Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

The 2025 Carnival season is under way across Europe and the Americas. These pre-Lent festivals, often a blend of local pagan and Catholic traditions, usher out winter and welcome the coming spring. Gathered below are images from the past week of Carnival celebrations around the world, including photos from Bolivia, Angola, Spain, Greece, Brazil, Italy, the United States, and more.

To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Consider the egg. What does it look like? What does it taste like? Where does it come from? Maybe you’re thinking tautologically: An egg is egg-shaped, tastes eggy, and comes from egg-laying hens. They make for great breakfasts and cost more than they used to at the grocery store.

That would be underselling things. The ubiquity of this hard-shelled organic vessel that so many of us fry, scramble, boil, poach, and crack into other foods is nothing short of a miracle. Eggs are “fragile, messy, spoilable ovals,” my colleague Annie Lowrey noted this week—yet they can also withstand, at least in one scientific experiment, 250 pounds if cushioned. They owe their taste to “a living, lively organic soil full of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes,” one egg farmer told Corby Kummer in 2000. (“My own conclusion is that feed is the chief influence on flavor, followed by the condition of the ‘layers,’” Kummer writes.)

Christopher Columbus brought what we recognize today as the oval-laying chicken to the Americas in 1493. But most eggs in the bird world aren’t even, well, egg-shaped, Ed Yong reported in 2017. Today’s reading list encourages you to reconsider the humble egg.

On Eggs

It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap

What were we thinking, buying so many of these fragile, messy, remarkable ovals?

By Annie Lowrey

A Better Egg (from 2000)

Now that doctors are letting us eat eggs again, farmers are working to make eggs taste like they used to.

By Corby Kummer

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer. (From 2017)

A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped.

By Ed Yong

Still Curious?

The breaking point for eggs Cuckoos start bodybuilding inside the egg.

Other Diversions

What does a robot with a soul sound like? Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule. Six older books that deserve to be popular today

P.S.

Courtesy of Peter van Dorsten

We recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world.

Peter van Dorsten of Raleigh, North Carolina, writes: “I took these photos on an afternoon visit to Pacaya National Park in Guatemala. Upon reaching the top of the active volcano, we roasted marshmallows from the heat rising from the ground and I watched tourists climbing to get closer to the red hot rocks and steam emanating above us.”

The Wonder Reader will continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Shan Wang

Marc Lamont Hill talks to Professor Greg Grandin on how President Trump’s policies shape US influence in the Americas.

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Whenever science has to defend itself from the skeptics, it tends to fall back on medical or other technological achievements that have improved our lives—such as the personal vehicle, solar energy, insulin, or ibuprofen.

Many scientists currently feel under threat to justify their research as the Eye of Sauron—sorry, DOGE—turns to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, jeopardizing grants to university research programs. Some have tried to draw the link between the cuts and their harms to patients and medical progress. But much of science can’t build a one-to-one connection between the curiosities of researchers and the immediate needs of humanity. Does that mean it’s worthless?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Johannes Krause, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as an archaeogeneticist and paleogeneticist. His research focuses on trying to uncover the mysteries of early human life-forms: Homo sapiens, yes, but also Neanderthals and other hominins.

The first hominins evolved in Africa and began to leave the continent about 2 million years ago. But, unlike today, Earth was home to many different forms of human life. Krause and other scientists are curious about Homo sapiens, or modern-day humans. Figuring out what made us so special requires figuring out exactly when we distinguished ourselves from our other upright, walking cousins.

Basically all of humanity is descended from people who left Africa and mixed with Neanderthals—but when? A study of a handful of very old bones revealed that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were living and procreating with each other much more recently than anyone realized: just 47,000 years ago.

“We’re really driven by finding out new stuff,” Krause says, “trying to understand, in our case, where humans came from—What’s their kind of evolutionary course? How did they adapt? What makes humans humans? How are we different to other mammals? How are we different to other types of humans?—which is largely driven by curiosity and will not result directly in products that you could easily sell to your mother and say, Look—I did this research, and now we have a new vacuum cleaner, or something like that.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: There are only a handful of known venomous lizards in the world.

The Gila monster, found primarily in the American Southwest and Mexico, is one of them. Gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman analyzed animal venoms from various species, including the Gila monster. Raufman eventually discovered some intriguing molecules in the lizard’s venom, a discovery he declined to patent.

Other scientists took interest in the Gila monster, and, eventually, those molecules became the foundation for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Mounjaro. These drugs are best known for their help treating diabetes and obesity, but recent studies have raised hopes that they could address chronic kidney disease, reduce the risk of heart problems and even cognitive issues and addictions to opioids.

As David Deming recently wrote for The Atlantic, “You can imagine a member of Congress in the 1980s denouncing the NIH’s wasteful spending on useless studies of Gila-monster venom.”

[Music]

Today we’re talking about another unrelated line of research that defies even my attempts to find clear, practical applications for modern-day humans. My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Johannes Krause. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in genetics, working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. When early modern humans came out of Africa, at some point, they interbred with Neanderthals. The evidence of those unions are in the genes of most humans alive today. A paper Krause recently co-authored with several other scientists helps pinpoint when this happened. Figuring out this prehistoric mystery is one step towards understanding why Homo sapiens are the only form of human left standing.

Johannes, welcome to the show.

Johannes Krause: Yeah, I’m very glad to be here, Jerusalem.

Demsas: So in 2022, the Nobel Prize went to your colleague—and I hope I’m saying his name correctly—Svante Pääbo for determining that Neanderthals mated with prehistoric humans. In an interview, he said, “The last 40,000 years is quite unique in human history, in that we are the only form of humans around.” If, right now, you and I could travel back 40,000 years ago and take a sort of census of human Homo genus species, what would we find in different parts of the world?

Krause: So if we could travel back to, let’s say, 100,000 years ago, we would find at least three different forms of humans—and we can debate whether we call them “species.” We are careful just calling them “forms,” because species is a concept from biology, which has definitions. And there’s many different definitions of what makes a species.

There’s at least 25 concepts of what makes a species, and for some groups, they work, and for some, they don’t. So we’re careful. That’s why we call them forms. If you pay attention, we are also calling them only Neanderthals—some of those archaic humans, other forms of humans that existed—and not Homo Neanderthalensis, which would be this nice Latin term that has been introduced in the 18th century, which, again, comes with a certain species concept. So we’re trying to be a little bit careful and neutral, and just call them forms of humans.

So Neanderthals were one of them, which is probably the most famous one that most people have heard about. Then, of course, there’s us—modern humans. But then there were also other groups, like one that we discovered a few years ago that lived in Asia, the so-called Denisovans. They were named based on a cave where the bones were discovered in, where we got the first genome.

But there were also other types of humans that have been discovered based on fossil evidence. So for example, there was a group of humans that was called Homo floresiensis that lived in Flores, which is an island in Indonesia, probably until about 50,000 years ago, when the first humans came there. And there was also a group called Homo luzonensis, which was living in the northern part of the Philippines, on the island of Luzon. That’s where the name comes from.

So those are at least five different groups, then, including us. But there’s also some people that suggest there’s something called Homo malayensis, Homo daliensis, Homo erectus maybe still present in some parts of Southeast Asia. So there were a whole bunch—at least half a dozen, maybe even more—types of human forms that lived at that time, 100,000 years ago.

And then 50,000 years ago, we emerged on the scene. We came out of Africa, and we largely replaced most of them, for whatever kind of mystical reason. One of the big questions we have in evolutionary anthropology: Why are we the winners, basically, of that type of competition, and what do we have that all the other groups did not have?

Demsas: What sorts of things distinguish these different types of forms of humans from one another? I know there’s probably a lot, but we have an image of a Neanderthal in our heads, but early Homo sapiens also looked a bit different than we look right now as well. So what made us different from them and other types of humans?

Krause: So as geneticists, we can quantify the amount of differences, which is just counting the number of base pairs in the genome that are different between those, say, Neanderthals and kind of modern-day people, which is not a lot. So this is about 0.1 percent of the genome. So 99.9 percent—they’re identical in their genome to the people that live today or to modern humans that lived maybe even 50,000 years ago. So they share a common ancestor half a million years ago, Neanderthals and us. So at that time, we were one population, and then we started to get different and diverge from each other.

And over this time period of maybe half a million years, they also got morphological differences. So I think if we would meet them today, we would probably recognize they look a bit funny. They had pretty big eyebrows. They had a bit of a protruding nose. They were a bit more stocky than we are today. If they were sitting on the New York subway, some people have argued that maybe you wouldn’t even recognize them if they were wearing a hat and maybe just have some clothes. And there’s a lot of diversity in the world today of people that are a bit taller and a bit shorter and a bit more stocky. So in a way, it might even be something that you might not recognize. But if you really pay attention, then they would look a bit different.

Some people even say, you know, there are people with similar features, individual features that are still living today, because there is a lot of diversity in the world today. So you might have the individual characters that are found in the Neanderthals in people today but not in combination, basically, in one person, like it was back then.

But they were quite similar to us. I mean, we would have recognized them as people. We would say they’re humans. That’s also, when we talk about them—they’re humans. They’re not modern humans. They’re not us. But they’re humans, so they’re quite similar. And again, we’re 99.9 percent identical in our DNA to them. So they’re probably not different. They probably had some sort of language. Maybe if we would have tried hard, we could have also kind of communicated with them over time.

But then, at the same time, they must be different enough that there’s a reason that they are gone and we’re still here. They got extinct, so there must be something that we have that they did not have. Otherwise, I think all those other groups of humans would not have gotten extinct.

And that’s kind of part of the motivation, why we’re so interested in them, trying to understand what is different in us, because that kind of, then, also comes close to these questions, What makes humans humans? What is so special about people today? What’s so special about humans, in general? Why are we the dominant mammal on the planet? And maybe those archaic humans can actually help us to understand, because they, obviously, did not have what we have today, because, otherwise, they would be the dominant mammal on the planet.

And then what, basically, happened between them and us in this kind of short time period? We’re talking about half a million years between a common ancestor with them and us today, which sounds like a lot—half a million years. A lot of people would say, Wow, that’s a lot of time. But in evolutionary time, it’s a very short time period.

Demsas: So I want to turn to this study that you co-authored. And I absolutely love the origin story of this because I think it underscores just how random discoveries can be. Can you tell us about how your new project came about?

Krause: Yeah, it all started in 2020, when one of my colleagues, Hélène Rougier, who’s a professor at Los Angeles—she’s a paleoanthropologist, so she specialized in identifying little pieces of bone and kind of knowing whether those bones are human bones or whether those bones are animal bones—she was supposed to do a sabbatical, so spend a certain amount of time with us at our institute, in Leipzig, Germany. And she came, but then she was supposed to look at some bones from a site that we had studied, which was in the Czech Republic, where there were a lot of bones. The border was closed, so she couldn’t go to the Czech Republic. So we were like, Okay, what to do?

I mean, we’re sitting with her here. She can’t go anywhere. So I’m calling some of my colleagues from the neighboring cities, [seeing] if they have some boxes of bones that she could maybe look at from the past. And then one of my colleagues, Harald Meller, from Halle, the closest city to our city here, was like, We have those 120 boxes from a site in Thuringia, in central Germany, that were excavated in the 1930s from a site that’s called Ranis. And it’s, like, below a castle. It used to be a cave that collapsed thousands of years ago. And it was excavated in the 1930s, and they had to stop because World War II started, and then they, basically, put all the boxes somewhere in the basement, and no one really looked at those boxes for, like, a hundred years.

And then, we were like, Okay, sure. Hélène was very happy to have something to do. So we just got all the boxes here to the institute, and she spent three weeks looking into the kind of boxes. These were tiny, little bone fragments that were excavated from the, basically, Pleistocene—old layers from the Ice Age, thousands of years ago.

Mostly, those were animal bones, but she found about 120 bones that she thought could be human. And there were about 28 that she said—they were from a very old layer, because they were from boxes that were labeled from the lowest layer of the cave. And they said, That would be really cool because, based on the archeology that is associated with those old layers, they should be very old—very early modern humans, potentially.

And so we said, Okay, let’s analyze them. And we were not sure if they are modern humans, if they’re Neanderthals, and what kind of human they could be. And we sequenced the DNA, and—yeah—to our surprise, we, first of all, found they were not Neanderthals, but they were actually modern humans. And what was amazing was that we also dated them.

So we radiocarbon dated them, determined how old those bones were, and they were 45,000 years old. And they were, at that point, with that kind of radiocarbon dating that we had, the oldest human bones—modern human bones, the Homo sapiens bones—that we had available. And one of them, even, was the best-preserved bone from the Pleistocene, so from the entire Ice Age. We had a lot of human DNA, enough to do a very high-quality genome.

And then we did a whole genome analysis, and we found very old people from 45,000 years ago, from the site in Thuringia where we had genomic DNA that we could study. It turned out one was a mother and a daughter. And we also found that some of them were related by fourth, fifth degrees to each other. And what was even more amazing was that we had published, just a year before, a genome from a very old individual, from a female individual, from a site in the Czech Republic that’s called Zlatý kůň, which means, in translation, “the golden horse.” That’s the name of the mountain above the cave where it was discovered in the 1950s. Unfortunately, that could not be radiocarbon dated, but, based on the genetic analysis, we could already say this was a very old person, not in terms of age, but, like, how old that person lived in the past.

And it turned out that this individual was related to our individuals from Thuringia, from Germany, which is 300 kilometers away from each other, which was an amazing surprise. I mean, what’s the chance that you look at some Ice Age people from 45,000 years ago and you find the great-grand-cousin of that one person and the other person? We have 10 genomes, and they happen to be related, which is really incredible.

Demsas: It’s like putting your DNA into one of those databases now and, like, finding a relative who lives next door.

Krause: Exactly. What’s the chance, right? Or someone that you went to school with or something like that. It’s very unlikely, but here we go. We had a very close relationship, and we had complete genomes. And those genomes are really interesting to analyze, because they also turned out to have, still, very long chunks of Neanderthal DNA.

I mentioned it before—we could already show that about 15 years ago, we sequenced the Neanderthal genome at the time, and we also sequenced the genome of the Denisovans, of this other type of human that we then discovered. And when we looked at those genomes of those archaic people, we actually saw that all people outside Africa carry Neanderthal DNA today. And people in Southeast Asia carry the DNA of the Denisovans, so there was some gene flow between those other forms of humans and modern humans.

Demsas: So the first thing I want to jump in on is one of the big contributions of this paper, which is that we had learned that there had been admixture between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. But you’re finding that this is happening much later than we had previously believed and that there’s this overlap of about 5,000 years when both human forms are coexisting. What is important about learning that?

Krause: So we actually found that, instead of some people saying it happened 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, it happened only about 47,000 years ago. And how did we find that? We found in our old genomes from Germany and Czech Republic that they carried very long chunks of Neanderthal DNA in those people’s genomes. They had the same admixture event that everyone outside Africa carries today. So people in Europe have that, and people in Asia have that. So they are part of the population outside Africa.

But they had very long chunks because, over time, the chunks become shorter. So when you have, basically, two people recombining—so a mother’s and father’s DNA recombining—then the chunks get shorter and shorter over time. But they had very long chunks, which told us when, actually, the admixture happened, because it’s like ticking off a clock.

So long chunks become shorter and shorter through time. So if you have longer chunks, you can actually calculate when the admixture happened, and we did that to about 47,000 years ago. So about 50 to 80 generations before our individuals lived—they had admixed with Neanderthals. And now this is the admixture that is common to all people outside Africa. So for the first time, we were able to say, This happened 47,000 years ago. Before, it was very indirect, using genomes of today. And there was lots of uncertainty when it happened.

And why is this important? It’s important because there’s hundreds, maybe even thousands of archaeological findings outside Africa that are attributed to modern humans, where people say, This was made by modern humans. This was a modern human skull. This was a modern human tooth. This is evidence of modern human presence outside Africa that is older than 50,000 years.

So there’s a lot of evidence for modern humans being present outside Africa before 50,000 years ago. But now we are saying that Neanderthals and modern humans only admixed 47,000 years ago, and everyone outside Africa has the Neanderthal DNA, so it’s basically not possible that modern humans—at least, how we know modern humans today: Europeans, Asians, Australians, Aboriginals—that it has to be, then, a different type of modern human, because all the modern humans today go back to a common ancestor that left Africa or intermixed with Neanderthals only about 47,000 years ago. So everything that’s older than 47,000 years ago has to be made by someone else. Or if it’s a bone, it has to be someone else.

And that’s very important because there really have been a whole lot of different studies published in highly prestigious journals over the last few years for evidence of modern humans being present in Papua New Guinea 60,000 years ago, modern humans being present in Australia 60,000 years ago, modern humans being present in Vietnam 70,000 years ago, modern humans being present in China 100,000 years ago, 80,000 years ago, 70,000 years ago.

And basically, all of that is, then, not us. It’s, basically, not the people that we know today outside Africa, because all of the people today outside Africa are from that common-ancestor population that we were now able to date to 47,000 years ago. And that’s quite important. So this is basically now dating, if you want, the “out-of-Africa event,” because that is, really, the last point that all people outside Africa were a common population, because we all share the admixture with Neanderthals that we could now date. So therefore, it’s really important for human evolution to understand when that happened, because it gives us a common ancestor of all the people outside Africa.

Demsas: And I want to make sure that listeners fully understand why you’re distinguishing outside of Africa versus what’s going on there. Can you expand on that?

Krause: So humans evolved to modern humans, Homo sapiens. We evolved in Africa. So of course, our entire lineage evolved in Africa. So the first kind of upright, walking, early hominins evolved probably 7 million years ago. And then about 2 million years ago, the first hominins left Africa. So Homo erectus left Africa, came to Europe, Asia, evolved into different types of Homo erectus.

So there were different types of humans—I call them humans—so hominins outside Africa, and that then includes also Neanderthals, Denisovans, the different forms that we talked about. But then, 50,000 years ago, we had the emergence of Homo sapiens, modern humans. So we left Africa about 50,000 years ago and went outside Africa.

And this was something that, of course, is a major event in human evolution. So something that, basically, gave rise to the human diversity that we have on the planet today. Part of that, of course, is that the people that left Africa were not everyone leaving Africa. It was just part of the genetic diversity. It’s just a part of that population. People even calculated: It’s only about, probably, between 5,000 to 10,000 people that left Africa. So there is more genetic diversity that’s left behind in Africa, which is also reflected today. Just looking at the genetic diversity, there is more genetic diversity in Africa than outside Africa.

There is, basically, larger genetic diversity present. So if you compare the genomes of two people from somewhere in Africa, you have an average of about 6 to 7 million differences in the genome, whereas if you do that for people outside Africa, you have 4 to 5 million differences in the genome. So there is, basically, more genetic diversity, which is part of that story, because just part of that population left.

And then when people came outside Africa, about 50,000 to 47,000 years ago, as we now know, they met Neanderthals because they’re there. They’re outside Africa. They’re probably somewhere in the Middle East. They’re probably somewhere in the Levant, so modern-day Israel or Lebanon or Jordan. And there, they meet Neanderthals; they mix with Neanderthals. And from there, they expand into Europe, Asia, Australia, later on into the Americas. And they take this Neanderthal mixture with them. And that is a really big event that we’ve known about for 15 years now, but we didn’t know when it happened, and now we do know when it happened.

Demsas: One unexpected finding in your study that you flagged for us earlier is the familial relationships that you’re finding between individuals who are pretty far apart. There’s one that I remember that was about 230 kilometers, or roughly 140 miles, apart. You also find that there’s a pretty small population, and you’re estimating these early populations as numbering only in the hundreds. So first of all, how are you doing that? How are you figuring out what the population size is? And given that it’s a pretty small population, is it surprising to find familial relationships among the fragments that you’re finding today?

Krause: So it is not completely surprising that we find closer relatives to the small population. So of course, if you go into a rural region somewhere in the world and you kind of sample people genetically, then it’s a higher chance that they are closely related than if you take that in New York City, where there are millions of people living. It’s basically a result, also, of the small population that we find so many relatives.

How we do that, how we can actually measure that, I mean, how we look at relatedness is how you do it today, how companies are doing it. You send the DNA to just compare the genetic profiles and see how much is identical, how much is different. And from that, you can measure how much relatedness you see between two individuals.

But what you can also do is, to calculate, for example, population size, you don’t compare the genome of one person to the genome of another person, but you actually compare the genome that you get from the mother and the father within the person, because you actually have two genomes, right? You do not have just one genome; you have two. You have to have two copies of chromosome 1, two copies of chromosome 2, two copies of chromosome 3, and so forth.

So if you compare those two to each other, if you have a very large population, you expect that on almost every part of the chromosome, there are differences between mother and father. But if it’s a small population, there happens to be, by chance, regions in the chromosome that come from a common ancestor quite recently. Because in a small population, you don’t have much choice with whom you can have children. And therefore, it’s often the chance that you have children with someone who’s actually not too far related from you.

And that basically causes regions in the genome that are identical, where both chromosomes are identical. They come from a common ancestor. And this happens in small populations and doesn’t happen in large populations. So you can directly calculate, basically, what that means for the population size. And then we came to a calculation of about 100 to 300 individuals. So that’s quite small because we’re talking about the region that stretches from the British Isles, which were, at that time, connected to Europe, and Poland. So it’s a large region. It’s, like, thousands of kilometers, only a few hundred people.

I mean, imagine that, right? Today we have a billion people living in Europe. And at that time, it was maybe just a few hundred people living in Europe, which is really insane. But then, of course, if you then happen to just find some of them, there’s a good chance—if you find them, by chance—that they are actually related, because there were just a hundred of them. It’s like an extended family, basically. So if it’s from the roughly same time period, then there’s a good chance you’ll find relatives, and that’s exactly what we found.

So we have basically two lines of evidence: First, the finding that we have relatives is expected if it’s a small population, but also, within the genomes of those people, we see that there were not a lot of people living at that time.

Demsas: So given that there was this interbreeding happening between different hominins that you’re finding in your research with Neanderthals, do you expect to find the same sorts of things with other types of human hominins mixing in other parts of the world?

Krause: We have actually seen that. We have found, already, 15 years ago, when we sequenced the first genome of the Denisovan, this other type of human, which jumped out of a box. It was like a super big surprise that we found in the lab a new form of human. If you think about that, when you do an excavation, you dig somewhere, and you find a skeleton, a fossil. You’re like, Wow, amazing. We found a new type of human, but imagine that happening in the lab.

I was the lucky person to discover it some years ago. And I was busy working in the lab. I looked at DNA sequences and looked at them on the computer and was like, Wow, this is not Neanderthal. This is not modern humans. That’s something else. It’s a new form of human. It’s incredible, right?

And when we then sequence the genome of this new form of human, we also found that it’s distinct to Neanderthals, it’s distinct to modern humans, but it’s actually more of a sister group of Neanderthals. It’s a bit closer to Neanderthals than it would be to modern humans. It separated from Neanderthals about 300,000 years ago, but there are also some populations of modern humans today that carry some of that DNA, some ancestry from those Denisovans.

And that includes groups in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands—so Indigenous groups from Papua New Guinea and also Indigenous groups from Australia. So Aboriginal groups carry about 5 percent of their genome from this Denisovan group. And there’s also some group in the northern part of the Philippines that has about 7 percent from those Denisovans.

In fact, colleagues of mine have shown that there were at least five admixture events between Denisovans and modern human groups in different parts of Asia. So people in China and in Japan, for example, have different ancestry from Denisovans than the people on Luzon, in the Philippines, and yet, a different type of Denisovan ancestry in Papua New Guinea and Australia. So they interacted multiple times.

And that’s different to the Neanderthals. For the Neanderthals, we have one main event that is shared with all people outside Africa, but then we also have some local events where we have local people—for example, some individuals that were found in Romania, some people that were found in Bulgaria that lived 42,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago—they had additional Neanderthal ancestry, so they had also admixed with additional groups, but they actually went extinct. They did not leave descendants. They did not give that DNA to people that live today. And so, therefore, today, all the people outside Africa only carry that one pulse of Neanderthalic mixture that’s basically shared with all the people outside Africa.

But in East Asia, Southeast Asia, it’s different for Denisovan DNA. So people from China or from Japan, for example, have different Denisovan DNA than people living in Papua New Guinea or Australia. So there have been multiple events that are still present in the diversity of people living in those parts of the world today.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the ancient human genomes we’ll never get to learn from.

[Break]

Demsas: One thing I want to ask you, broadly, about this research is about selection issues. Obviously, you need some level of preserved remains in order to do this sort of analysis, and most of these are found in very cold regions of the world or are things that can be fossilized and maintain their structural integrity to some extent. Are you worried about how that might bias findings about this time period in history?

Krause: Absolutely. That is a strong bias. So in fact, we have a very hard time finding ancient human genomes from, say, equatorial regions. So places that are really warm in average temperature, people that are moist—they don’t preserve DNA well like northern latitudes, because it’s just too warm.

The preservation is not good enough. We cannot go back to 50,000- or 100,000-year-old humans from Africa, which is unfortunate because there’s, as we said earlier, more genetic diversity. This is where humans evolved. That’s where the really interesting stuff is happening. But that’s actually where we don’t have a lot of ancient DNA. We cannot really go back.

I mean, there’s some genomes—there’s one, actually, from Ethiopia, which is about 5,000 years old. There’s some, again, from Morocco. There’s some from Malawi that are even older than 10,000 years. So there is some ancient DNA maybe going back to the last 10,000 or 15,000 years in Africa, but we cannot go back 50,000 or 100,000 years, or maybe even more time ago, whereas, for example, in Europe, the oldest human genome that has been analyzed so far by my colleagues here at the institute is 400,000 years old—so almost half a million years old from a site in Spain, in Sima de los Huesos, which are some early Neanderthals, it turns out, genetically.

It was also very exciting to find those early Neanderthals there, because it means that Neanderthals are at least 400,000 years old, which is also something that wasn’t actually clear. So they’re already on the Neanderthal lineage after they have diverged from the Denisovans and from modern humans.

Demsas: One big question that you raised in the top for us is this large mystery of why it is that Homo sapiens won. And there’s this general sense that I think we’re taught in K–12 here when learning about this time period in history, which is that Homo sapiens were just better. We were, for some reason, just a superior form of human and were able to outperform and outlast all of these other forms of hominins. Can you tell me what the kind of prevailing wisdom is about why this happened?

Krause: There’s a whole bunch of different hypotheses, and I summarize some of them in a book that we just published—actually, just a couple of weeks ago in English—that’s called Hubris, where we talk about the history of humankind, so the rise and fall of humankind and, also, the kind of challenges that we have in the future and looking into the past.

So the big hypothesis we’re talking about is: What makes us special? What do we have that they did not have? And I mean, there’s much speculation in that direction. So what we can see is that modern humans are extremely expansive in their nature. We are expanding very fast. We basically don’t tolerate, sometimes, borders—like, to a degree where it’s almost suicidal.

If you think about going on a little raft into the ocean to discover an island, like, 3,000 kilometers away in the middle of the ocean, who would ever do that? Like, what the hell? What kind of drives people to go on some of those kinds of crazy adventures to discover new land? I mean, even sitting in a rocket that shoots you to the moon—why would someone do that? But we are doing those things. We are adventurous, in some ways.

Our population is highly culturally diverse, and we adapt surprisingly fast to different environments. We are living in all ecosystems you can imagine on this planet, from high altitudes to deserts to living on the ocean or living in the Arctics—which, also, no other mammal has like we have, because, culturally, we have a high plasticity, so we can really adapt super fast, which is also something that we don’t really see to that extent with other earlier human forms.

And our population has been growing surprisingly fast through time. So we have a lot of children. That largely come out of later time periods, when we start with food production. So with agriculture and pastoralism, then we basically produce food in large amounts, and then the population becomes billions of people, like we have today, which is a process that happens later, after we came out of Africa.

But it’s part of the success story and also shows—and this is something where we conclude, also, in this recent book that it should have a biological basis, what I’m now talking about—that agriculture and this kind of complex way of food production actually emerges in parallel in at least five different places in the world, starting about five to 10,000 years ago.

So there must be something that modern humans had that allowed us to develop this complex way of life—food production, domestication of plants and animals—that happens independently so many times. It didn’t happen in the hundred thousands of years before, even when climate was similar and stable. But about 10,000 years ago, there is something in the kind of genetic makeup of the people that came out of Africa 50,000 years ago that we seem to have all in common, that allows us to develop this complex way of life, which I don’t think was there hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So that’s really something that is unique, which kind of tells me that there must be a biological basis to that—that something evolved in Africa more than 50,000 years ago that allowed us to expand out of Africa, to be, in a very short time, basically, replacing all other forms of humans. I mean, we were talking about 5,000 years, and all those earlier forms—Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis—all those groups were extinct, and we’re the only ones left behind. And then we came up with this incredible way of living and complex culture. We settled all kinds of distant places, the tiniest islands in the Pacific in that short time period of about 50,000 years, the entire planet. There needs to be a biological basis to that. I cannot imagine that this is just pure coincidence.

But we can’t point it now to one gene. We can’t really say, It’s this gene. It’s that gene. Maybe it’s a number of different genetic changes that happen. If you compare the genome of a Neanderthal to the genome of a modern human today, it’s a surprising kind of similarity—as we said, 99.9 percent. But even if you just look at the specific differences, like how many genes are fixed differently between Neanderthals and modern humans, there’s less than 100 genes that are different between a Neanderthal and a modern human.

But somewhere there, I think—and maybe a combination of several of them—hides exactly that type of mystery of what we have and they don’t. But that’s what we’re still after, right? So even if we now have a Neanderthal genome and some of those other earlier genomes, we haven’t really found yet the exact recipe—basically, what makes us so special. But I think we’re getting much closer to that than we were 10 years ago, before we had those genomes of those archaic humans.

Demsas: I know this is an area of research where just learning and understanding on its own terms is important, but I think that there are also some really interesting implications for modern-day humans. I came across this study that found that a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 was inherited from Neanderthals. Can you explain how that was found?

Krause: So this was my colleague Svante Pääbo here at the institute. He found that, together with another colleague, Hugo Zeberg, from the Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm. And what they made use of was a large study and effort from another group from Helsinki in Finland, called FinnGen. They collected patients’ genomes from COVID-19 and looked at severe cases and looked at their genetic factors that cause a stronger response or higher risk of actually having severe COVID compared to others.

And they did find regions in different parts of the genome that gave a higher risk. Interestingly, the kind of regional chromosome 3 that has the highest risk to actually have a severe form of COVID and have a three-times-higher risk to actually die of it was then found by Svante and his colleague Hugo to come from Neanderthals. So basically, they just made use of someone else finding all those regions, and they looked, like, Could that be from Neanderthals? And it turns out to be from Neanderthals.

It’s somehow a bit of a fun fact, to some degree, because it’s not really. So okay, now we know it’s from Neanderthals. That doesn’t help us to cure COVID or to do something about the disease. It does not. But it does tell us, then, of course, that this is something that actually came into the human population about 45,000 years or 47,000 years ago, when modern humans and Neanderthals admixed. It’s not found in Africa. It’s found outside Africa only because it came from Neanderthals when they admixed. It’s in high frequency in southern Asia. It’s in higher frequency in Europe.

So it points out a bit more the history of this interesting region. And what kind of story might be behind it probably has something to do with some other diseases, which are not coronaviruses but probably some other diseases that have caused this variant to be, for example, in high frequency in South Asia. So my colleagues are now studying it and trying to understand the exact mechanisms that are actually behind this more severe form of coronavirus.

And there are many other such examples where we have found that Neanderthals passed on some of their genes to us, which were, actually, good for adapting to certain environments. So for example, immunity genes that help us to tackle some of the pathogens present , probably, in Europe at the time when they came here. There’s also some genes, like a gene that people have in East Asia today, that allows them to live in high altitudes. So for example, Tibetans, like the Sherpa, which are this famous group of people living in Tibet today—almost all of them carry a gene that came from the Denisovans into the gene pool of East Asians.

Whereas the frequency in an average person from East Asia is only about 0.1 percent of the gene, Sherpa have it to 100 percent. They all have it. So it was very advantageous to have that gene. And it came from Denisovans, and we do know now, even, that Denisovans lived in high altitudes, because in some cave in China, they found a bone that is from a Denisovan. We know that now genetically, as well as based on the morphology. And that was found at 3,200 meters altitude. So they actually lived already for a long time in high altitudes and were probably, over time, adapted to live in that high altitude. And that helped the people like the Sherpa today to live in Tibet, which is quite useful.

It’s a bit more kind of a complex mechanism, what it’s actually doing. It’s actually switching off the natural adaptation that all of us have when we go to high altitudes, when your body starts to adapt to the kind of low oxygen levels. And basically, those Sherpas switched that mechanism off, so it’s not working anymore. But for living at high altitudes for a long time, it’s actually what you need. And that’s an interesting example of something that we actually inherited from those archaics and gave us something that kind of made life for people better.

Demsas: I feel like I want some more context on how different this can lead modern-day humans to be, because there’s tons of mixture that’s happened between the populations of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas. There’s tons of intermarrying and children that have been had. Is it just that there’s such a short time period where that’s been happening, where you still see serious differences in the genetic codes of people in Tibet versus Central Europe, like you said?

Krause: Yeah. So this is indeed the case. So populations in some parts of the world have it mixed more. In some parts of the world, they have it mixed less. Like, the genetic differences between European populations are half as strong now than they were 10,000 years ago, because over the last 10,000 years, humans in Europe merged with different parts.

There was a whole group of people coming with agriculture from Anatolia. About 7,000 years ago, there was another group coming from Eastern Europe. But then there are other parts of the world where populations have been more stable, like Inuit, for example, in northern America. They have been pretty un-admixed in the last 4,000 years. But even there was some mixture, and there was some replacement with some other groups.

And this is, in a way, if we wouldn’t have modern medicine and technology, the environment still has a very strong selection on people. So one good example that I always tell my students is: Australia. Australia today has, by far, the biggest rate of skin cancer in the world. Why is that? Because they largely come from Great Britain and Ireland. That’s where most of that population descends from. They moved to almost the equator. They moved to an environment that they’re actually not adapted to.

They come from Northern Europe, basically, to equatorial regions, where the sun is very, very intense. They should have dark skin, like the Aboriginal population in Australia that has dark skin. They don’t have skin cancer, because they are adapted to living in latitudes on the equator, whereas Northern Europeans are not. It’s not so much a problem today, because you have sun blocker; you have all kinds of medical treatments. So it’s not a strong selection pressure anymore, but if you would give it a natural thousand years or 2,000 years, basically all Australians would look like Aborigines, because their skin would just adapt over time to living on the equator. And that’s a natural tendency that happens everywhere in the world.

So you have Native Americans, for example. So Native Americans in North America and far in South America—they have lighter skin than the ones living in Bolivia or Ecuador, living on the equator, because they had to adapt. They actually came with lighter skin to the Americas, and then they started to live in high altitudes, as well as on the equator, and got darker skin. So this is also a natural kind of tendency to adapt to living in equatorial regions.

And there are, of course, many other such examples. It could be the environment, like sun exposure, but it can also be a diet, right? So in Europe, for example, there is this lactase persistence, which a lot of people have. So a lot of people in Europe can drink 2 liters of milk, which the majority of people in the world cannot do. But 5,000 years ago, people started consuming milk. Probably 3,000 or 2,000 years ago, that peaked and caused a variant to emerge that gave people the ability to drink a lot of milk in adulthood, which mammals usually don’t have, because no mother wants to breastfeed the offspring for the rest of their life. They want to get rid of that.

So what Mother Nature did in evolution was to switch the gene off that allows us to digest milk, which is the lactase gene. So for normal people, that switches off, which is good. That happens with your cat. That happens with your dog. That happens with any mammal out there. But then for humans, they started to drink a lot of milk because they had cows. So they used cow milk. But then it is bad if you have that gene switched off, because you get all kinds of problems.

But then, people had a mutation that allowed them to drink a lot of milk, which was extra proteins. And then they adapted, and that’s adaptation, now, to the food but not to the environment, but basically the kind of environment that we have created. So this is something that is also part of that story. The local adaptation is something that, of course, different environments and, also, different types of foods are introducing.

Demsas: So I have really pushed to try to figure out a practical application for modern-day humans in this debate and in the research strain that you’ve been pushing on. And I was reflecting about why I was trying so hard to find that, and it probably has to do with the larger debate that’s happening in the U.S. right now about the value of research that does not have an obvious direct material benefit to people.

We’ve talked a little bit about how it can help us understand genetic risk factors and understand the way that we can metabolize different foods, and you’ve walked us through that. But I largely categorize the research you’re doing as interested in uncovering the truth about who we are and how humanity came to be divorced from immediate practical considerations. How do you make the case to people about the value of this type of research?

Krause: So I’m working in the Max Planck Society, and we do basic research. So we are not driven by what can be turned into a product, what’s applicable to some sort of new medical treatment, or what is something that will really benefit humanity directly, as some new discovery that will result in a new form of energy or a new form of medical treatment or so.

We’re really driven by finding out new stuff, kind of basic research, trying to understand, in our case, where humans came from—What’s their kind of evolutionary course? How did they adapt? What makes humans humans? How are we different to other mammals? How are we different to other types of humans?—which is largely driven by curiosity and will not result directly in products that you could easily sell to your mother and say, like, Look—I did this research, and now we have a new vacuum cleaner, or something like that, right? This is maybe what a physicist or mechanic can do but I cannot do.

But then, a lot of people are interested in ancestry. A lot of people are interested in history. A lot of people are interested in evolution and trying to understand how things evolve. And in my case, I’m also doing a lot of work. About half of my work is, actually, not on the evolution of people but on the evolution of pathogens. So where did some of the most infamous pathogens in the world come from? Plague, leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis, and so forth. And there, I could even come up with this being relevant, because we try to understand where pathogens emerge, how they change, their evolution trajectory, their mutation rate. So I do have some examples where I could say that could be relevant, also, for medical research in infectious-disease biology.

But in terms of human evolution, I think it is largely curiosity driven. And I think there’s also what our society, the Max Planck Society, stands for—that we really want to create more basic research and try to understand various kinds of things that should be researched and should be understood. And I think that’s an incredible luxury to have, I should also say, especially in these times that we’re living today, where a lot of people question, Why should we do research, right? Why should we spend money on that? We need to save money for something else, either for defense or for certain products or certain luxury goods or just, even, for food or for health for a lot of people that are maybe marginalized in certain parts of the world. But you can also never know what your discoveries, your basic science and insights, might actually generate in the future.

Demsas: So what you were saying about what drives you to do basic research really reminded me of the same exact thing you said earlier about what may have made Homo sapiens special: this kind of desire to explore and research and find new things, even if there’s not a very clear, obvious reason to do it. Like, why strike out to go see if that island is habitable? Why look to see who your ancestors are? I mean, these are questions that maybe other mammals wouldn’t investigate, but it maybe is what makes us different.

But I think this is a great place to ask our last and final question, which is: What is an idea that you had that you thought was a good idea at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Krause: That’s hard for me. I mean, you have all kinds of experiments that you do in the lab, and that’s almost on a weekly basis where you say, We should do this. We should do that. For example, in my first book that I wrote some years ago, Short History of Humanity, we speculated that horses, when they were domesticated, were responsible for the spread of plague. Now, that sounds crazy, but we had some reasons to think, because horses are partially immune to plague, that they played an important role, because at the point when horses got domesticated, the plague spread for the first time.

And we thought that there’s some sort of a correlation here, and that might also explain why horses are more resistant to plague than other animals. At the end, what we actually could see from some of the data that wasn’t generated by some of our colleagues, together with us, was that horses were domesticated a thousand years after the plague spread. So, okay, bada boom. That kind of hypothesis is then not substantiated. And that, of course, happens often in science, where you come up with a hypothesis, and then you reject it. So that’s quite normal.

If I think about stories that kind of made me really excited over the last 20 years doing research, one thing that I was really hoping for is longevity and extension of longevity. There was much debate when I was a student: The first human genome was deciphered, and now we can read it like a book, and we can switch off certain genes. We can extend the ends of the chromosomes, called telomeres, that will help us to become hundreds of years old. And being aware of mortality is one of the hardest things about being human, that kind of sucks. I wish to be a chimpanzee sometimes, and I wouldn’t be aware of mortality as much as I am, because I’m a human.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Krause: Because it sucks if the lights turn off and that’s it, right? It’s gone, right? That was life. So longevity was something I was really excited about, but I haven’t seen any progress in that direction over the last 20 years, despite the big revolution we have in genetics and in molecular biology. So we don’t really see that people get older and older. And we eventually are still all gonna die. So that really, really sucks.

Demsas: Well, hopefully someone one day is studying our genomes in the same way you’re studying our ancestors. But, Johannes, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Krause: It was really great to be on the show.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

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Whether over creationism or gender identity, bitter political fights have sprung up around what sorts of ideas should be taught in public schools. Education is often touted as a tool of social mobility meant to help students access well-paying jobs, but these curricula battles indicate that many adults view it as a tool for inculcating future citizens with a particular viewpoint.

How can an institution that carries so much of our collective expectation to equalize mankind also bear some of the marks of an indoctrination factory? On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Agustina Paglayan, a professor of political science at UC San Diego whose new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, conducts a rigorous historical analysis of why public education spread.

“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals, but by the state’s desire to control citizens,” Paglayan argues. “And to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: You’ve probably heard the name Horace Mann. He was a 19th-century reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and, most famously, the American public-school system.

As Adam Harris wrote for The Atlantic, Mann “sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive.”

Agustina Paglayan would probably add another word: obedient. Agustina is a political scientist at UC San Diego. Her new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, argues that the roots of the world’s modern education systems were based not on progressive ideals but on a desire to suppress unruly populations.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Public education is largely seen as a progressive enterprise meant to provide opportunities to those who could not afford an education on their own, but its roots may have been anything but. Beginning with Prussia in the mid-1700s, Agustina looks at the curious timing of when countries invest in their education systems and finds that investment comes in response to political elites witnessing threats to their political power.

I still believe that public education, as Horace Mann put it, can be the great equalizer of the conditions of man. But after reading Agustina’s book, I’m not sure policy makers were seeking to make it so. And troublingly, modern reformers may be more interested in indoctrination than education.

Agustina, welcome to the show.

Agustina Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I’m very happy to be here.

Demsas: Happy to have you. So every single time I have a conversation with someone about education policy, whether on this show or in real life, I’m sort of struck by the selection-effect issues of having education conversations with policy makers and policy wonks, because, almost universally, they’re people who liked school and liked learning, and they’re people who probably, in some ways, thrived or at least managed to overcome difficulties that they had in school.

And then they’re the people who then go on to have these conversations about, What’s wrong with schools these days? and, What’s going on here? I was one of those weird kids who would get FOMO about sick days. (Laughs.) I assume that you’re also in this class of people. You have a Ph.D. and, I guess, never quit school. Do you think about how your relationship to education affects your research?

Paglayan: Absolutely. I always think not just about how my personal experience but everyone’s personal experience shapes their research. I will say your intuition is correct.

I was a straight-A student all along. But I also had, for better or worse, the benefit of having many siblings, some of whom dropped out of high school. And so within the confines of my family, I had exposure to those inequalities that we see in society more broadly. And that inequality that I observed, even within my family, was something that was always a source of curiosity for me, particularly, as you were saying, you and I—we were straight-A students.

Demsas: Not straight-A, but I won’t co-opt that. I liked school. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Okay. And I didn’t need much support to do that. But what I saw was that some of my siblings who needed more support from school in order to do well—they weren’t getting that support. And so that was always something that was a little troubling for me to try to understand: Why is it that those who get more easily distracted, those who maybe have more behavioral problems or more difficulty concentrating, they’re not getting the support they need? That’s what schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to be helping the most. At least, that’s what I grew up thinking.

And so that always was at the heart of my interest in education. I mean, the other really relevant piece of what drove me to study education, in terms of my personal experience, is just that I grew up in a family where education was the most important thing. And my mom, in particular—she sacrificed a lot to be able to afford one of the best schools in Argentina, which is the country where I grew up. We didn’t have health insurance for a while. There were a lot of different things that she sacrificed along the way. And so I grew up with this sense that education is the most important investment you can make in order to live a life that is not just a prosperous life but a life with individual autonomy, where you can pursue your dreams, if you want.

And then what I started seeing as I started working on education—I worked both at the World Bank, helping with education reform in different countries, and also at Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis—as I started getting to know more about education systems, I started noticing, well, we have these ideas about how education is supposed to be about improving living standards, promoting individual autonomy, etcetera. But education systems worldwide are not living up to that promise.

And so that was also something that led me to be further interested in education systems and figuring out this puzzle, which began as a family-specific puzzle, but then I started observing these broader patterns cross-nationally.

Demsas: Do you still believe that education holds all those values that you did growing up?

Paglayan: I think education certainly has the promise to accomplish that. I don’t think education systems were designed to accomplish that, and I think that’s a big part of the explanation why they don’t live up to that promise.

Demsas: I want to situate us in the history of the rise of state-led primary education. Before reading your book, I think I hadn’t really taken in the short timeline that we’re talking about here, just over the course of, like, 200 years. I’m hoping you can talk to us—like, when did this start? Where did it start? Give us sort of a historical grounding.

Paglayan: Yes. So you’re right. This is a 200-year history—very short in human history. Historically, what we had was that the education of children was left entirely to families and churches. And it’s in 1763 that Prussia became the first country in the world to create a compulsory primary-education system.

And that sort of is the first instance of a state-regulated primary-education system. And Prussia, in that time period, also happens to transition from being a backward economy to being one of the most developed and, particularly, a military and world power. And so there are many countries around the world who are trying to figure out: What did Prussia do? How did Prussia accomplish this major transformation?

And what they observed as they traveled to Prussia—and you have people from all over, from Horace Mann traveling to Prussia, to the education reformers in Latin American and in France and other parts of Europe—and what they observe when they go to Prussia is, well, the one thing Prussia has that no one else has is this primary-compulsory-education system. And so that sets off a set of reforms in other countries or, at least, debates about how, if you have a primary-education system, you can consolidate political authority if it is the government that’s in charge of regulating what’s being taught in schools and then using that regulation to ensure that children are being taught to obey the state and obey its laws.

But as I pointed out, it began in 1763. I would mark that as a really important date with Prussia. And then what you see progressively is the U.S. and Canada and continental Europe following Prussia successively at different points in time, followed by Latin America toward the end of the 19th century. And then much later, you see Asian and African countries sort of following suit. So the timing of the different countries varies in terms of when they push for primary education. And that’s one of the things that I examine in the book, is, Well, why are they doing it when they are doing it?

Demsas: How did parents react to this? It seems pretty rapid, over the course of maybe a generation, where you’re not expected to have any kind of regular interaction with state institutions, to, all of a sudden, You need to send your 5-year-old to a state-run public school. How do they react to that?

Paglayan: We don’t have a lot of evidence on how parents directly reacted. What we do have evidence on is what politicians perceived was the parents’ reaction. And the perception that politicians had was primarily that parents really did not like this, because the schools weren’t teaching their kids anything that was particularly useful. And those children were used to contributing to the household income. They worked in farms. They worked in factories. And so, suddenly, you were withdrawing a form of labor that contributed to the family’s economy.

And so the parents resisted that at first. Or at least, again, that was the perception that governments had, that there was this resistance. And that’s why, then, governments passed compulsory-schooling laws, to say, Okay, even if you don’t like it, you need to send your children to school, because we have this project that we want to carry out.

Demsas: I know we’re talking in generalities now, and I know from reading your book, you’ve collected a lot of data to be able to speak in these averages, and there’s a ton of heterogeneity that’s underlying a lot of this that I’m just going to pin for our listeners here.

But in general, when we’re talking about compulsory public education, are you saying that these states would send police officers to require that? Would they levy fines? How much state capacity did they really have to require this? Or was it just that people kind of just follow the law for other reasons?

Paglayan: So as you pointed out, one of the things that I document in the book is the different sets of penalties and provisions that were put in the law to encourage parents to comply with compulsory-schooling provisions. And so in some countries, what you had was the threat of fines, and sometimes it’s just the threat itself that was sufficient to encourage low-income parents to send their kids to school. You didn’t have to really have everyone fined. It was just the existence of those fines.

It was the creation of school inspectorate systems that was very heavily in charge of monitoring school attendance. So states also created this monitoring tool through hiring and deploying school inspectors to monitor whether children were attending school and identify parents who were not complying. So this system in and of itself was something that encouraged parents.

And then the other thing that was also used was not just fines but, for example, in the context of Prussia, if you wanted to get religious confirmation, you had to send your kid to school. Otherwise, they couldn’t get their religious confirmation. And so that was another way to induce parents.

Demsas: So you mentioned this before, but the question under investigation is: Why did the west lead in expanding mass primary education? What were the reasons for that expansion and the motivations underlying that shift? Before we get into your explanation, I want to run through the traditional theories and talk them through, and talk through how you were able to discard those with your research.

You mentioned a few of them in your book: democratization, industrialization, interstate wars, assimilation of immigrants. Can you walk us through these theories and why you don’t see them holding water?

Paglayan: Yes, so all of the theories that you just mentioned, I examine in the book, and I rule out only after looking at the evidence. And so let me start with democratization.

So there was a big literature that argued that the expansion of primary education in the west, and around the world, was driven by the spread of democracy—that once lower-income people became enfranchised, they wanted primary education, and governments, who now needed to win elections with votes from lower-income individuals, responded by expanding primary education.

And so to test this theory, one of the things that I did was to compile information about when governments began to regulate primary education. And also, how much access to primary education was there prior to a country becoming democratic for the first time?

And so the two things that I found there was, first, that the creation of state-regulated primary-education systems (as defined by the passage of the first primary-education law that regulates the curriculum, regulates when you need to attend school, regulates who can become a teacher, all of these things that are regulated by these primary-education laws), these laws are passed well before a country transitions to democracy for the first time—on average, a hundred years before. So that’s the first piece of evidence to rule out the democracy argument.

Demsas: And what’s your data sample? What countries are you looking at, and are you just independently doing all this research, or are there data sets that already exist?

Paglayan: No.

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Paglayan: Yeah. I did all of the information gathering. So I started with Europe and the Americas, and I used a collection of roughly 80 different books, dissertations, and secondary sources, primarily to locate the year when these laws were passed and then to locate the actual laws, because the book also analyzes the content of the laws, the curriculum, the teacher training-and-recruitment policies, and so on. But I started with the secondary sources first, and sometimes there’s discrepancies, so you have to sort of figure out who’s correct here.

Demsas: A big theme of the show is just how laborious all data collection actually is and how it’s the main part of most research. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Yeah, it takes a little bit of an obsessive personality to enjoy the task, actually.

Demsas: So essentially, you’re plotting this first year as, like, Year Zero and then also plotting at what year democratization happens and seeing whether those things are actually happening one after the other. And you just don’t see any relationship at all?

Paglayan: Well, the relationship you see is that it happens way before democracy. And then the other thing that I also look at is, Okay, maybe they just passed laws, but they didn’t do much in the form of providing primary education to people. This was just paper but not much in the form of implementation.

And so to get at whether that was the case, the other thing that I did was to construct a data set with primary-school enrollment rates for European and Latin American countries going very far back in time, farther back than any other previously existing data set. And what I looked at is, Okay, when you get to a country’s first transition to democracy, what was the prior level of enrollment in primary education? Are we talking 20 percent? Are we talking 30 percent? And no, we’re talking an average 70 percent enrollment. So enrollment in primary education was already very high prior to democratization.

And the other thing that I also find—and this isn’t in the book; it’s in a separate article that I published—is that democratization itself didn’t lead to further increases in primary education. And this is totally consistent with theories that argue that democracy responds to a majority of people. Well, a majority of people already had access to primary education, so they didn’t want a further expansion. And you don’t see, therefore, democracy expanding primary education further, even if you still have 30 percent or 40 percent of people in some countries left out of primary education.

Democratization doesn’t do much. And the origins of primary education are nondemocratic origins. They preceded the arrival of democracy. So that’s one piece of evidence that the book provides.

The other argument is on industrialization. So here, the argument was that the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy created a need for skilled and docile workers. And industrialists themselves were demanding that the state create this docile and skilled workforce by setting up primary school systems. And this isn’t something that I have studied on my own. There are other people who’ve studied this, and I build on their work, and some of the primary sources that I collect are consistent with these arguments. The first thing you notice is that industrialists often opposed, at first, the expansion of primary education by the state.

Demsas: You’re taking away their workers.

Paglayan: Exactly. [It’s] for the same reason that the parents opposed it. Children were working, and industrialists thought, Yeah, you’re taking away our workers. That’s going to reduce the size of the workforce, and that’s going to increase salaries, so we don’t want that.

The other thing is the timing of industrialization versus the timing, again, of these laws that are passed. And you don’t see a consistent pattern of industrialization or the beginning of industrialization preceding the creation of these systems. I think a nice example is the contrasting experiences of Prussia and England. So Prussia created, as we were talking about earlier, the first compulsory primary-education system regulated by the state while it was an agrarian country. And on the flip side to that is that England, which was the leader of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the last countries in all of Europe to create a primary-education system. By 1850, England was the country in Europe with the lowest level of access to primary schooling, even though you had already had almost an entire century of industrialization.

Demsas: Okay, so we’ve run through democratization and industrialization, and then there’s also interstate wars.

Paglayan: Yes, so interstate wars is, again, an argument people have made that countries developed their primary-education systems in response to military competition and, in the context of that military competition, a desire to form a large, trained, and loyal army—and also to inoculate citizens from external invasion or attempts to capture the country’s territory. So the idea is, Well, if I teach you to be patriotic, and a foreign power comes and tries to seduce you, well, I’ve taught you to be patriotic, and you’re not gonna be seduced by those attempts.

And again, the evidence, if you look at what happens with access to primary education after interstate wars, you are seeing that the occurrence of interstate wars leads to an expansion of access to primary education, which is what you would expect if interstate-war arguments were correct. You don’t see that.

What you see in the western world is that during interstate wars, there is a big drop in enrollment, and after the end of the interstate war, there is a recovery but not new expansion of enrollment. It’s just a partial recovery of the drop that took place during the period of the interstate war.

Demsas: Largely, what you have done in falsifying the democratization, the industrialization, the interstate wars—and also, you talk about the idea that assimilating immigrants also does not fit with the timing. Like, you don’t see large waves of immigration coincide with the creation of expanding primary education to the masses. Largely, your objections are with ones of timing, and those are ones I think are really easy to grasp.

But with democratization, I have a harder time buying that you can pinpoint exactly when that begins. Of course, as you know, democratization is not a simple, binary yes or no. It’s a process that happens and exists even within very autocratic regimes. Amartya Sen had a very famous and provocative argument that democracy is a universal value. And he points to various historical examples of democratic deliberation and norms around public reason outside of the normal Greek, western tradition throughout history.

Obviously, that doesn’t prove anything about whether democratization causes education, but it makes me less certain about our ability to say, Democratization does not play a significant role in pushing for more education, because it’s possible that there were just natural reactions to the fact that people were demanding more things, or there were riots happening all the time, and that creates a response within the state to provide educational resources.

Paglayan: Right. So I think you’re absolutely right that you could have, even within the context of a regime that is still a nondemocratic regime, a response to the masses that is driven by what we would consider relatively democratic ideals. And in order to get at whether that’s what’s going on, one of the key things that we need to do—one that I do as part of the book—is to look at: What are the political arguments that are being used by politicians when they are choosing and defending the creation of primary-education systems?

And so if there was an effort to address societal demands, what you would see is that kind of language. And you don’t see that. You see language along the lines of, The masses don’t want to send their children to school, but this is something that’s going to be beneficial for the state for its own sake, for its stability and the consolidation of political authority. And so we’re going to create these systems. We’re going to force parents to send their kids to school, even if they don’t like it.

So you don’t see this demand. And likewise, one of the things that I look at is: Are civil wars, then, leading to an expansion of primary education? Because civil wars or, as you said, riots, rebellions—there are different types of internal conflicts that I discuss in the book. Are these episodes of internal conflict leading to an expansion of education because people are asking for it? And that’s maybe part of the reason why they’re rebelling, is they want an improvement in their living standards.

Well, when you look at what politicians are saying after these episodes, and they’re talking about, Okay, what’s the goal of education? it’s not to improve living standards. It’s to teach obedience, to teach submissiveness to the state’s authority. And so it’s in the arguments that are being made by political elites who are setting up these systems, and it’s in the content of the laws themselves, also—What is the curriculum that’s being taught? How are the teachers being trained? and so on and so forth—that you see that the intention is not driven by democratic ideals. I think that’s the collection of evidence, in my view, that helps realize that there’s an authoritarian route in education systems.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the real roots of western education, according to Augustina.

[Break]

Demsas: So I think it’s a good time for you to give us your thesis, because I do think there’s a pretty-convincing refutation of many of these traditional explanations, and people are probably left wanting more now.

Paglayan: Sure. So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.

So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems. And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States. But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

And so from that standpoint, you can teach someone to accept, uncritically, that an absolutist regime is the best thing that could happen to you. Or you could also teach someone to accept, uncritically, that democracy or republican institutions are the best form of government.

And what makes it indoctrination is not the content of what’s being taught. It’s that the process of teaching these beliefs occurs without allowing, or much less encouraging, critical thinking. There’s no room for students to question, Oh, but why are you saying that republican institutions or absolutist regimes are the best way to structure political life? So there’s this emphasis on using education to instill a set of beliefs about: These are the existing political rules. This is how society is led by the state, and you should accept that as the right thing.

The other core argument of the book is about when exactly governments are likely to turn to education for this indoctrination and social-control and instilling obedience purposes. And that’s another key part of the book, which is to show what we were talking about earlier, that these efforts to use education as a form of indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when political elites experience social unrest and mass protest against the status quo that these elites benefit from.

So these episodes of mass violence against the status quo generate a lot of fear among political elites who benefit from that status quo. And that fear is what leads political elites to then forge a coalition that supports, Okay, let’s invest in primary education, because clearly what we’ve been doing so far, whether it’s repression or trying to appease people with material concessions—that’s not sufficient. We just had this mass revolt or rebellion or insurrection or protest, etcetera. That tells us that what we’ve been doing is not sufficient. We need to do something new. And that’s when they either choose to invest for the first time in primary education or reform the existing education system that they have to better tailor it to the goal of obedience.

Demsas: Your book is called Raised to Obey. It’s a great title, and it’s also, I think, a very apt, succinct way of describing your thesis here. But I think that the natural question that rises is, you know: There is a desire to repress the peasantry and the citizenry of countries that have largely been authoritarian for hundreds of years. What changed about the capacity or the tools that they were using in advance that made compulsory education necessary to repress the masses? Because I can imagine someone listening to this and going, Okay, so it’s another tool in order to maintain social order, but isn’t there something interesting about the fact that it all kind of just develops in a short, 200-year time span?

Paglayan: Yes, and what happens is the Enlightenment. We have sort of this myth that the Enlightenment promoted ideas of individual autonomy and using reason to make decisions, as opposed to superstition or religion. And there’s a lot of truth in that, but during the Enlightenment, conversation and ideas that circulated around mass education, specifically, which is distinct from education for elites—the idea that took form during the Enlightenment on mass education was that mass education could be used by states to instill obedience and to consolidate the authority of the state.

And so what you see is this moment of change in ideas. It’s sort of a new idea that emerges that We didn’t have, before, any notion that the state could or should be involved in the education of children. And its people like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Voltaire and Kant who are saying, Well, the state has an interest of its own to educate children so that they will learn to obey the sovereign and its laws. And you get kind of these ideas in the 18th century or so becoming very pervasive in terms of circulating among elites.

Now, the ideas on their own are not sufficient for then political rulers to implement those ideas. And that’s where the role of internal conflict and social protest against the status quo becomes a catalyst for elites to say, Oh, okay. We’ve heard that maybe we could use mass education to instill obedience, but we know that’s a costly endeavor. We have to hire a lot of teachers.

So they only agree to turn to education after they experience a situation that tells them, Okay, the tools you’ve been using—repression, material concessions—those are no longer sufficient. And so that diagnosis is what then leads them to education. But you’re right that this is based on a necessary condition, which is the existence of these ideas, which occur primarily around the Enlightenment.

Demsas: Talk to me a little bit about your evidence for this here. I know you’ve talked a little bit about the research you’ve done into how elites were talking about creating public-education systems. But I assume that there were many instances of upheaval that were happening throughout hundreds of years of human history, and even over the course of this time period that we’re talking about here, when the Enlightenment ideas were in place. There were many instances of upheaval happening and concerns from elites that they were maybe losing power.

But not all of these countries choose to engage in expansion of primary-education systems after every single one of these things. So is there something particular about the upheavals or the rebellions that cause elites to change their minds here? Are you able to kind of code all of the specific types of rebellions that occur? How do we know that these things are causal?

Paglayan: So there are three different things that I want to say in response to this question, which was at the heart of my concern in studying how these instances of upheaval affect or not affect education efforts by the state.

So one of the core concerns is, as a social scientist, you don’t want to start cherry-picking the upheavals that do lead to the expansion of primary education, because that’s just like, Yeah, you’re cherry-picking the cases that meet your theory or support your theory, but there could be all these other upheavals that also take place that don’t lead to education reform.

And so what I did to get around that issue of cherry-picking is just use civil wars as a way of testing systematically whether one type of internal conflict that has been coded by other social scientists, its timing, and has been coded across countries over time for centuries—whether that type of internal conflict is associated with an expansion of primary education.

And that’s what I find, is that when you look at civil wars and expansion of primary education, both before and after a civil war, what you see is that in countries that experienced a civil war, there is a rapid acceleration of primary education following the civil war that you don’t observe in countries that in the same time period did not experience a civil war. So the civil war is leading to further expansion of primary education above and beyond what you would expect in the absence of civil war. And so that’s one of the pieces of evidence that the book provides.

There’s also specific cases that I look at that are not using nationally aggregated data but subnational data to further look at this argument. So in the context, for instance, of thinking about the case of France or the case of Chile or the case of Argentina, what I also examine is: When you have a form of internal conflict that is followed by an education reform, is the implementation of that education reform and the construction of schools being targeted specially to those areas that are perceived by the government to constitute a threat to its social order and stability?

And so, again, that’s another piece of evidence that I find, that yes, indeed, what you’re seeing in the aftermath of these episodes of social conflict involving mass violence against the status quo is that the state not only decides to create a national primary-education system and expand access to primary education, but it’s particularly targeting or specially targeting the expansion of primary education to those areas where the rebels had rebelled against the status quo.

And then this brings us back to your question: Well, but maybe it’s doing that because the rebels were asking for education or asking for an improvement in their living conditions. And they’re responding by providing education for that reason, not for social control. Which is then why I have to look at, Okay, is that what the education system is designed to accomplish? And it’s not.

And then the other thing that I discuss in the book considerably is: Not all kinds of internal conflict are likely to lead to the expansion of education for indoctrination purposes. So if you think, for example, of the context of England, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that England did have episodes of political instability. You had civil wars in the 17th century. You had mass strikes in the 19th century.

But what you have in the context of England is that—while these ideas of the Enlightenment that circulated in Prussia and continental Europe, around, States should use education for consolidating authority by instilling obedience in future citizens—in England, the ideas that exist about mass education are different. And people in England have more of a concern that if you educate people, that’s going to lead them to be more empowered and to become more rebellious, if anything.

And so one of the things that the book says is that for episodes of social unrest to lead to mass-education efforts for indoctrination purposes, well, elites have to believe that education can indeed indoctrinate people. If elites believe that education is going to empower them, as they did in England, they’re not going to respond to strikes or civil wars by expanding education. And so that helps explain in the case of England, for example, why it lagged behind.

And then there’s other conditions that also need to be in place. You need a minimum level, for instance, of fiscal capacity and administrative capacity to be able to roll out these plans. In the context of Mexico, for example, throughout the 19th century, there were all kinds of civil wars. And those civil wars led to a lot of laws that tried to create an education system that was focused on instilling obedience. But that could never be implemented, because there were no resources to do it.

Similarly, in the case of France after the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, there is an effort to pass laws to use education for indoctrination, but the state’s treasury is completely decimated, so they can’t implement that. So there are some conditions that need to be in place.

The other thing that also needs to be in place is that you need elites to come to the conclusion that the existing tools failed to contain the disorder, that a new type of approach is needed. So if you have a situation where you have a mass upheaval, but repression succeeds in quashing those rebels relatively quickly, then I would not expect that to be a situation where you turn to invest in education, because the existing tools worked. So it’s really in those contexts, where the masses are perceived as predisposed to violence and also elites believe that the existing tools are insufficient to address that violent predisposition—that’s when you turn to education.

Demsas: I’m very persuaded by your argument. But I think there’s another theory I want to run past you.

I’m a Protestant, and so I’m forced to ask, like, in my bones: What about Protestantism? There’s a great paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann in QJE. They use county-level data from late-19th-century Prussia to figure out whether Protestantism led to better education and higher economic prosperity.

They essentially look at how close a given county was to Wittenberg. Wittenberg is where that story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church happened. Apparently, whether these were nailed or pasted or even posted on the church doors is up for debate by historians, but I choose to imagine him nailing the theses to the door for dramatic Protestant effect.

The economists find a strong effect of distance from Wittenberg on literacy, which they say largely explains the Protestant lead in economic outcomes. Luther himself also called for boys’ and girls’ schools so they could read the Bible, have that kind of personal relationship with God that defines Protestantism against Catholicism.

So I can imagine a story that Protestantism, the development of Martin Luther’s ideas, and the push to develop these schools as a tool of religious education—that this sort of literacy leads to the development of schooling. And then you see the diffusion from Prussia to other countries, because, as you mentioned earlier in our episode, people were going to Prussia and going, like, Why are you so much more prosperous than us, better than us? And they are seeking to just copy things that feel distinctive. What’s wrong with that theory?

Paglayan: I know the paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann that you’re mentioning. I know it very well. I teach it in one of my courses on historical political economy, and I think they are definitely on to something.

It is the case, as you are articulating, that in Prussia, the Protestant elites played an important role, as well, in pushing for mass education. Now, what you have in Prussia is a situation where Protestants had been pushing for mass education for their own religious goals. And then what you then have is, in the 1740s and 1750s, a situation in which you have peasant revolts in the countryside.

And at that point, the king says, Well, we need to do something to contain these peasant revolts and prevent them from recurring in the future. And the king’s advisers tell him, Well, we should use mass education to teach obedience to the state and its laws. And the king turns to Protestants, who have been providing mass education, to get their support on how to repurpose this Protestant education into an education that’s going to help the king’s goal of consolidating his political authority.

And the Protestants, in this process, they give up some of their power to shape education. And in exchange for giving up that power, they get more resources. So for example, they get resources to fund a normal school, which is in charge of training teachers in Berlin. And the state says, Well, we’re going to give you a monopoly right over the training of these teachers, but the schools are going to be supervised by a state authority and no longer by the priests themselves. And the curriculum of the schools and the normal schools, as well, is going to be set by the state itself, not by the church.

So there’s ways in which the Protestant church gives up power in order to get more resources to do some of its projects and reach more people than it had in the past. Now, of course, that’s the story in Prussia. There’s other countries where you also have a legacy of Protestantism, and Protestantism doesn’t really do much there to expand primary education. But in the context of Prussia, I think you are absolutely right that it played a role, but it’s just not sufficient to explain why, then, the state took over this function.

Demsas: This show is about questioning popular narratives, and I think that the idea that mass primary education was expanded by the west as a tool of social control—I think that’s a pretty controversial claim to a lot of people. But I’ll often gut-check my sense of what a popular narrative is with various sources. I’ll look at polling, or I’ll ask various experts in the field or, you know, read books and papers.

One thing I did when preparing for this interview was to just ask my fiancé, who’s not in education at all—he’s a software engineer—why he thought the spread of mass education happened first in the west. And I’m not joking—he immediately walked over to our bookshelf and pulled out a copy of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish.

You mentioned this in your book, but some sociologists, like Foucault, have argued that schools are a tool of social control. The argument goes, you know, many modern institutions—like schools but also, hospitals, factories, and the military—they use confinement, and they normalize meticulous examinations of the body and routines in order to subjugate citizens to the state. Do you view your argument as essentially in line with that school of sociological thought?

Paglayan: I do. I think that one of the contributions of the book is to reinstate that way of thinking about education. So Foucault wrote a lot, as you pointed out, on different ways of disciplining individuals, one of which, according to him, was schools. But Foucault also lost a lot of traction in sociology. There were sociologists who criticized him as providing a very cynical interpretation of history. There were also sociologists who said there was essentially no evidence, systematic evidence, whatsoever for his arguments.

And so I think one of the contributions of the book is to provide a wealth of evidence that Foucault’s work didn’t have, that’s cross-national, that’s across two centuries, showing that indeed social-control goals were at the heart of governments’ efforts to regulate and expand primary education.

And I think the other place where I think I depart from Foucault is in putting an emphasis, in the case of my work, in the role that the state played in creating schools for this disciplining purpose. He talks a lot about how schools discipline students, monitor their behavior, create norms of what constitutes good behavior and what constitutes deviant behavior. There’s a lot of that in Foucault, but what he doesn’t really talk much about is how this function of the school was something that the state itself created and used for its own sake of consolidating political authority.

Demsas: I want to bring us to modern day, because I think a lot of people may find it easier to buy that this expansion of mass education happened in the 1700s, 1800s, even early 1900s as a tool of social control but may find it harder to stomach that that’s what’s happening now.

So much of expanding education is seen as a liberal, even progressive value. It’s seen as a way of empowering people, and even if it was the case that it was the intention hundreds of years ago, at this point, obviously, schools are a democratizing force. They’re a liberalizing force. They’re an empowering force.

So you cite research that talks to, you know, people in developing countries about why they want to expand education and find something that surprised me a lot. So could you tell us about that?

Paglayan: Yes. So these days, it is absolutely true that if you ask a politician why they want to provide education, they’re going to tell you, Well, to promote economic development, to reduce poverty and inequality. In public, that’s what they’re going to say, because to say, We want to provide education to create docile and obedient citizens, would be political suicide, right? So usually that’s not what they’re gonna say.

So what this group of researchers at the Center for Global Development did was to try to get policy makers—they surveyed 900 policy makers across developing countries—to try to get them to reveal their true motive for providing education, without these policy makers knowing that’s what they were revealing.

And so what they used was these forced-choice experiments, where they essentially gave policy makers the option to choose between two different sets of education systems. And what they had was, for example, in Scenario A, an education system that promotes 90 percent docile citizens or dutiful citizens, 10 percent skilled workforce, and 30 percent literate individuals—I don’t remember the specific details, but that’s one scenario. And then another scenario is, instead of 90 percent dutiful citizens, it’s 30 percent dutiful citizens, 90 percent literate workforce.

And essentially, what you’re doing is for people to see, Okay, what do you prefer? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens or 90 percent skilled workforce? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens, or do you prefer 90 percent literate population? without them realizing that’s what they’re doing. And what they saw, by having many different pairs of comparisons and having these policy makers choose between these pairs, was that, by far, forming dutiful citizens was the goal that they prioritized over these other options.

Demsas: I hear you talking about this, and you can’t help but think about the current education-reform movements in the United States. I think that they’re pretty cross-pressured, though, because I tried to think about how I would apply your theories to this kind of modern instantiation of it, and you see cross-pressures within the movement.

On the one hand, Republicans in many states have successfully pushed for decentralization efforts, like allowing the use of public dollars to send your kids to private, religious institutions, homeschooling, places where it’s actually quite difficult to, like, instill control about how people are teaching their children or what they’re learning. But then you also see this desire to eradicate certain books or reaffirm certain ideas about American history, about how racism functioned, about what it means about American identity really in reaction to, you know, the 1619 Project. You see that both in primary [education] but also throughout education, including higher education, like in Florida. How do you think about this? Do you still see this kind of education as a tool of social control?

Because, basically, there are two ways I can read this. One is that there’s a wing of the Republican Party that sees education as a tool of social control that they can continue to use to reaffirm certain ideas about America and what ideas people should believe, whether it’s about gender or race or other things. And on the other hand, there’s a wing in the Republican Party that believes that education is clearly a liberalizing force, and so, We need to decentralize and undermine this sort of public institution.

Paglayan: That’s a very good point. So let me take a few steps back.

So the first thing I’ll say is that when I think of all of the efforts that the Republican Party has made since September 2020 with the creation of the patriotic education commission, or 1776 Commission, at that time, and then all of the subsequent state laws in Republican-controlled states to prohibit the teaching of so-called divisive concepts, such as the idea that there’s institutionalized racism, and all of the book bans that you were just describing—all of these I see as just another example of this pattern that the book identifies, which is a cross-national and a centuries-old pattern of politicians responding to mass protest against the status quo by turning to education to teach children that the status quo is actually okay. To the extent that Republicans are using public education, they want to ensure that public education is repurposed for the sake of teaching kids that the status quo is okay.

And they’re doing this precisely after the Black Lives Matter protests, because that was a set of protests that were nationwide. And that sort of ignited a fear of what the country would look like if we were to reform the institutions that these elites benefit from. Now, I think you’re also right that there are some, and a not small portion within the Republican Party, who say, Well, better yet, let’s get rid of public education, and let’s try to have more education in the hands of parents and religious institutions providing education.

But I think there’s also a realistic sense that you can’t just get rid of public schools. So they’re doing both things at the same time to try to, in some ways, shift enrollment away from public schools but, also, reform public schools so that they serve this specific agenda. The one thing I’ll say, though, Jerusalem, is that we talk right now about how they want to use education to instill a specific set of political and moral values, and that the Republican Party wants to do this.

But in my view, the issue is: Liberals are also doing this. I haven’t really seen much effort on the part of liberals in rethinking education systems and saying, Hey. Yeah, we’re still teaching the Pledge of Allegiance in many states to 5-year-olds. They’re repeating, I swear allegiance to the U.S. flag and to the republic for which it stands. And these are 5-year-olds who don’t know how to write their name yet, much less know what the republic is that they’re swearing allegiance to. What does that even mean?

So there is a lot of continued, persistent use of education to teach a lot of norms, to teach the norm, for instance, that in the U.S., if you want to express discontent, you do it by voting. You don’t do it by protesting. And if you want to protest, it has to be a peaceful protest. That’s a norm. The idea that republican institutions are the best form of government—again, that’s an idea, but it’s not taught in a way that encourages critical thinking.

And I hear a lot of liberals right now saying, Yes, and we shouldn’t teach critical thinking. We should indoctrinate for democracy. And so they’re kind of complicit in some ways. They want to teach a different set of ideas than conservatives, but they still want the education system to serve their own political agenda and teach a specific set of norms, instead of thinking, How can we use education to actually encourage critical thinking? And so that’s something that I also wanted to bring up as part of this conversation.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess we’re coming a little bit full circle from this episode here, where, because maybe I had a unique experience of school or a less-common experience of school—I don’t know—I feel like I learned critical thinking in school. I feel like I was able to get pushback or things like that, but I think there’s a lot of people who have been doing a lot of writing in the tradition of Foucault and others about how that is not the common experience at educational institutions.

Paglayan: Yes. Exactly. And the reality is that the lower the level of income of the student, the more the school tends to be focused on disciplining than on promoting critical thinking. So that’s the other thing, because I talked to some friends or colleagues who tell me, Yeah, but the school that my kid goes to—yeah, the school your kid goes to serves affluent people. And that’s not the group of people that politicians are concerned about disciplining: It’s the people who are at the bottom who need to be taught to stay in their place, to be happy with what they have, and so on. So that’s also relevant here.

Demsas: Well, I think that’s a great place to ask our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Paglayan: So I’ll say that, historically, I’ve been someone who was very focused on my intellectual development and thinking that my brain and my mind are crucial for my well-being. And investing in that is crucial for my well-being. And over the course of time, I’ve come to see that my body is also really important and that, oftentimes, it’s really taking care of acknowledging how I feel in my body that’s more important to figuring out what I really think for my well-being.

And so that’s been sort of a bit of an evolution in trying to not to separate the body from the mind experience, and certainly trying not to prize the mind over the body, which is what I used to do.

Demsas: I have had a very similar experience. Maybe it’s just, like, you’re getting older or whatever, but you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you’re thinking about yourself in terms of, like, Well, I could have just continued reading. I could have continued doing more work. I could do more prep for this interview, or I could have written more.

I also just think the research is getting pretty definitive here about things like stress and not taking care of yourself in that way having serious impacts down the line, in a way that’s really kind of conflicting with advice you get as a kid, which is just, like, Put everything you can. Sleep four hours a night. Neglect all these things about self-care in order to advance your intellectual pursuits. So I feel very similar.

Paglayan: Exactly.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Agustina. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I loved talking with you.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

This is an era of talking about eras. Donald Trump says we’ve just begun a “golden age.” Pundits—responding to the rise of streaming, AI, climate change, and Trump himself—have announced the dawn of post-literacy, post-humanism, and post-neoliberalism. Even Taylor Swift’s tour name tapped into the au courant way of depicting time: not as a river, but as a chapter book. A recent n+1 essay asked, “What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era (and its feelings)?”

Oddly enough, the new edition of Civilization, Sid Meier’s beloved video-game franchise, suggests an answer to that question. In the six previous Civ installments released since 1991, players guide a culture—such as the Aztecs, the Americas, or the French—from prehistory to modernity. Tribes wielding spears and scrolls grow into global empires equipped with nukes and blue jeans. But Civilization VII, out this month, makes a radical change by firmly segmenting the experience into—here’s that word—eras. At times, the resulting gameplay mirrors the pervasive mood of our present age-between-ages: tedious, janky, stranded on the way to somewhere else.

In many ways, the game plays like a thoughtful cosmetic update. You select a civilization and a leader, with options that aren’t only the obvious ones (all hail Empress Harriet Tubman!). The world map looks ever so fantastical, with postcard-perfect coastlines and mountains resembling tall sandcastles. Then, in addictive turn after turn, you befriend or conquer neighboring tribes (using sleek new systems for war and diplomacy), discover technologies such as the wheel and bronze-working, and cultivate cities filled with art and industry. The big twist is that all the while, an icon on-screen accumulates percentage points. When it gets somewhere above 70 percent, a so-called crisis erupts: Maybe your citizens rebel; maybe waves of outsiders attack. At 100 percent, the game pauses to announce that the “Antiquity Age” is over. Time isn’t just marching on—your civilization is about to molt, caterpillar-style.

[Read: Easy mode is actually for adults]

In each of the two subsequent ages—Exploration, Modern—players pick a new society to transform into. In my first go, my ancient Romans became the Spanish, who sent galleons to distant lands. Then I founded modern America and got to work laying down a railroad network. Over time, my conquistadors retired, and my pagan temples got demolished to make way for grocery stores. Yet certain attributes persisted. For example, the Roman tradition of efficiently constructing civic works made building the Statue of Liberty easier. As I played, the word civilization came to feel newly expansive. I wasn’t running a country; I was tending to a lineage of peoples who had gone by a few names but shared a past, a homeland, self-interest, and that hazy thing called culture.

In the run-up to the game, Civilization’s developers have argued that the eras system is realistic. No nation-state has continuously spanned the thousands of years that a typical Civ game simulates; the closest counterexample might be China, which is playable as three different dynastic forms (plus Mongolia) in this game. Although Civ’s remix of history is always a bit wacky, in my head, I could maintain a plausible-ish narrative to explain why my America’s cities featured millennia-old colonnades (to quote a colleague: Are We Rome?). Each era-ending crisis created a credible kind of drama: In real life, revolutions, reformations, migration, invasion, disasters, and so much else can reshape societies in fundamental ways. The game succeeds at making the case that, as its creators like to say, “history is built in layers.”

Unfortunately, in the most recent version of the game, history also feels overdetermined. Winning in previous Civs meant accomplishing one self-evidently climactic feat—conquering Earth, say, or mastering spaceflight. During the many hours it took to get to that goal, you enjoyed immense freedom to improvise your own path. Civ VII, however, adds on a menu of goals for each era. To succeed in the Antiquity Age, for example, you might build seven Wonders of the World; in modernity, you could mass-produce a certain number of factory goods and then form a world bank. The micro objectives lend each era a sense of a narrative cohesion—but a limiting and predictable kind, less epic novel than completed checklist. Playing Civilization used to feel like living through an endless dawn of possibility. But this time, you’re not in command of history; history is in command of you, and it’s assigning you busywork.

[Read: What will become of American civilization?]

Making matters worse, the complexity of the eras mechanism seems to have encouraged the game’s designers to simplify other features—or, less charitably, to just pay those features less care. I played on what should have been a challenging level of difficulty—four on a six-point scale—but I still smoked the computer-controlled opponents, who seemed programmed to act meekly and unambitiously. Picking your form of government used to feel like an existential choice, but now despotism and oligarchy are hardly differentiated. Complicated ideas have been reduced to childish mini-games: Achieving cultural hegemony in Civ VI meant fostering soft power through a variety of options—curating art museums, building iconic monuments, shipping rock bands off on global tours—but in Civ VII, it’s mostly a matter of sending explorers to random places to dig up artifacts. Luckily, many of these problems seem fixable, and later downloadable updates may make the game richer and more satisfying.

Still, I worry that the dull anxiety that can creep in over a session of Civ VII results from a deeper flaw: the strictly defined ages. I like that the game wants to honor how societies really can change in sweeping, sudden ways. But in gaming and in life, fixating on an episodic view of time—prophecies of rise and fall, cycles of malaise and renewal—can have a diminishing effect on the present. Civilization VII suggests why the what’s-next anxieties of our times, stuck between mourning yesterday and anticipating tomorrow, can be so draining. Time actually doesn’t move in chunks. At best, eras are an imprecise tool to make sense of the messy past, and at worst, they rob us of our sense of agency. It’s healthiest to buy into the old Civilization fantasy, the dream that’s always propelled humans forward: We’re going to last.

Photographs by Chris Hoare

Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.

For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”

Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.

Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.

[Read: When the culture wars came for the theater]

“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”

In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).

These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”

[Ethan Zuckerman: America is no longer the home of the free internet]

These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”

But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.

Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:

“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.

As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”

Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticThe script of Una Marson’s At What a Price

“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”

From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”

Universal History Archive / GettyA cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.

Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”

By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.

It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”

[From the January 1930 issue: Edward Weeks on the practice of censorship]

These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.

Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.

Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticInside the archive 

There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.

“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.

Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

At least 33 countries, mostly in the Americas, provide automatic citizenship to anyone born within their borders.

Becoming a public-health expert means learning how to envision humanity’s worst-case scenarios for infectious disease. For decades, though, no one in the U.S. has had to consider the full danger of some of history’s most devastating pathogens. Widespread vaccination has eliminated several diseases—among them, measles, polio, and rubella—from the country, and kept more than a dozen others under control. But in the past few years, as childhood-vaccination rates have dipped nationwide, some of infectious disease’s ugliest hypotheticals have started to seem once again plausible.

The new Trump administration has only made the outlook more tenuous. Should Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists, be confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services, for instance, his actions could make a future in which diseases resurge in America that much more likely. His new position would grant him substantial power over the FDA and the CDC, and he is reportedly weighing plans—including one to axe a key vaccine advisory committee—that could prompt health-care providers to offer fewer shots to kids, and inspire states to repeal mandates for immunizations in schools. (Kennedy’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kennedy’s goal, as he has said, is to offer people more choice, and many Americans likely would still enthusiastically seek out vaccines. Most Americans support childhood vaccination and vaccine requirements for schools; a KFF poll released today found, though, that even in the past year the proportion of parents who say they skipped or delayed shots for their children has risen, to one in six. The more individuals who choose to eschew vaccination, the closer those decisions would bring society’s collective defenses to cracking. The most visceral effects might not be obvious right away. For some viruses and bacteria to break through, the country’s immunization rates may need to slip quite a bit. But for others, the gap between no outbreak and outbreak is uncomfortably small. The dozen experts I spoke with for this story were confident in their pessimism about how rapidly epidemics might begin.

[Read: How America’s fire wall against disease starts to fail]

Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of one of the two rotavirus vaccines available in the U.S., needs only to look at his own family to see the potential consequences. His parents were born into the era of the deadly airway disease diphtheria; he himself had measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, and risked contracting polio. Vaccination meant that his own kids didn’t have to deal with any of these diseases. But were immunization rates to fall too far, his children’s children very well could. Unlike past outbreaks, those future epidemics would sweep across a country that, having been free of these diseases for so long, is no longer equipped to fight them.

“Yeah,” Offit said when I asked him to paint a portrait of a less vaccinated United States. “Let’s go into the abyss.”

Should vaccination rates drop across the board, one of the first diseases to be resurrected would almost certainly be measles. Experts widely regard the viral illness, which spreads through the air, as the most infectious known pathogen. Before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, the virus struck an estimated 3 million to 4 million Americans each year, about 1,000 of whom would suffer serious swelling of the brain and roughly 400 to 500 of whom would die. Many survivors had permanent brain damage. Measles can also suppress the immune system for years, leaving people susceptible to other infections.

Vaccination was key to ridding the U.S. of measles, declared eliminated here in 2000. And very high rates of immunity—about 95 percent vaccine coverage, experts estimate—are necessary to keep the virus out. “Just a slight dip in that is enough to start spurring outbreaks,” Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. Which has been exactly the case. Measles outbreaks do still occur in American communities where vaccination rates are particularly low, and as more kids have missed their MMR shots in recent years, the virus has found those openings. The 16 measles outbreaks documented in the U.S. in 2024 made last year one of the country’s worst for measles since the turn of the millennium.

But for all measles’ speed, “I would place a bet on whooping cough being first,” Samuel Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University, told me. The bacterial disease can trigger months of coughing fits violent enough to fracture ribs. Its severest consequences include pneumonia, convulsions, and brain damage. Although slower to transmit than measles, it has never been eliminated from the U.S., so it’s poised for rampant spread. Chickenpox poses a similar problem. Although corralled by an effective vaccine in the 1990s, the highly contagious virus still percolates at low levels through the country. Plenty of today’s parents might still remember the itchy blisters it causes as a rite of passage, but the disease’s rarer complications can be as serious as sepsis, uncontrolled bleeding, and bacterial infections known as “flesh-eating disease.” And the disease is much more serious in older adults.

Those are only some of the diseases the U.S. could have to deal with. Kids who get all of the vaccines routinely recommended in childhood are protected against 16 diseases—each of which would have some probability of making a substantial comeback, should uptake keep faltering. Perhaps rubella would return, infecting pregnant women, whose children could be born blind or with heart defects. Maybe meningococcal disease, pneumococcal disease, or Haemophilus influenzae disease, each caused by bacteria commonly found in the airway, would skyrocket, and with them rates of meningitis and pneumonia. The typical ailments of childhood—day-care colds, strep throat, winter norovirus waves—would be joined by less familiar and often far more terrifying problems: the painful, swollen necks of mumps; the parching diarrhea of rotavirus; the convulsions of tetanus. For far too many of these illnesses, “the only protection we have,” Stanley Plotkin, a vaccine expert and one of the developers of the rubella vaccine, told me, “is a vaccine.”

Exactly how and when outbreaks of these various diseases could play out—if they do at all—is impossible to predict. Vaccination rates likely wouldn’t fall uniformly across geographies and demographics. They also wouldn’t decrease linearly, or even quickly. People might more readily refuse vaccines that were developed more recently and have been politicized (think HPV or COVID shots). And existing immunity could, for a time, still buffer against an infectious deluge, especially from pathogens that remain quite rare globally. Polio, for instance, would be harder than measles to reestablish in the United States: It was declared eliminated from the Americas in the 1990s, and remains endemic to only two countries. This could lead to a false impression that declining vaccination rates have little impact.

A drop in vaccination rates, after all, doesn’t guarantee an outbreak—a pathogen must first find a vulnerable population. This type of chance meeting could take years. Then again, infiltrations might not take long in a world interconnected by travel. The population of this country is also more susceptible to disease than it has been in past decades. Americans are, on average, older; obesity rates are at a historical high. The advent of organ transplants and cancer treatments has meant that a substantial sector of the population is immunocompromised; many other Americans are chronically ill. Some of these individuals don’t mount protective responses to vaccinations at all, which leaves them reliant on immunity in others to keep dangerous diseases at bay.

If various viruses and bacteria began to recirculate in earnest, the chance of falling ill would increase even for healthy, vaccinated adults. Vaccines don’t offer comprehensive or permanent protection, and the more pathogen around, the greater its chance of breaking through any one person’s defenses. Immunity against mumps and whooping cough is incomplete, and known to wane in the years after vaccination. And although immunity generated by the measles vaccine is generally thought to be quite durable, experts can’t say for certain how durable, Bill Hanage, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me: The only true measure would be to watch the virus tear through a population that hasn’t dealt with it in decades.

Perhaps the most unsettling feature of a less vaccinated future, though, is how unprepared the U.S. is to confront a resurgence of pathogens. Most health-care providers in the country no longer have the practical knowledge to diagnose and treat diseases such as measles and polio, Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University, told me: They haven’t needed it. Many pediatricians have never even seen chickenpox outside of a textbook.

To catch up, health-care providers would need to familiarize themselves with signs and symptoms they may have seen only in old textbooks or in photographs. Hospitals would need to use diagnostic tests that haven’t been routine in years. Some of those tools might be woefully out of date, because pathogens have evolved; antibiotic resistance could also make certain bacterial infections more difficult to expunge than in decades prior. And some protocols may feel counterintuitive, Offit said: The ultra-contagiousness of measles could warrant kids with milder cases being kept out of health-care settings, and kids with Haemophilus influenzae might need to be transported to the hospital without an ambulance, to minimize the chances that the stress and cacophony would trigger a potentially lethal spasm.

[Read: Here’s how we know RFK Jr. is wrong about vaccines]

The learning curve would be steep, Titanji said, stymieing care for the sick. The pediatric workforce, already shrinking, might struggle to meet the onslaught, leaving kids—the most likely victims of future outbreaks—particularly susceptible, Sallie Permar, the chief pediatrician at NewYork–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, told me. If already overstretched health-care workers were further burdened, they’d be more likely to miss infections early on, making those cases more difficult to treat. And if epidemiologists had to keep tabs on more pathogens, they’d have less capacity to track any single infectious disease, making it easier for one to silently spread.

The larger outbreaks grow, the more difficult they are to contain. Eventually, measles could once again become endemic in the U.S. Polio could soon follow suit, imperiling the fight to eradicate the disease globally, Virginia Pitzer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Yale, told me. In a dire scenario—the deepest depths of the abyss—average lifespans in the U.S. could decline, as older people more often fall sick, and more children under 5 die. Rebottling many of these diseases would be a monumental task. Measles was brought to heel in the U.S. only by decades of near-comprehensive vaccination; re-eliminating it from the country would require the same. But the job this time would be different, and arguably harder—not merely coaxing people into accepting a new vaccine, but persuading them to take one that they’ve opted out of.

That future is by no means guaranteed—especially if Americans recall what is at stake. Many people in this country are too young to remember the cost these diseases exacted. But Edwards, who has been a pediatrician for 50 years, is not. As a young girl, she watched a childhood acquaintance be disabled by polio. She still vividly recalls patients she lost to meningitis decades ago. The later stages of her career have involved fewer spinal taps, fewer amputations. Because of vaccines, the job of caring for children, nowadays, simply involves far less death.