The American Age has one objective:

Re-ignite zeal for the American idea. Not by provoking nostalgia for what has been, but by inspiring hope for what might be, The American Age takes up the cause of those visionaries who have come before us.

The American possibility does not belong to the West, but to all peoples who have sacrificed for self-determination, and who believe that the rights of the individual are at least as important as the rights of the group. Yes, there have been shameful epochs in American history, and, yes, there will be more. Yet no other community so far imagined has greater potential to manifest the virtues of equality, fraternity, and liberty. And if this is not the American Age, if it has already past, then we would not let it go gently. We would fight so that its most authentic ideation may yet manifest, so that it might be remembered for what it could have been, instead of for what it failed at most bitterly.

African slavery, the conscription of East Asian laborers, the theft of indigenous lands and the murder of indigenous peoples, the bleaching of history and our deeply felt denial that we are responsible for any of it, all of these must be confronted. But we would not stall in the breach created by this inquiry; we would push beyond the static antagonisms of unexamined group affiliations and strive for a reconciliation with our past. A historical reckoning is only the beginning of our project.

We would revive wisdom as a viable subject of rigorous intellectual inquiry. We would champion virtue. We would take up speculations about God, and destiny, and hope, and strip them of their facile denominational associations. We would cast aside the adolescent binaries—the donkeys and elephants, the believers and nones, the whites and non-whites—and agitate for a more humble and nuanced understanding of what it means to live amongst a vast network of strangers whom we must learn to trust, even though we will never come to know them. We would recall, over and over again, what it is to be a human being aware of our own mortality, aware of our own limitations and fears, aware of our own animal desires.

The American Age is unapologetically secular, even as it defends the value of religion. The American Age promotes truth and objectivity, even though it understands truth and objectivity are elusive and wild, and only ever momentarily won. The American Age knows that writing and talking have their place, but so too does action, and that “pedestrian” concerns about status, property, and tradition are concerns all the same, and that we have a responsibility to take those concerns seriously, and to help our brothers and sisters address those concerns.

For thousands of years human beings have struggled, and fought, and labored in pain. There is no place to stand outside of that history. No tribe is innocent. No community above reproach. And there is finally no future in which these messy, unruly bodies stop colliding with and loving other bodies. There is no utopian future, no City of God, no Nirvana “this side of blue.” The world is on fire with competing wants and antagonistic desires. The American Age is an opportunity to embrace that world honestly and help shape its future.

We will never make the world right, but we won’t retreat from our responsibility to try. We hope you’ll join us.

Our Mission

Poets, philosophers, historians, devotees of the musae, no matter what grammar you don, we call you to arms.

Though scientists, industrialists, and well-meaning social engineers have secured life and liberty for a greater number of Americans than at any time in our history, we are failing to flourish as a people.

America’s imagination has enervated because we have failed to dream “America.” Its ambitions have languished because we have failed to speak for “America.” Its men lurch from adolescence to predatory entitlement because we have failed to discipline “America.”

“America” doesn’t belong to colonialists, capitalists, or slavers. America doesn’t belong to Donald Trump, or Oprah Winfrey, or Barack Obama, or Taylor Swift. America belongs to us. It belongs to you.

It is our responsibility to do something with it.

If we leave its imagining of the world to those intellectuals who have given up on the ideas of life, liberty, and the possibility of human flourishing, then the country will continue to fecklessly unspool. And if we leave its imagining to those who are evangelical about their own entitlement to history’s bounty, then our polity will surely curdle into tyranny.

It is our belief that the humanities should not drift too far from the concerns of the people who make humanistic inquiry possible. We should not forget to serve the people who clean the offices, fix the faucets, answer the phones, and process the financial requests. Not only the subaltern, but the working and burgher classes must be included in our imagined communities.

As a publication, The American Age dispassionately contextualizes the United States within the broader sweep of human social evolution by drawing on the latest research in anthropology and sociology. It also uses those insights to agitate for positive cultural and intellectual changes within and without American academic and political institutions.
This is not a place for utopianism, or regressive social Darwinism.

We hope to revive the critical concision and relevance of our best intellectual forebears by producing something that is light on jargon, big on existential concerns, and pragmatically engaged in improving people’s lives.

This is a place of intellectually honest, historically conscientious hope.