The New Museum
I had not been to the United States for six months. That is not long in the life of a country, but it is long enough to notice a change in its weather. What I felt this time was not merely the usual political noise, but something more exacting: a country growing grander in its self-display, and more estranged from itself.
In New York, after board meetings and other visits, the city still seemed able to generate light, language, and argument. Yet beneath that brilliance there was a thinning of meaning, as if it no longer inhabited its role so much as performed it well. A generous colleague arranged an early private visit for us to The New Museum, and it did not take long for the building on the Bowery to impose itself on me as metaphor. Newly reopened after a major expansion, with an inaugural exhibition titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the museum describes itself not as a place for preserving and recording history, but as a place where history is made. That was the paradox that stayed with me: what does it mean when the making of history falls quiet, and only the display remains?
The building seemed to explain America without intending to. Larger in scale, more conscious of itself, and more anxious about its human measure. One is not standing before a preserved past, but before a civilization that keeps restaging itself as an ongoing event, even as it loses some of its capacity for quiet, continuous action.
Yet the city is not only its museum. In politics, Mamdani’s New York appeared to offer something different in form, and less different in substance. The symbolism of the city’s first Muslim mayor is undeniably powerful, and the oath in the disused City Hall subway station, on the Qur’an, carried more resonance than administration. But the first weeks revealed the oldest law of power: promise outruns structure, and symbolism outruns capacity. This is not an indictment of the man so much as a description of a wider condition, one marked by density in signal and looseness in effect. Even the alternative, here, risks being consumed too quickly as spectacle.
Then came Harvard, which had been, in one way or another, an intellectual home to me for three decades. There was loyalty in the visit, but also ache. Great universities are supposed to preserve a republic’s long memory and sustain it through habits of seriousness and restraint. Harvard now stands inside a wider national tremor. More than $2.2 billion in research funding was frozen, and multiple legal actions followed, all under the banner of combating antisemitism. But a federal judge said the administration had used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted ideological assault on one of the country’s premier universities, and Harvard itself had to sue its own government to recover a measure of independence. The troubling thing is not only the siege on higher education, but what it reveals: when some of the strongest moral claims are weaponized in political struggle, and much of the country absorbs this as merely another instalment in a domestic serial rather than as a shift in the state’s ethical posture toward itself and the world, the museum metaphor becomes exact. Even conscience is displayed rather than practiced.
And in the background, between meetings and memory, I stole a few hours to watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. On its surface, it follows a father-to-be asking what kind of world his child will inherit. At a deeper level, it captures a rising anxiety among American elites about artificial intelligence, as the symptom of a civilization that has begun to ask the machine questions political will has failed to settle. The film released on March 27, 2026, and one prominent review explicitly credits Jason Matheny, President and CEO of RAND, with coining the term “apocaloptimist.” The association is apt. It names not only a view of AI, but the mood of an age: grave about catastrophe, yet unwilling to surrender the future.
That may also be the best description of America in this phase. A nation that built its power on action has begun to reintroduce itself as a permanent exhibition about the future, more than as a governing force in the present.
That is why the title came to me: The New Museum. America will not disappear. It is too large to be erased, and too dangerous to be ignored. But it seems, in this phase, to have entered a condition of permanent display: power more exhibited than exercised, anger more archived than disciplined, anxiety more aestheticized than healed. When a civilization reaches that point, it no longer fears disappearance as much as it fears silence; so it fills the void with performance, and calls emotional reflex politics. A museum, in the end, is not only a place for vanishing things. It is also a place for civilizations when ordinary action can no longer carry their meaning.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.