Philosophers Interpret Trump's UFC Spectacle and Modern Disorientation

In an Atlantic Books Briefing, editor Boris Kachka and staff writer Gal Beckerman discuss how philosophers like Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Bruno Latour, Walter J. Ong, and Hannah Arendt illuminate the current baffling era. Beckerman invokes Barthes' 1957 essay "The World of Wrestling" to explain the symbolic importance of UFC 250, a blood sport spectacle staged by Donald Trump at the White House on Sunday. Canetti's 1960 work "Crowds and Power" helps understand the crowd of tens of thousands watching at the Ellipse. Latour, who died in 2022, argued scientific truth is shaped by subjective forces like funding and politics, relevant to vaccine skepticism and RFK Jr. Ong's 1982 "Orality and Literacy" examines the shift from oral to written culture, now reversed by AI. Arendt's 1961 essay collection "Between Past and Future" addresses the limbo of modernity without new models. The briefing also recommends books: Octavia E. Butler's "Dawn", Fiona Sampson's "Becoming George", Matthew Wolfe's "Fires in the Night", and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's "Regime Change". A weekend read on Washington's French and Indian War years is also featured.