Little known in the U.S., the British journalist Paul Mason has emerged as one of the foremost thinkers associated with the hard-left faction, led by Jeremy Corbyn, that has come to dominate the Labor party. His recent book, Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defense of the Human Being, which in part is intended to prop up Corbyn ideologically, is one of several recent works attempting to update Marxism for the current era, with particular attention to technological changes. Neil Rogachevsky writes in his review:

Its principal aspiration—to herald the coming of a world that abolishes private property as well as any need for work—is absurd on its face. And yet in arguing this position ardently, Clear Bright Future presents a good opportunity to study the principal features of the New Marxist mind.

Like some “moralist” Marxist writers of old, Mason is refreshingly critical of the degradations in contemporary culture. The lazy postmodernism of the last few decades does deserve every word of the critique that Mason offers. In adamantly rejecting discussions of human nature as “essentialist,” postmodernism contributes mightily to the sense of powerlessness and anomie that predominate in our societies. Social and political thinkers do need to take up Mason’s challenge to return to human nature.

And yet, . . . Mason’s atheistic, materialistic depiction of the human being is no more persuasive than previous articulations of the same thesis. . . . Mason expresses the unexamined faith that man is only a wolf to man under the conditions of capitalism, and that it’s possible to bring about an order in which the desire for mastery or oppression is eliminated.

Though he dismisses religion as superstition, Mason’s materialist view of human beings leaves basic problems unanswered. When confronted by questions such as “what is the soul?” or “what is thinking?”, materialists can only utter something about “brain wiring” that tells us about the material function of the brain but nothing about what a thought actually is. The inability of materialists definitively to refute such questions, or to stop them being asked, keeps open all sorts of other questions about the proper task of human beings in the world. And the inability to resolve those questions stands in the way of achieving heaven on earth.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.