Pathways, March 2026
Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.
In January of this year, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, made the following grand historicizing gesture:
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. […] This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
What Carney describes is the broad sense that the rules-based international order, built in the wake of World War II, has eroded almost entirely. Taking its place, many argue, is the “spheres of influence” model of international relations, à la the nineteenth century, where—to quote Thucydides, as Carney does in the opening of his speech—“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Carney isn’t making a modernity claim exactly, but he is identifying a break in the liberal international order that suggests the close of one age and the opening of a new one. What could the new order bring? Likely, more of what we’ve seen this March. It's difficult not to view the Iran War, waged by the US and Israel at the beginning of this month without the approval of institutions intended to uphold the rules-based international order like the United Nations, as a continuation of the process Carney describes—whatever one thinks of the justness of this particular war or of the UN.
War plays a special role in our narratives of modernity’s emergence. Philosophical liberalism’s genealogy of modernity, for example, claims that the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the formation of liberal modernity, a political and institutional framework developed in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to promote peace and toleration and defang sectarian religious disputes. Then, there’s the counternarrative: modernity is not the disruption of warfare and sectarian disputes, religious or otherwise; instead, modernity— particularly the modern state—is constituted by and through war. As Charles Tilly famously wrote, “War made the state, and the state made war.” There’s the Marxist take, where war in the modern era is a structural outcome of capitalist competition in which imperial capitalist states continually vie for new colonies and new markets. And last, there’s the crisis of modernity narrative: that modernity’s rational, industrial, and bureaucratic elements do not solve war but intensify it. In this view, modernity makes possible new forms of mass violence like the Holocaust, as Hannah Arendt and others have argued. This is not by any means a comprehensive list of the ways that war is intertwined with genealogies of modernity—but it is illustrative of war’s centrality to these narratives.
Apropos of this, one of the most important stories of the last month was the squabble between the Pentagon and the AI company Anthropic. The reason: Anthropic refused to allow its AI system, Claude, to be used for “domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.” (CEO and Co-Founder Dario Amodei has been credited for taking a principled stance in this regard. If you want a glimpse into his position, I recommend checking out his 2024 “Machines of Loving Grace” essay, the title of which was taken from a poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan). Given that other AI companies quickly stepped in to offer their services to the Pentagon, it seems all too likely that the blending of AI and war could put another feather in the cap of the “crisis of modernity” narrative.
A few more AI stories to wrap up: China is training humanoid robots to do basic tasks like fold laundry and clear tables. But as Heather Baker notes, it’s not a far leap from humanoid domestic servant to robot soldier. Of course, not everything about these new technologies comes back to war. This month, the First Lady unveiled “a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,’” a teacher who can bring “instantaneous” access to “classical studies” into the “comfort of your home.” For some reason, I don’t think Plato—who famously argued against the much more rudimentary technology of writing—would be a fan! Meanwhile, in one of the more positive developments of the last month, a tech entrepreneur used AI to produce an individualized cancer vaccine for his dog.
That’s it for March—see you at the end of April!
