the mid-1970s, per capita beef consumption entered a long decline, while pork consumption plateaued. By 1992, Americans ate more chicken per capita than they did beef for the first time.

This meant that beef production, too, would have to be made more efficient and cost-effective—“chickenized,” in the parlance of some farmers. But cows were a much more challenging terrain for this type of Fordist intensification than chickens. Small, docile, fast-maturing, and slaughtered without much fuss, chickens are the perfect cogs for a highly optimized food production system.

Cows and other ungulates, by contrast, are ruminants that need much larger amounts of food and land, develop more slowly, and require greater amounts of individual care; their size means they cannot be as concentrated in CAFOs as chickens are. In relation to the central ratio of meat produced per hour and dollar spent, it is clear which creature comes out ahead.

But cow producers would have to chickenize what they could to stop from losing more ground. This meant more concentrated diets built on corn-based feed, made cheap by massive corn surpluses from the 1970s on, as well as more concentrated feedlots. But these diets caused liver abscesses, bloat, and acidosis, while crowding provided ideal conditions for infectious diseases like bovine footrot. And cows were still much less cost-effective than chickens. This meant that antibiotics were necessary, both for disease suppression and growth promotion.

In 1975, the antibiotic monensin was licensed; within ten years, it and other ionophore antibiotics were being fed to more than 90 percent of American feedlot cattle, alongside other antibiotics like tetracycline and penicillin. It was a decades-long spree of antibiotic abuse. “Motorway veterinarians” could make huge sums of money prescribing antibiotics for animals they had never seen; many entrepreneurs simply sold drugs without prescriptions. A congressional investigation in 1985 found that “as many as 90 percent or more of the 20,000 to 30,000 new animal drugs estimated to be on the market” had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As with chickens, the biological effects on cows were significant. The year that monensin was licensed, the average weight of cows at slaughter was 1,047 pounds; by 2005, it had grown thirty percent, to 1,369 pounds. By 2017, American cattle producers used about 171 milligrams of antibiotic per kilogram of livestock—four times as much as in France, and six times as much as in the United Kingdom.

This has a significant effect on all types of animal products, and potentially on any watershed downstream of the trough water. Antibiotic residue in both drinking water and animal products like milk, meat, and eggs remains a significant problem with little work done to address it. While individual meals may have only sub-inhibitory concentrations, the power of bioaccumulation over decades of significant consumption cannot be discounted. There is still little data collected on the risks of long-term bioaccumulation of antimicrobials for human health.

The Price of Something Better

As a result of this mass pharmaceutical use in animal agriculture, natural bodies of water now contain remarkable amounts of antibiotic waste. One study of a river in Colorado found that “the only site at which no antibiotics were detected was the pristine site in the mountains before the river had encountered urban or agricultural landscapes.” Antibiotics like macrolides and tetracyclines have been found in chlorinated drinking water, while the antibiotic triclosan has been found in rivers and streams around the world. This effluent trickles into everything else: research has detected uptake of veterinary antibiotics in carrots and lettuce, as well as in human breast milk.

The effects of this antibiotic pollution in the natural world appear to be profound. The leakage of antibiotics into natural environments alters animal biology in grotesque ways: sub-medical concentrations of antibiotics have been shown to cause severe physical deformations in zebrafish, like yolk sac edema, as well as in amphibians like the Western clawed frog. Because the drugs have an effect on gene expression, the deformations extend into development and behavior as well: a study of the small crustacean Daphnia magna found that tetracycline impacted the general stress response and metabolism.

Most worryingly, the effect was multigenerational, extending from parent to child—and carried over even after tetracycline was removed from the ecosystem. It is not surprising that the introduction of antibiotics into an aquatic environment leads to reduced fertility and increased mortality. Lewis believes that antibiotics are responsible for the insect die-offs seen in industrialized countries: the antibiotic rifampin resulted in “prolonged reductions in longevity and fecundity” among two termite species, with similar effects shown with bumblebees’ exposure to antibiotics. He points to the richness of insect life on his farm as a useful contrast.

This is the essential crisis that Lewis and others are diagnosing. The effects of antibiotics on the microbiomes of living organisms are profound and highly detrimental; the full scope of their impacts on human health—from autoimmune disease to early puberty to antisocial behavior—are not yet clear, let alone those of their impacts on the non-human environment. Antibiotics are present almost everywhere as environmental pollutants; and because microbial strains are passed from generation to generation with significant potential for gradual attrition, without serious intervention the crisis will only worsen with time.

It may well be, of course, that other environmental toxins are also contributing to the increase in postmodern disorders. Studies have highlighted a potential link between autism-like behavior and the herbicide glyphosate; there have also been some findings, generally more limited, about the link between toxicants and autism, and a recent focus on the role of toxic “obesogens” in the obesity epidemic. But no single element has demonstrated as clear a pathway for a wide variety of conditions as antibiotics.

And yet in spite of a loudening scientific drumbeat, there has been little action on the microbiome problem in the United States. There is work around marketing probiotic products and microbiome transfer therapies—usually in the form of bacteria-fortified drinks or fecal transplants—but little in the way of significantly reducing antibiotic pollution in the first place. European Union regulators have been far more proactive in reducing antibiotic pollution since the 1970s, though with antibiotic resistance in mind rather than microbiome dysbiosis. Though establishing causality is always tricky, it is a good sign that France, for instance, reports notably low rates of autism, low rates of irritable bowel syndrome, and low rates of obesity.

For decades, the FDA had attempted to follow the European example. From the 1970s into the 2000s they sought to restrict penicillins and tetracyclines as growth promoters, but were repeatedly stymied by pharmaceutical lobbyists. It was not until 2017, well after European countries had strictly limited the use of antibiotics, that the FDA was finally able to ban the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock, mandating that all antibiotics given to cattle needed a prescription. After peaking in 2015, antibiotic use on farms has declined by about 40 percent, with most of the effect taking place in the year of the ban.

But antibiotic use remains elevated, above an average of 100 milligrams per kilogram per year—far more than the 50 milligram limit that reports on antibiotic resistance have proposed, and several times more than is normal in European countries like France or Norway. The reason, Lewis believes, goes back to his anaplasmosis episode. He believes that anaplasmosis is commonly used as a pretext for administering growth-promoting antibiotics, and that this is an open secret among farmers and livestock veterinarians. The “motorway veterinarian,” dependent on the business of growth-hungry farmers, remains alive and well.

It is difficult to establish the precise intent surrounding current antibiotic use—what exactly farmers want when they put tetracycline in the water. But antibiotics ostensibly used as prophylactics against disease are effectively the same as antibiotics used for growth promotion: rebranded as a convenient side effect, antibiotic growth promotion survives in all but name.

Thus even the FDA’s ban on antibiotic growth promotion remains full of holes. Verification is another issue: it is not so difficult for beef farmers to acquire antibiotics underground and feed them to their cattle without reporting it. Much of the system essentially relies on an honor code, and the Department of Agriculture—a notorious case study in regulatory capture—is hesitant to cause too much trouble. One study in Science found that 42 percent of lots that were certified by the Department of Agriculture as “Raised Without Antibiotics” actually contained cattle that had been given antibiotics, with five percent of lots being composed entirely of cattle raised on antibiotics.

As we toured the Lewis Family Farm, we discussed the best ways to address the problem. Perhaps an organization could test feedlots to determine which farms are trustworthy in their antibiotic claims, and which are not. Mass testing of rivers and streams for antibiotic runoff might be useful. There is still much work to be done on seeing how far microbiome transfer therapies could go in ameliorating the postmodern disease package—results indicating that they could help children with autism are encouraging, and experiments are now expanding to conditions like ulcerative colitis. New institutions could arise in response to new challenges of health: microbial restoration will have to be a societal project, not an individual one.

But keeping in character, Lewis proposes something more ambitious: a 6.5 million acre reserve—roughly the size of Sicily—in upstate New York, hosting both a consortium of elite universities (Cornell, Dartmouth, and others) and a massive organic farm. The land would be cycled between grazing for sheep and cows, and the students would be enlisted in agricultural production. It would represent the promise of an agricultural order fully integrated with the social one, with human health not just a casualty of ever-cheaper meat.

The project, he estimated, would cost somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars just to buy the land. We were skeptical that this could produce the economies of scale to compete with industrial, antibiotic-dosed meat; it seemed tinged with a rustic utopianism out of William Morris.

But Lewis was serious. On the day we were due to return to New York, as we nibbled on coffeecake that his wife Barbara had prepared in their wooden farmhouse kitchen, Lewis called up one of the very wealthiest men in the world—someone whose fortune dwarfed his own—and started pitching him on the importance of this issue.

As he cajoled the billionaire on the phone, we looked outside at the sweeping Adirondacks; the whole place, from the farmhouse to the air itself, felt healthy and pleasant. Whether or not his way could ultimately triumph over the feedlots and trough-water antibiotics, Lewis had cultivated something charismatic in his crusade for human-aligned agriculture.

He was still on the phone, teeing up his pitch. The billionaire, clearly riding in the back of a limousine, said he was busy. But Lewis was insistent. We didn’t have much time, he said. It was urgent: it was a matter of human health.

Price had noticed a rapid increase in dental problems roughly around the end of the nineteenth century. Before, he had been able to expect a baseline of dental health in his patients and research subjects. Now, that was rapidly slipping away, and cavities, once rare, were quickly proliferating. Tooth decay was everywhere. Something had clearly changed, and the modern diet—then only in its infancy—was the leading suspect. Medical professionals across the Western world were observing the same trend: as the Boston dentist Gustave Wiksell noted in 1902, “before American-process flour was shipped to Sweden, two generations ago, two dentists were enough for the whole city of Stockholm…now they are as thick as in an American city.”

Price wanted to find out what exactly was going on. The deterioration was due not just to the newfound presence of bad substances in diets, he thought, but the absence of some unknown “essential factors” that had gone missing with the new diet that society was adopting. So he was determined to go to places where the modern diet had not yet found its footing, and study the health of groups living on their traditional diets.

Over the following years, Price traveled to virtually every corner of the globe. First, it was off to the Alps, to spend time among Swiss villagers; then to the isolated Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland, and then to Inuit communities in Alaska, indigenous communities in northern Canada, and parts of the United States. Then he journeyed to the archipelagos of the South Pacific to survey the health of traditional Melanesian and Polynesian tribes; to central and eastern Africa, meeting thirty different tribes, from the Maasai to the Tutsi; and to Australia and New Zealand, to observe the diets of Aboriginals and Maoris. Finally, he went to Latin America to study the teeth of ancient Andeans and their Peruvian descendants. In 1939, after eight years of intensive travel, Price published his findings in a lengthy book titled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Price’s book is a strange read. There is little hint of the condescension and chauvinism of his time toward “primitive” societies, or of the disinterested gaze of the contemporary professional researcher. Price seems to fall in love with nearly every traditional group he encounters, sometimes romanticizing them to the point of excess, but nonetheless treating them with a deep respect bordering on awe. “The reputation of the Maori people for splendid physiques has placed them on a pedestal of perfection;” the skill of the Maasai in killing lions with a spear is “one of the most superb of human achievements;” the Swiss of one village in the Lötschental Valley have “some of the finest physiques in all Europe,” along with such a remarkable level of social trust that they “have neither policeman nor jail, because they have no need for them.” It is a highly discursive and repetitive book, filled with lengthy asides and observations—on the splendor of Inca civilization, child-rearing among the Aboriginals, and the methods by which Torres Strait islanders kill sharks. 

But the book is most interesting not as a travelogue, but as an account of Price’s painstaking medical examinations. The data they produced is documented to an exhausting degree and is accompanied by striking photographs of his examinations. Virtually everywhere he went, all those who had not yet adopted a modern diet and were still eating their ancestral foods—whether based on fish, meat, dairy, or fruit—exhibited far better dental health than those eating modern diets. People who had never seen a dentist or orthodontist were in no need of them. In many isolated groups, Price found no instances at all of tooth decay. Among the Dinkas of the Nile, for instance, he found that only 0.2 percent of their teeth were affected by decay or cavities; among a group of Inuits along a tributary of the Kuskokwim River in Alaska, 0.3 percent; among the Maasai in southern Kenya, 0.4 percent.

When those same groups started eating what he called “the foods of commerce”—white flour, sugar, jams, marmalades, canned goods—their teeth rapidly degraded, with cavities becoming endemic. He was horrified by what colonization had done to the health of the Aboriginals of Australia: “In their native life where they could get the foods that keep them well and preserve their teeth, they had no need for dentists. Now they have need, but have no dentists.”

And it was not just a matter of rotten teeth. Almost everywhere he looked, whether among Swiss breadmakers or Nilotic hunter-gatherers, he found that traditional diets were more conducive to physical development than modern ones. In traditional communities, people had levels of strength and physical ability that astonished him. Swiss village children could go barefoot in glacier-fed rivers without developing tuberculosis; the Maori could allegedly see moons of Jupiter “which are only visible to the white man’s eye with the aid of telescopes;” the swimming ability of remote Scots was “almost beyond belief.”

In the years since Price’s book was published, it has attracted a small but devoted following. His arguments—that traditional food reflected time-tested wisdom; that soil and grass quality affected food quality and thus human health; that modern food was deeply unconducive to healthy living—have only gained currency in the last few decades, and influential food writers like Michael Pollan and Gary Taubes have cited Price as an influence on their work.

Though unscientific by modern standards—Price was more of a nineteenth-century natural scientist, part ethnographer and part medical researcher—it remains a startling book. Much about Price is strange, like his monomania about poor nutrition as a cause for juvenile delinquency or war. But his book is remarkably persuasive in making the case that something had gone very wrong with the modern diet.

The Nutrition of Our Discontent

In the 2000s and 2010s, many decades after Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was published, there was a flurry of efforts to tackle the “lifestyle diseases” that had by then become endemic in Western nations. These included Michelle Obama’s ill-fated “Let’s Move” public awareness campaign about childhood obesity, complete with a companion song by Beyoncé; the banning of particularly large sugary drinks in New York City, soon found unconstitutional by an appeals court; and a variety of short-lived government advertising pushes to encourage people to eat healthier or simply take the stairs, all of which rapidly hit the rocks of widespread apathy.

Americans did not get any healthier, or any less prone to chronic diseases. By the second half of the 2010s, political elites had quietly given up. Both Democratic and Republican platforms dropped mention of the obesity epidemic in 2016, with no reappearance in 2020.

When COVID-19 arrived in the West, population health became a key variable, with the highest death rates seen in the countries with the most obese populations. The twentieth-century shift in mortality from infectious to noncommunicable disease—what demographers call the “epidemiological transition,” linked to the “nutrition transition” that reshaped global diets—largely eradicated diseases like polio and yellow fever, but it did not lead to conditions of general health. Instead, it created populations that are chronically ill, and thus require near-constant medical attention; in turn, healthcare systems shifted from treating acute diseases to managing populations that are permanently, but “manageably,” ill. More medicine than ever, but less health.

It’s easy to view this as a necessary cost of undeniable progress. People are richer and better-fed, so more people will become fat; people are living longer, so they’ll die of cancer or heart disease, rather than typhoid fever or cholera or a spear in the side. There are negative externalities, but what matters is that the lines have been going up.

But this triumphalist narrative is only a partial account of what has changed in the last two hundred years. It is true that the “average person” is dying later than they would in prior centuries, though crude demographic averages typically present a more brutish picture of the past than is accurate. People who survived childhood could regularly expect to live about as long as Westerners do today. In his study of the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari desert, the anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee writes that the proportion of individuals over 60 years of age “compares favorably to the percentage of the elderly in industrialized nations.” Likewise, the modal lifespan among the Tsimané of Bolivia is 70 years—not bad for a group that practices a subsistence lifestyle combining hunting, gathering, and farming.

It is not just hunter-gatherers who are overlooked by life expectancy statistics. Consider another maligned population: the working classes of mid-Victorian Britain (roughly the years between 1850 to 1870). Accounting for infant mortality, life expectancy for mid-Victorian Britons at age five was 75 for men and 73 for women, not too different from what is enjoyed today in the U.K. The numbers look even better relative to the current life expectancy of British working-class men (compositionally more directly comparable to the mid-Victorian population)—around 72 years for men. Life expectancy for working-class women has increased only slightly, to 76 years.

Of course, in some regards health in modernized societies has improved: we do indeed live longer than in the past and are much less affected by hunger and infectious pathogens. But in other regards, health has become much worse. When scholars like Marshall Sahlins or Jared Diamond contrast hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, they do so with the suggestion that hunter-gatherers were in many ways healthier than us. Diamond reaches the conclusion that the Neolithic agricultural revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Many elements of that thesis are true: the Tsimané, the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea are fascinating for their remarkably good health. Numerous studies exist on the total absence of the “diseases of civilization” that ail us today. Acne, which is so common in the West so as to be mundane, simply does not exist among the Kitavan Islanders or the Aché of Paraguay. Among the Tsimané, brain atrophy with age occurs far more slowly, and the population has the lowest levels of coronary artery disease ever recorded.

But emphasizing the hunter-gatherers overlooks just how recent much of this deterioration has been. The advent of agriculture did inaugurate an epochal decline in health, with populations becoming shorter and more prone to a variety of illnesses. The advent of the modern food system, however, only took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That change brought on a similarly traumatic deterioration in health, of similar magnitude—one that is still playing out. 

Look, for instance, to a remarkable set of studies published in the 2000s in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine on the diet and health of mid-Victorian Britons. These found that the conventional idea of Victorian eating patterns—emaciated orphans begging for gruel—is far from the truth. The British working poor and peasantry of the 1850s and 1860s could enjoy a diet “vastly superior to that generally consumed today, one substantially in advance of current public health recommendations.”

The mid-Victorian diet, the study found, was rich in vegetables, fruits—especially cherries and apples, with between eight and ten portions a day—Omega-3 fatty acids, nuts, whole grains, and meat. This meat, in turn, did not come from expensive prime cuts, but mainly from micronutrient-rich organ meats, drippings, and bones. Though the mid-Victorian working poor may have been hungry more frequently than we are—food was not always instantly available for “snacking” in the way it is today—they almost certainly ate more in absolute terms: “Due to the levels of physical activity routinely undertaken by the mid-Victorian working classes, calorific requirements ranged between 150-200 percent of today’s historically low values.” It was not a perfect diet—food quality, especially when it came to meat, left much to be desired—but it was by no means the starvation diet we typically think of.

All of this created a population that was far healthier than we are accustomed to believing, reared on “something closer to the Mediterranean diet or even the Paleolithic diet than the modern Western diet,” with far higher intakes of micronutrients and phytonutrients than we enjoy today. A land of widespread malnutrition, mid-Victorian Britain was not.

Corresponding to a better diet were much more vigorous lives: nearly all British workers would have qualified as very active by today’s ultra-sedentary standards. At the top end of physical hardiness were the railway builders, who could “routinely shovel up to 20 tons of earth per day from below their feet to above their heads”—a feat requiring tremendous amounts of strength that few people today could match. Leisure activities, from gardening to informal football, were similarly vigorous.

Cancer incidences were shockingly low as well. In 1869, a doctor in Charing Cross Hospital in London described lung cancer as “one of the rarer forms of a rare disease. You may probably pass the rest of your student’s life without seeing another example of it.” When they did occur, cancers were much less rapidly progressive than they are today. The physician James Paget suggested that people with Stage 3 or 4 breast cancer could expect to live four years after diagnosis, or eight years with surgery—far longer than is common today.

But for all the surprising health benefits of the mid-Victorian diet, it would prove no match for a key shift of the 1870s and 1880s: the remarkable decrease in the price of food. Technological improvements (refrigeration, steamships, railways, improved milling techniques) and free trade policies allowed for the emergence of the first truly global regime of food production and circulation.

Outside of Britain, this meant the destruction of old orders that had been in place for centuries. Entire biomes—like the sprawling grassland prairie of the United States, stretching from the Rockies to the Mississippi River—were rapidly uprooted. In the American West, traditional nomadic bison herding was replaced by vast cattle ranches, with bison exterminated and hunter-gatherer Plains Indian nations decimated and dispersed. With the departure of these local actors, ecological economies that had sustained the landscape for generations—far more intricate and subtle than anything the successors could invent themselves—simply collapsed. The ranching economies that followed, defined by barbed-wire fencing and artificial water developments, deeply deformed the region’s ecology in order to create huge surpluses of meat for foreign export.

Accordingly, after 1870, Britain was flooded by meat and grain from the U.S., as well as Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. British domestic agriculture, now outcompeted, entered a long depression. For most Britons, meanwhile, food became remarkably plentiful and inexpensive. Between 1877 and 1889, the cost of a national weekly food basket fell by about 30 percent.

The fallout of this period transformed the British diet. Foods that had been previously consumed rarely were now widely accessible. Consumption of meat and grains grew at a rapid pace, along with “luxuries” like cheese, butter, and milk. Sugar consumption enjoyed a particularly remarkable boom, with the new craving satisfied by plantations in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. From 1820 to 1846, per capita consumption of sugar had been about 18 pounds; by 1901, it had grown fivefold to 91 pounds, with jam, condensed milk, and sweetened tea being prime vectors.

It was the birth of the mass modern diet: high in ultra-processed carbohydrates, sugar, and fats, and deficient in many of the phytonutrients and micronutrients that defined traditional diets. For ordinary Britons, it was a dramatic transformation in lifestyle that seemed liberatory at the outset. Cheap food—in common parlance, “big loaf, little loaf”—became a political rallying cry and a major force in Britain’s late-imperial inability to reform trade policy in spite of growing industrial competition from the United States and Germany.

But even as the British populace welcomed it, the cheapening of food led to a significant deterioration in physical health. The British diet entered a severe downturn at the end of the 1870s, one from which it has arguably never recovered. The decline of foods like offal made nutrient deficiencies much more common. The increase in sugar consumption alone did so much damage to people’s teeth that many were now unable to chew tough foods. Tooth decay had been rare in Britain until the mid-nineteenth century; now it was ubiquitous. So stark was the problem that a 1909 visitor to Sheffield found people with “loose-set mouths with bloodless gums and only here and there a useful tooth.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a dramatic increase in chronic degenerative diseases—like cancer and diabetes—that had previously been rare.

During the late Victorian period, there was clear evidence of a worsening in health. By the Boer War at the turn of the century, 50 percent of young working-class recruits were so malnourished as to be fully unfit for service—a problem that had never been reported during the Asante or Zulu Wars in the early 1870s. In 1901, the British infantry was forced to drop its minimum height for recruits from 5’ 4” to 5’. The British government responded by setting up a “Committee on Physical Deterioration,” in order to address a problem that had not existed a few decades prior. But this did little: a similar recruitment crisis occurred during the First World War, with David Lloyd George mourning “how many more men we could have put into the fighting ranks if the health of the country had been properly looked after”—concluding that “we have used our human material in this country prodigally, foolishly, cruelly.”

It is easy to see why so many commentators at the turn of the twentieth century perceived the overwhelming trend in physical health to be not “progress,” but some sort of deterioration. Publications like the North American Review and the British Medical Journal frequently referenced questions of “physical deterioration” and “national vitality.” These signs of physical decline were soon incorporated into a rather hyperbolic theory of general civilizational decay, expressed in books like Max Nordau’s Degeneration—which regarded modern trends, especially artistic and literary ones, as manifestations of physical illness. Nordau described the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine as having, “in astonishing completeness, all the physical and mental marks of degeneration.”

It is through this narrative of weakening and decay—the sense, ably expressed in Kipling’s “Recessional,” of lost strength—that many of the intellectual and social trends of the turn of the century emerged: Muscular Christianity and the YMCA; physical culture, especially bodybuilding and gymnastics (symbolized by Eugen Sandow, “the perfect man,” who built his physique to resemble classical Greek statuary); Theodore Roosevelt’s ideal of “the strenuous life”; or the return to nature represented by the Boy Scouts, the Wandervogel, summer camps, and nudism. Nordau himself found something of a solution to degeneration in his embrace of Zionism, which for him meant forging a “new muscle Jew” free of the marks of physical degeneration.

Much of this discourse of degeneration was tinged with a degree of hysteria, leading to a variety of ephemeral trends that had little to do with reversing symptoms of physical decline. One fad responding to the diet problem, “Fletcherizing,” involved chewing food up to a hundred times until it was liquified; John D. Rockefeller was an adherent. But the problem that these figures described was very real. The advent of the modern diet really was a disaster for health, one that some elites briefly felt they could fix. Even amid all the hot air, the actual evidence of physical deterioration was hard to dispute.

But the burst of enthusiasm for healthy, more naturalistic living eventually began to ebb. As late as the 1920s, writers like the British parliamentarian Pierse Loftus could reflect on the “degenerative effects” of eating white bread; but this was a losing battle. The modern diet, along with the increasingly sedentary mode of living it enabled and depended on, had become too entrenched to overturn. By the 1920s and ‘30s, the prerogative for responding to the problems created by diet had moved from the cultural realm to the spheres of medicine and public health.

Any sense of a coherent, holistic response to the health problems created by the advent of industrial diet and lifestyle had been lost. Instead, institutions adopted a variety of “public health” tweaks to ameliorate the problem. Brushing teeth was an early example: campaigns to encourage brushing teeth began to proliferate at the beginning of the twentieth century, with proponents claiming that it was necessary at least “until the ways of the race have become more simple, more primitive and more healthful.” The fluoridation of water followed in the 1940s and ‘50s in order to improve dental health. These interventions did improve specific health outcomes, but only by treating emergent symptoms while the underlying malignancy—a physiologically harmful way of eating and living—continued to metastasize.

The modern diet underwent a second phase of rapid degradation in the late twentieth century. With the advent of fast-food chains and addictive snacks that contained high-fructose corn syrup—consumption of which increased tenfold from 1970 to 1990—non-processed food sources eroded rapidly. Oreos, potato chips, and Coca-Cola could soon be found all over the world, owing to the lowering of trade barriers, brilliant corporate marketing strategies, and the fundamental addictiveness of the products being sold. Coca-Cola was not regularly consumed in Mexico in the 1950s; by 2019, residents of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, drank an average of 2.2 liters of Coke a day.

At the same time, the international agricultural system experienced another transformation in the decades after the Second World War, fully globalizing the modern diet. In regions like the Caribbean or much of Africa, trade liberalization and development programs rewired agricultural economies away from food independence and toward cash crop exports. Local populations, increasingly pushed from peasant communities into urban slums, became dependent on processed foods imported from abroad. In others—most famously in India—the Green Revolution and its new varieties of wheat and other staples defused the Malthusian “population bomb,” which had seemed imminent at mid-century. But it also meant national agricultural systems that focused increasingly on staple crops, pushing toward a global convergence on industrial diets. India alone has lost more than 100,000 varieties of rice since 1970, and the farmland accorded to ancestral coarse cereals like sorghum and millet, highly adaptive to Indian conditions and considerably more nutritious than their replacements, has declined significantly. 

As homogenized rice, wheat, and corn gained global dominance, driven by huge increases in yield, their nutritional value declined. Since the mid-1960s, the mineral density of wheat—the amounts of zinc, iron, copper, and magnesium it holds—has declined significantly, coinciding with the rise of the Green Revolution’s high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat cultivars. Similar trends have been found in rice, which, combined with wheat and corn, constitutes 51 percent of global calorie intake. Of about 30,000 edible plant species worldwide, modern agricultural systems cultivate only about 150, with 30 of those providing 95 percent of calories consumed. Everywhere, ancestral staples gave way to the familiar, highly centralized dietary regime.

Nutrition was transformed and delocalized in accordance with a system that emphasized yield above all else. These changes brought to the “developing” world a dietary pattern that had already led to physical deterioration in modernized countries. The same transition that played out in Victorian Britain now took place throughout the entire periphery. Price, horrified as he was by the poor teeth of modernizing populations, only saw the beginning of what was to come in the places he studied. In New Caledonia, whose people he had praised for the “very high order” of their physical development, 64 percent of men and 60 percent of women are now overweight or obese. The global obesity rate tripled between 1975 and 2016. It would have already been harmful enough to switch from traditional diets to the late-Victorian one, with its jam and sweetened tea; but that diet seems quaint next to the sugar-packed food and drink of the late twentieth century.

The effects of this transition can be seen in the globalization of “diseases of affluence” to non-affluent countries. The country with the highest prevalence of diabetes is now not the U.S. or Britain, but Pakistan. The countries with the highest rates of obesity are the impoverished statelets of the South Pacific, like Nauru and Tonga, which now neglect nutrient-rich local staples like coconut or breadfruit in favor of processed foods imported from Australia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Even the Yucatec Mayans of southern Mexico have begun to suffer greatly from Western lifestyle diseases.

Hawaii represents a particularly tragic story of nutritional decline. Upon European contact, native Hawaiians were entirely self-sufficient in food: they cultivated taro extensively, venerating the plant as an elder brother to the Hawaiian people and eating up to 15 pounds of it a day. On this diet, they enjoyed such good health and freedom from disease that, per the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, “the art of healing” faded away simply because “there was not much sickness within the race.” But the restructuring of Hawaiian agriculture toward exports (of sugar and pineapple, and later of coffee, avocado, and macadamia nuts) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries destroyed taro production, resulting in a rapid loss of traditional knowledge of its cultivation. Today, more than 80 percent of Hawaii’s food is supplied by imports, and taro is grown on just a few hundred acres—a shift corresponding to the advent of modern lifestyle diseases, with native Hawaiians particularly affected.

In this historical context, the “nutrition transition” of the last two centuries begins to look more like a dietary apocalypse. It represents the extirpation of traditional, local foodways across the world in favor of an inflammatory, nutrient-poor diet of processed foods, with catastrophic consequences for human health.

Morbid Symptoms

All of this would be bad enough if it meant only an increase in chronic degenerative diseases, worse teeth, or a loss in nutritional diversity and richness. But it goes deeper: we do not yet fully understand what the modern diet and lifestyle are doing to our bodies. The changes are strange, swift, and profound; they go far beyond the degradation Price observed in the 1930s.

Consider the example of puberty: in both boys and girls, puberty seems to be beginning earlier and lasting longer than in the past—a shift whose consequences have received remarkably little attention. In 1835, the median age of first menstruation for girls was 16; by 1970, it was 12. Scientists have cited factors from higher rates of obesity to endocrine-disrupting chemicals to overall diet changes as possible explanations, but no precise causality has been demonstrated. The costs of this maldevelopment seem to be significant: earlier puberty has been linked to higher rates of breast cancer in women, and to the emergence of mood disorders.

The destruction of the old agricultural order has also severed modern humans from the foods and environments in which we acquire our natural gut microbiome as children—a crucial process for proper immune system functioning. We are only now beginning to understand the microbiome, and its depletion, but the implications are clear: in losing our microbiomes, we are losing an entire organ. In addition to the inability to digest certain foods, microbiome loss has led to complex second-order effects, such as immune system maladaptation. This likely plays a role in the explosion of various unrelated chronic diseases—from Crohn’s disease to diabetes—seen since the beginning of the twentieth century, and accelerating in the last 50 years.

This means that both sexes are now far more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, like ulcerative colitis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis, characterized by the immune system erroneously attacking healthy cells. These illnesses can be permanently managed but never cured—barring a restoration of microbiome health at the societal level. Individual restoration of microbiomes doesn’t work well, since we have no idea how to mechanistically recreate the complex natural ecosystem that builds immunities; therapeutic success has been limited to the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile.

Microbiome depletion is likely linked to the growth in mental disorders over the last few decades: researchers have increasingly focused on the “gut-brain axis” and its relationship to mental health. There is substantial evidence that the remarkable increase in depression and anxiety over the last few decades might not just be a product of loosening interpersonal bonds, but also a reverberation of these widespread physiological problems. Common deficiencies in minerals like magnesium, for instance, have been linked to depression and anxiety in women; a number of studies have found a connection between low intakes of Omega-3 fatty acids and depression and bipolar disorder, on both the individual and population levels. Even rats exhibit some link between anhedonia and unhealthy diets. The soft decline in IQ in several Western nations over the last few decades—the reversal of the famous “Flynn effect,” seemingly linked to environmental and not genetic factors—may also implicate worsening health and nutrition.

One remarkable physiological difference comes in our jaws. Human jaw shrinkage, commonly linked to the Neolithic agricultural revolution, has accelerated rapidly in the last two centuries with the advent of ultra-soft processed foods. Because so much of the modern diet is defined by softness—or by simply being liquid, from sugary drinks to protein shakes—humans spend much less time and effort chewing than they used to, leading to the severe underutilization of masticatory muscles. This underutilization of jaw muscles leads to smaller jaws and causes a host of formerly rare orthodontic problems—malocclusions, like overbites and teeth crowding, and non-eruption of wisdom teeth—which necessitate medical intervention throughout the early years of life. This change in chewing affects jaws, but it also affects the broader skull. Compared to pre-industrial populations, modern people tend to have smaller jaws, smaller teeth, and smaller faces more generally.

But perhaps the most worrying sign has to do with fertility. In the West, sperm counts have been in severe decline for decades; the number of men with less-than-normal levels of sperm has increased significantly, along with the number of men with such low sperm levels that they require fertility treatment to reproduce. It is clear that more couples will have difficulty having children. Studies have repeatedly linked diet to worsening fertility problems in men; endocrine disruptors, like phthalates—commonly found in the packaging of store-bought food—also appear to play a major role, along with obesity and deficiencies in nutrients like iron or folic acid.

Many of these changes are still shrouded in mystery: the precise etiologies remain unclear or have yet to be fully explained. We do not know what exactly is going on with our bodies, or what these ongoing changes will mean. But since the underlying pathology continues unchecked, the grim truth is that, for developed and “developing” countries alike, the strange and malign health trends of the last few decades are likely only to worsen.

Approaches and Exits

Some—those with the means to afford it—can cushion their exposure. You can find the healthiest American populations today on elite college campuses or in upper-class enclaves like Nantucket or Loudoun County. America’s rich have, at great expense, acquired a degree of relative immunity from the health disaster. Wealthy neighborhoods are dotted with health-food stores, “slow food” restaurants, and farmers’ markets; the new elite diets like paleo and veganism, have, for all their cloying moralism, a similar function of shielding those who can afford them. Modern people can still have the type of non-poisonous diet ancestors of the year 1850 might have eaten; it just entails a sharp upfront cost.

The simple fact that whole, organic food is expensive creates a class divide in health that is severe enough to be visible in the geography of American cities: the disparity in life expectancy between the Roxbury and Beacon Hill neighborhoods of Boston, for instance, is now about as large as the gap between El Salvador and Finland—with the poorest sub-neighborhoods of Roxbury, like Egleston Square, reporting life expectancies lower than those of Haiti or Liberia.

But this metastasizing crisis will not spare the health-conscious: even people who avoid the modern diet still bear the costs, direct and indirect, of living in unhealthy societies. Because contemporary Western populations are still so vulnerable to mass death events like COVID-19 due to their general unhealthiness, and because pandemics will only become more common occurrences on account of industrial agriculture and globalization, such costs are only likely to grow. 

Governments might adopt increasingly desperate maneuvers to protect against these biological threats, but they are unlikely to touch the things making people so vulnerable to them in the first place. Bill Gates’ book How To Prevent The Next Pandemic—essentially an outline of how the Gates Foundation will use its endowment in the coming years—spends 304 pages on ideas like “get better at detecting outbreaks early” or “find new treatments fast,” with only a single mention of obesity and not a word on the autoimmune diseases which make people more vulnerable to pandemic disease. Improving overall population health to reduce risk does not merit his attention.

Such approaches will only manage diseases, chronic and pandemic, without solving the malignancies from which they stem. Bad nutrition creates damage at a scale that cannot be fully remedied through past facto intervention: the public health and medical frameworks which respond to problems after they emerge are much less effective than simply avoiding those problems in the first place. These approaches essentially operate within the modern dietary paradigm, disciplined into a symbiotic relationship with it. They create societies with more resources dedicated to medicine—more drugs, more treatments—but not necessarily one with a greater degree of population health. They present not an exit, but a trap.

Actually escaping the health trap requires moving from managing poor health to preventing it: an immense reform of how societies grow and consume food, and by extension how it structures and regulates human behavior. Logistically—not to mention politically, culturally, and socially—this is an immense challenge. It requires not just weaning populations off highly addictive diets, but attempting to recreate and even improve the healthier agricultural economies that were decimated by twentieth-century centralization. But it is not impossible: America, as a continent, has the natural resources to transform its food system and make it the nutritional basis of a healthy population. Even smaller polities like premodern Hawaii could sustain large, healthy populations on whole foods; nothing physically prevents this from happening again.

This is a civilizational question—broad matters of agriculture and food always are, as Price recognized. But the reality is that no current institutions have the capacity or incentive to do much of anything about the diet question: the food industry has tremendous power, and most of the medical establishment is more focused on post facto intervention and selling drugs than on general population health. The problem would have to be solved by a state that is willing to reshape the modern diet.

This would be a stark departure from the current framework—which dictates that diets, falling under questions of “lifestyle,” should be left to fast food companies and advertising agencies. But it would, if anything, be a return to the historical norm. States have always been responsible for food; the modern diet, rather than the natural outcome of autonomous “market forces,” was in many ways the creation of conscious government choices. This begins with the British state’s pursuit of imperial “free trade” in food but also includes more recent shifts: modernizing Mexican elites pushing Rockefeller Foundation agronomists to prioritize breeding wheat over traditional maize, or Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary, supercharging American corn production, eventually creating a corn surplus so large that it spurred the mass production of high-fructose corn syrup.

The modern diet was the creation of conscious decisions; the same could be true for a health-restoring successor. Ecological and social projects at this scale have been attempted, and accomplished, before—in the U.S., clean air, wildlife protection, and the current diet and agricultural regime itself are all examples. On the practical level, restoring population health would demand a vast recovery of lost agricultural knowledge, the cultivation of new cadres of agronomists and ethnobotanists, sketching what sustainable biome-specific permacultures might look like, and how they can be scaled up using new techniques. On the theoretical level, it will require a new state paradigm where the regeneration of a healthy populace—and not just the management of its illnesses for profit or stability—is a matter of species-level biosecurity, and afforded the priority that such a problem demands.

Why was I here? When I told people I was going to Ukraine, they reacted in some combination of disbelief and horror; it was as though I told them I was going to be backpacking through Somalia. But I was curious to see what I would find on the apparent eve of a war. I also suspected that media outlets and governments were overreacting based on poorly-vetted information.

I did have some lingering concern—and a bit of dread. The day before my flight, Melinda Haring, Deputy Director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, announced the danger I would be in almost immediately upon landing in Kiev:

Putin has big weekend plans in Ukraine: 1) he’s going to cut power and heat, knock out Ukrainian navy and air force, kill general staff and hit them with cyber attack; 2) then install pro-Russian president and 3) resort to full-scale military invasion if Ukraine doesn’t give in.

Respecting Haring’s expertise on the matter—according to her Atlantic Council page, she “has worked for Eurasia Foundation, Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute, where she managed democracy assistance programs in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia”—I passed the weekend like a Beckett play: waiting for Putin. I sat in cafés, toured Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and watched an excellent performance of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet at the National Opera in Kiev.

Through it all, I wondered when the lights would go out, or when I would hear the momentous news that Ukraine’s general staff had been murdered. By the night of Sunday, February 13, I was surprised to be enjoying the expected amount of power and heat in my apartment, and to have received no indication that the members of the general staff had ceased to draw breath.

Besides the usual disorder of a poor, low-trust country—a carjacking in progress outside my apartment, ignored by all who walked by, and an old lady openly selling IDs near Maidan Square—the Ukraine that I visited was a remarkably calm place.

There seemed to be two realities before me. The first was one where Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War was about to unfold, where national-security reporters solemnly warned of the likely death of tens of thousands, where the dead hand of authoritarianism was about to sweep over a “young, vibrant democracy.” And the second was the Ukraine I actually saw: no war, no Russian soldiers, no great upsurge of domestic nationalist sentiment; only the usual boredom and dysfunction. More people mentioned Eurovision—the Ukrainian representative, Alina Pash, was talented but controversial, and ultimately had to withdraw—than the “imminent” war that was supposed to change their lives forever.

Where was the invasion? Unlike the many commentators, I had no predictions about what would or would not happen. But the anticlimax after daily signals of war was still palpable. I was reminded of the ending of a poem by C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” describing a Roman town waiting to be sacked:

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
Everyone going home lost in thought?

 

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are barbarians no longer.

 

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

The anticlimax was a product of my own mind, and of the feeling online from Westerners like Haring or The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. Ukrainians never felt the same way. In a bar in central Kiev, a young woman told me she had never expected an invasion of Kiev—the Americans were panicking, she said, God knows why—but expressed relief that the predictions had not come to pass, and that she would not have to go to her mother’s town in the west of the country, about two hours away. The mood was talkative and joyful. Young Ukrainians were on dates, drinking and joking with friends, vaping or smoking. In the warmth of the rose-hued bar, Ariana Grande was playing; everyone was wrapped in the ordinary rhythms of their lives. It seemed impossible to think that a few days’ time would make this a warzone.

The country in front of me was a charming one, culturally rich and relatively lax (smoking indoors is not so tightly controlled, and the lack of stringent traffic regulation means that drivers are gentler with jaywalkers). But while the imminent warzone slowly began to vanish from my imagination, so too did the optimistic story of a “young and vibrant democracy” told by Western liberals and their allies in Europe-oriented Ukrainian civil society.

The regime that ruled Ukraine—in power, in one form or another, for the last 30 years—had an unvarnished record of miserable failure, tangible even in the richest parts of the country: the elderly beggars; the decrepit Communist-era housing blocks; the women pawning Soviet medals on the street for the equivalent of a few dollars. It was difficult to summon much optimism about this society’s future.

Ukraine lags behind other European countries, including other Eastern European countries, in practically every regard. The most obvious failure is an economic one. Economic performance has been abysmal: adjusted for inflation, GDP per capita was lower in 2020 than it had been in 1990. Nearly every post-communist state experienced some sort of collapse in the 1990s; Ukraine’s collapse was actually less severe than Russia’s, in part because the privatizations were not carried out so rapidly. But Ukraine is unique in that it has simply never recovered from its experience, instead transitioning from stagnating state socialism to oligarchic competition. Ukrainian economic growth from 1990 to 2017 was the fifth-worst in the entire world. At the dawn of independence in 1990, Ukraine was the second-richest among post-Soviet republics in terms of real GDP per capita (ignoring the Baltic states, for whom solid records were not kept by the World Bank until 1995); by 2020, it was richer only than three Central Asian backwaters—Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Ukraine’s dysfunction maps onto the very physical health of the population. As in Russia and Belarus, the transition to capitalism in the 1990s saw a collapse in standards of living that significantly shortened Ukrainians’ lifespans. In 1964, male life expectancy was 66.8 years; in the 1990s it fell all the way down to 61.2, and only by 2019 was it back to 66.9. Nor did Ukraine ever match Russia or Belarus in the strength of its recovery from the brutal ‘90s. The most “democratic” of the three countries became the worst place to live: Ukraine’s overall life expectancy, once the highest of three East Slavic nations, is now the lowest. By 2019, male life expectancy was about a year lower than Syria’s, a year and a half lower than Iraq’s, and more than two years lower than North Korea’s.

To these measures of underdevelopment and regression, Ukraine adds indicators of social decay familiar across eastern Europe: low social trust, a high suicide rate, and a declining population. Ukraine’s fertility rate has not exceeded replacement levels since 1971; its population has been declining since 1993, due largely to low fertility and emigration. In 2019, the suicide rate was the 11th-highest in the world. Brain drain continues to sap the country of its most productive citizens.

The Ukrainian analyst Volodymyr Ishchenko calls his country “the best candidate to be called the northernmost country of the Global South.” But unlike much of the actual Global South, in which there is at least a general trend of development, Ukraine has reached this position on a generational downward trajectory.

This should create a great deal of gloom within Ukraine. And that pessimism is certainly present—though unequally distributed. Older Ukrainians were often the most pessimistic, and much of the country’s despair seems centered on them. Nearly all the homeless are older; Kiev’s train station has a fair share of white-haired seniors slumped over in winter gear or hiding behind wooden doors. When I spoke with older Ukrainians they always seemed to have some story of personal diminution that matched the story of Ukraine more broadly.

At 2 A.M. on the night I left Kiev, I met an older man named Vladislav at a fast-food establishment. He was depressed and eager to find company amid the patrons. We split a donut and he told me the story of his life: born in Kiev, he had been a boxer, a military officer, a professional artist; he had found himself among “scoundrels”; and now he was here, alone, without a place to sleep, because of a family dispute that left him unable to see his granddaughter. Vladislav was full of regrets. And now he was an old man, “alone as a poplar.” Time had stripped him of his dignity. “I am no longer the same Captain Vladislav as when I was younger,” he said. Like many Kievans of his generation, Vladislav couldn’t care less about politics. He simply hung onto what remained of a life.

For those in the east, the pessimism took a more political flavor. On February 16, the day the media had selected for the invasion, I visited Kharkiv—Ukraine’s second-largest city, and the largest in the east. Its oblast borders Donetsk and Luhansk, the two breakaway states. Kharkiv’s predominant language is Russian, and the city had been a stronghold of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in the 2000s and 2010s.

But Kharkiv does not fit in neatly with the common picture of eastern Ukraine. Alongside the Russian-speaking pensioners who are such a key population in the east are a large number of students—many of them internationals, from China, India, or Africa—who occupy the city’s relatively decent cafés. This gives the city a surprisingly global character, even as its built environment is overwhelmingly Soviet.

The day I visited, the predicted invasion had changed almost nothing. Everything was open; the sidewalks were full of people, and the streets were full of cars (a good number of them clearly from the 1970s or ‘80s). Apart from a few uniformed and masked Ukrainian soldiers, most of whom seemed to be more occupied with buying coffee or cigarettes, a visitor would have little idea that this was a place under threat. The croissants were delicious, and the coffee decent. No one was talking about politics. Kharkiv was rather dilapidated, especially around the outskirts, and it was here that I encountered the greatest degree of pessimism about Ukraine.

An elderly pensioner named Anatoly, whom I met in Kharkiv, proudly showed me his military identification card from his time as a Soviet officer, and mentioned that he’d served in Afghanistan. He explained that he saw independence as a catastrophe, a process of forcibly becoming like America—a society that he said was defined by materialism, the making and having of money, and a lack of patriotism. The Americans had gone on the radio and told the people that their ways were bad, and ever since then, there had been more materialism and less patriotism in Ukraine. For him, this was not a matter of ideology. Anatoly wrote down the Russian words for “capitalism,” “socialism,” and “communism” and crossed each of them out; he went on to explain that it could all be explained via a numerological system derived from the Kabbalah. This, Anatoly explained, was a matter of massive symbolic and cosmic importance.

It was in the younger places, like Kiev and Lviv, that people were the most hopeful. Often, these were also the same people most intent in their nationalism. Lviv, in many ways the most optimistic place in the country, is also the place where the wartime nationalist Stepan Bandera is most deified. A young, buzzcut ultranationalist I met in Kiev named Gania—originally he was from Donetsk; easterners who became nationalists seemed to go further in order to compensate—was proud of Ukraine, and would stay behind to defend it. “Слава Україні!”: glory to Ukraine. I asked him what he thought of Bandera: a hero, he said. Ukraine was the greatest country. But he liked other places too. Would he move to America if he got the chance? Absolutely, he said: it’s too hard to get a good job here.

The people whose views most closely tracked the ones I saw on Twitter were invariably associated, in one way or another, with liberal civil society. I went to a bar in Kiev’s Shevchenko district—one of the more affluent parts of the city—where I met a couple who represented this view exactly: the woman formerly an official in the Petro Poroshenko administration, the man a full-time cryptocurrency trader, particularly passionate about XRP and Litecoin. (Crypto, as every self-described founder in Kiev will tell you, is increasingly popular in Ukraine; by some measures, Ukraine has the highest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world.)

The trader didn’t talk politics with his wife because he’d voted for Poroshenko’s triumphant rival, Volodymyr Zelensky. His wife had the full stock of opinions one would expect from someone of her background. But even these two liberal Ukrainians expressed a great deal of disillusionment—though not quite despair—in their political system. The woman had participated in the Maidan protests in 2014; the outcome of all of it was not that which she had hoped for. The oligarchs remained in power. No matter who the Ukrainians elect, she said, that remains unchanged.

And that appears to be the crux of the matter. Ishchenko offers a provocative thesis: that Ukraine, rather than being any more of a “democracy” than other post-Soviet states, is more aptly “a more competitive authoritarian regime.” To be sure, Ukraine’s political system is relatively pluralistic; elections are held regularly, and there is no one strongman who has managed to dominate the country for decades. Its leaders do not possess the singular political power of their Russian and Belarusian counterparts.

The Ukrainian government’s “anti-democratic” actions are not quite as brazen (or effective) as those of Putin or Lukashenko. Recent moves included Zelensky’s recent blocking of opposition TV channels; the customary legal prosecution of political rivals, from Poroshenko to Viktor Medvedchuk; the government-linked Myrotvorets website listing “enemies of Ukraine,” with the dead ones marked as “liquidated”; restrictions on minority languages like Russian or Romanian; and decommunization laws that prevented the Communist Party from participating in the 2019 elections.

But the matter of the political system is largely irrelevant. Power does not lie in the hands of these formal political institutions. Instead, it is held by the various “clans” of oligarchs who profited massively from the privatizations of state assets in the 1990s and 2000s—like the powerful Donetsk clan (led by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man) that was famed for its thuggishness and relatively open criminality and which is said to run the Party of Regions, or the Kiev clan (like Medvedchuk, seen by Ukrainian liberals as a figure on par with Lucifer).

Distinguishing between “licit” and “illicit” is useless on this level, since these conglomerates usually blur any lines between political, business, and criminal activity. Akhmetov has established himself as an international businessman and investor. In 2011, he bought the most expensive residence in London for £136 million. He has bankrolled the Party of Regions that controlled much of the east and which produced Yanukovych—all this despite decades of alleged ties to murders and organized crime. (“The Akhmetov Clan,” writes the sociologist Danilo Mandić, “is arguably the most successful mafia in Eastern European history.”)

Criminal ties are a familiar feature of Ukrainian politics. It is not uncommon for politicians to be widely suspected of crimes for which they are not prosecuted, or to have several criminal convictions (Yanukovych had two for violent offenses), or to have mysterious net worths in the tens or hundreds of millions. Ballot-stuffing and vote-buying have been marked features of Ukrainian public life; so have murders, poisonings, and open bribery.

Striking examples are plenty: the “cassette scandal” of the early 2000s, which revealed that President Leonid Kuchma had implicitly ordered the killing of an anti-corruption journalist who was found beheaded in a forest north of Kiev (Kuchma has never been prosecuted); the open rigging of the 2004 Yushchenko/Yanukovych election by Yanukovych’s party, followed two years later by Yanukovych becoming prime minister to Yushchenko; the 2005 death by two gunshots to the head of Kuchma’s former interior minister, shortly before he was due to testify about the journalist’s murder case (the minister’s death was ruled a suicide); and Yanukovych’s notorious history of graft, which earned him and his son hundreds of millions of dollars—partly spent on a garish estate outside Kiev, with a replica Spanish galleon and a private zoo with kangaroos and ostriches.

Less openly criminal politics in Ukraine are still remarkably dysfunctional—reminiscent of a stereotypical Latin American country, dominated by personal charisma, inchoate populism, and the constant demand for “new faces.” Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, is named after the TV show in which he starred; the western-based Fatherland Party is nakedly a vehicle for the personal ambitions of Yulia Tymoshenko, for a time one of the most popular politicians in the country; and UDAR, the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, is built around Vitali Klitschko, a globally renowned heavyweight boxer who now serves as mayor of Kiev. (The name is well-selected given Klitschko’s career history: удар, udar, means “punch.”)

The dominance of personalistic parties, the thriving culture of corruption and retribution, the regional cleavage within Ukraine, and an elite formation process of economic privatization widely viewed as illegitimate have all conspired to cripple each attempt to establish a stable elite hegemony. Regardless of whether the attempts were of a patronal-regionalist character (Yanukovych or Medvedchuk) or liberal-nationalist character (Viktor Yushchenko or Arseniy Yatseniuk), they have resulted in a succession of ineffectual governments, which quickly lose their popularity as they are unable to deliver on much beyond symbolism. No single faction of the oligarch clans has been able to triumph over the others; neither have any of the liberal-democratic reformers managed to subdue the oligarchs as a class.

The repertoire of contention available to opponents of this system is narrow, and it centers on ideologically vague urban uprisings of a national-democratic character, always centered in the Maidan Square. These are the occasional flowerings of “democratic renewal” or “national salvation,” like the Orange Revolution in 2004 or the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, that briefly capture the liberal imagination. But this results only in some elite circulation. Ukraine’s political economy is largely unchanged, and business as usual eventually returns. Yushchenko, champion of clean government, was unable to transcend the system’s logic, and the oligarchs remained largely untouched; the 2014 revolution against the Party of Regions resulted in the election of the opportunistic oligarch Poroshenko—who had helped found the Party of Regions in the 1990s.

In Kiev, I wondered if the possibility of invasion might lead to real change to this status quo. But this seemed unlikely. Most Ukrainians simply didn’t care. Outside Maidan Square, middle-aged men who were not quite in shape handed out fliers imploring people to sign up for the local self-defense militia; they got little interest. By now, Maidan has been incorporated into the national mythology as a place of ceremonial rebirth—slain protesters are remembered as “the Hundred Heroes,” and have a day in their honor. The square now features large slabs telling the story of their martyrdoms in a rather derivative graphic novel format—but, in light of the disappointments of the post-revolutionary era, that seemed to be far from their minds.

On the night before the supposed invasion, I went to Maidan Square again, wondering if there might be some demonstration or rally for the cause of Ukraine. But there was nothing: the square was virtually empty save a few passersby, going somewhere more interesting. Near the Kentucky Fried Chicken, there were some teenagers vaping; in the center, there were a few foreign students taking photos in front of a large sign reading “я україну” (“I Ukraine”). What did they think about Ukraine, I asked? “Nice country,” an Algerian named Walid told me. But he was not going to stay here for long; he was going to live in France.

On the one hand, this was an admirable sign of calm under pressure: the only people fleeing the country en masse were the oligarchs. But I wondered if the country had become so disillusioned, so disappointed by 30 years of failure, that it simply couldn’t be bothered to care much about foreign troops outside its borders. Why were there so few demonstrations, so few patriotic rallies? More than not being scared—many people had some residual fear of the invasion, they confided in me—many were simply resigned: what could they do?

The crypto trader told me it was all the same: the answer was just to go on, to muddle through. I asked him about the possibility of invasion; he didn’t want to talk about it. He shrugged his shoulders.

A moment of silence passed. Changing the subject, I asked him about Eurovision. His eyes lit up.