LIVE from NYPL: Timothy Snyder: The New Paganism

Do we live in an age of enlightenment or an age of divination? Timothy Snyder argues that our present moment—one in which obsession with the new distracts from patterns that are very old—is best understood as a political religion, rooted not in Christianity but in something far older and pagan. The pervasive nature of social media and rampant wealth inequalities seem to have created conditions for behavior that might typically be associated with myth, but instead perhaps reflect historically familiar patterns of behavior that now seem to be reasserting themselves.