Weil saw in her historical moment a loss of a sense of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and communication and, ultimately, a forfeiture of rational thought. She observed how political platforms being built upon words like “roots” or “homeland” could use more abstractions — like “the foreigner,” “the immigrant,” “the minority” and “the refugee” — to turn flesh-and-blood individuals into targets. Finally, she understood how central abstractions were in legitimizing unwarranted authority, in pitting people against one another, and in justifying indefensible wars, discrimination and other forms of brutality.

While Weil was describing Europe on the verge of catastrophic war, this insight can also help us understand the demoralizing reality of contemporary American politics.

There is no doubt that driven by the explosion of new and more accessible technologies, our world has become more and more abstract: from the advent and expansion of cyberwarfare, through demographic research and online banking and trading, to algorithmic commerce and the move toward cashless societies. The tendency toward abstraction, though, is not merely restricted to the realm of technology. It extends to our social, intellectual and political lives — including the various isms (feminism, racism, colonialism, nationalism and so on) that we use to sum up human systems and behaviors.

Abstractions often arise when there is too much to know and too little time in which to know it. Submerged in a superabundance of information, abstractions — in the guise of statistics or stereotypes — seem to act as valuable timesavers. But what we save in time, we lose in nuance and exactitude. And there is a greater danger: When the world grows more complex, as it has in our age of global technocracy, specialists begin to monopolize information and use it as a tool of control.

Weil described this dynamic well in a 1934 essay, “Analysis of Oppression,” in a passage about the origins of religious thought. She argued that when the religious rites meant to help humans gain favor from the gods grow “too numerous and complicated to be known by all,” these rites become “the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests.” And, she concluded, “Nothing essential is changed when the monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests.”