Sometimes you take a shot, say yes, and end up in a place you did not expect. That’s what brought me to the Understory Festival that took place in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, this week.
In a forest, the understory is the in-between space, neither the canopy bathed in sunlight nor the forest floor covered in dead leaves. The understory is darkness speckled with rays of light breaking through the canopy. It is crowded and yet alive with saplings, shrubs, fungi, birds, and animals. If the canopy drives upwards, the understory is, in the words of Anne Snyder, “the forest’s nursery, its root network, and crucially, its memory.” The Festival asked a question that now haunts many of us: when the old canopy of liberal humanism no longer shelters us, what kind of human world can still grow below?
The Understory Festival was conceived by Snyder, the editor of Comment Magazine. It was billed as a gathering, a coming together of Christian humanists. There is a Manifesto building on the metaphor of the understory. The overstory of our time — call it secular liberalism — is broken. People are lonely, scattered, and resentful. We need to do more than simply say “no” to the reduction of persons to statistics, the flattening of people into social media and political memes, and “no” to a vision of freedom so unmoored from the given that it cannot tell a child who he is or where he belongs.
But it is easy to know what we are fighting against. The harder question — the one the Understory was really convened to ask — is what we are fighting for. Not incidentally, that is also the question of the 2026 Arendt Forum: Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For? The Understory was imagined specifically as “a gathering, in the flesh, of the spiritually alert, long-game creative repairers of the breach.” Amidst this gathering of citizens, storytellers, believers, and activists, the hope is to nurture the understory, to give birth to a new world that is struggling to be born.
I came to the Understory not sure what I would find. I am an outsider to the world of Christian humanism. And yet I recognized the parallels to the story Hannah Arendt tells about modernity. The western world, the traditions of our post-Roman liberal, Judeo-Christian, humanist world have broken. The pillars that held up that world for many centuries have shattered. We confront a world between past and future. The question, “What is Authority?” is actually “what was authority?” To ask “What is Freedom?” is to recognize that we must now be free to re-found and re-imagine our world, a world that has lost its moorings.
Arendt’s answer to a broken tradition was not restoration. She did not imagine that the old canopy could simply be repaired. She imagined instead a work of retrieval and re-founding: diving into the wreckage of the past for fragments that might illuminate the present without governing it.
In Arendt’s understory, the past still matters. In her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt describes how we are pearl divers who descend into the ocean of the shattered past to retrieve fragments and gems from the wreck of history. The pearl diver pulls from the treasure of the tradition what now appears strange. It breaks up what might be called the overstory, the confidence that there is a true tradition. Pearls of the past both recall the tradition and remind us that it has been broken. By attending to citations from the past, pearl divers tie us to the past while also freeing us to build our world anew. This is what Arendt calls the gift of thinking poetically, to tell the new stories that will inspire us and gather together new peoples who will found new worlds on the broken foundations of the old.
The centerpiece of the Understory Festival was a debate over what we are fighting for, a debate given flesh by a real argument between David Brooks and Ross Douthat. Our world is shattered, yes. Can we rebuild it? And how? Brooks and Douthat agreed that the old canopy is broken. They disagreed about whether the understory can flourish today and rejuvenate a new humanism.
Brooks took the optimistic approach. What we call our crises of spirituality, politics, and culture are really not so new. There are crises in America every 60 years or so. There was the crisis that gave birth to Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830s, the crisis that gave birth to progressivism in the 1880s, the crisis that birthed the New Deal in the 1930s, and the crisis that tore the country apart in the 1960s and 1970s. Our present crisis — the loss of faith, anomie, loss of trust, and the pessimism of our times — is not exceptional. There is growing resentment at the failed promises of equality and liberty. The rage is so intense that many have turned nihilist; the values of the American dream are seen as fake. There is a loss of all higher values.
We have, Brooks argued, been here many times before. It is natural in the midst of a crisis to look at the world through mud-colored glasses. But culture can change. Dominant paradigms fail. People will cut down the canopy, chop it up. The ruins of the old fertilize the ferment of the new. And that is the reason for the understory. New ideas, new stories, new overstories are struggling to be born. Culture orients around what is a flourishing human life. Out of crises of pessimism emerges romanticism, a yearning for meaning and beauty. Brooks’ New Romanticism has faith that amidst the darkness of resentment, new forms of dignity can emerge. We can rebuild our institutions. At our universities, new centers for civic life are springing up. Local clubs and groups are experimenting with new forms of democracy and civic participation. We can elect new members to Congress who will once again take up the calling of legislating. Even in dark times, people will stay idealistic. Brooks calls this our “defiant humanism” — that is what we are fighting for.
Douthat agrees with much of Brooks’ analysis, but he takes up the mantle of the pessimist. Some cycles of renewal take longer than 60 years, and our present crisis seems bigger than most. Beyond the corruption, despair, and resentment that are common to human history, there is a new threat to the very foundation of human romanticism. Since the Enlightenment, our answer to what makes us human has been our capacity to think and to reason. But what if machines can think and reason better than we can? We are now on the precipice of a world in which the very faculty on which we have grounded human dignity — our reason — may no longer be uniquely human.
Douthat also argued that our culture and institutions suffer from a unique form of torpor. Our bureaucracies are immense and our government is mammoth. It was one thing to turn around the small and relatively powerless governmental system of the 1830s and the 1930s. But turning around a ship so big and so sclerotic as our present ship of state may take longer. It may require a more profound spiritual, cultural, and religious conversion than simply new clubs and revitalized institutions. The combination of AI-induced despair about human obsolescence and the torpor of institutions that have lost the ability to change means, Douthat worries, that a new romanticism will not be enough to re-invigorate our world. It may require, he muses, a greater radicalism. Here is where Douthat’s religious impulses emerge. It may be that supernaturalism is more necessary than romanticists like Brooks are willing to admit. Revival may mean that we need to go back to the extremes of new religious movements. The fight for humanity, in other words, may need superhuman assistance.
I came to the Understory Festival thinking I would know no one, that I’d be a curious interloper. It turned out that everywhere I turned I found old friends. Amber Lapp was there, who will be speaking at the Arendt Forum in October. Angel Parham and Eric Liu were among former Arendt Forum speakers I ran into. I was struck by the words and art by Makoto Fujimura and inspired by Romanita Hairston and Mónica Guzmán. I also found new friends who believe that telling stories about humanity is the way that we build and re-build our world.
Sitting in the nave of the National Cathedral and gazing upward at the vaulted ceiling, I watched as the literal stone canopy came to life with light shining through stained glass. Amidst the crowded space below where people gathered, I was inspired by the understory. It asked the right question. What does it mean to seek today a human tradition and a human solidarity, to discover the human not in reason but in a broader and deeper and more profound humanity?
Douthat may be right that the challenges for human renewal are greater than we’ve faced before. It is also true, however, that humanity has an uncanny ability to rewrite its past, its present and also its future. The understory is not yet a world. But it may be one of the places where world-building begins.
Originally published by Roger Berkowitz on his Substack, [Roger Berkowitz — For the Love of the World/https://rogerberkowitz.substack.com/p/the-understory-and-defiant-humanism], and republished with permission
