Review of The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, by George Scialabba. Yale University Press, 2026
The book that first made me recognize the Cambridge writer George Scialabba as one of the most important living American intellectuals arrived with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the early spring of 2020. The slim volume bore an audacious title: “How to Be Depressed.” Somehow, it seemed to be written for me. Bookended by an introduction and an interview—in which Scialabba reflects on depression in his characteristically wry and penetrating voice — “How to Be Depressed” consists of notes and records taken by therapists and clinicians over his decades of mental health treatment.
The information conveyed about Scialabba’s inner life recontextualized my reading of his essays, each one having crystallized vast learning into a diamantine critical intervention. “Through How to Be Depressed” I came to see his essays as hard-won achievements, produced amid cycles of despair and professional frustration that threatened perennially to silence his voice. I read about Scialabba’s career insecurity; his struggles to surmount the mundane roadblocks to realizing his potential that our society strews before all but the most well-resourced; his grief at losing the meaning-making framework of his youth (Catholicism); his inability to replace it with anything commensurable. The non-academic path Scialabba trod looked to me as a byway for a questing life of the mind. And I recognized, with a twinge of self-reproach, the emotional and material advantages I too often took for granted.
In “The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia,” Scialabba collects essays that together make an overt case for the exemplary experience I had reading “How to Be Depressed.” The book affirms a precept by the philosopher Richard Rorty: moral and political progress transpires insofar as solidarity or sensitivity to the suffering of others expands in “detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like.” Rorty thought the novel is our most powerful technology for expanding understanding of what other people experience and what we are capable of. Scialabba, in the essays here collected, suggests the nonfiction of public intellectuals such as Rorty, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and the historian Christopher Lasch (the book’s three dedicatees) serves the same function.
Scialabba is aware that intellectuals do not always display what he likes to call “moral imagination” in impressive quantities. Yet he maintains that their failures can be as instructive as their successes. One especially incisive chapter examines the transformation of the journalist Christopher Hitchens from left-wing provocateur to warmongering neoconservative during the War on Terror. Scialabba observes that “Hitchens’s generous and romantic temperament” struggled to accept the “long, slow process” of reforming the United States to truly align with the democratic ideals he professed. It was Hitchens’s love of the fray that tempted him to throw in with the swashbuckling idealists in power then. Their promise to spread democracy here and now must have been “overwhelming” to Hitchens. Scialabba concedes that his interpretation is ultimately speculative. I think he’s right.
In that essay, first published in 2005, he describes the George W. Bush administration as “the most ambitious and skillful pack of liars as American history has seen.” That W.’s record has been shattered is not the least of it. Scialabba’s writing career, now in its fifth decade, has coincided with an uninterrupted process of devolution from the New Deal’s social democratic vision, toward the nihilism that rules us today. The evidence he arraigns is enough to make me wonder whether our present situation might not represent a foundational rot beneath our way of life. Is human progress really possible with moral imagination in such evidently short supply?
In essays about Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Allan Bloom, and others, “The Sealed Envelope” takes this harrowing question extremely seriously. Scialabba can’t bring himself to answer definitively. If progress is not metaphysically guaranteed, neither it is hopeless. If the re-enchantment of the world is vain, he wants us to believe that “imagination and social criticism” might at least accomplish its re-humanization. “Depressions virtually always end,” he wrote in “How to Be Depressed.” The essential thing is to hold on.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.