Dispatch from the Committee for Post-American Activities

Reflections on the future of America, Rousseau, and Heidegger

Rain seeps through rusted bodies of a previous age. The glass towers hide in the fog; the same fate will befall them too. I cannot find a definite point on the timeline—a moment when it “ended.” Still, a pungent mood of mourning, of anguish, and of something that escapes language sits heavy over the northeast as my train rumbles toward Montreal.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that Jean-Jaqaue Rousseau is a French philosopher. When they read his Social Contract, they imagine Paris. Aber er ist von der Schweiss; he hails from the rocky crags of the Alps. Geography is destiny. Despite our technological powers, despite the atom bomb, mountains remain. Their continued existence proves our finitude. We tunnel through them only because they are too strong, too immense. And with their power, they shape the humans who dwell in their shadow. Water flows from snow and ice, safeguarded above the clouds. Between the peaks, forests and meadows surge forth, fed by lithic flesh. Along the banks of rivers and lakes, humans grow their sustenance. And, thereby, these humans too partake in this act of holy communion. To be from the mountains is to know that land is nothing incidental. The land is that from which all comes into being and recedes into nothing. Those humans, those philosophers from the plains, forget this fact too easily. Like in the paintings of the Dutch masters, the focus is placed on the infinite sky. The land is forgotten, all while it yet sustains celestial dreams. But when the land recoils, when it no longer gives us our daily bread, all flights of fancy evaporate. Our cities crumble. There is only starvation, war, and death. But, when all is stripped away, when we are reduced to our bare, naked being, is this all that remains?

I read Rousseau for the first time in the fall semester of 2025. Where I expected to find a normative thinker, one who would teach us how to live (and so one I could disagree with), I found the opposite. Rousseau’s chief concern is the corruption of human nature by human nature. For Rousseau, we are, by nature, free. And this freedom gives us the possibility of acting against our freedom. And we have used our freedom to forge our own chains. The city is so often, and perhaps almost always is, the exemplar of this tragedy. Yet, a city can accord with human nature. The possibility of corruption entails the possibility of preservation and flourishing. The thesis of The Social Contract is that a city can be founded and ruled by free beings to safeguard freedom. Still, so easily can we act against our best interests. There is no guarantee that we will act in our best interest. So often, we give up our freedom for vanity. And once something is lost, it can never be recovered. This is the essential insight of Rousseau’s philosophy.

To abjure our freedom is to give up our being. But, if we have recognized, like Rousseau, that hitherto we have done just that, what must we do? The Being of the human being tells us what to do: get out.

When I moved to Philadelphia last August, I was struck by the sense that something was wrong. The grocery stores were always missing something. Like the worn-out chain of a bicycle, every so often, something would slip and the city would lurch. America as a whole too lurches, sputtering, hacking, and coughing like a man afflicted with consumption.

What practices, activities, and infrastructure can prepare us for the arrival of a future that we cannot foresee? I never considered myself a revolutionary. I was never so bold as to pretend that reading Marx, attending political meetings, or attending a protest bore world-significance. After the George Floyd riots, I sought to act politically within my community in concrete ways. Now at the start of my 30s, I often ask myself what can be built here in Philadelphia that can survive the end of America. But to “get out” does not always mean to physically leave. The question is how to build an ark that floats upon the sea like the eye of the storm.

The other truth Rousseau tells us is that it takes a miracle to found a city. Only the lawgiver, whose disappearance forms the condition for the freedom of the city, can sustain the establishment of newly born general will with a gifted set of laws that befit the people of the city to be. These laws preserve freedom by policing freedom. These founding taboos, injunctions, and proscriptions are the language of freedom. So once those laws have failed, freedom falls silent. It awaits the arrival of new laws, a new city, by which it speaks. To “get out” is thus to make space for the arrival of a dispensation, a gift that clears a way for human Being to freely be.

It has been 50 years since Martin Heidegger died. “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten [Only a God Can Save Us].” This line was uttered before his death but did not reach our ears until May 26, 1976. I cannot help but think of it now, but with one addition: wherever this god comes from, he shall meet us on the earth, and in the time of waiting, there is much to do. There is soil to be tilled. There are wells to be dug. There are rites of mourning to be performed. Maybe this god already walks among us. May this god wait for us to make space for him to arrive so that we can feel his arrival as an absence that preserves our Being.