Science

People keep trying to catch me in a contradiction. They say: you call yourself an agnostic, but you talk like a militant atheist, so which is it? Pick one. And I keep refusing to pick, because the demand rests on a confusion — the quiet substitution of one question for another. There are two questions hiding inside the single word “God,” and my honest answer to the first is genuinely different from my honest answer to the second. On the first I say: I don’t know, and neither do you. On the second I say: no, this is a myth, and everything I know about the world tells me so. The whole argument that I am secretly a “fierce” atheist dressed up as an agnostic is built on smearing these two questions together until they look like one. They are not one. Keeping them apart is, I think, the beginning of thinking clearly about belief at all. ...

We are used to reading repression as a display of power. The arrests, the prison terms, the raided institutes, the criminal cases against people who have already fled the country — all of this looks, at first glance, like a strong state flexing its muscles, reminding everyone who is in charge. I want to argue almost the opposite. The repression now grinding through Russia is not the regime demonstrating its strength; it is the regime wounding itself. It destroys the very minds and talents a country needs in order to live. It manufactures, with its own hands, the people who will one day come to settle accounts. And it always intensifies at a particular, telling moment — not when the regime is winning, but when it is failing abroad and has nowhere else to put its rage. Seen this way, the machinery of fear is not armor. It is a slow poison the state keeps administering to itself. ...