Torrential rain pummels city still reeling from effects of devastating Storm Daniel earlier this month.

My mother used to tell a certain story at family parties when trying to explain why my sisters and I didn’t really speak Cantonese, my parents’ primary language. It’s probably a familiar narrative, especially to kids of immigrants in America. Still, it stung every time I heard it.

When my oldest sister, Steph, was in her suburban-Connecticut kindergarten, she returned home one afternoon embarrassed and upset, and insisted that our parents talk to her only in English. Steph was young and doesn’t remember the specifics, though the scenario is easy to imagine: some kid, probably oblivious but still cruel. Our parents, who came to the United States separately from Guangzhou, China, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Hong Kong, spoke mostly the Chinese dialects Cantonese and Taishanese to us, but also possessed fluent English from their education in colonial Hong Kong. They conceded to Steph’s request, my father told me, and we became a primarily English-speaking household. Although my sisters and I could understand and speak some Cantonese (mine was the most limited, because I was the youngest; I was born a few years after Steph’s kindergarten incident), the ability faded as we aged.

The term for what my sisters and I experienced—the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill—is language attrition, and research shows that it occurs rapidly. Linguists say that in many cases, a heritage language becomes all but extinct by the time a family’s third generation is living in a new country. The reason is simple, according to scholars I spoke with: A language stays alive when used out of necessity. And the longer a group lives in a new country, the more likely another language will take its place.

Attrition can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration. For me, though, the outcome also feels dire. The thought of future generations of our family having even less of a connection to my parents’ language than I do stirs a specific melancholy in me, a sense of relinquishing something greater than myself—a shared history, perhaps. For a long time, I experimented with different methods of learning Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, the most common Chinese dialect and the one for which learning resources are easier to find. I tried a college course, a tutor, online classes, Duolingo, watching films from Hong Kong. Throughout, I asked myself: What was the hole that I was trying to fill by attempting to absorb my family’s language? And was it possible to reverse this attrition, so that the next generation wouldn’t have to experience it?

Three and a half decades after my sister Steph renounced her Chinese, these questions return to me when I’m visiting her in the suburbs of New York City. I’m helping her take care of her children, who suffer none of my language anxieties.

Her 3-year-old daughter is home from day care and hunched over an iPad that is playing Frozen II in Mandarin. She turns to me beseechingly. “Wo yao li,” she says. Translation: She wants something, though I don’t know what.

“‘Li’? ‘Li’ shi shenme? What is ‘li’ in English?” I ask her, translating myself.

She studies me with a cool, appraising expression. She knows the English word for li. She’s just hazing me, Steph will confirm later. Bored, my niece turns back to the movie.

I type different fruit names into Google Translate. After a few minutes, I learn with sheepish amusement that li, spoken in a rising tone, means “pear.”

My niece and her 5-year-old brother speak mostly Mandarin to their parents. My sister’s in-laws—Mandarin speakers—live nearby and often look after the kids, which has helped reinforce the dialect as the household’s dominant language. That, plus the Saturday Chinese school the kids attend every week. And—crucially—my sister’s hard work.

Steph primarily speaks to her children in a mix of English and elementary, self-taught Mandarin. She has spent hours translating her kids’ books and labeling mundane objects around the house with their Chinese names, memorizing the characters for “light switch” and “refrigerator” in the process. The family watches the Mandarin versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Bluey, and Moana, and in her free time, Steph uses Duolingo for her own lessons.

The result is that I’m constantly amazed by my niece’s and nephew’s linguistic abilities. I’ve also had a preview of the incredible parental labor required to raise children in a language one is also learning.

Much of it involves making peace with being outsmarted by children who toggle seamlessly between two languages, and who, in my case, sometimes correct my pronunciation. My nephew and niece sense that my Chinese is lacking, and converse with me in English. This behavior isn’t a snub, but kind of feels like a cause for shame, because it comes from a child. I try to cobble together my broken Mandarin to keep up. I realize that I can no longer joke that my Chinese is “toddler level,” because my toddler niece has far surpassed my abilities.

Steph has told me that having her children speak Chinese—whether that’s her Cantonese dialect or her husband’s Mandarin—is one of the most meaningful ways for them to engage with their lineage. To be proficient in a language makes you not merely a cultural spectator that passively enjoys food or classic films with subtitles, but an active participant. You can contribute information to a conversation; you can entertain others with your wit; you can give rather than just take.

I’ve always wondered about the relationship that any future children of mine might have to their family history. Yet there’s a comfort in what my sister has achieved. To me, she has wrested back some semblance of control. Her kids—and maybe even Steph herself—are connected to their past in a manner that I am not.

The key to reversing language attrition is simple in theory and difficult in practice: Expose your children to the language. “It’s really about time with that language—and high-quality time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, whose work focuses on infant development and language acquisition, told me. “When we say ‘high quality,’ we mean interactions with real people, with the things that parents and adults normally do, so just talking back and forth.”

Byers-Heinlein said the figure varies, but a child typically has to have a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with those high-quality interactions in order to be able to speak a second language proficiently. She walked me through a hypothetical scenario: Say a kid attends a three-hour Chinese school each Saturday, and hears Chinese only in that environment. If this child were to sleep 12 hours a night (optimistic!), that would mean they were awake for 84 hours that week. The child would need at least an additional 14 hours a week of Chinese interactions.

The challenge is how to boost a child’s exposure when the parents don’t speak the language well themselves. In these cases, a parent’s key resource is a community, Maria M. Carreira, a Spanish professor at California State University at Long Beach and a co-founder of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, told me. For parents to rustle up the 20 to 25 percent of waking hours needed in a language, perhaps they can rely on schools or day-care centers that teach in multiple languages, extended family close by, play groups or library storytimes, caregivers who speak the language.

Of course, so much depends on where someone lives in the U.S. and how many generations their family has been in the country. A nationwide survey that Carreira and colleagues conducted from 2007 to 2009 analyzed people learning their heritage languages, among them Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Persian. Carreira and the late UCLA professor Olga E. Kagan noted in a subsequent report on their findings that Spanish-speaking respondents had some of the highest levels of proficiency, which they attributed to the closeness of Latin America to the U.S., as well as to the country’s large population of Spanish speakers. Though most Mandarin and Cantonese heritage-language learners surveyed were—like the Spanish speakers—born in the U.S. or had arrived before age 11, their exposure to their heritage language “was considerably more limited than that of Spanish speakers.” The researchers pointed out some potential reasons: Compared with Spanish speakers, fewer Mandarin and Cantonese speakers visited their (or their parents’) birth country each year, and nearly half of them reported never having read in their heritage language.

These data fed my curiosity about how Asian American parents in particular navigate teaching their children a heritage language they’ve lost. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed an influx of newcomers from Asian countries, my parents included; many Asian Americans around my age were thus the first in our families to be born in America. Through our immigrant parents, we understand our heritage. And we’re also, by virtue of being born here, indelibly American. How we raise children—and in what language—can feel like an inflection point for our cultures.

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These challenges are hardly unique to Asian Americans, however. Silvina Montrul, a linguist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, notes in her recent book, Native Speakers, Interrupted, that “in the United States, English is the language of power and the language children choose to speak with their peers.” She nods to the work of colleagues who found that in Miami, some children who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English and Spanish at school still chose to converse in English outside school.

Montrul, who is Argentinian, went to remarkable lengths to make sure that her two daughters spoke Spanish. She formed the University Language Academy, an after-school and summer immersion program for children ages 4 to 17. She recalls that she was particularly firm in making Spanish the primary language she used to interact with her daughters, even when one—in an echo of my sister Steph’s story—begged her not to. Montrul says that if a child picks up another language before puberty, there’s a good chance they’ll sound like a native speaker with continued exposure and use. But without that practice, the language can just as easily fade. “As I say in my work, children are great language learners,” Montrul told me over the phone, “but they are also great language losers.”

Even though America is full of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, Americans tend not to speak multiple languages. According to the nonprofit American Councils for International Education, only 20 percent of K–12 students take foreign-language classes. In Norway, Romania, and Luxembourg, by contrast, every primary- and secondary-school student takes foreign-language classes. And even European countries with lower percentages of students learning a foreign language far outpace the U.S.: Greece with 87 percent, Portugal with 69 percent, and Belgium with 64 percent. Large immigrant populations have historically brought new languages to America, yet as the scholars Rubén G. Rumbaut and Douglas S. Massey note, the country has a “well established reputation as a graveyard for immigrant languages.” This is no aberration; it is grounded in decades of policy and sentiment.

Efforts to suppress languages other than English were present even in the country’s earliest days. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to so-called residential schools to be educated according to white American standards; they were punished for speaking their own languages.

In 1915, speaking at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that there was “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” He would proclaim four years later in a letter to the American Defense Society that the U.S. had “room for but one language here, and that is the English language.” Roosevelt’s words foreshadowed a posture of monolingualism. The following century of American hegemony allowed this approach: People in other countries have had to learn English to apply to study at American colleges, to conduct business with American companies, or to understand the nuances of Hollywood films. Americans have felt far less pressure to reciprocate by learning foreign languages.

Today, true fluency in multiple languages is uncommon in most of the United States, even as it exists in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, where the government weaves multiple languages into daily life through street signs and official forms. Legislation in Wales and Quebec have established Welsh and French, respectively, as official languages. In Wales, nearly 30 percent of people age 3 or older can speak Welsh—about 900,000 people—according to a population survey from 2022. In Quebec, just under 86 percent of people said in a 2021 analysis that they spoke French regularly at home.

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Compare that with Hawaii, where U.S. authorities banned teaching in the native language in the 19th century. Not until 1978 was the state constitution amended and Hawaiian recognized as an official language; prior to this change, fewer than 2,500 people spoke Hawaiian, most of them 60 years or older, according to Larry Kimura, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. To try to save the language, educators created a nonprofit preschool, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a Hawaiian immersion program that has become a model for indigenous-language revitalization around the world. ‘Aha Pūnana Leo and its Hi’ipēpē Infant Program now have more than 6,000 alumni, and the organization has offshoots that extend Hawaiian immersion schooling all the way to college. If language can be decimated by government policies, efforts around the world have shown that language can also be saved from extinction, even if progress is often fragile.

In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort.

Betty Choi, a pediatrician who lives outside Santa Barbara, California, and is the author of the children’s book Human Body Learning Lab, is another remarkable example of just how far a dedicated approach to language instruction can go. Choi grew up in Syracuse, New York, and wanted to connect her two young children to the memory of her late parents, who spoke various dialects of Chinese, and to her husband’s family, who live across the country and speak Korean. So Choi set about teaching herself and her children Mandarin and Korean.

Over a few years, she cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages. (Few other Asian Americans live where Choi does, which presents a particular challenge, she told me, in her effort to expose her children to Chinese and Korean outside the house.) Eventually, Choi created her own curriculum, which she parlayed into what is now Chalk Academy, an online resource for raising multilingual children that includes worksheets; articles; and suggestions for books, toys, and activities that help facilitate learning Chinese and Korean.

Choi’s children are now conversational in Mandarin and have retained a small number of Korean words. (“It was painful to watch my children forget Korean so quickly,” Choi wrote in an email, sharing that the Korean words they mostly say now are: ttong (poop), bang-gu (fart), and saja (lion), referring to a favorite stuffed animal.) She’s worried they will start to lose their Mandarin, too, as the English terms they’re learning at school and with friends outpace the amount of self-taught Mandarin she can speak to them at home. “But my kids know that Chinese language is a family value, not simply an extracurricular activity. As such, Mandarin is still the primary language that I speak with my children,” Choi wrote. Still, the children might reply in English, Mandarin, or a mix of the two.

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There is, of course, another alternative to either total fluency or abandoning a language. Hieu Truong, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the area, has a 4-year-old son and a six-month-old baby. She’s slowly trying to introduce her children to Vietnamese, but has remained realistic about their potential bilingualism and her own abilities.

Truong, whose parents left Vietnam for the U.S. in the early ’80s, says she can understand, speak, and read only a little Vietnamese—enough to order in a restaurant, but maybe not enough to digest the newspaper. Truong sometimes reads her son children’s books in Vietnamese—through those books, she learned the words for, say, “zebra” and “giraffe” herself, and he’s now familiar with basic Vietnamese words, like the one for “numbers.” Truong also benefits from resources that didn’t exist when she grew up: Netflix shows and movies dubbed in Vietnamese; activity books and flashcards sold online; resources such as the SEAD Project, a Minneapolis-based organization that offers Hmong, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao language courses, and emphasizes the history and culture of the Southeast Asian diaspora through its programming.

For her son, “fluency isn’t necessarily the goal,” Truong told me. She knows personally how hard it is to maintain proficiency and doesn’t want to add that pressure. “But I do want him exposed to it. I want him to go into a Vietnamese restaurant and be like, ‘Okay, I know what’s going on.’ I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

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Ultimately, Truong said that a big part of teaching her son Vietnamese is “untangling” the objective for herself versus the one for her toddler. Here, I relate to her, even though our goals differ. Being far from family and a network of Cantonese speakers with whom I could interact on a daily basis makes the goal of everyday fluency difficult to attain. But I long for the emotional closeness that comes with an ease of interaction. Having only a vague familiarity with a language is like navigating the world with blurred vision. Everything appears with softened edges, and I am forever grasping for true meaning, deciphering fuzzy translations. I can see the outline of things, but I can’t be confident that I truly know what I’m seeing.

Fluency would sharpen my focus. It would allow me to see and participate in the small details of my life that are rendered in Cantonese: the textures of a conversation with extended family, the jokes that unfold at the dinner table, the subtext that is begging to be teased out with a gentle question. I’m seeking to know more of these tiny moments.

This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too. I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal. Language facilitates many things: at its most basic, a transfer of information, and at its most complex, an exchange of emotion. But perhaps what I value above all else is that it grants intimacy.

Greece’s population is shrinking, and tourism - its biggest economic success story - is making matters worse.

Caesars are back, big caesars and little caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and developing nations. The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed strongmen strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings and plotting a comeback after a humiliating fall. And we thought it couldn’t happen here. How can these uncouth figures with their funny hair, their rude manners, and their bad jokes take such a hold on the popular imagination? How can anyone bear to listen to their endless resentful rants? Surely, they can’t get away with this? People will see through them before it’s too late.

But no. Here they are again, and in numbers. Look who’s leading in Argentina’s presidential race: Javier Milei, a former tantric-sex coach with a wild mop of dark hair and Elvis-impersonator sideburns, known as El Peluca (“The Wig”), who stumps the stage to the backing of a hard-rock group. El Peluca promotes monetarism, free love, and the sale of human organs; claims that climate change is a hoax; and wants to burn down the central bank and close the ministry of education—in short, a ragbag of eye-catchers, because eye-catching is what the would-be caesar is all about.

The little caesars of today seem to get along quite nicely without any systematic ideology worth the name. For what consistent line have Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and even Britain’s Boris Johnson been operating on, beyond a shouty sort of nationalism and a carefully advertised hostility to immigrants—a mixture familiar from ancient times? The great Pericles himself instituted a law barring anyone not of Athenian parentage from claiming citizenship (his own, foreign-born mistress fell foul of the law).

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Yet why should this surprise us? Dictators of one sort or another have been an ever-lurking threat throughout history. They interrupted and betrayed the constitutional traditions of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic: Peisistratos, Critias, and the Thirty Tyrants in Athens; Sulla, Marius, and Julius Caesar in Rome. As early as the time of Thucydides and Plato, the word tyrannos had mutated from a neutral term for “king” into our modern pejorative sense of “tyrant.” Absolutist rulers broke up the city-states of medieval Germany and Italy.

Nice-minded people may shy away from lumping together the excesses of a petty charlatan with the horrific deeds of a mass murderer. How can there be any comparison between a Johnson and a Putin? But only a dullard could fail to notice the painful similarities in their methods: the unabashed mendacity; the contempt for law, parliaments, and due process; and, above all, the relentless propaganda, inflaming old resentments and provoking new ones. “Propaganda, propaganda, now it all depends on propaganda,” Adolf Hitler declared at a tense moment during the Beer Hall Putsch. The putsch failed. But the lesson was learned, and not just by Hitler.

Big caesars may come to power by outright lawless violence or by more or less legitimate means, as Louis-Napoléon, Benito Mussolini, and even Hitler did, and then consolidate their dictatorship in a so-called self-coup or autogolpe. Little caesars go only as far as they need to within a reassuring constitutional framework, which of course they cynically abuse by fixing elections, neutering parliament, and manipulating the courts. “Tinpot dictators” says it nicely. Yes, caesars occupy a broad spectrum, but the caesarist style is always much the same.

It is an uncomfortable thought that caesars may pop up in any country and under all sorts of economic and political conditions. Which is why so many of us prefer not to think it. We would rather look back on any such experience as an unlucky blip that left scarcely a scratch on the body politic, mere “kerfuffle,” as Boris Johnson notoriously brushed aside Trump’s impeachment and acquittal on charges of inciting insurrection against his own government.

But the damage is real enough. In Britain, the tendency on the political right is to concede, at most, that Johnson was too chaotic to be prime minister, too much of a joker to get anything much done. But it was largely Johnson’s personal achievement to smash the U.K.’s legal and political ties with Europe and cripple its continental trade. Less noticed are Johnson’s Five Acts, which came into force last year: restricting the right to judicial review; dissuading the poor from voting by requiring ID at polling stations (which even Johnson’s ally Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg described as a form of “gerrymandering”); bringing the Electoral Commission under the direct control of the government; granting the prime minister the unrestricted right to dissolve Parliament; giving the police the right to ban “noisy” protests; and, of course, stringent (but so far wholly ineffective) immigration controls. These measures bear a strong family resemblance to the repressive Six Acts of Lord Liverpool’s government in 1819, and are likely to be remembered with equal loathing.

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Those who continue to indulge the memory of Johnson as an overpromoted but endearing clown who kept us amused for a while should also recall his power-grabbing and obnoxious style of government. He purged the party of 21 senior members of Parliament, including two ex-chancellors of the exchequer. He sacked some half a dozen top civil servants in defiance of constitutional tradition. He expanded the Downing Street apparat from a few dozen to more than 100 functionaries. He diluted the ministerial code, so that offenders might escape with a reprimand instead of automatic dismissal, and then proceeded to let off or ignore a string of gropers and chiselers. And he repeatedly lied to Parliament about Partygate, which forced him to slink out of office in a humiliating exit never before experienced by a British prime minister.

Last year in the U.K., the Year of the Three Prime Ministers, may not have been as bloody as A.D. 69 in ancient Rome, the Year of the Four Emperors (two of them were murdered and a third topped himself). But it was a uniquely excruciating moment in our modern political history, when chaos collapsed into farce, and at ruinous expense to the nation, while the world looked on in amazement and contempt.

And how has America fared? There was nothing original about Trump’s agenda. Protectionism, hostility to foreign entanglements, persecution of immigrants (the title of Most Hated Immigrants passing over the years from the Italians to the Irish to the Jews, to the Chinese, to the Japanese, to the Mexicans)—all of this has been the staple fare of the American right since the 19th century. What is original about Trump, as is true of all caesars and would-be caesars, is the technique: the tweets, the rallies, the bullying, the nicknames, the floodlights, the slogans.  

A caesar creates his own visual culture and basks in it. Emperor Augustus had the text of his boastful brief autobiography, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, cast in bronze or carved in stone and then erected in public spaces all across the empire; today you can still see surviving fragments of this huge exercise in global PR. Ever since, the caesar has been a pioneer in the use of new media, including the inventions of printing and photography, the development of advertising, later cinema, radio, and television, and finally—perhaps most potent of all—social media, which gives him unrivaled direct access to every voter. Trump said quite frankly, “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here.”

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The caesar’s delight in the visual image is no accident. He thrives in the moment; he is the enemy of long-winded statutes and codes of law and practice, and is the king of the photo opportunity. He is an endless source of stunts, gestures, masquerades: He may appear in the guise of a Greek god or a Roman emperor, or a construction worker or a fighter pilot, never resting in his efforts to convince the public that life is simply more vibrant, more fun when he is around. His verbal messages are deliberately simple, aimed at the lowest common denominator in his audience (a method extolled ad nauseam by the author of Mein Kampf). These communications also necessarily involve a good deal of distortion of the truth. Caesars are shameless liars. After two millennia, scholars have cottoned on to the fact that Julius Caesar embellished or invented large parts of his history of the Gallic Wars. Napoleon’s communiqués were so overblown that “to lie like a bulletin” became a catchphrase.

Caesars know how to intimidate as well as charm, to frighten and shock, often by the use of foul language. Remember how Johnson scuppered Theresa May’s deal with the European Union by repeatedly denouncing it as “polishing a turd.” When, in the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell was attacked by judges for his lawless actions, he reportedly vilified them for invoking “Magna Farta,” and called the Petition of Right “the Petition of Shite.”

Only a caesar can get things moving by making the circumstances abnormal. Otherwise, the new “national conservatism”—or the less pleasant inflections that its name brings to mind—is likely to remain the niche pursuit of a disgruntled minority. Yet the one thing that the movement’s Statement of Principles does not mention is leadership, because its promoters know that this is an indecent subject. The yearning for a strongman cannot be openly admitted. But they can’t do without him.

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Only a caesar has the chutzpah to break the rules, and to break open the treasury, as Julius Caesar did to grab the gold and silver needed to prosecute his war against Pompey, and Trump did under his emergency decree 9844 to grab the billions of dollars to build his Mexican wall, which Congress had denied him. By contrast, the idea that there is some hidden continuity between the conservatism of, say, Margaret Thatcher and today’s new right is fantasy. Thatcher was bossy and overbearing, and she made quite a few bad mistakes (her attempt to impose a poll tax, for one), but she was a stickler for the rules—as well as being a qualified lawyer, not a profession followed by most caesars—and she was deeply distressed when she was thought to have broken the code, as, for example, over the Westland Affair.

Political analysts are rather reluctant to consider the phenomenon of caesarism. They prefer to think up new abstractions, or revive old ones, to describe the political tendencies of our day: authoritarian populism, white nationalism, illiberal democracy, neofascism. These terms may convey the broad outline of what we see around us, but not the motive force: We get a good idea of what the cart looks like, but where’s the bloody horse? Without the spark of a caesar, the rumbling discontents are unlikely to catch fire. Caesarism isn’t just a cute trope; it’s an ever-recurring danger. The crucial thing is to spot the incoming caesar before he crosses the Rubicon—and above all, to stop him from doing the comeback-kid act. Nobody said it was easy.

But it can be done. This is an age of caesar-toppling, too. In the past three years, a U.S. president has been impeached twice, before and after being thrown out by the voters, and a British prime minister has been forced to resign by mass defections among his own ministers and then forced to leave the House of Commons by the Privileges Committee. The constitutional checks and balances worked. Accountability kicked in. We must never fall into the complacency of assuming that we have reached some liberal-democratic nirvana. History goes on, and it is still ours to make and remake. If applied with a little persistence, the rules can always break the rule-breakers in the end.

In 1802, a marble procession of horses, humans, and gods was chiseled and sawed off the pediments where they had long watched over Athens, and marched overland to the port of Piraeus to begin a forced odyssey from which they have not yet returned. In Alexandria, at about the same time, a slab of igneous rock etched with Greek and hieroglyphics was packed onto a 40-gun ship and made to brave the waves of the Mediterranean. Later, a colossal pair of winged lions floated on rafts down the Tigris to Baghdad and eventually sailed out of the Persian Gulf, around Africa’s cape, and into the Atlantic. In 1868, a giant, heavy-browed head undertook an even longer journey, voyaging all the way from Polynesia to London, to converge with these other ancient travelers inside a single building called the British Museum.

When the British Museum opened its doors to the public in 1759, it was a new thing in the world. Scholars of museology have since given it a name: an “encyclopedic museum,” an institution that tries to tell the whole story of human culture across a single collection of objects. The Brits’ idea caught on. After the Bastille fell, the Jacobins converted the Louvre royal palace into a museum with similarly comprehensive aims. During the 19th and 20th centuries, American industrialists filled the Met and the Getty with encyclopedic collections.

The philosopher Ivan Gaskell has described an object’s entry into these collections as a “secular consecration,” which sets it apart from all other things in the world. But however consecrated these objects, a great many were acquired in unseemly ways—in shakedowns, for instance, or through shady deals with grave robbers. Some are imperial spoils, spiritual successors to the obelisks that were hauled out of Cairo and Karnak and made to stand in the piazzas of Rome. In recent decades, museum directors have been asked insistent questions about the legitimacy of these transactions, and whether they should be reversed.

It is no easy task to reverse the acquisition of an ancient artifact. The original parties are long dead. Claims of ancestry are rarely straightforward. Curators have concerns about releasing a priceless object into a possibly shoddier standard of conservation, or into the private collection of a greedy royal family. They worry that it may disappear entirely during an invasion or a civil war. Despite these complexities, there is no doubt that at least some, and perhaps many, of the items in encyclopedic museums should be returned to their originating communities or their otherwise rightful successors. But what happens after the forced migration of stone has been undone? Could there be a new encyclopedic museum, and if so, what should it be like?

I asked Erich Hatala Matthes, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College who has written extensively about cultural heritage, to imagine that humanity’s most precious cultural artifacts have all been returned to the nation-states where they were made. In this scenario, there would still be national museums, perhaps modeled after the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City or the new Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, where curators would display artifacts against the backdrop of their home landscapes. But the encyclopedic museum as we know it would be gone. What, if anything, would be lost?

Matthes groaned. A world where artifacts have been sequestered into single-culture museums struck him as impoverished. For one, cultures aren’t easily sliced up into discrete, bounded wholes, he said. They’re connected, and museums are well positioned to demonstrate those connections. In the British Museum, you can circle a porcelain vase from the Ming dynasty, admiring its white-and-blue gleam from every angle, and then, a few rooms over, you can see how it inspired a delftware plate from 17th-century Amsterdam.

These connections can add up to something larger. The philosopher David Carrier has argued that museums offer visitors a kind of mystical experience. Upon encountering the physical manifestations of different cultures, a person’s self-conception can expand into the deep past, forming new memories that are shared, in some sense, with people who lived long ago. In an encyclopedic museum, these expansions of self and memory can extend outward to the entire interlinked human story. The classicist Mary Beard, a British Museum trustee, told me that an encyclopedic museum is a way for the world to represent itself to itself.

In a world where repatriations were the norm, how could a museum still offer this experience? Any reconstituted encyclopedic museum would have to build its collection by consent. I imagine an international trust, its collections composed solely of artifacts that have been freely lent by the world’s nations. Just as UNESCO’s World Heritage Site designations are highly coveted, and often lobbied for, national governments may eventually come to desire their artifacts’ inclusion in an international museum of this sort, especially if it’s the only one telling humanity’s story on such a grand scale.

This arrangement could help the trust avoid some of the presentation errors that Western museums have made in the past. Members of the Zuni Native American tribe used to carve elongated figures from lightning-struck pines and place them some distance from their pueblos, where, as a matter of custom, they would slowly disintegrate in the sun, wind, and rain. Matthes told me that the tribe’s elders were dismayed to find them intact and on permanent display in many Western museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. In an international encyclopedic museum, nations that contribute artifacts could set the terms for their display. Even then, Beard said, we should be careful not to impose the Western model of the museum on the world, which could itself be a kind of imperialism.

I asked Nana Oforiatta Ayim, an art historian from Ghana and an advocate for repatriation, whether she could imagine an encyclopedic museum reconstituted by consent. “One hundred percent,” Ayim said, but only if the whole idea of an encyclopedic museum had been taken apart and put back together according to new principles. “Like a lot of these museums, the British Museum was set up as an ethnographic museum to study the other,” she said. “The West was the center and subject, and anyone else was an object. Once we start embracing different approaches to objects and different approaches to heritage, that’s when we will truly begin to have an encyclopedic museum.”

But where should such a museum be located? A museum that aims to tell the story of all humanity makes an argument for itself by opening its galleries to as much of humanity as possible. Back in 2002, the directors of the Louvre, the Met, and 16 other institutions made precisely this argument in a joint declaration that justified their continued possession of objects acquired “in earlier times,” when “different sensitivities and values” reigned. “The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today,” they argued, had the artifacts in their collections not been made “widely available to an international public.” As Hartwig Fischer, until recently the director of the British Museum, used to say, his institution was “a museum of the world, for the world.”

[Read: The West is returning priceless African art to a single Nigerian citizen]

Encyclopedic museums are more accessible than the royal collections that preceded them, but they’re certainly not accessible to the entire world. As many critics have pointed out, they’re virtually all located in Western cities, in countries that are home to less than one-tenth of the global population. But existing encyclopedic museums display less than 5 percent of their collections; they have more than enough artifacts to tell an encyclopedic story about humanity several times over. Those of the future could be spread across multiple locations, with at least one on every continent. Shanghai, Mumbai, and Jakarta would be excellent candidates for host cities. As would Lagos, Kinshasa, and São Paulo—transit nodes in the global South where at least 100 million people live within a day’s train ride.

Other, less tangible goods could be redistributed under this scheme. When Chile agreed to host some of the planet’s largest, most sophisticated observatories on the high plains of the Atacama Desert, its government negotiated 10 percent of each instrument’s “telescope time” for local astronomers. As a consequence, the country’s stargazers have published widely in recent decades. Wherever a new encyclopedic museum plants its outposts, local curators will derive analogous benefits. No longer would they have to travel across the world to work at the museums with the furthest-reaching collections.

In the scenario I’m describing, the previous generation of encyclopedic museums—in London, Paris, and New York City, for example—could adapt to play a role. Their curators have accumulated a body of expertise that would be useful to an international institution like the one I’m imagining. Their buildings could even serve as its European and North American outposts. This evolutionary shift could be as ennobling as the Louvre’s transition from a palace to a place of public learning. “We are in a real mess if encyclopedic museums can’t be part of the solution,” Beard told me.

This vision is, at best, a long way off; negotiations for the repatriation of a single artifact can sometimes take decades. In the meantime, these institutions will make thousands of decisions. The British Museum has a major one coming up. On August 26, Fischer, its former director, resigned his position, citing his failure to pay sufficient attention to a light-fingered curator who had reportedly stolen thousands of the museum’s objects, selling some of them on eBay. Critics in China, Nigeria, and Greece pounced, noting that the museum had often cited its superior security as a reason for retaining their precious artifacts. Its trustees will soon appoint a new director to guide the museum out of this scandal. Their pick will give us some indication as to whether they’re satisfied with the encyclopedic museum as it exists today, or whether they’re beginning to edge toward one that really is of and for the world.

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