The introduction to this June 16, 2026 New Yorker article “The Dream of Reason - Jurgen Habermas- Defending Reason in a Darkening Age”, by Alex Ross, has an interesting (and in my mind accurate) description of American life as we know it in 2026.
“You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.”
Ross writes that the person who should have been best able to explain how we got here is the great German philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
Rick Roderick, the late West Texas philosopher, has a good synopsis of Jurgen Habermas’s thought in this YouTube video.
