In this new volume of essays, Marilynne Robinson reflects with exceptional depth on how politics and society today tend to devalue the human. "It is shocking how helpless the protection of nature, the poor and even the rights of voters have been in recent years. The great machinery of capitalism can put an end to them," he says in the book's introduction. Against this influential contemporary trend, which aims to reduce everything to a simplistic cost-benefit analysis, Robinson claims nonconformist and combative thinking and the need to give voice to those who are never taken into account. Criticism of both the right and the left ("We have surrendered thought to ideology. It is no accident that Marxism and Social Darwinism arose at the same time, as two narrators of a single tale") he concludes: "The willingness to let ourselves be carried away by ideological thought – that is, a thought that by definition is not one's own, that is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when wider spheres of knowledge are consulted – supposes a capitulation that no one should ever assume. It is a betrayal of our portentous minds and all the splendid resources that our culture has prepared to be used."