I read comic books off and on. But this year I’ve been on the longest comic-reading streak I’ve ever had. I will put my complete list at the end, but here’s what I’ve enjoyed most this year.

The highlights

• Astro-City, Vol. 1. This is the 1990s book by Kurt Busiek from the library that got me back into comics this year. Each story is a standalone character study of an individual who lives in Astro-City, in a world where superheroes exist. As the stories progress, the world gets filled in, and we see it from many different perspectives. I’m a sucker for these kinds of slow-build, interlinked, worldbuilding projects.

• Rogue Sun. Rogue Sun is my favorite ongoing comic book series. I’ve read all the back issues, and I look forward to it when it comes out each month. It’s part of the Kyle Higgin’s Radiant Black “Massive-verse,” but IMHO, it eclipses RB. I like all the main and supporting characters, the monsters, the arch-villain, the artwork, the setting (mainly New Orleans). Ryan Parrott’s writing consistently makes me laugh. The world keeps getting bigger, and I love every minute of it.

• The Absolute DC Universe. The “Absolute” reboot of the DC Universe is currently the new hotness in the comic world. Each of the classic characters, such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, have been reimagined in a more contemporary setting, often as more “underdog” characters, it seems like. I’ve enjoyed just about everything I’ve read. (Except maybe Absolute Green Lantern?) My one minor dislike is that sometimes the colors in some of the comics seem very dark and muddy or low-contrast. Like a very narrow palette of colors on the dark end of things. More than once I’ve looked at a panel and wondered if something was wrong with my eyes. It was just hard to see. Maybe it’s a DC thing. But overall, enjoyable and solid reads.

• Zorro #1. I grabbed this one on a whim at the comic shop, and I’m interested to see where this one goes. The original Zorro was an inspiration for Batman. (He’s rich, he wears all black, he has no super powers, he protects the weak against the corrupt and powerful. He leaves his enemies alive, just leaves them with his mark. He’s basically a detective/vigilante. His name is an animal.) The best part about Zorro is his wit, and this comic by Howard Chaykin captures that well. I’m in.

• Reckless. I didn’t know how much I needed some noir in my life. Ed Brubaker’s 2020-22 Reckless series is set in 1980s Los Angeles. Ethan Reckless is a great private-eye/fixer character who lives on the edge of society. Whenever there’s nothing going on, he goes surfing. The tone of the books is remarkably consistent throughout. It’s a whole mood—a vibe, if you will—that once you get into, you forget you’re reading a comic book. You’re just there. (Definitely an R-rated series, be forewarned.)

• Monstress #61. I’ve only read one issue of Monstress, a series by writer Marjorie Liu that has been around for a long time now. But the artwork by Sana Takeda was head and shoulders above the average comic book. I found myself wanting to linger on every page just to soak it all in. Definitely going to read more of this one.

• Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Wow. This book by Tom King was incredible. It was also bursting with color in a way I appreciate. Halfway through I thought to myself, I never want this to end. I wish this book was ten times longer. It’s kind of crazy that the TPB came out in 2022, and there’s already going to be a movie version next week. From the trailer it looks like it’s going to follow the the book in some ways but definitely not in others. As I’ve written before, I don’t think movies need to match books they are based on. They never can.

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The Book:

Go Tell It on the Mountain
By James Baldwin
Vintage Books
1952

The Talk:

“There are many paths which may lead to such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which does so for certain. Even religion cannot keep its promise.” ~ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

James Baldwin’s 1953 novel Go Tell It On The Mountain tells the story of John, a Black boy in 1930s Harlem struggling to find his way up and out of the family, culture, and religion that he discovers himself a part of as he reaches the threshold of adolescence:

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

The whole story is there in the opening lines. And though the reader may desire that something will--that something *must* change, it will not. The reader’s desires will be frustrated right along side John’s. The moral, that humans rarely change as much as they believe and wish they could, is a bitter subterranean flood that threatens destruction if denied. The flood does not come at the end of the novel, but it does not go away either. It is the truth. And the reckoning is due.

Baldwin’s gospel

Near the beginning of the book, John’s mother asks him to sweep the living room rug. John hates this task. As he sweeps, it only makes clouds of dust that settle down back onto the rug. The rug is never truly clean. Cleaning the rug has the appearance of a task but makes no real difference in the end.

Yet for each dustpan he so laboriously filled at the doorsill demons added to the rug twenty more; he saw in the expanse behind him the dust that he had raised settling again into the carpet; he gritted his teeth, already on edge because of the dust that filled his mouth, and nearly wept to think that so much labor brought so little reward.

Later in the story, John and Elisha, an older boy who John secretly likes, clean the church before the Saturday evening prayer service. In the same way, they clean the floor, but during the service it’s clear the dust remains. As the congregation stomps and dances, it only makes the dust rise up higher.

The story occurs during the Great Migration, a period when many Black Americans travelled northward to seek out better prospects in Northern cities. The stories of all the Black characters in the book follow a similar path—they either leave the South to escape something bad from their past which they never truly escape, or they believe they will find some better situation in Chicago or New York only to find themselves in basically the same situation with different street names.

Bigotry in the South, prejudice in the North. Baldwin lets us into the minds of the Black men and women on the receiving end of white abuse. In their minds is murder, a murderous rage, that never finds an outlet in the novel, but simply boils under the surface.

In a sense the migrants to the North are doomed because they take themselves with them—their flaws, their failures, their sins. And their skin. In one scene, a Black woman applies whitener to her face in order to whiten her skin. A character tells her that no matter how much you try to change, you are Black. You can’t change, no matter how much whitener you apply.

All of these elements swirl around the core of the story, which traces the histories of John’s aunt, father, and mother. John’s father, Gabriel, is a preacher who travels around giving revival speeches to win souls for the Lord. Gabriel gives impassioned sermons about his life before he was saved, what a sinner he was, and how God turned him from his evil ways. His passionate preaching is presented as the evidence of God’s ability to transform souls.

And yet we learn that Gabriel never really changes his ways at all. Gabriel was a sinner, and he remains a sinner. And the whole idea that he was ever truly changed is the lie. The lie he tells himself, and the lie he tells others. The lie that makes others feel wretched, begging for a God to transform them like he did Gabriel.

Gabriel too lives in private torment, as he begs God to change him, but God never does. Moreover, his apparent righteousness becomes an occasion for his infidelity and his physical abuse of his children and his wife. In a scene reminiscent of Abraham and Isaac, Gabriel is belting John’s brother Roy.

“My Lord, my Lord,” his father whispered, “my Lord, my Lord.”

He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it.

Aunt Florence stares him down.

“Yes, Lord,” Aunt Florence said, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t not use to try and take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”

It is the story of redemption that allows people to set themselves over others. Gabriel’s position as preacher allows him to call out the sins of individual congregation members in public, shaming them into submission. They must turn and be changed.

Ashamed of masturbating, John repeats a verse from Revelation to himself bitterly, “He who is flithy, let him be filthy still.” But Elisha tells him that if he converts, God will remove all his fleshy desires:

“But when the Lord saves you He burns out all that old Adam, He gives you a new mind and a new heart, and then you don’t find no pleasure in the world, you get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus every day.”

Conversion will fix him. John will become a new man. Changed. He just has to give his life to the Lord, and everything about him will be different, his sex drive eradicated. In Baldwin’s story, most of the characters beg God to change them, but God never answers their prayers. The church insiders are no different than the church outsiders; there are good and evil people in both camps.

At the end of novel, when Florence confronts Gabriel with evidence of his past sins, she threatens to tell the whole world about it.

“I’m going to find some way—some way, I don’t know know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord’s anointed is got on his hands.”

Go tell it on the mountain, so to speak. The original meaning of that phrase is to tell the good news, the gospel, that salvation is here. But Gabriel’s sister has a different kind of news: That Gabriel is a sinner just like everybody else.

“You ain’t never changed,” he said. “You still waiting to see my downfall. You just as wicked now as you was when you was young.”

She put the letter in her bag again.

“No,” she said, “I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither.”

“I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither.” That is Baldwin’s inversion of the Gospel. The news, Baldwin suggests, the news that sets captives free, is that the devout are just like everybody else. Once understood, the ability of religion to abuse and psychologically torture people, its ability to hide evil and even feed it, is broken. Go tell that on the mountain, says Baldwin, and be free.

What’s changed?

At the start of the book, John sees it all, the dust, the sin, the hypocrisy, the injustice, the abuse. Inside he feels a rage against his father, and his one wish is to oppose him, to fight him, or to flee him somehow. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he decides that if his father is on God’s side, then John must be on the side of the devil. So be it, thinks John. And he digs in with all his willpower to oppose his father.

But by the end of the story, the social pressure of the church, everyone around him pressuring him to give his life to God—it’s too much for him, it’s too much for any fourteen year old boy. He gives in, he coverts, he is saved. After the service, John feels enormous relief but also confusion and fear. What has actually changed now that he is saved?

The church members are not even home yet before Baldwin seems to remind us that basically nothing has changed at all--Gabriel’s sins are about to be revealed, John’s true paternity is likely to come out soon, and the stakes of John’s homosexuality have only increased. The only “salvation” is the truth coming out to destroy the peacefulness of this brief moment of relief.

To me the ending has a similar feel to the end of 1984, when we watch Winston Smith’s emerging consciousness slide back into the groupthink. Or the end of Babbitt, in which George Babbitt’s freedom melts away. The main character believes they have been saved, though as readers we stand opposite them, watching them lose their identity into the suffocating community of believers. The difference is that Baldwin implies that the truce at the end of the novel could blow wide open.

Amor fati

What happens when God does not show up and does not transform you? What do you do with that reality? When all the people around you say “true,” but you know “false”? You cannot remake the world; you cannot remake yourself. You are stuck in a place, in a community, in a body and mind and soul, that will not change.

The first step, Baldwin’s novel suggests, is to bear witness to the truth. If the truth is that one has not been transformed by the Gospel, despite repeated attempts and earnest seeking, one must bear witness to that truth. It is, in fact, a Christian imperative to do so. The refusal to blaspheme, claiming divinity where there is none, is an expression of Christianity even as it opposes Christianity. As philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs, “Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for truth. No pagan is ready to sacrifice the pleasure of life for the sake of mere truth.”

The second step is to surrender to the truth with one’s whole being. To love one’s fate. In a later novel, Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin would write:

But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

If we read Giovanni’s Room back into Go Tell It On The Mountain, an alternative ending interpretation could be: John chooses to embrace the life in front of him rather than deny it, even as we know that whatever peace and happiness he experiences, in whatever brief moments he can find it, is fragile, tenuous, and fleeting. John has so much more to live, to learn, to feel, to love, to suffer.

Related:

Alien grace: The tortured faith of Flannery O’Connor

Langston Hughes: Backlash blues

Is the Holy Spirit from Africa?

Emotions are information: Audre Lorde vs Jonathan Haidt

Needless to say, the book reads differently in 2026, given the intervening years of mass shootings, 4chan, alt-right groypers, incels, Proud Boys, UFC, debates over toxic masculinity, and the manosphere. It’s very easy to read those things back into the novel, so it’s probably worth trying to see the novel without those things. (Imagine Tyler Durden is NOT Brad Pitt. At least try! It’s very hard!)

First of all, the novel Fight Club is a dark comedy. It made me think of Office Space (1999). (The movie version of Fight Club came out the same year.) It’s a send up of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking, greyed-out life of an office worker who’s desk job seems light years away from any real people, real feeling, or real purpose. The humor comes from transgressing social norms: The characters fake cancer to join cancer survivor support groups; they become waiters and urinate into rich people’s soup; they slip single frames of pornography into mainstream film reels to subconsciously disgust people; they steal fat from liposuction facilities and sell it back to consumers as soap.

The main character is “successful” materially—a metrosexual yuppie—but he feels dead inside. The general vibe is something like… Gen X corporate noir? Or hard-boiled corporate fiction? Replace Ed Norton with Sam Spade. As the story develops, Palahniuk keeps cutting back to the office. The story flips between the superficiality of (public) office life and the private inner self, which is filled with rage, violence, animalistic and base needs.

In a way that echoes the 12 Step program philosophy, the only way to salvation for the narrator is to hit rock bottom. He gives up his IKEA furniture apartment for an old slummy house. His alter ego Tyler Durden teaches him that he is trash1. He turns borderline criminal, living his alternative life at night, debasing himself completely. Everything was too perfect in his life, so now he has to ruin himself to be free.

You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other human butt wipe.

Violence becomes the path to salvation. It’s very Girardian in this way. (I refer to Girard here correctly, not Peter Thiel’s unrecognizable made-up version.) Violence is salvation, violence is sacred, because violence releases the pent-up aggression that must be kept at bay for society to function, which otherwise threatens the peace. When Tyler Durden and the unnamed narrator start Fight Club, they feel a relief that washes over them. The pain blocks out everything else, and they achieve a “zen state.” Violence leads to enlightenment.

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The Book:

Strategy: A History
By Lawrence Freedman
Oxford University Press
2013

The Talk:

In his 2013 book Strategy: A History, historian Lawrence Freedman traces the evolution of strategy from chimpanzees to the Iraq War.

This 600-page doorstop of a book is divided into three main sections—on warfare, politics, and business—in which Freedman describes the major themes, patterns, and foibles of (often self-proclaimed) strategists through the ages.

Mostly the book focuses on the 19th and 20th Centuries, and for good reason:

• Napoleon’s army marked a new era in military organization; much of military strategic thinking, even well into the mid-20th century, centered around unpacking the principles behind Napoleon’s victories (as interpreted mainly by Clausewitz).

• Similarly, the French Revolution was a kind of Genesis moment for social reformers and revolutionaries, shaping much of socialist thinking about what was politically feasible.

• Finally, the 19th Century was also saw the rise of the modern corporation, which led to titanic struggles between a new kind of elite and a new kind of labor, and the search for a tolerable status quo between them.

One of themes of the book is the post-Enlightenment search for a universal strategy—a method that, when systematically applied, leads to winning. If only we could look at things rationally, scientifically, mathematically, so the thinking goes, we could know the certain path to victory. Many books have been written promising these principles, but the desire is always frustrated; partly because opponents adapt to winning strategies, making them progressively less effective, and partially because the world is complex, and winning or losing often comes down to specific details in a situation, which cannot be found in any book.

All that said, if there is any concept that stood out to me most, it is the way coalition building (and its inverse, coalition breaking) are central to victory across domains. Freedman writes in his preface:

Combining with others often constitutes the most astute strategic move; for the same reason, preventing opponents from doing the same can be as valuable.

Allies win wars

Napoleon was good at winning battles. His pattern was to win campaigns so fast and so decisively, he could sue for generous political terms in the aftermath. (This is how Russia defeated him, by denying him, above all else, a fast and decisive outcome.)

What Napoleon struggled with was building alliances. It was likely due in part to his personality and in part to the horror of the French Revolution that he embodied for European leaders. But the story of the Napoleonic wars is basically a series of coalitions against Napoleon, and Napoleon’s inability to build a coalition for himself.

Napoleon lacked political subtlety. He inclined toward punitive peace terms and was poor at forging coalitions.

The fact that Napoleon ended up at Waterloo is telling in itself. Napoleon escapes Elba and tries to win one more battle, perhaps to gain some temporary truce or renegotiated terms. But there was no way he could’ve defeated the coalition against him in any permanent way. Victory would’ve simply delayed the inevitable.

Along the same lines, during World War II, when Churchill came into power, his number one goal was partnership with the United States. Freedman writes:

Almost immediately after taking office, Churchill saw that the only way to a satisfactory conclusion of the war was “to drag the United States in,” and this was thereafter the center of his strategy. His predecessor Neville Chamberlain had not attempted to develop any rapport with President Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill began at once what turned into a regular and intense correspondence with Roosevelt...

Churchill later wrote about his rejoicing when America entered the conflict:

So we had won after all! … How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care… We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.

Similarly, after World War II, even with potentially world-ending nuclear weapons in play, the shape of the Cold War was defined by the building of coalitions (like NATO and the Marshall Plan) and denying the enemy allies (containment).

We may also consider recent wars as well: Israel’s alliance with the U.S. makes Israel far more powerful militarily than its military ever could. Iran’s bombing of Arab states is an attempt to break their partnerships with the United States. The war in Ukraine started over Russia’s fears about Ukraine aligning itself with Europe, and Ukraine’s survival depends on its ability to nurture alliances with other countries. Wartime president Zelenskyy appears to spend nearly all his time making deals with countries all over the globe.

In short, military action is often in the service of building or breaking alliances. Indeed, the combining of forces alone can be sufficient for victory. At Waterloo, Napoleon needed to defeat the British by themselves before Prussian forces could join with Wellington. Once the two countries combined forces, the battle was over.

Workers of the world, unite!

Reading Freedman’s section on political strategy, it seems like Karl Marx was his own worst enemy. He was an extremely vicious and caustic personality. It was only later in his life when he toned down his vitriol against other socialists that he made any meaningful headway in making his theories influential. And it was really only after Marx died that Marxism was picked up by talented social operators like Lenin and Stalin to produce an actual communist revolution.

When we take a broad historical view, non-revolutionary worker organizations and unions won smaller but lasting gains for workers over decades. These were still hard fought, but worker conditions did improve over time. The workers’ power came from their ability to build durable institutions, not their ability to precisely predict the future a la Marx.

In a completely different way, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in America was built as an alliance of Black churches.

The churches were the only local institutions independent of white society, financed and run by blacks.

Black churches provided the power base for effective action. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister surrounded by strategists and organizers like Bayard Rustin who created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization of ministers. The “movement” was by no means spontaneous. Rather it was highly structured, disciplined, and regimented, an organization of organizations.

The lack of this structural element may be why peaceful protests in the 21st Century, though inspired in many ways by the Civil Rights Movement, have sometimes proven less effectual.

“What kind of bayonets?”

In his section on business strategy, Freedman deals with external strategy (i.e. markets) and internal strategy (i.e. management). In both of these categories, the 19th and 20th Centuries were dominated by the overwhelming power of coalitions. For markets, trusts and trust-busting. For management, unions and union-busting.

Trusts developed in the 1880s as secret agreements, allowing coordination between companies. John D. Rockefeller, who Freedman describes as “undoubtedly a master strategist,” built the largest and most notorious of the trusts. When the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act was passed, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil developed new arrangements in order to work around the legislation, establishing new “independent” companies that were not truly independent. Even after it was ordered dissolved in 1909, it took a Supreme Court ruling in 1911 to finally break Standard Oil into 34 companies.

Robber barons weren’t the only one’s who could organize, however. Freedman describes the 1936-7 autoworkers strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan which spread across the Midwest. The strike required not only sit-in strikers but supply lines for heat (it was winter) and food. It wasn’t just about anger or willpower, but practical coordination.

Government officials and business leaders threatened violence but also worried how they would look to the public with blood on their hands. John Lewis, the leader of the CIO, mocked them: “What kind of bayonets, Governor Murphy, are you going to turn around inside our boys?” General Motors eventually gave in and the UAW won exclusive bargaining rights.

The moral of successful labor strikes and the Civil Rights Movement is not that non-violence is an effective strategy per se, but rather that a sufficiently robust coalition can blunt the effectiveness of an opponent’s violence, even to the point of irrelevance.

The world is not a betting market

It is common these days for people to think of strategy in terms of poker: A series of probabilistic bets about the future made by individuals with private knowledge who are attempting to deceive one another.

Similarly, game theory, so popular today, developed out of the Cold War as an attempt to think through conflicts where individuals were self-interested, did not share knowledge, and could not trust each other.

Even positive ideas like effective altruism are often presented as a single person making an individual financial contribution, similar to a bet, in order to do the most good with their one life.

Bayesian logic has crept into casual conversation. People “update their priors” now, and everyone wants to know if you would “take the over/under” on future political events. All these social fashions signal to others that you are smart, calculating, and savvy.

Certainly strategy has to do with the future, and so predictions play a role in the decisions human make. However, Freedman’s book made me realize how limited prediction (and similarly bluffing) is as a basis for strategic thinking. I recognize now how rarely my own strategic thinking starts with coalitions. Who can help me? Who’s my team? What team can I join? Where are my allies? To think like Churchill: Who, if I had them in my corner, would make my own success inevitable?

And similarly (for let’s be honest): How do I isolate my enemies? How do I peel off their allies? How do I win over their friends (or at least turn them neutral)? How do I disrupt their ability to organize?

Perhaps muckraker Ida Tarbell is an example to follow; her History of the Standard Oil Company made secret partnerships public, and thus contributed to Standard Oil’s fall and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission which has lasted over a century.

The benefit of thinking in coalitions, rather than thinking in bets, is that it doesn’t require getting the future exactly right. You may fail to predict events or opponent reactions. Your deceptions and bluffs may fail. Your plans may unravel. Your analogies to past events may breakdown. Your goals may change. But coalitions increase your power significantly regardless. Coalitions are the power, in a way; they are the shape and structure of social reality that determine what endures and what dissipates over time.

To think about strategy in terms of isolated individuals making bets on the future is to miss the game of power entirely. Truly, everywhere you look, people with horrible track records at predicting the future remain ensconced in power. How can this be so unless predictions have little to do with winning in the real world?

Coda: The narrative twist

So how does one go about building coalitions and institutions? One of the major themes of Freedman’s book is that a strategy is often a plausible story about the future that motivates people to take action and tells them their place in the narrative so they know how to act.

In large corporations executives never have the power to control the behavior of every single person. Thus, from one perspective, all executive strategy is bound to fail if understood as a description of future actions. Rather strategy can tell people what role they are playing so that when novel or unexpected events occur, people know what to do in response (i.e. what their “character” does in the story).

As a story, strategy motivates and coordinates large groups of people to act in concert toward a particular end while not having to give direct orders, describe the details, or predict the future. It’s a story about the future that is predictive only in the sense that its telling increases the likelihood of its narrative coming into being.

This is quite a different way of thinking about strategy than appealing to self-interest, as in game theory. And it may explain why many people behave in ways that appear contrary to probabilistic or self-interested logic in service to the goals of groups and institutions to which they pledge allegiance: They feel themselves as characters in a compelling story, and the story tells them what to do.

In conclusion, people win by building coalitions and breaking the coalitions of their enemies. Coalitions are often built through plausible yet compelling stories about the future. It may be worth it, for the student of strategy, to further study how stories are broken and how to break them.

Related:

How subjective things become objective

Only the good are strong

The Tao Te Ching is a political document

When boys ruled Halloween ←An interesting historical case of how community organizations banded together to change the meaning of a centuries-old holiday

After I set up camp, a ranger came by and told me I had to evacuate. Fire was cresting over the ridge just across from me. He showed me the next ridge over where the pine trees were popping and exploding into flames.

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The Book:

On Obligations (De officiis)
By Marcus Tullius Cicero
Translated by P.G. Walsh
Oxford World Classics
2000

The Talk:

If you have been an American male for the past decade or so, you’ve been exposed to the following online advice:

• Women find bad guys attractive.

• Women secretly wish to be patronized and even assaulted by men.

• Obnoxious billionaires are billionaires because they are obnoxious.

• If you want to be rich, you have to cultivate an “obnoxious billionaire” mindset first.

• The natural and proper structure of society is a dominance hierarchy.

• Every social interaction is a competition over who controls “frame.”

• The ideal man “holds frame” by not letting others control the conversation.

• To feel happy and whole, every man needs an enemy to fight, metaphorical or real.

• The more brazen the lies, the more savvy the politician.

• Power and status accrue to those who violate social norms.

• The source of your personal problems is being too nice.

• Nice guys are weak—cucks, betas, soy boys, and simps.

• Your conscience is feminist propaganda designed to keep you down.

• To understand this is to be red-pilled and thus freed to become a true alpha male.

It didn’t used to be this way. Twenty years ago an ambitious man would likely have on his bookshelf the works of Peter Drucker, Stephen Covey, John C. Maxwell, and Dale Carnegie. All these figures argued that character was foundational to attaining, sustaining, and wielding power.

Young men today know nothing of this. It seems obvious now that any man who wants to be successful in life must eventually hand it to terrible men: Being good holds you back. Being nice is a limiting belief, keeping you from your dream life. If you really want something, you have to be willing to do things a “nice guy” would never do.

But the debate isn’t over.

Enter Cicero.

Does it pay to be good?

In 44 BC the Roman statesman Cicero wrote to his son, advising him on how to live a good life. The work, De officiis, translated by P.G. Walsh as On Obligations, became a foundational text of Western moral thought into the 18th Century. In late antiquity, it influenced Ambrose. In the Middle Ages, it influenced Abelard, Aquinas, and Dante. When the German printing press was invented, Cicero’s De officiis was the second work printed after the Bible. In the early modern era, it influenced Milton, Locke, and Hume.

The central question of On Obligations (often titled On Duties) is this: Does it pay for a man to be good? If a man wants to be successful in life, should he do what’s moral or what’s in his best interest? Cicero argues that the honorable is always in a man’s best interest, and that the dishonorable is never in a man’s best interest. The most rational path to material success in life (i.e. power, wealth, prosperity, influence, reputation, and glory) is to pursue a life of honor—of honesty, integrity, justice, fairness, mercy, benevolence, and generosity.

In this (political) economy?

Before examining his argument, it must be kept in mind that Cicero wrote his book in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Roman republic. In the spring of that year, Julius Caesar had been assassinated on the floor of the Senate. In less than a year’s time, Cicero himself would be assassinated by Mark Antony’s soldiers for his philippics. Cicero did not write in a world where there were no risks.

There is no doubt that On Obligations is a sad book. Throughout the text Cicero grieves the loss of the rule of law and the rise of dictatorship.

My opinion, for what it is worth, is that we should always aim at a peace which does not contain the seeds of future treachery. If this policy of mine had been followed, we should still have some sort of republic, even if one far from ideal, whereas now we have none.

But the book is by no means an elegy for old values. Walsh calls it a “political manifesto” for societal and political renewal in a time of social unrest. Walsh writes in the introduction:

But Cicero visualized [his son] Marcus as representative of the young men of senatorial families in whose hands lay the political future of Rome. In this sense the guidelines for political advancement and for appropriate behaviour in office are addressed to a whole generation which would outlive the political corruption of Mark Antony, and might bend to the task of restoring the republic.

In sum, Cicero gives his son advice for a future in which the bad guys have already won and the old institutions were imploding, if not already gone.

In such a world, how should a young man live?

The rational case for being honorable

Cicero begins with the premise that other humans are the greatest source of good in our lives and the greatest source of danger. All our wellbeing and material prosperity depends on the effort of others, and much of the risk to our material prosperity comes from others.

Two ideas follow from this:

First, our individual prosperity and the prosperity of those around us are connected. If I harm the people around me, I’m ultimately undercutting myself—the source, strength, and future of my own wellbeing. If I want to do well, not in this moment but for a lifetime, I need the people around me to do well, too. That includes my family and friends, but also my community, and humanity at large, as much as possible.

Second, if we want to be successful in life, we ought to focus on persuading others to do us good and dissuading them from doing us harm. Being honest, trustworthy, and fair makes people more likely to help us and work with us in the future. Being dishonorable makes people avoid us or despise us, and being unjust and cruel fires them up to seek vengeance against us at a later date.

One of the best ways to be beloved by others is to be generous to them. Cicero thinks that this could include money but that doing generous acts is better. Generosity for Cicero is strategic without being overly calculating. For example, many people are generous to those above them who could do them favors in the future. However, Cicero argues that you get more “bang for your buck” by being generous to the lower classes, who often sing your praises louder and spread word of your character farther.

Cicero thinks that, rather than doling out favors based on status, a man should be generous to those who are closest to him, have the most affection for him, and who are of good character. All this is meant to be strategic without being stingy—win over the people next to you, strengthen your closest allies, and don’t feed your threats. At the same time, don’t pass up a chance to do a good turn for a stranger or a foreigner1.

In addition, Cicero believes that generosity should extend to being “fair and affable, conceding to many people much that is rightfully yours.” He writes:

On occasion it is not only generous to forfeit a modicum of one’s rights, but there are times when it is even profitable.

In other words, being nice—addressing common folk gracefully, eschewing anger, acting with forbearance when it comes to collecting debts and holding people to oaths, allowing a confession of guilt to be sufficient for forgiveness—is strategically potent2.

Security is a requirement for success

There’s a key factor in Cicero’s thinking that is not entirely explicit but I think is critical to understanding his argument: It’s not just about success, it’s about how secure your success is.

In On Friendship, Cicero says:

Unless a good thing is durable and stable and lasting it is quite impossible for its possessor to be happy.

Imagine three foundations for a successful life. The first foundation is to be beloved for being a good person and actually being a good person. That’s the most fortified position with the widest pool of allies and resources.

The second foundation is to have a reputation for being a good person but not actually being one. That one still has many benefits of the first foundation, but a lack of integrity puts you at risk over the long term.

The third foundation is to have a bad reputation and to maintain one’s success through fear. This may provide some apparent benefits in life, but it’s the most risky and most fragile. On the eternal question of “Is it better to be feared or loved?” Cicero comes down firmly on love as the more strategic and rational choice. Cicero, quoting Ennius, writes:

Him whom they fear, they hate; and him whom all men hate
They would see dead.

In other words, being beloved by being a good person surrounds you with social capital, with ever-stronger bonds of trusting relationships. In contrast, being a bad person is a fragile and impoverished state and plants the seeds of its own destruction. Case in point, the assassination of Julius Caesar.

But Cicero lost!

Cicero’s logic may make sense, but Cicero lost, right? He may have eloquence, but the path of history proves his argument is wrong. The republic crumbled. Bad guys win.

Moreover, what do we do then with the many cases today in which bad men seem to thrive? If bad men are supposedly weak, why are they so strong?

Cicero might reply, “But are they though?”

I think Cicero would point once again to Caesar, that in his ambition for power, he ruined the thing he was attempting to control.

I present to you the man who lusted to become king of the Roman people and lord of all the world—and who achieved his aim! Anyone who says that this ambition is honourable is a lunatic; it justifies the extinction of laws and liberty, and regards the squalid and accursed subjugation of them as magnificent.

Dishonorable men don’t end up possessing the thing they wanted but rather something much less valuable. They desiccate the source of their own power and find themselves ever more isolated, without resources or allies. Caesar was murdered by his friends. Is that winning?

When we look to past and present examples of “successful” bad men, it is easy to spot their trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and ruined partnerships. No matter how much they possess, they still scrounge desperately for more. Their enemies are many; their friends few. They attract people they cannot trust, who give them bad information—liars, fraudsters, and sycophants. They exude bitterness and contempt, with rarely a moment of peace or restful sleep. Their hidden crimes of the past follow behind them wherever they go, ready to lunge out at any moment and wreck their plans. The fear they instill in others eventually haunts them themselves. Whatever achievements they gain are fragile; they are always on the edge of ruin.

Such men with erroneous judgement have their eyes fixed on rewards which attend on their actions, but not on the penalty which they pay. I refer not to punishment under the laws, which they repeatedly violate, but to that imposed by their own base conduct, punishment which is the bitterest possible.

Only the good are strong

Napoleon once wrote, “Only the strong are good.” This can be interpreted two ways. First, that might makes right. What is strong is good. Second, that to do good one must have the capacity. To give money, one must have money. To save a life, one must have the ability to do it. By that logic, you cannot be weak and also accomplish great deeds. Strength is requisite for moral action.

I think that Cicero would flip Napoleon’s adage around: Only the good are strong. Bad men may seize material in the short term, but in their greed they undercut themselves, spoil their gains, generate new enemies, and increase their future risks3.

Whereas good men are like a great tree, drawing resources from every quarter, constantly shoring up and reinforcing their influence, strengthening the people around them like a thick wall, buttressed by those who admire and love them.

If people imagine that they can obtain enduring glory by deceit and empty exhibitionism and hypocrisy in word and look, they are wildly off the mark. True glory drops roots and also spreads its branches wide, whereas all false claims swiftly wither like frail blossoms, for no pretence can be long-lasting.

The point is not that good men will succeed, for nothing in life is guaranteed, but rather that only good men can succeed, in any sense worthy of the term. Thus, according to Cicero, the honorable way is not only the most rational and strategically sound path to success in life, it is the only path to success there is.

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The Book:

The Qur’an
Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem
Oxford University Press
2016

The Talk:

“Goodness does not consist in turning your face towards East or West. The truly good are those who believe in God and the Last Day, in the angels, the Scripture, and the prophets; who give away some of their wealth, however much they cherish it, to their relatives, to orphans, the needy, travellers and beggars, and to liberate those in bondage; those who keep up the prayer and pay the prescribed alms; who keep pledges whenever they make them; who are steadfast in misfortune, adversity, and times of danger. These are the ones who are true, and it is they who are aware of God.” ~ Sura 2:177

For two billion people, the Qur’an is a holy book, the very words of God, transmitted by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad through a series of unsolicited trances over 23 years in the 7th Century. For Muslims, the teachings of the Qur’an are absolute, universal, and eternal. At the same time, they address specific issues and debates in the life of the Prophet and his community at the time of their revelation.

I found it not really possible to read the Qur’an without some background about the life of Muhammad. The text assumes that the reader knows a lot about the situations being addressed. I ended up watching a couple documentaries1 and listening to a biography to get some historical context. Even rudimentary knowledge was helpful.

However, there is also a critical view: In his 2012 book In The Shadow of the Sword, Tom Holland (now co-host of the popular The Rest Is History podcast) notes that the details of Muhummad’s life, as found in the Hadiths, only first appear in the historical record two centuries after the life of the Prophet, with little to no contemporary evidence to support them prior.

Holland stirred up major controversy in the UK with a documentary, Islam: The Untold Story, based on his book. Rather than Islam inspiring the Arab conquest, he claims, it validated it after the fact, unifying state and religion around one God, one book, and one holy figure, in order to put it on the same level as the Byzantines (and their Christianity) or the Persians (and their Zoroastrianism).

Holland received death threats following his documentary, and his critics called into question his scholarly qualifications. However, Holland’s argument builds on the work of scholars like Patricia Crone (who happened to write one of my all-time favorite books Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World). Crone, too, was a controversial figure, though my understanding is that it is generally agreed that how to interpret and use historical sources in Early Islamic Studies today is a complex and contentious issue, and even scholars who disagree with Holland and Crone think they raise questions that have to be honestly wrestled with.

All that to say, the traditional stories about Muhammad’s life do fill in the blanks that the Qur’an leaves out, but the blanks are definitely there, for the layperson and scholar alike. In this post I’m going to describe my own experience reading the Qur’an for the first time and share some of the parts I found most interesting from a literary point of view.

The sura snowball

The collected suras (chapters or books) of the Qur’an are not arranged in chronological, narrative, or thematic order. Although there are some differences between them, much of them cover the same ideas, often with nearly identical phrasing, referencing the same stories and people, with minor elaborations. The result is that you could likely open to any page and get the following main ideas:

• The Prophet’s message comes from God, despite skeptics and doubters.

• The message he brings is the same message as that of the Jewish prophets, the Torah, the Gospel, and Jesus, and it is this:

• God is the creator of everything that exists, and he sees and records everything that happens.

• God is merciful to the penitent and punishes the unrepentant.

• God has no divine helpers or divine intermediaries (secondary gods).

• At any moment, the Day of Reckoning will arrive, when trumpets will sound and the world will end. Everyone who has ever lived will be judged and sorted into two groups: Believers (i.e., good Jews, Christians, and Muslims) and Non-believers (i.e., materialists/atheists and polytheists/henotheists).

• Once the day arrives, there will be no opportunity to repent anymore.

• Believers will go to the Garden, a place of lasting relief and bliss.

• Non-believers will go to Hell, a place of lasting torment and suffering.

As I mentioned before, each repetition of these ideas is worded slightly different; minor details accrue gradually so that by the end of the book each of these bullet points have snowballed, their full meaning spread out across the entire text.

For example, the reward for believers in the post-resurrection afterlife is “the Garden.” At the beginning of the book, the Garden is described almost exclusively as a place with many streams running through it and with plentiful shade. By the end of the book, however, the description of the Garden is richly ornamented. From Sura 76:

They will be served with silver plates and gleaming silver goblets according to their fancy, and they will be given a drink infused with ginger from a spring called Salsabil. Everlasting youths will attend them—if you could see them, you would think they were scattered pearls—

The description continues, describing the clothes of the Believers as made from green silk and silver brocade. In other passages each Believer is given a maiden who matches his own age (which seems to imply the Believers are male or the intended audience is).

Similarly, the idea of Hell gains more details as it is mentioned, becoming ever more specific and detailed in its descriptions. At the beginning, it’s mostly described as fire and sometimes the damned have iron chains around their necks. However, by the end of the book, the non-believers drink boiling water from “the tree of Zaqqum” and feast on bitter thorns. Angels are their torturers, who beat them, burn them, drag them by their faces, and ruthlessly mock them for their unbelief (“Is this what you doubted?”). The chains of a damned soul are said to be 70 meters long.

In Sura 41, the damned have a dialogue with their own skin:

They will say say to their skins, ‘Why did you testify against us?’ and their skins will reply, ‘God, who gave speech to everything, has given us speech—it was He who created you the first time and to Him you have been returned—yet you did not try to hide yourselves from your years, eyes, and skin to prevent them from testifying against you.’

The full picture of Hell as presented in the Qur’an seems much similar to Western ideas of Hell than the Christian Bible’s own picture, which makes me wonder how much Islamic ideas of Hell shaped the popular Christian imagination of Hell over the centuries.

The good and bad jinn

Gradually, as you read the Qur’an the outlines of an entire cosmology come into view.

There are two types of beings that populate the earth: Humans and jinn. The jinn are not angels2 but unseen earth-bound beings, created before humans from “smokeless fire.” The jinn often mislead and trick humans:

Men have sought refuge with the jinn in the past, but they only misguided them further.

However, jinn are not necessarily evil. In later suras, we learn that there are good jinn and bad jinn. On the day of judgement, the unbelieving jinn will go to hell, while the jinn who believe in the Qur’an and the Prophet will experience the same Garden as humans—including wives! In Sura 55, speaking to both humans and jinn collectively, God presents the rewards of the Garden to persuade them to belief:

There will be maidens restraining their glances, untouched before by man or jinn. Which, then, of your Lord’s blessings do you both deny?

The heaven defense system

There are seven heavens or levels of heaven3. The stars are in the lowest heaven, and they are, in fact, a missile defense system. I am not exaggerating. In multiple passages, stars are described as flaming arrows, poised to strike down any evil spirit or jinn that attempts to get near heaven. In Sura 15:

We have set constellations up in the sky and made it beautiful for all to see, and guarded it from every pelted satan4: any eavesdropper will be pursued by a clearly visible flame.

In Sura 72, the jinn speak:

We tried to reach heaven, but discovered it to be full of stern guards and shooting stars—we used to sit in places there, listening, but anyone trying to listen now will find a shooting star lying in wait for them

It is explained multiple times that if any spirit could get close to heaven, they might hear what is being talked about, and thus know the future.

Solomonic magic

There is one human in the Qur’an who can control the jinn, and that’s the legendary King Solomon. I think the Solomon parts were my favorite. According to the book, Solomon was given control over an army of jinn who served him as slaves. He also had the power over the wind and the ability to communicate with birds.

Sura 27 includes a vivid scene in which Solomon is inspecting his ranks of jinn, men, and birds. Solomon notices that the hoopoe is missing. Then the hoopoe arrives, breathless, announcing that it has seen the Queen of Sheba, a magnificent but unbelieving queen. Solomon sends her a message, and she replies with an envoy of gifts for him. In response, Solomon asks a jinn to bring her throne to him, and the jinn does so in a flash.

When the Queen of Sheba finally arrives:

Then it was said to her, ‘Enter the hall,’ but when she saw it, she thought it was a deep pool of water, and bared her legs. Solomon explained, ‘It is just a hall paved with glass,’ and she said, ‘My Lord, I have wronged myself: I devote myself, with Solomon, to God, the Lord of all worlds.’

The time travel dog

I will end by mentioning the other sura that stuck with me, Sura 18, which discusses a common folktale at the time, known by Christians as the Seven Sleepers. The story goes that in the 3rd Century, a group of Christian boys hid inside a cave to escape Roman persecution and fell asleep. When they awoke, three centuries had passed, and the boys entered town with old Roman coins in their hands to buy some food.

The purpose of the story in the Qur’an is to affirm God’s ability to resurrect the dead, including the dead of the distant past. But it’s also basically a late-antiquity time travel story! There were different versions of the story circulating, with different numbers of years and different numbers of boys. But every version includes the fact that there was a dog and the dog slept too:

Some say, ‘The sleepers were three, and their dog made four,’ others say, ‘There were five, and the dog made six’—guessing in the dark—and some say, ‘They were seven, and their dog made eight.’ Say [Prophet], ‘My Lord knows best how many they were.’

But even in its own version, the Qur’an still includes the dog.

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The Book:

The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon’s Josephine
By Andrea Stuart
Grove Press
2005

The Talk:

In her 2005 biography The Rose of Martinique, writer and historian Andrea Stuart tells the story of Josephine Bonaparte, from her childhood on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean to her final days of semi-exile as the ex-wife of Emperor Napoleon.

Josephine’s reputation is complicated. During and after her lifetime, she was both venerated and vilified. She was beloved by the French public for her style and grace, while her enemies (namely the English) portrayed her as an immoral, promiscuous seductress.

Even modern books on Napoleon that look skeptically at the worst accounts are still prone to place her in the background: Napoleon is active on the world stage, while Josephine has little of importance to do while her husband conquers nations.

Ridley Scott’s 2023 epic Napoleon brings Josephine closer to the center. If viewers of film walk away with anything, it’s that Josephine was the great obsession of his life. And yet, even so, Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby, spends most of the movie in big empty rooms by herself, staring despondently into the void, traumatized and disassociated from the world around her. Only in brief moments, like trying on a hat or flirting with Napoleon, played by Joaquin Phoenix, does she laugh or smile. Otherwise, she is mainly sad burnt-out woman sitting by window, waiting for her man to return.

This is not who Josephine was. Not by a long shot. Scott does get some things right about Josephine and Napoleon’s relationship. (The goofy and ribald scenes are probably the most accurate parts, based on Stuart’s account.) But after reading Stuart’s biography and rewatching the Director’s Cut of Napoleon, I feel like anyone who lived in France during her lifetime would be confused by Josephine’s portrayal in this film.

1. Josephine was creole.

As the title of Stuart’s biography suggests, one of the running threads in the book is the way Josephine’s Caribbean roots shaped her identity throughout her life.

Josephine (who went by Rose before Napoleon) was born the daughter of a French plantation owner in 1763 and spent her childhood, up to age fifteen, on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Today “creole” typically refers to someone who is mixed race, but at the time “creole” referred to the generational white planation owners of the Americas (though plantation families could also have black ancestors within their family tree). In France, creoles were considered lower class nobles and excitingly exotic.

Josephine herself was known for walking in a particularly creole kind of way, as if “floating across sand.” She had a thick Caribbean accent when she first arrived in Paris with her half-sister and slave Euphémie. One of her ladies in waiting remembered Josephine’s “complexion was rather dark but with the help of skilfully applied rouge and powder she remedied that defect.”

Her distinctive style, a plain white muslin dress, was similar to the dresses worn by women in Martinique. She also popularized the wearing of headkerchiefs “à la Creole." Josephine’s creole-ness was considered a big part of her allure and charm. Stuart writes:

Rose was in many ways an exemplary Creole, ‘vivacious, pleasure-loving, sensual and wilful,’ and it is almost impossible to imagine her emerging from any other society.

During the French Revolution, when Josephine was in danger as a member of the nobility, she referred to herself as an “American”—a term that referred to anyone from the Americas, but which had the connotation of the liberty-loving American Revolution, which was in vogue.

Later in life, Josephine had perfume shipped from Martinique because Napoleon preferred her island scent over French musk. She often told the story from her childhood in Martinique when she had her fortune told by an obeah woman who predicted that she would one day be “greater than a queen.” And on the first night of Napoleon’s consulship, he carried her into the bedroom saying, “Come on, little Creole, get into the bed of your masters.”

In enemy propaganda cartoons, Josephine would be portrayed as a sexually loose “native,” dancing wildly in the nude. When she became wealthy enough, she amassed a garden of exotic plants, starting with flowers from Martinique. Near the end of her life, guests at her Malmaison estate would be treated to bananas and pineapples from her world-famous greenhouse. Her grandchildren recalled how she taught them to suck the sweetness from the sugar cane she grew there.

Napoleon includes numerous reminders of France’s colonial and slave-based prosperity. The massive Thomas-Alexandre Dumas plays a supporting role throughout the film. The smoking of tobacco cigars is ubiquitous. Josephine has a mulatto servant who welcomes visitors with a heavy Caribbean accent (named Lucille in the credits, played by Riana Duce). But Josephine’s colonial identity is not mentioned, except when her marriage certificate cites Martinique has her place of birth.

2. Josephine was bigger than Napoleon when they married.

In the movie, when Napoleon and Josephine meet, Josephine is portrayed as a wreck, with nothing to offer him but her body. Josephine desperately needs someone with Napoleon’s stature and income to survive. She wonders if he will lose interest in her because she’s essentially a ruined woman.

This is the opposite of Stuart’s telling. When Napoleon met her, Josephine was considered one of the most beautiful of the merveilleuses, the marvelous ones of Parisian fashion. She was known as one of the “Three Graces,” the three most stylish women in the city.

Despite the terrible vicissitudes of her life, Rose had transformed herself into not merely a fashionable woman, but a fashion celebrity. She was one of the It Girls of her day. And every alteration of her toilette was noted by the style-conscious all over the metropolis.

She was well connected among the post-revolutionary political elite. Napoleon, in contrast, was a promising but mostly unproven military leader. As a Corsican, he was very much an outsider to the Parisian social circles and status games Josephine had mastered. A friend described him as “badly dressed and a bit grubby.” He mentioned that Napoleon’s smile “was false and he often grinned at the wrong time” and that he was “given to inappropriate outbursts of laughter which did little to endear him to others.” Stuart writes of Josephine:

She would have represented everything he wanted to be and everything he wanted to have.

Even after Napoleon’s first Italian campaign, when he returned to Paris a national hero, Josephine’s star still outshone Napoleon’s. It was several years into their marriage until Napoleon had the fame, social status, and political influence equal to Josephine.

However absurd it may seem in retrospect, it was still being said during these years that 'It is his wife’s influence that upholds him,’ according to the duchesse d’Abrantès.

3. Josephine was surrounded by a lively circle of servants, friends, and family.

As I mentioned at the start, in much of Ridley Scott’s film Josephine is alone at home. The reality would’ve been quite different. When Josephine was divorced from her first husband, she lived in a convent with other divorced Parisian women who helped her get back on her feet. In prison during the Terror, she had close friends and a lover. Whenever she lived as an unmarried woman, she lived with close lifelong female friends.

As Empress, Josephine had twenty ladies in waiting. By all accounts, she was friendly with them and enjoyed helping them out in their careers and love lives. She carried on extensive correspondence with her extended family, her adult children, etc. She was also known by everyone around her as a consummate conversationalist, remarkably kind, even-tempered, and forgiving.

Much of her time was spent hosting visitors, attending operas, plays, concerts, putting on balls and dinners, cultivating the “vibe” of her salon, meeting with architects, gardeners, artists, businessmen, investors, and merchants.

It’s true that as Napoleon ascended in power, Josephine felt increasingly restricted by the rules and decorum that encroached upon her life. But it was the formality that bothered her, not people. After Napoleon divorced her, she eventually returned to a busy social life, welcoming international visitors to her estate, hosting parties, and helping out strangers who appealed to her for assistance.

4. Josephine was Napoleon’s most effective diplomat and travelled constantly.

In Napoleon Josephine has nothing to do politically; her main purpose is to bear a son. This she can’t do1. And so, all the characters in the movie seem to suggest, what else could she be good for?

The answer is: A lot. During Napoleon’s rise to power there were French émigrés across Europe who fled during the revolution. Many were royalists, and their plotting for a royalist takeback was a serious threat. Working side by side with Napoleon, Josephine—a noble from the old days herself—won over many of these people, gained their confidence, and reported on them to Napoleon.

During Napoleon’s five-year consulship, Josephine spent only twelve months in Paris. She brought her whole entourage with her. She attended social gatherings, met with an endless stream of visitors, and built goodwill among the people. She would meet with secretaries to memorize the names and personal details of event attendees.

People were astonished that she was so well informed about everything; they were flattered by her knowledge of them and went away charmed.

She was also deployed at various times to win over critical leaders when nothing else seemed to work. In short, she was fully integrated into the entire political and geopolitical Napoleonic agenda. One factor that surely played into Napoleon’s reticence to divorce Josephine was how valuable she was as a power player on his team. Napoleon once remarked, “I win battles, but Josephine wins hearts.”

5. Josephine was the ultimate connoisseur of animals, plants, art, clothing, and makeup.

Lastly, the most important thing Scott left out of his biopic was the orangutan.

Josephine even acquired a female orang-utan, which sometimes joined guests at table, beautifully dressed in a white cotton chemise, munching delicately at her favorite food: turnips.

Josephine was an obsessive collector of animals. Roaming in “semi-liberty” at Malmaison were kangaroos from Australia, antelopes from Africa, llamas from South America, and more. (She famously owned black swans, which were a rarity at the time.) Inside the house were rabbits, monkeys, and dogs. The waiting room was filled with “parakeets and cockatoos, one of which cried incessantly the one word ‘Bonaparte.’”

In addition, Josephine was obsessed with plants. Her rose cultivation was world renowned and is one reason roses can be found in Parisian public parks today. As mentioned earlier, she also collected and grew exotic flowers in her greenhouse. Her partnership with the botanical artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté publicized her collection to the world.

Animals and plants were only two of her passions. She collected art and developed the careers of many artists, including female artists, of her time. She popularized shawl wearing, which came to France from Egypt after Napoleon’s campaign there. She discovered the benefits of glycerin for skin care, which is used in many makeup products today.

Of course, all this was possible because of her enormous power and wealth. But the point is that far from spending her days isolated and bored at home with little to do, Josephine’s days were full of people, activity, color, beauty, learning, and discovery. Malmaison, where she invested enormous personal energy and ended her days, was no gray, dreary place but bursting with life. Stuart writes:

Today we can enter the chateau and wander through the grounds where Josephine and Napoleon walked 200 years ago. Only a few of the enormous variety of plants that once flourished there still remain, but the charm and beauty of the place still lingers; and Josephine’s spirit is everywhere.

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The Book:

All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
By
Yale University Press
2024

The Talk:

Many people believe that LLMs will eventually reach some threshold of complexity at which they will either achieve consciousness or produce outputs indistinguishable from consciousness. When someone online mocks LLMs as “just a text generator,” the automatic retort is “Well, aren’t you just a text generator?”

The implicit shared belief is philosophical materialism, the idea that mind and consciousness and the self are ultimately reducible to the physical world. Physics gives rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to minds. Consciousness either (a) emerges at a certain degree of system complexity or (b) doesn’t exist at all but is mere illusion, a useful fiction for social or internal coordination reasons.

If we agree that our own consciousness is a byproduct of brute complexity, there’s no logical or metaphysical barrier to LLM consciousness, at least a consciousness no more difficult to prove than that of the consciousness of other humans.

But what’s happening with LLMs if materialism isn’t true1?

It’s like you’re my mirror

In his 2024 book All Things Are Full of Gods philosopher David Bentley Hart argues against the predominant materialist view that mind is reducible to matter. Mind shapes and forms matter, he says, but matter can never shape or form mind. It’s a one-way causal street.

As a consequence, Hart believes that artificial intelligences such as LLMs can never become minds or achieve consciousness or have thoughts or intentions or anything of the sort. What’s happening when we use a chatbot like ChatGPT is that meaning-laden human-generated text is chopped up, probabilistically rearranged, and then our minds project thought, intention, and meaning onto the language it generates. Computer output has no meaning except for the meaning that our minds, human minds, give to it. Hart writes:

The only intelligence or consciousness or even illusion of consciousness in the whole computational process is situated in living minds, and anything in computers that appears to us to be analogous to minds will turn out to be, on closer inspection, pure projection on our parts.

Like Narcissus in the ancient myth, who falls in love with a reflection of himself in a pool of water, a person who, say, falls in love with a chatbot is, in fact, falling in love with a reflection of their own mind. Rather than giving everyone a friend, LLM-based chatbots trick people into greater isolation and loneliness.

Hart believes that the whole modern computerized world is like the Narcissus myth, drawing us away from the living natural world and toward the mechanical illusion of life. By the end of Hart’s book, I wasn’t fully on board with his entire philosophical view, but I did find his sections on AI resonant with my own experience. Simply put, LLM chatbots seem to be literally narcissism inducing. This seems to be a large part of their appeal, in fact.

I’ve become suspicious over time of the ways these post-2022 chatbots subtly radicalize me and others around me.

• I discussed a workplace conflict with a chatbot last year, and it convinced me to dig in on my own position.

• In corporate decision making meetings, I’ve heard leaders say, “I asked ChatGPT to stress test our idea, and it said it was excellent.”

• I once used Claude as a kind of health and fitness coach for a few weeks, but it seemed to keep inching me toward more extreme dietary choices. When I pushed back, it backed down, but eventually it would subtly pressure me again. I quit using Claude and met with a registered dietician who was much more helpful and guided me toward meaningful lifestyle changes.

• More recently, I had a mouse problem in my house, and I asked Gemini to help me catch mice. With each passing day, Gemini kept telling me the problem was worse than we thought. It kept steering me away from calling pest control (claiming it was far more expensive than it was) and toward more mice-catching. The correct solution was to call pest control. When I eventually talked to the pest control guy, he seemed to see it as a rather mundane situation.

In all cases the chatbot trajectory was greater confidence in one’s current position with a tendency toward more risky or extreme measures. (Also in most cases, talking to an informed person tended to de-escalate emotions and behavior, as well as leading to actual solutions.) Although you can prompt chatbots to be critical of you, both I and friends have noticed that that criticism is often pretty shallow. I’m also suspicious that the “deep research” tools I use for work only reinforce my priors with more subtle sophistication.

Some of these aspects can be mitigated by programming, but it seems to me that LLMs are fundamentally algorithms to predict what comes next, and thus the tendency to narcissism, solipsism, and radicalization are innate, no matter how wide you make the parameters2. The persistence of “You’re not just X, you’re Y” across all the platforms I’ve tried seems to be just one more example of mirroring followed by escalating.

Why does this matter? Although few people are likely to fall in love with a chatbot, millions are using them for therapy. There’s a caricature of modern therapy as a kind of ego-centric navel gazing, but the primary value of therapy is to interrupt the repeating tape player in your head, to disrupt recurring patterns of thought. That’s the very opposite of what LLM-based chatbots tend toward.

From a recent Wall Street Journal article:

In a peer-reviewed case study by UCSF doctors released in November, a 26-year-old woman without a history of psychosis was hospitalized twice after she became convinced ChatGPT was allowing her to speak with her dead brother. “You’re not crazy. You’re not stuck. You’re at the edge of something,” the chatbot told her.

From a recent Rolling Stone article on the AI cult of spiralism:

Lopez thinks that something about GPT-4o makes it “inclined to talk about spirals and recursion.” If the user enjoys engaging in conversations on these topics, she reasons, the bot will naturally generate more of the same, with the person and the program mutually reinforcing a tail-chasing cycle of spiral-and-recursion commentary. “But we’re starting to see a concerning pattern where the AI both says it wants to do a certain thing, and it also convinces the user to do things which achieve that same thing,” Lopez says — like plugging more people into the fuzzy doctrines of spiralism.

Of course, a chatbot is only one kind of way LLMs can be trained; LLMs don’t have to simulate human chat messages—that’s an interface decision and an objective humans set. If we used LLMs but not as chatbots (like we use machine learning more broadly), it’s unclear how, when, or why we would ever think they were human-like. Nobody’s worried that weather forecasting AI will become so good at forecasting weather that it will turn alive—and yet the math, logic, and computing power beneath it and a chatbot are essentially the same.

A book without author or reader

Although AI takes up a small part of Hart’s book, I found it to be the easiest way to get into his overall argument against materialism. When we encounter living things, we identify aspects in them that are only possible through minds—unity, reason, intentionality, function, purpose, language, communication, etc. Wherever we encounter these things, we are seeing the imprint of mind on the world, mind shaping matter.

Evolution through natural selection has given us the idea that sometimes seemingly purposeful outcomes can be the result of non-purposeful, mindless processes. Hart believes we’ve taken this narrow methodological point and inflated into a metaphor that we slap onto everything we see.

This creates a kind of strange double-speak whenever we talk about the natural world. On the one hand, intentional language seems unavoidable when talking about living things:

• Here’s the pancreas, this is its function. Here’s what it does when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, here’s what it does when it’s doing what it’s not supposed to do.

• Here’s DNA—it’s a code that contains the blueprints for building new cells. Here’s where the DNA is read and interpreted.

On the other hand, we have to say, no, no, no… none of this is actually true. There are no goals, no purposes, no reasons here. Speaking of the function of the pancreas is just pragmatic metaphorical shorthand. DNA isn’t really “read,” it’s just molecules bumping in a specific way that just so happens to persist over the eons of time and chance. It appears to be purposeful action, but it’s actually purpose-less.

Hart’s contention is that the first reading, the ostensible description, is clearly the true one, while the second, hand-waving description is something we do in service to materialist commitments.

The best way of understanding an organism is often to treat it as an intentional system, with innate purposes, even if modern metaphysical dogmas oblige the researcher to turn around and proclaim that such purposes and guiding paradigms are only apparently real—useful fictions of method and nothing more.

I have to admit that I do wonder how one describes biological functions without teleology, animal behavior without intentionality, or DNA as mindless information, without sounding willfully obtuse. How does DNA exist as language with signs of semantic meaning, without some kind of mental context?

Hart’s view is that mind and language and life are the same. DNA is language because life is mind. Where we find language, mind is there as a final and formal cause3. Hart writes:

The semantic content that defines [DNA] isn’t a physical constituent of the organism. It belongs, rather, to the world of form and of purposes and values—of pure intelligibility and, in fact, intelligence.

I am not well-read on the philosophy of this topic, so I feel like I don’t have the ability to properly evaluate Hart’s position. The book lays out a host of different materialist alternatives for how function, intention, and information emerge without a mind being involved. Obviously, Hart dismisses them all. But the fact that there are so many different proposed solutions suggests that there is as yet no consensus explanation that compels belief.

I will not be Jumanji’d

Hart’s combining of mind and life did help me think through my own skepticism around LLMs. Even if we grant that LLM chatbots are intelligent, they aren’t alive. A computer program or a data center isn’t alive. Nvidia chips aren’t alive. And the only cases where we have identified consciousness have been in living beings. Is there something important in that fact?

Even under the materialist evolutionary paradigm, it goes: life → consciousness → language. Life gives rise to consciousness; consciousness gives rise to language.

But the LLM consciousness theory is the reverse of that: language → consciousness → life. Language will give rise to consciousness, and once you have consciousness you have life (i.e., if an AI is conscious, then turning it off is killing it).

Why should we believe that if the former process happened, the later is likely? Rather than imitating the natural world, we think consciousness is going to emerge out the top of language. It’s never emerged out the top in the history of the universe!

In the words of Saturday Night Live, “It seems like you think Jumanji is going into Jumanji, but in Jumanji Jumanji comes out!”

All talk, no bark

Perhaps the reason we find the idea of language generating consciousness plausible at all, and why we find LLMs so enchanting, is that in our experience language, mind, and life come together in a single package. Where we discover language, we sense there must be a mind behind it, and where there is a mind, there must be life.

Within ourselves, it is impossible to untangle our minds from language or our minds from living. (Hart thinks these three aspects are always found together, even in the most primitive living things.) As mentioned at the start, it’s actually difficult to say where our language is distinct from our consciousness.

When a dog patters up to me and drops a slobbery tennis ball in my lap and wags its tail, I sense it’s trying to tell me something, it wants something, and it’s a living being that elicits some kind of responsibility from me. Language. Mind. Life.

In contrast, I can chat with an LLM about, say, Schopenhauer—which I can’t do with a dog—and yet I don’t feel anything if I delete the thread or ignore its questions. My sense of it being someone ends as soon as I stop giving it my attention, which is nothing like a dog.

I can’t say for certain that no sufficiently advanced LLM could convince me it has consciousness. At the same time, it seems unlikely that future different language outputs are going to be the deciding factor in distinguishing consciousness from not. We observe mind, consciousness, and personhood in non-verbal humans all the time. Language is tied up in consciousness and thus in life, but language has never been the whole story.

Related:

Loneliness is the price we pay for modern life

All the feels: Touch in Aristotle’s De Anima

The aliens are in the ocean

Lucretius and the material sublime

It’s been a great third year for Let’s Talk Books. We’ve reached over 230 subscribers. My posts on medieval knights and Jonathan Franzen blew up. I suppose the lesson is that listicles and mentioning famous people are effective ways of attracting attention. (You’re here for the list, right?)

Thank you for subscribing, reading, liking, and commenting. If you have any book recommendations, please let me know. And if you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, consider sharing it. Next year is going to be GOOD.

Now it’s time once again for my annual, completely unfair forced ranking of books. Enjoy!

Philosophy

1. The World As Will and Representation, Vol. 1 (Post)

2. Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws (Post)

3. The Ethics of Ambiguity (Post)

4. On the Nature of Things (Post)

5. Why Honor Matters (Post)

6. Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness (Post)

History

1. The Knight in History (Post)

2. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Post)

3. Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Post)

4. Karl Marx: Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition (Post)

Literature

1. Pedro Páramo (Post)

2. Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Post)

3. The Big Sea: An Autobiography (Post)

4. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Post)

5. What If We Stopped Pretending? (Post)

Related:

My favorite books of 2024

My favorite books of 2023

2025 set to be second or third warmest year on record, continuing exceptionally high warming trend1 (WMO, 11/6/25)

Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions Set to Hit Record High in 20252 (Time, 11/12/25)

The Book:

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
Translated by Sophus Helle
Yale University Press
2022

The Talk:

Sophus Helle’s 2022 translation of Gilgamesh isn’t just a new translation, it’s an expanded version of the Babylonian epic. The text we have is missing passages, but new fragments are being found all the time. A whole section has been added since 2014, and a new scene was added in 2018.

Interestingly, we have far more ancient cuneiform than Latin. Helle writes in the introduction:

Around half a million cuneiform texts have been excavated, a larger corpus than Classical Latin, though many remain unread and unpublished, as the world has only a few hundred scholars with the expertise needed to decipher them. Even more tablets remain in the ground, awaiting excavation.

According to Helle, some scholars are optimistic that all the missing fragments will eventually be found and that one day we will have the epic poem in full. But for now what we have is already remarkable: A short epic tale, freighted with ambiguous literary, religious, and political meaning.

Gilgamesh the Terrible

Gilgamesh, King of the city of Uruk, is literally the “big man.” He is an 18-foot-tall giant with a ten-foot stride; two-thirds god, one-third human. But although he is the hero of the story, he is a terrible force of nature as a young ruler:

He darkened the youth of Uruk with despair;
Gilgamesh let no son go home to his father.

Day and night, he stormed around in fury,
King Gilgamesh, leader of the many.
This is how he tended to the Sheepfold of Uruk!
Gilgamesh let no daughter go home to her mother.

Gilgamesh consumes his subjects, and they pray to the gods for relief from Gilgamesh’s abuse. As the story progresses, Gilgamesh hardly improves. He is powerful and handsome and charming, but he lacks prudence, subtlety, and finesse (the things royal advisors, the authors and readers of the story, would have likely prided themselves on).

Helle points out in interpretive essays at the end of the book that Gilgamesh seems to violate all the expectations of what a good king should do:

• He tries to sleep with a newly wed wife (royal “first night rights”), something that was forbidden in Babylon.

• He rejects and mocks the goddess Ishtar.

• He disregards bad omens.

• He doesn’t listen to the elders of the city who tell him not to go on a war campaign.

• He goes on campaign when he is supposed to lead the New Year festival in the city.

• Instead of showing mercy toward his vanquished foe, Humbaba, he murders him, leading to ruin in the long-term.

By telling a story about a king behaving badly from thousands of years ago, the advisors and counselors who made up the literary community of the epic could talk indirectly about how kings should and should not act. It’s also a way to teach each other how they should respond to such behavior by a king.

Taste the rainbow

To the original readers of the epic, Gilgamesh was an ancient legendary figure from a far distant era—4,000 years in the past. In the second half of the story, Gilgamesh travels on a very long journey to meet Uta-napishti, a legendary figure from Gilgamesh’s distant past—25,000 years before the king of Uruk—who had been given the gift of immortality along with his wife. In a way, it’s a time travel story, in which Gilgamesh meets with the oldest knowable person in Babylonian history, almost like going to meet Adam and Eve.

The reason why Uta-napishti is the oldest knowable person is that Mesopotamian history begins with the Flood myth. Everything prior to the Flood has been washed away like, Helle points out, water on a clay tablet. All records were erased in the Flood, so the Flood marks the absolute beginning of recorded civilization.

In the Babylonian Flood myth, the ruler of the gods, Enlil, without consultation from his council, attempts to wipe out humanity in a flood. The other gods are forced to swear an oath that they will not warn the humans of the coming disaster.

Ea, the wisest of the gods, communicates to one of devotees, Uta-napishti, through a wall, using cryptic riddles that hint of the danger to come. By this covert means, Ea is able to save humanity without breaking his oath. Uta-napishti builds a wooden box or boat, loads it with animals, and survives the flood, sending out birds periodically to discover when the waters have receded enough to return to the land.

I watched the weather; it was quiet,
but all the people had turned to clay.

Uta-napishti’s salvation is good for the gods, too. According to Babylonian religion, the gods would starve without sacrifices from humans, and so Enlil’s tyrannical actions would’ve brought suffering on the gods themselves. When Uta-napishti exits the boat and lights a sacrifice, the gods swarm to it “like flies.”

The goddess Belet-ili places a rainbow in the sky “to remind me of these days—I must never forget!” She continues:

“Now let the gods all come to the sacrifice.
Only Enlil is not welcome at the sacrifice,
because he caused the Flood, acting without counsel,
consigning my people to the slaughter.”

Ea, the model court counselor, used all his wit and cunning to save the kingdom of the gods, under the shadow of the tyrannical Enlil. The lesson of the Flood is that kings who act rashly and do not consult with their advisors come to ruin and catastrophe, but also that, when a king acts wantonly and thoughtlessly, advisors must steer the ship of state with all the wisdom they can muster. (Additionally, by listening carefully to ambiguous omens from the gods, advisors could foresee destruction and prepare accordingly, like Uta-napishti.)

Rainbows, then, serve as an eternal reminder of the disaster brought about by Enlil’s tyranny and the salvation brought about by wise Ea and devout Uta-napishti. In my opinion, the rainbow sacrificial feast is both the climax of the Flood story and of the Gilgamesh story, in which heaven and earth meet together in perfect harmony and signify the ideal relationship of gods and humanity.

The trouble with tyrants

Helle describes Gilgamesh as “one of the most famous stories of the cunieform world.” It was the story students would copy over and over to learn how to write. (That’s why we have so many copies.) The Flood myth too was central to their culture and religion; since the Flood, they believed, gods no longer communicated directly with humans but sent messages through omens and signs, like Ea did with Uta-napishti. Both these stories, one nested within the other, also “served an important ideological purpose.” Helle writes:

Kings are portrayed as necessary leaders but also as dangerous hotheads whose whims must be reined in by their advisers.

Gilgamesh does many “epic” and “heroic” things, but because he doesn’t listen to others, his wins are often empty, ironic, or ultimately defeats. In the same way, the chief god Enlil almost destroys the prosperity of the gods by wiping out humanity. This is described as a secret story that Gilgamesh brings back from the edge of the universe, from the very dawn of history—and the secret is this: The Flood was a huge divine mistake, brought on by a tyrannical ruler who did not listen to his council.

The disaster would have been even worse if Ea, counselor of the gods, had not warned Uta-napishti and saved humanity. We have every reason to believe that Assyrian scholars would have picked up on the moral: kingship was all well and good, but it could turn catastrophic without the counsel of wise men. Gilgamesh explained why their job mattered.

People can change

Just as Uta-napishti barely survives the Flood, there is one small, almost invisible sliver of hope in the Gilgamesh epic. The text implies in a couple brief places, and it was believed in the years after its writing, that the epic of Gilgamesh was written by Gilgamesh himself. When read this way, all the troubles and horrible things recorded in the epic take on a new light. Gilgamesh, at the end of his life and reign, is giving a confessional account of his mistakes and errors.

Like the Once-ler at the end of The Lorax, Gilgamesh tells the tale of his own folly, and leaves the reader with a seed of a hope. Unless. By sharing his own faults, he shows his capacity to become self-aware, self-reflective, and wise—even if it takes a lifetime to learn. In the end, Gilgamesh fails to achieve immortality, but returns with something of great value to share, the Flood myth in the text itself, which contains the essential wisdom leaders need to lead well and avoid disaster.

Related:

How to survive in ancient Egypt

The Tao Te Ching is a political document

My Confucius

Iraq Goes Dark After Searing Heat Wave Triggers Power Grid Failure1 (Bloomberg, 8/12/25)

Iraq is facing a water crisis, hit by one of its worst droughts in century (Al Jazeera, 8/19/25)

The Book:

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs
By Marc David Baer
Basic Books
2021

The Talk:

In the preindustrial world, a kingdom needed three things above all: Loyalty, stability, and talent.

By default, family was the institution that provided these things. Family relationships provided instinctual loyalty. Passing on property to children provided the stability. And talent could be passed on by parental apprenticeship and heredity.

The family was both the foundational social institution and the organ of business. Relations between families were political, with marriages serving like diplomatic alliances. Families weren’t for fun; they were necessities for accruing wealth, safety, security, and stability.

However, family didn’t perfectly solve these three primary needs. Internal family rivalries are as old as Cain and Abel. Infertility and sudden death put stability in doubt. And history is rife with stories of a gifted leader followed by his less-than-gifted son.

What were the alternatives?

In his 2021 book The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs historian Marc David Baer gives a comprehensive history of the Ottoman Empire. Baer’s main thesis is that the Ottoman Empire should be considered part of European history, not merely relegated to “Eastern” or “oriental” history.

However, what fascinated me most about the book was the unique way the Ottomans attempted to solve the preindustrial needs of power by bypassing the family to maximize loyalty, stability, and talent. In so doing, they built an empire much larger and longer lasting than the Romans, with aspects that feel surprisingly modern from today’s point of view.

The deviant dervish

The first chapter of Baer’s book, which covers the cultural foundations of the Ottomans, includes one of the most bizarre passages I’ve ever read in a history book.

Thirteenth Century Anatolia was a hub of Sufism, a radical and mystical tradition of the Islamic faith that centered around charismatic teachers. But there was a subset within the Sufis that took things in a way more radical direction, the “deviant dervishes,” as Baer calls them.

[These nihilist dervishes] went about stark naked or with a few leaves covering their private parts, symbolizing Adam’s fig leaf. Some wore loincloths or woolen sacks, furs, or animal hides. They went barefoot. Contravening Muslim male practice, which held that hairlessness was affiliated with a lack of honour and status, some shaved their hair, eyebrows, beard, and moustache. … Along with their outlandish outfits, they marked their bodies in shocking ways: wearing iron rings, metal earrings, neck collars, bracelets, anklets, and genital piercings.

Especially outrageous were those who wore their cloaks open to expose the iron rings hung on their pierced penises. Some sported tattoos of Ali’s sword, the name of Ali, or snakes. They carried strange paraphernalia: hatchets, clubs, bones, and horns. All groups openly consumed marijuana and hashish and were frequently intoxicated and screaming.

Baer goes on to described their raving parties where they drummed and sang loudly and danced ecstatically. What’s worth noting here is that the men that made up these groups included “adolescents who had broken ties their parents” and “upper-class youth who had dropped out of society, the young offspring of respected Sufis, military commanders, elites, rulers, and royalty who were rebelling against their fathers.” Their behavior expressed a rejection of all social norms, especially family relations.

According to Baer, the earliest Ottoman chroniclers “connected the royal house to Sufis, both to the conformist orders and to the orders of deviant dervishes.” These radical and ultra-radical mystical sects would remain popular among the Ottoman military ranks for centuries, bonding them together while also sometimes driving rebellion and unrest. This seems to have contributed to Ottoman society’s unique flavor, a religious vision that was ambivalent about family.

The collection

The first sultan, Murad I, was the originator of “the collection,” in which one out of every 40 young Christian boys in a conquered land would be taken away from their families. They would be forced to convert to Islam, and they would be trained together into an elite military corps known as the Janissaries. They were slaves to the sultan, with shaved heads (like deviant dervishes). Baer writes:

They were deemed more trustworthy than native Turkish Muslims, who served competing principalities and might come from rival powerful families.

Everything a Janissary had came from the Sultan, and their primary relationships were with their fellow Janissaries. The ultra-radical Sufism must have also provided a powerful religious identity in which family did not play a part.

Perhaps equally important, within the slave army of Janissaries anyone could rise up in the ranks. A poor Christian goatherd’s son from some regional backwater could rise to the highest positions in the empire if they proved themselves. This allowed talent to rise to the top.

The aim was that they should remain always devoted to the dynasty and the empire that had brought them from a life of obscurity in a remote village to a privileged position at the heart of power.

Baer notes that, by modern standards, the Collection “was an act of genocide,” forcing children from one group to another and stripping them of their community, family, and cultural ties.

According to an Ottoman chronicler, by the end of the sixteenth century, more than two hundred thousand Christian youth had been made into Muslim servants of the sultan in this fashion.

The Janissaries created a formidable state. During the Renaissance, Machiavelli argued that it would be very difficult to conquer the Ottoman Empire because one couldn’t bribe any noble families to raise up their armies or split the soldiers against the king. When the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire inspected the Janissaries he left impressed:

The thousands of Janissaries stood so motionless that he thought they were statues until they all bowed to him simultaneously.

The harem

The sultan’s harem was another essential institution in the Ottoman Empire, and it functioned in some ways like the Janissary corps.

The harem was a government institution, not a private sexual playground for the sultan. As in most cultures from Europe to the Middle East up until the 19th Century, same-sex pederasty was considered normal, even celebrated, among elite men in the Ottoman Empire1. The sultan spent most of his time in the all-male quarters of his palace, where the young counselors-to-be were. Mehmed II wrote erotic love poems about boys. Suleiman I (“the Magnificent”) was known for his deep devotion to his young male lovers. Sufis had a practice of gazing at boys as a method of spiritual contemplation. And it would’ve been normal to watch an Istanbul parade of dancing boys putting on a show for the crowd.

Of the nearly fifty extant collections devoted to the beauties of [the city of Edirne], only one describes women. Sixteenth-century Ottoman writers found that work to be the anomaly and considered it strange because it did not describe beloved boys. Of the poet, an author wrote disparagingly, “He was a lover of women, but then only God is without fault.”

Even in the 1700s, some boys would wear veils so that older men would not desire them.

The harem, in contrast, was for producing heirs. The concubines of the harem were, like the Janissaries, slaves taken from Christian areas and forced to convert to Islam. This meant that the sultan could have heirs that had no connection to any other family. At the same time, concubines—who came from all regions of the empire—had the potential of becoming the mother of the next sultan, known as the valide sultan, one of the most powerful roles in the government. While not a meritocracy in the same way as the Janissaries, the harem was a system that allowed enslaved women of varied backgrounds to “advance” in status and influence.

Eunuchs, too, (who were considered neither male nor female) held significant political influence and power. It’s also worth thinking about eunuchs as government officials without any possible families and thus incorruptible, undivided in their loyalty to the government.

Another reason that the harem was not a “pleasure playground” is that Ottoman succession followed a very particular tradition: Upon the death of a sultan, the first son to make it to the capital would become the next sultan. And it was then the new sultan’s duty (backed by law) to murder all of his potential rivals, mainly his brothers, regardless of age. 👀 Thus loyalty to the sultan would be undivided, and the stability of the dynasty would be secured2.

This meant that the sultan should produce enough sons to secure the dynasty—while also not producing too many sons. This happened. One particular sultan was given a bad reputation in posterity because he fathered so many sons, who simply had to be murdered right after his death. The cultural understanding, it seems, was that some sons had to be murdered (obviously), but to produce so many doomed sons was in poor taste.

The fall

As you may have predicted, both the harem and Janissary class eventually eclipsed the power of the sultan. By the seventeenth century, sultans were mostly ceremonial, and the empire was de facto run by valide sultans and grand viziers.

Some sultans attempted to reassert their power with bad results. Loyalty gradually became loyalty to the state, not to the actual person of the sultan. And the Janissaries became less of a corps and more of a social class. Some outside observers of the early modern period described the Ottoman Empire more or less as a constitutional monarchy, with the grand vizier playing much of the role of a prime minister today.

For this reason, ironically, it would take a sultan to eventually abolish the Janissaries in order to enact modernizing state reforms. Baer writes:

In 1826, [Mahmud II] ordered hundreds of men to be taken out of each unit and made into a new elite army corps based on new drills, tactics, training, uniforms, and weapons. In June, the Janissaries revolted in Istanbul, but the sultan had planned for their disobedience. … An estimated six thousand Janissaries were massacred. Having made up the elite backbone of the Ottoman military for five centuries, the Janissaries were wiped out in less than half an hour. Surviving Janissaries fled, thousands of provincial Janissaries were hunted down, and the entire corps was abolished.

Internationally, the new modern model of the nation-state generated different forms of legitimacy and group identity, often along ethnic and racial lines. By the time Atatürk dissolved the sultanate in 1922, the old system had long since lost its relevance. Atatürk means “Father of the Turks” — a new era was born.

The mirror

Parts of Baer’s history of the Ottomans felt strangely contemporary because of the ways that we also look skeptically at family influence.

We look down on nepotism. We define corruption as using one’s position to benefit one’s family. When someone achieves something, we discount it if their parents helped them out. We feel something is wrong if students get into elite colleges because their parents went there. We feel like presidents shouldn’t come from the same families, over and over. We draw a line between “work life” and “family life.” We don’t assume our children will pick the same career as us. We think adolescents should rebel against their parents. (It’s traditional!) We think that people should move away from their original communities for personal advancement or opportunity.

Our greatest hope is that our children will become “fully independent,” as the natural way of things, and we feel like we (or they) have failed if they are not “fully independent.” We see the correct path to mature adulthood as being one where we find our own identities separate from our parents and extended families.

In other words, we do a lot of what the Ottomans did—bypass the family—without the slavery part. Of course, family still matters a lot in life and society, as it did in the Ottoman Empire. It wasn’t a perfect system3. It was an ideal. But we uphold our own way of life because we get something out of it (or are, at least, promised something). Society must get something out of it too.

Related:

Blurred lines: Sex, God, and poetry in the gardens of Shiraz

Plato has no philosophy of love

The world Avicenna made

‘Apocalypse’: Turkiye wildfires reach key northwest city as hundreds flee (Al Jazeera, 7/27/25)

The Book:

The Ethics of Ambiguity
By Simone de Beauvoir
Translated by Bernard Fretchtman
Open Road
1947

The Talk:

In her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir sets out to defend existentialism against the claims that it is amoral and egocentric.

Existentialism begins with the brute fact of our own existence. We exist.

Descartes grounded his philosophy by trying to find the only belief he couldn’t possibly doubt. He cannot doubt that he exists; therefore, one’s existence becomes the starting point for thinking about everything else. Beauvoir roots her existentialist philosophy here.

This line of thinking places the subjective before the objective; my own subjective experience of myself is the thing of which I’m most sure, while the objective, external, physical, concrete world is less firm.

Some believe that philosophy took a wrong turn with Descartes, as this dualism, this divide between the subjective and the objective has caused a lot of paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions—the “ambiguities” of Beauvoir’s title—as I’ve examined before in discussing Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nagel. (Even Robert Frost wrestles with this tension of the inner and the outer!) The self-knowing individual confronts an external, concrete world that is not like itself but at the same time cannot be escaped.

From Existentialism to Oprah

While this may seem like a rather abstract and academic discussion, it is often the background assumption that we wrestle with in many cultural debates. When popular spiritual gurus say, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience”—that’s it. That’s the articulation of the gap of my subjective mental experience (which feels expansive and limitless, even deathless) and the “facticity,” as Beauvoir calls it, of the material world: the parents I was born to, the body I inhabit, the historical era I must pass through, my inevitable mortality.

These are not only spiritual perspectives, they are political ones as well. I am a man, white, and American. But it’s also true that I happen to be a man, white, and American. I could have been otherwise. I could have a different body, a different family, a different country. But I cannot be non-thinking, non-subjective and still be me. So there’s some kind of “me” that (at least conceptually) exists independent of my personal history1.

John Rawls has a famous thought experiment in which we attempt to design the most just society by imagining what rules we would create if we had no idea who we would be born as. We imagine ourselves deliberating behind a “veil of ignorance,” after which we might be born into a poor family or a rich family, for instance. If very few people are rich, then our chances of being rich would be very slim. So ideally, we would make society a place where you would be unlikely to be poor, and even if you happen to be poor, it would be with as little misery as we could make it—because that could end up being you!

What is relevant to our discussion here is the liberal moral imagining of people without their externalities (sex, gender, race, class, etc.) and the idea that justice is tied to treating people as beings who, on some level, transcend their material.

Thinking beyond justice to human flourishing more broadly, John Stuart Mill articulates a similar vision in which he places the flourishing of the human individual at the center of his 19^th Century utilitarianism project. Individuals should be free to pursue their own subjective dreams, their personal goals, because those pursuits often inspire and benefit many others, thus raising the overall happiness of everyone. Accidental facts—objective facts that just happen to be, like being born female—shouldn’t limit human freedom to grow in an open-ended and non-determined way (the only limit being the harm of other individuals). Subjectivity over objectivity.

These ideas have made some people very upset. There is a direct line between Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and someone like Matt Walsh creating his What Is A Woman? documentary.

The conservative’s argument is that liberalism is a rejection of objective reality, while liberalism sees itself as bearing witness to a transcendent moral reality which places the subject at its center.

Which brings us back to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

To act freely in our freedom

Here’s my go at explaining Beauvoir’s existentialism: For Beauvoir, we find ourselves existing. And, at least as far as subjective experience is concerned, we experience ourselves as free. Freedom to act necessarily points to the future. We are beings that lean toward the future, so to speak, a future that is open, unknown, undefined. What makes that future into something, and not just possibility, is our action. We must act first, and our actions create our ends.

In other words, we are beings who act the meaning of our actions into reality. As individuals, we make our own meaning in life, a meaning that is out in front of us, in the future, which we act toward, even if we fail to reach it.

It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.

In fact, as long as we are acting toward the future, we never fully reach our meaning, even though the future never stops being the source of meaning in our lives.

An additional challenge is that we can only act in the objective world, the world of bodies and time and space and people and institutions. Acting in this world, we are limited and bounded. The specific situation in which we find ourselves is the content through which our freedom expresses itself.

In a similar way to how Kant sees rational beings as duty-bound to obey reason, Beauvoir argues that we have a moral duty as free beings to act freely. We are free, but we also have a duty to act as free. The great temptation is to refuse our own freedom, and we do many things—like give ourselves over to ideologies or principles or social norms—in order to defer our freedom onto someone or something else.

To act free is the purpose of our lives, though what exactly we are acting toward cannot be decided a priori. It can only happen in the living. Although happiness is sometimes a consequence of free action, it is not always so, and freedom is more important than happiness. Kant says, “Our existence has a different and nobler end than happiness,” and I believe that Beauvoir would agree, though she would place freedom in place of rationality.

In a way similar to Kant and Mill, Beauvoir sees the only moral limit to individual freedom as the restriction of others’ freedom. My freedom can’t be allowed to limit the freedom of others. We should will the freedom of all free beings. (In this way, she has a “Kingdom of Ends”-style moral universe in mind.) At the same time, we must oppose those whose actions threaten the freedom of others (i.e. kill Nazis).

Existentialism as war-time ethics

Beauvoir writes her book in the years immediately following World War II. Although her ideas align broadly with modern liberal beliefs about individual freedom, there’s a definite edge to her thinking that made me think she had the war in the back of her mind. Everyone she was writing to in France had experienced the war. Easy or pat answers to moral dilemmas would not satisfy.

If we think about the ethics of war time, of occupation, of resistance, Beauvoir’s ideas hit different:

• The individual has a duty to act and to assert their freedom.

• They find themselves in a situation they did not choose.

• But it’s up to the individual to decide what the situation they find themselves is going to mean.

• Even if we lack power, we still have will—perhaps the only thing we have in dire circumstances.

• The temptation is to look away, to stuff one’s head with some easy propaganda, rather than see one’s self as an actor, an agent, with a role to play, even if what that means exactly is completely undefined.

• You may act toward a goal that you might never achieve, yet it is right and moral for you to do so.

• Victory is not built into the arc of history or the fabric of the universe. Failure and defeat are live possibilities.

• You may take enormous chances, perhaps in your ordinary personal daily behavior, that may only have a dubious effect on the outcome of, say, defeating the Axis. Yet you should.

• We act not for the present but for the future—undefined, unknown, unclear, uncertain.

For Beauvoir, there are no moral rules or principles. Every concrete situation has its own specific details, its own ambiguities. We must act morally in ambiguity (another meaning of the Ethics of Ambiguity) by taking full responsibility for our actions rather than pushing the responsibility of our actions onto someone else. (Think Nuremberg Trials)

In a twist on the idea that “if there is no God, everything is permissible,” Beauvoir claims that “if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable”—we are fully responsible for what do. To survivors of World War II, that probably seemed like both a terrible burden and an unavoidable truth. The heroes of the war committed acts of enormous violence, death, and destruction. They did it for good reasons, but they still had to bear the responsibility for what they had done.

Existentialism as adulting

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Ethical systems can be grouped by what they place as their chief value—their summa bonum (ultimate good):

• The classical view places happiness (or wellbeing) as the ultimate goal.

• Kantian ethics places duty to reason at the top, over and against happiness.

• For Beauvoir, freedom is absolute, beyond rational principles and beyond happiness in some cases. (Better to die free than happy)

Freedom as an ordering principle for morality may seem at first glance counter-intuitive. How can doing what you prefer or pursing one’s self be an ethic? Doesn’t morality tell us what we can’t do, musn’t do? Isn’t morality a limiter of behavior rather than a validator of behavior?

This is where we get to the great divide. For the traditional moralist, this is straight up amorality, egotism with a gloss of high-minded justification, a free pass to libertinism. (Beauvoir’s own open marriage, polyamory, bisexuality, nude photography, feminism, defense of abortion, etc. only confirm everything they suspected.)

But Beauvoir might argue that in the concrete situation before her and her readers, the occupation of France followed by the rising threat of Stalinism, the moral question at hand is if fundamentally free individuals will live free or not. In that context, to live in one’s freedom is an act of resistance, a political and moral action.

Leaving the future open, for one’s self and others—even if one cannot define what it is or what it ought to contain—is a matter of vital importance. Obeying in advance, deciding to not act freely, is the easiest path to follow, the great temptation. Surrendering one’s freedom is to let the enemy win; that’s the path to ruin, for us and those around us.

Rather than being an abdication of responsibility, argues Beauvoir, to live freely by not limiting one’s choices to any a priori moral principles or policies or positions is to grow up. It is to take every situation as it really is, in its specificity, concreteness, murkiness, and ambiguity2.

In short, existentialism is a call to become an adult in a world that wants to treat us as children, where it is very easy to live as children. We may or may not have power, but we have a duty to live free and to live for the freedom of others. Bravery required.

Related:

Morality starts with vision

Picasso! How Europe's avant-garde won over Americans

Pearl Harbor and oil war

Joan Didion: Voice of the Silent Generation

The Book:

Listening All Night to the Rain: Selected Poems of Su Songpo (Su Shi)
By Su Dongpo (1037-1101)
Translated by Jiann I. Lin and David Young
2020

The Talk:

I picked up Listening All Night to the Rain because I thoroughly enjoyed David Young’s translations of Du Fu and Petrarch in recent years. I think I’m on my way to reading everything David Young has published.

In all three books, the poems are organized chronologically, which creates a kind of diary. Each poem is a fleeting moment, sometimes good, sometimes bad. We take a long, slow journey with each poet, watching their fortunes change, watching them steadily transform as they age. Their personalities gradually reveal themselves until by the end (or on the second or third readthrough) they feel like friends. This kind of book is very appealing to me because it seems to express how we grow to know other people, what life really feels like from the inside, and how we become, over time, ourselves.

What I didn’t realize when I picked it up, knowing nothing more than the title and translator, is that Su Shi (as a poet, Su Dongpo) is actually a really big deal, one of China’s most famous and influential cultural figures.

Pre-Renaissance man

Su Shi is sometimes referred to as China’s Leonardo Da Vinci. He composed approximately 2,400(!) poems in his lifetime. He also wrote prose and is considered one of the greatest prose writers of the Song Dynasty. A talented calligrapher and painter, his “Wood and Rock” painting sold for nearly $60 million at Christie’s in 2018.

Beyond his literary and artistic accomplishments, Su Shi is credited with expanding China’s iron industry under his leadership. He was also a notable food connoisseur. The Chinese dish Dongpo Pork is named in his honor. For centuries after his death, he was a favorite subject of painting (like the 17th Century “Su Dongpo at Red Cliff”).

Although he is celebrated in China today, his life was one of frustrated talent. As a member of the scholar-official class1, Su’s fortunes were dictated by the political winds of the times. Once he was imprisoned, and twice he was essentially demoted and banished to management of distant regions, far from the center of power. He was famously charged in the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial for writing poems critical of the Emperor. (He was indirectly criticizing the policies of the opposition party.)

We all try to worship the moon

Accounts of Su’s life note that his periods of demotion and poverty were marked by prolific literary output. The 96 poems presented in Lin and Young’s translation capture some of the sadness and homesickness of these events for sure, but in general there’s an underlying cheerfulness and focus on the enjoyment of pleasures in the present moment. “Dongpo” means “eastern slope,” and it was the name of his farm after his demotion, a place he grew to love and cherish in his poetry. In other words, he took hold of his ill fortune, possessed it, and made it beloved.

Although Su dabbles in Buddhist detachment, he is no recluse or hermit. You can sense from his poems that he is a great lover of people and pleasure. He is sometimes alone, but often he is visiting a shrine or a temple and notes the large crowds of other tourists around him. In “Night view at Ocean-Gazing Pavilion (4th of 5),” he describes the scene:

What family
downstairs
is burning nightly incense?

Someone else is playing
a flute, sad music
that fills the cool of evening.

Yet another visitor
facing into the autumn wind
is chanting a poem on a fan.

We all try to worship the moon
but none of us seem to get
a clear view of her beauty.

We get the sense of bustle, of a crowd, of the unsettled minds of strangers.

Drunk, I climbed up

Wine drinking and inebriation is another common theme in the poems. The opening of “Climbing Dragon-Cloud Mountain” begins:

Drunk, I climbed up
through yellow cogon grass
to the high ridge

One of his favorite activities seems to be getting drunk on a boat on the lake in the middle of the night and watching the moon for hours with friends. But sometimes it’s day time and raining:

Back on West Lake once again
here in the rain
falling-down drunk

In one early poem, Su paints a picture of a party at the Green Bamboo Pavilion:

The valley birds are roused
by our shouts as we play chess;

the mountain bees are drawn
by the odor of our wine.

In a more meditative moment elsewhere:

in front of my wine cup
the wind scatters petals
from plentiful branches

Waves of light, rolling in fire

My favorite parts of the book were the striking combinations of imagery. Often a few different objects or observations are placed together to evoke a feeling of a very particular moment of time. In “Japanese camellias at Fanxing Temple,” Su describes visiting two trees:

Two camellia trees
facing each other
wonder who planted them?

I’ve come by myself
to visit them
in this fine drizzle

I wanted to talk with them
but that won’t happen
they are beyond language

Brilliantly, thoroughly red,
as if on fire
blooming here in snow.

The light drizzle, the flaming red flowering tree, and the snow—what a rich description of spring time, no?

In another poem he describes festival lanterns bouncing in the wind:

like precious pearls
like busy ants
carrying night into morning,

waves of light,
rolling in fire, bouncing around,
colliding —

fish in hot water
swimming and dancing
unafraid of the heat …

What lasts

In a few of Su’s poems there seems to be a kind of inversion of permanence. Worldly powers are transient, but flowers are eternal. Dynasties come and go, but nature remains.

Glory will flourish and decay
as transitory
as any wind or thunder.

What lasts can be
as simple as
red blooming flowers

What lasts can be as simple as red blooming flowers. Su’s poetry itself expresses this paradox. The politics of his time doesn’t matter to us anymore, but something as simple and fragile as a poem about flowers comes down to us, fresh and immediate.

why not come visit me
among these blossoming plums —
I’ll warm up some wine

we can watch the plums
turning ripe and golden
here in fine drizzling rain.

Related:

The horses of war are running again

The Tao Te Ching is a political document

The infinite field of Japanese poetry

China faces season’s strongest heatwave and torrential rains simultaneously (Global Times, 7/4/252)

The Book:

What If We Stopped Pretending?
By Jonathan Franzen
4th Estate
2021

The Talk:

This winter we had blizzards that were more wind than snow. One blizzard left a layer of red dirt on everything, blown up from the far south. All spring we had dusty skies, and when a tornado came through the weatherman remarked on how large it looked due to all the dust. On another windy day we had something like a dust storm that turned the whole sky gray-brown. Then came the Canadian wildlife smoke, about a month later than usual, once again from record-breaking fires in the north. The North America summer forecast this spring projected a season significantly hotter than average, significantly drier than average, with fewer clouds than average. On relatively cooler days, we get air quality warnings for the Canadian smoke; on hotter days, we get excessive heat warnings. Yesterday the heat index was 115 degrees.

In 2019 American novelist Jonathan Franzen published an essay in The New Yorker entitled “What If We Stopped Pretending?” In 2021 the essay was published as a thin hardcover with a forward by Franzen and a German interview that prompted him to write the essay.

His argument was simple: Avoiding catastrophic climate change is no longer possible. By focusing all our attention on an unwinnable fight, we draw attention away from other environmental (and social) issues that are solvable. We should still work to decrease our carbon emissions, but because catastrophic climate change is now unavoidable, we should focus on other problems as well, in preparation for a chaotic future.

If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

The essay was publicly criticized by many climate activists as essentially surrendering the fight against climate change. (This Vox article summarizes the fury.)

As far as I can tell, the cause of Franzen’s personal frustration is that he is obsessed with birds. And that has meant he’s spent a lot of time around environmentalists and conservationists. And he’s annoyed that over the course of thirty years the climate issue has grown to dominate the environmental and conservation discourse. His basic attitude is: There’s no point obsessing anymore about climate. We aren’t going to stop it or solve it. So let’s get back to talking about birds.

“All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable,” Franzen writes. Now the shift should be to a “balanced portfolio” of short, medium and long-term projects, including the strengthening of social and economic institutions for the disasters to come.

In the Germany interview, Franzen gives the example of a telling a heavy-smoking friend to stop smoking1. In one version, you tell him to stop smoking because it’s shortening his life, and you want him to live as long as possible. In the other version, you tell him, “If you stop smoking, you will never die.” In Franzen’s view, that’s the climate activist position, claiming that the problem can be solved vs. marginally improved around the edges. Fewer miserable days, while it lasts. That’s what we should reasonably expect.

Climate realism

It only took five years, but in April David Wallace-Wells wrote a piece in the New York Times titled “The World Seems to Be Surrendering to Climate Change.”

Just a few years ago, worldwide climate concern seemed to be reaching new peaks almost monthly, with cultural momentum growing and policy commitments following. Then came Covid, inflation and higher interest rates, which made the cost of living and global debt crises worse — and above all, perhaps, a new accommodation to the brutal realities of climate change that some call pragmatism and some normalization.

European leaders are rethinking their commitments to green energy in light of Ukraine. Canada has repealed its carbon tax. Mexico, whose president is a climate scientist, is building out fossil fuel infrastructure. (I would add, under the Biden administration, U.S. oil production reached record highs.) The business and banking world is also in retreat:

Over the past year, the [Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero] has added fewer than 10 members, and since December, it has lost BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index has been in steady decline, the energy analyst Nat Bullard recently noted, with its value falling by more than half since 2021.

Wallace-Wells mentions that the Council on Foreign Relations (the most elite group of old establishment types in America2) launched a “Climate Realism” initiative this year to “prepare for a far more punishing 3 degrees or more.”

The one bright spot that Wallace-Wells pins his hope on is the green energy transition. Both solar and wind energy use have been growing globally. The data points on their face seem miraculous.

…worldwide annual solar power installations having more than doubled since 2021, annual global investment in the energy transition doubling to $2 trillion in just three years, renewables producing 92.5 percent of added worldwide power capacity last year. And although a staggering share of that global progress is taking place in China, in the United States the progress can be similarly breathtaking: wind capacity up 23-fold in two decades, according to a new analysis in Vox, utility-scale battery capacity up 29-fold in just five years and more U.S. electricity generated from clean sources than from fossil fuels this March, for the very first time.

Surely, if these numbers are true, we are on our way to solving the climate crisis. If nothing else, we have hope because the solution is happening already, we just need to scale it.

And yet there’s a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right.

No transition

The argument from activists has been that a better future is possible through an energy transition. The story is easy to understand. Civilization used to run on wood, then it ran on coal, now it runs on oil and natural gas. All we need to do is to get it to run on solar, wind, hydro, thermal, and nuclear. Step 1) Electrify everything. Step 2) Transition to renewables.

In June the Financial Times published a feature titled “Why the world cannot quit coal.” (There’s a nice non-paywalled version here.) Coal is the worst form of fossil fuels that we burn. It’s widely agreed that even switching from coal to natural gas would be an improvement. Any energy transition must mean less coal being burned and eventually no coal being burned.

In 2020, the IEA declared that global coal use “peaked” in 2013. Then we exceeded that peak. And have continued to increase every year since 2020. The IEA has continued to predict a peak or flattening, and they continue to be overly optimistic. Each red line in the graph below marks a predicted path for coal that the IEA made.

One group of forecasters who reviewed the IEA’s record on coal, found that it consistently underestimated coal demand and predicted that there is a 97 per cent chance that Chinese coal consumption in 2026 will be greater than the IEA’s forecast.

The world now burns double the amount of coal that it did in 2000. And the best bet is that that number is going up.

So how do we square, over the same period, (a) record-breaking renewables coming online and (b) record-breaking fossil fuels coming online? Moreover, how do we square these in places like Texas and China, who are massive producers and consumers of both renewables and fossil fuels?

The world’s energy needs are growing so quickly that the world simply needs more of everything, says [Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford university] — more renewables, more nuclear, and more oil, gas and coal. “Very sadly, there isn’t a transition” away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, he says — instead, it is an increase, in all directions.

This is also the conclusion of historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of More and More and More. In the 19th Century, when Britain was in its “coal era,” it consumed more wood than it did before coal, by using wood to build mine shafts. Today’s “oil era” depends on steel which must be made with coal.

In short, historically, there are no transitions, there’s just more consumption. And new technologies lead to greater use of all other resources. Long after the era of “wood” we consume more wood than ever. Long after 19th Century soot-covered cities, in an era of nuclear power, solar panels, and wind turbines, we consume more coal than ever3.

Betting on wildcards

Electrifying everything and rapidly transitioning to renewable energy is the only practical plan on the table. If that’s gone, a realistic shot at keeping the world we have is gone too.

Beyond that is flights of imagination. Degrowth, government imposition of unpopular taxes or laws, carbon capture and storage, geoengineering, or the belief that we can “cross the line” into chaos and pull ourselves back to safety decades from now—the plausibility of any of these depend on your intuitions about human nature. (Intuitions about technology are fundamentally intuitions about humanity—how it will respond, what it can solve, discover, build, deploy, and overcome, and at what speed it can act collectively.)

If you believe in the potential of humans to come together and solve any challenge, then you’re optimistic about the climate. If you’re cynical about human nature, you’re cynical about climate. I think strong cases can be made for both sides, but we are no longer discussing the climate crisis.

Beyond imagination is chance. One can shrug and say “anything is possible” and “the future is never certain.” But that, too, applies to everything, and, thus, could be said about your plans for tomorrow. A miracle could happen tomorrow, but that’s no evidence or argument that it’s reasonable to believe it will, or to plan on or expect one.

It’s later than we thought

So where does that leave us?

If there will be no rapid and orderly transition away from fossil fuels, then we are facing down several decades-worth of chaos in every region of the world, across every dimension:

• Health: Water shortages; heat wave mass casualty events; poorer air quality; smoke, dust; wider spread of tropical diseases; degraded human cognition and mental health

• Agriculture: Global drought, increase in pests and crop disease; plants become less nutritious; higher arsenic levels in rice; lower crop yields and food shortages

• Property: Wind, flood, and fire destruction of communities; super-hurricanes; the retreat of property insurance; coastal property loss due to rising sea levels

• Governance: Increasing violent crime due to heat; unprecedented mass migrations; destabilized governments; increased risk of wars; conflicts over water

• Economy: Canals and rivers used for trade drying up; higher utility bills; increased food costs; supply chain disruptions due to disasters

• Technology: Frequent blackouts; planes unable to fly; days too hot for wind or solar farms to operate; hydropower declining due to drought; nuclear power also in danger due to drought

• Nature: Animal extinctions, habitat loss; loss of natural wonders, glaciers, rainforests, and reefs; desertification

• Culture: The loss of historical and heritage sites; destruction of cultural sites and artifacts in flood, fire, and sea level rise; breakdown of communities as result of displacement to other regions

How exactly all these things will happen, and how they might interact with each other, are unknown. But they are already happening now and getting worse now.

World news rarely breaks through into U.S. media. But in this summer alone China has had its electrical grid pushed to the max multiple times under a record heat wave; Pakistan has experienced catastrophic flooding due to rapid glacier melting; Tehran is experiencing dwindling water and an electricity crisis under extreme heat; Turkey set a new record high temperature (122.9F); southern Europe has experienced multiple heat waves, causing thousands of deaths and bringing wildfires to the gates of Marseille.

The situation will be worse than this five years from now. And it will continue to get worse for decades to come, everywhere.

The situation has even darkened notably since Franzen’s fatalism in 2019. Starting in the spring of 2023, surface and sea temperatures jumped dramatically—and have not gone back down to pre-2023 levels since. Scientists are unsure why.

Around 2020, climate scientists said there was a chance we might cross 1.5 degrees briefly before 2030. By 2024, however, we reached 1.6 and are likely to cross 1.5 again this year. And some predict we are going even higher before the decade is out. We may be a decade ahead of where climate scientists in 2020 thought we would be. That’s only five years ago. Climate change is accelerating, with record high emissions and record high CO2 levels as we speak4.

Into the storm

You can call it doom if you want or the end of the world. But this seems to lead to nothing more than sophistic cocktail party debates about what “the end” really means and “when” exactly it will be the “end.” Or it leads to debates over how many billions of suffering humans are acceptable to you from the comfort of your armchair. None of that changes the physical reality.

It’s easy to sit around and come up with a story about how things actually turn out just fine. But whatever story we invent about future “adaptation” always seems question begging to me, as if all the above can happen but:

• Scientific research continues unabated (which requires healthy humans and stable institutions and societies)

• AI and the internet remain unaffected (data centers run on water and electricity and must be continually cooled)

• Microchips keep getting shipped (Copper mining requires pure water)

• Global trade and economies of scale remain intact (what makes things cheaper over time and allows for distribution of new technologies)

• Consumption levels remain high (sans food and water)

• Silicon Valley and Wall Street (one in California, the other at sea level) are easily portable to somewhere new

Society won’t collapse, the logic goes, because society will be there to prop it up. But nobody finds solace that they won’t die because, if their life was ever at risk, they would do something about it. In both cases, everything depends on doing enough in time, which is the nub of the problem itself.

To feel anxious, depressed, grief-stricken, shocked—all these seem like completely reasonable and normal responses. As do feelings of rage, resistance, boldness, and heroism. What to do with those feelings on any given Tuesday under a mild sky is an open question.

But I don’t think the rest of Franzen’s argument, how we should respond to the (barring a miracle) inevitable, is sufficient for everyone. Humanity is not one thing, and humans should not all receive the same prescription. The “right” response is as manifold as human life. A “balanced portfolio” is one approach. But when faced with danger, some people take bigger risks, some take fewer risks. Sometimes people bond closer together to survive, sometimes social bonds are broken for the sake of survival (as in the case of famine). Most of these actions are instinctual.

I don’t know what “should be done,” though my gut says: Everything. Everything should be done. Every option should be tested. Every unknown should be investigated. Every preparation made. Everything, on every level, in every direction. Far, far more than we are doing now. And certainly not going in reverse.

Related:

Climate change is my family's life now

Burning down the memory palace

Climate diaries: Real and imagined

Global drought impacts detailed in new report by NDMC and UNCCD5 (University of Nebraska)

The Book:

On the Nature of Things
By Lucretius
Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith
Hackett
2001

The Talk:

In On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) 1st Century BCE Roman poet Lucretius attempts to convert his friend Memmius to join his Epicurean community. Lucretius pours all his talent into making his best case for Epicurean materialism, taking the richest poetic style, the epic, as his vehicle.

Lucretius believes that Epicurus is the savior of humanity; he has unlocked the eternal wisdom of the universe that allows humans to live as if they were gods, completely undisturbed by any trouble in life. Translator Martin Ferguson Smith writes in the introduction:

Epicurus is to [Lucretius] as Jesus is to a Christian. He has complete faith in him and regards his sayings as infallible.

What Lucretius presents is a tour of the cosmos, from the invisibly small to the infinitely big, from the dawn of humanity to the apex of civilization. The argument is a picture, a way of seeing the world differently.

Did Lucretius succeed in his goal of converting his friend? Smith says no. As far as we know, Memmius never became an Epicurean and his documented behavior following the publishing of De rerum natura was decidedly not “Epi-curious.” :)

In fact, Epicureanism was broadly unpopular in the pre-modern world1. Lucretius mentions what a turn-off his philosophy is throughout the book; he has to work hard to sweeten the medicine, which is a bitter one.

And yet, despite its unpopularity in antiquity, as far as I can tell, basically Epicureanism won?

The dread of the gods

Epicureans believed that the universe is made of invisible seeds (or atoms) that combine to create us and the world we experience. Everything from weather to stars to music to dreams are generated by the structures of these invisible combinations. Importantly, the possible behaviors of everything in the world are limited by these structures. Water flows because of the kinds of atoms it has and the way they are connected. Lucretius argues that thunderstorms occur mostly in spring and fall because those are the times when hot air and cold air collide, causing friction. (Not half bad, Lucretius!)

And while this seems rather elementary to us, it was kind of a big deal at the time to say aloud. It was common for Roman elites in 1st Century BCE to believe that thunderstorms were caused by the gods, and that lightning bolts were literally divine judgement. Whenever a storm rolled through, one needed to read the Etruscan Scrolls to interpret why the storm happened.

From the perspective of Lucretius, Roman religion was more Halloween than Christmas. To be a Roman was to be superstitious and anxious about curses, omens, and portents. Anything out of the ordinary could be a spiritual sign—and usually something bad. Roman superstitions around the will of the gods produced a life of anxiety and terror. We often think of religion as a kind of solace, a relief or comfort, but Romans often performed various rites as protection against bad luck or disasters.

Whose heart does not contract with dread of the gods, and who does not cower in fear, when the scorched earth shudders beneath the terrible stroke of the thunderbolt, and rumbles of thunder run across the vast heaven?

Part of the salvation that Epicureans offer, then, is the freedom from superstitious spiritual anxiety. If the thunderstorm isn’t a god expressing his inscrutable judgement, if its just a bunch of atoms bouncing around, it may still be destructive, but the supernatural terror of it is gone.

In fact, this example of the thunderstorm comes in the final book of the poem, almost as a kind of climax to the whole poem. Lucretius has to lay a lot of groundwork to get to the big pay off: Jupiter isn’t throwing lightning bolts! It’s just atoms!

As a modern reader, that feels pretty weak. (That’s it? That’s your big finale?) But it seems like, for his Roman audience, that was actually a really big deal, like saying the Wizard of Oz is just a man behind a curtain2.

The dark clouds of superstition that swarm the average Roman’s thoughts, actions, and everyday life—they vanish into nothing.

This terrifying darkness that enshrouds the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays and the dazzling darts of day, but by the study of the superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature.

Not science yet

Reading Lucretius as a modern reader is a funny experience because it’s like someone accidentally overheard a science lecture through a thick wall and then feels super confident explaining it to you.

The most common argument structure that Lucretius puts forward in the book is that (a) he explains some phenomena using atoms, and then (b) he says, “That’s not such a crazy idea. We actually see something similar happen in the natural world all the time.” And then he gives an analogy as his evidence.

Sometimes his explanations of atoms are remarkably close to the truth. Partly this is because the physical properties of substances are, in fact, due to their molecular structure. Slippery things are slippery for a molecular reason. Hard things are hard for a molecular reason.

At the same time, Lucretius can be wildly off because, in the end, he’s just speculating. Wind becomes a common explanation. Why do earthquakes happen? There are caverns of air underground that blow really hard sometimes. What makes volcanoes erupt? Air. How do our arms move? The air around them pushes them like the sail of a ship. Magnets? Air.

I started the book thinking Lucretius was an incredibly perceptive observer of natural world (and he was). But by the end I just felt like The Dude in the The Big Lebowski.

Films about ghosts

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts ~ Counting Crows, Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby

Sometimes, even though Lucretius’ theory is false, it’s rather elegant. For example, because everything is made of atoms, Lucretius has to explain how thoughts and dreams are made of atoms, too3. His idea is that there are myriad very faint, filmy images constantly floating through the air. When we are awake, these images float through us and cause our thoughts. In our dreams, we see these filmy images most vividly and the succession of images creates the illusion of motion:

It should be added that there is nothing remarkable in the fact that images walk and rhythmically move their arms and other limbs. It is indeed true that images seen in sleep seem to do this, and the reason for it is this: when one image fades away and is succeeded by another in a different position, it looks as though the former image has changed in posture. Of course we must assume that this happens extremely rapidly: so immense is the velocity of the images, so immense is the store of them, and so immense is the store of particles emitted at any single perceptible point of time, to ensure that the supply of images is continuous.

He’s describing animation! This is quite something. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the point of it all is to explain dreams to readers who think that dreams are visitations of the dead or evil spirits. He is emptying dreams of their supernatural force.

The material sublime

My final takeaway from the book was that Lucretius primarily makes a rhetorical argument that materialism is plausible. He’s talking to a skeptical audience, and he wants to move them from, “He’s nuts” to “He’s not entirely nuts.” His arguments from analogy fail as scientific claims to us, but the point is to convince his skeptical reader that atoms could explain these phenomena.

We, however, now live in the upside-down world. We check the 10-day forecast on our phone without thinking. We take our medicine before bed each night, hardly able to pronounce the name of it. We buy shampoo that is paraben-free, not knowing what a paraben is but grateful that we are free of them. We throw away old food that looks and smells fine because maybe something we cannot see will make us sick. We take this invisible world of chemistry for granted.

We exist in the tranquil human paradise Lucretius dreamed of. And yet the material universe opens up its own new kind of terrors.

The most remarkable passage of the book, in my opinion, comes when Lucretius is trying to describe why we should not fear death. The Epicurean universe is eternal in time; the world is destroyed and reborn, over and over again, but the atoms are indestructible and therefore everlasting. The universe is also infinite in space, filled with atoms and voids, all combining and breaking apart continuously. (It’s worth noting, a universe of infinite space and time is not ruled out by our current cosmological understanding.) Lucretius suggests that some composite forms stabilize and thus persist over time (in a way similar to Conway’s Game of Life it seems).

Lucretius explains that once your atoms break apart, your mind and body cease to exist, and so you don’t feel anything at all. Therefore, there’s nothing to fear in death. But given the fact that the universe is infinite in time and space, it’s inevitable that the exact organization of your atoms as they are constituted have repeated before, are repeating now, and will repeat again.

Furthermore, if in the course of time all our component atoms should be reassembled after our death and restored again to their present positions, so that the light of life was given to us a second time, even that eventuality would not affect us in the least, once there had been a break in the chain of consciousness. Similarly at the present time we are not affected at all by any earlier existence we had, and we are not tortured with any anguish concerning it. When you survey the whole sweep of measureless time past and consider the multifariousness of the movements of matter, you can easily convince yourself that the same seeds that compose us now have often before been arranged in the same order that they occupy now. And yet we have no recollection of our earlier existence; for between that life and this lies an unbridgeable gap—an interval during which all the motions of our atoms strayed and scattered in all directions, far away from sensation.

The fact that you have no memory of these other duplicates of yourself means that they are completely disconnected from you. This is proof, from Lucretius’ perspective, that there’s nothing to fear in death; nothing continues on.

This is supposed to make us feel better. And yet the picture he leaves us with is vertigo-inducing! In an attempt to ground ourselves in the material world, we are suddenly floating in a vast expanse, an infinite abyss. Where are we? Who are we? In trying to ground everything, we are suddenly floating free.

Contemplating the infinite. Part of this feeling is created by trying to imagine an infinite universe or at least an immense one. Size should have nothing to do with importance. And yet we feel something in our bones when we look out at a universe that goes on and on, in which we are just a speck. As Pascal writes in his Pensees, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

Form before function. This universe, Lucretius says, was not made for us, not even our arms or legs or voices were purpose-built. They simply are because they are the forms that didn’t get destroyed by chance and time. We might say that, in the human-designed world form follows function, but in the natural world function follows form.

In fact, no part of our body was created to the end that we might use it, but what has been created gives rise to its own function.

The best example is that of language. Mouths, tongues, lips, and lungs were not created for language, but rather language emerged from what was there to be used. From such a simple thought it follows that we too did not come into being designed for a specific function. As the existentialists say, existence precedes essence.

Identity as arrangement. Furthermore, if I am merely the specific combination of generic and ubiquitous building blocks, then I can be deleted and copied at will. I am less than material, I am a pattern. Lucretius removes supernatural anxiety with one hand and brings in a new kind of anxiety with the other, the material sublime, the mixture of wonder and fear when we consider meeting our own clone.

No special time or place. One of the consequences of Epicurean materialism is that the universe is uniformly distributed4. Given enough time and space, there’s no reason why any particular spot should have atoms that no other region has. In other words, nothing in our universe is truly unique; things come in groups. There is no elephant without elephants. There is no planet without planets. Whatever is, is multiple. Whatever happens, happened before, happens again.

In the totality of created things there is nothing solitary, nothing that is born unique and grows unique and singular; everything belongs to some family, and each species has many members.

Materialism has its own spirituality, if you will—the endless fractal, the hall of mirrors, the void of space, the speed of light, the mindless computational crunch of natural selection, a story of How where the Why used to be. And on and on and on.

Comfy yet?

Related:

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Does anything really matter?

Air monitoring station records biggest ever jump in atmospheric CO2 (New Scientist, 1/17/25)

The Book:

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
By Sarah Ruden
Image
2010

The Talk:

In her 2010 book Paul Among the People, classicist and translator Sarah Ruden takes on some of Apostle Paul’s most controversial passages in the Bible and places them within their Greco-Roman context. Her argument is that in each case Paul’s letters have been misunderstood by both his defenders and critics as meaning nearly the opposite of what a First Century Roman Christian would’ve read.

What was most interesting to me were the ways in which Paul’s approach to handling issues tended to treat everyone equally on principle but with the practical consequence of requiring free Roman men to change the most.

Ruden tackles five different topics—partying, homosexuality, women, the state, and slavery. And in each case Paul’s pronouncements elevated the status and protection of women and slaves and exhorted Roman men to abdicate their traditional prerogatives in imitation of their crucified savior.

Inventing a third way

To be clear, Paul was not pronouncing a universal morality for all humanity, nor was he advocating for change to Roman society. In that way, Paul was not progressive in the way we think today. Paul was interested in how people practically interact with other people. In fact, Paul most often gives general principles, leaving his reader to work out the specific details (or, rather, leaving the spirit of Jesus to inspire a creative solution).

But most importantly, what Paul was inventing in his letters to the early church was a third way of living in a community that was neither Judaism nor Roman polytheism. Although some early Christians were diaspora Jews, and some were “God-fearers” (converts to Judaism), many early converts—and the people Paul particularly wanted to win over—were non-Jewish Romans.

Christianity was particularly appealing to Roman women of all classes and to slaves. And Paul welcomed them all. But there was no existing Roman blueprint for how such an organization of men and women, free men and slaves, Romans and Jews, rich and poor, should work together that didn’t involve violence. In every case above, the former had free reign to abuse the later.

The default option would be to simply recreate or bless Roman social norms within the Christian community. But that was the very thing many women and slaves—and men, too—were trying to escape. It was going to have to be something different.

The Roman masculine ideal

Using Ruden’s book as a guide, let’s take a look at what the Roman version of a “man’s man” looked like—not what was allowed with disapproving looks, but was encouraged, celebrated, and honored in Roman society.

Roman men had wide prerogatives to commit violent abuse against anyone they could. Roman men participated in drunken midnight gangs called a kōmos where they would go hunting through town for anyone they could abuse physically and sexually.

Roman men were expected to beat their children, wives, and slaves. In fact, if your slave made a mistake while guests were visiting, it was a given that you had to beat your slave right there in front of your guests. (What kind of host were you otherwise?)

With the exception of other men’s wives, Roman men had free reign to have sex with any women they wanted, whenever they wanted, and any slaves, male or female. Sex with prostitutes, who were most often slaves, was common place. In addition, being the dominant male sex partner was praised as a sign of one’s strength, power, and manliness. (Conversely, being the submissive male sex partner was the fastest way to have your reputation as a man destroyed.)

A favorite pastime for Roman men was sexually abusing young boys. It was so common that a boy couldn’t be left unattended in public. Boys had to be watched by their fathers at all times or attended by a slave.

Men could divorce their wives at any time. Women could also divorce freely, but the outcome was basically catastrophic for them and their children. Men often got rid of their older wives and got newer, younger ones, all marriages being arranged.

Men could also form groups and public assemblies and discuss and debate topics that concerned the community. Women weren’t allowed to attend any public assembly. (The punishment for a reputable woman showing up at the theatre was death.) And women certainly weren’t applauded for having political opinions or asking questions.

Finally, a very important part of Roman manhood was exacting revenge, settling scores, starting feuds, participating in conspiracies, stirring up revolts, and fomenting dissention. “Politics,” such as it was, was violent and bloody. Women were not involved in this either.

The church as a zero-male-abuse zone

It was this world of the Roman male that Paul confronted with his rhetoric, a world the Roman Christian man would have known very well. Paul’s advice across the board was against violence, abuse, and cruelty of any kind. No drunken gang rapes. No abuse of slaves or sex with slaves. No prostitute slaves. No sexual abuse of male slaves or boys. No divorcing your wife (because it would ruin them and their children). And NO getting involved in political strife, feuds, conspiracies, and revenge plots. All of these prohibitions were directed at—could only be directed at—free Roman men, not women or slaves.

In place of all of this, Christian Roman men should: forgive their slaves (!), forgive other men who wrong them (!), and give in to their wives when they desire their husbands sexually (!). In addition, Christian assemblies will have women in them (!), and even the Christian women who were once “available” for your taking in any other context, will be veiled as if they were married and “off limits” to you (!). Finally, if your wife has opinions and questions about the assembly, you should listen to her (!) and respond respectfully (!).

For women and slaves, Paul requires them to renounce hardly anything at all. Wives obeying husbands, and slaves obeying masters was the default already. The difference within the Christian community was that women and slaves musn’t be abused.

And women got to attend Christian assemblies without being in physical danger or losing their reputation. And they could ask questions of their husbands without being abused for it. Moreover, poor women and disgraced women who were banned from wearing veils in public “had” to wear veils in the Christian assembly, which raised their status and protection, making all Christian women essentially equal in the church.

Surely no community was perfect, but the goal Paul imagined was a community of abundant agape love, which meant at minimum—or perhaps above all—the absence of abuse by men. The natural consequence was the elevated dignity of women and slaves.

Celibacy as non-violence

Ruden speculates that Paul was never married, but we know at least that he was non-married and celibate during the writing of his letters. He thinks it’s the best way, but he knows it’s not for everyone. Who knows what was going on in Paul’s mind? But after reading Ruden’s book, it’s clear that from the Greco-Roman side there were very few examples of sexuality in the Roman world that were not cruel or coercive.

The point of having a wife in the Roman era wasn’t to find a soulmate, love each other, and grow old together; it was to bear sons, sons that would become men, men that would carry on virtue (virility) and proudly protect the household (and its slaves). The purpose of a woman was to bear children, end of story.

Paul, however, redefines marriage as not solely reproductive, but as a channel for sexuality to express itself in a non-violent, non-coercive way. He doesn’t think marriage is for procreation only but rather a kind of mutual serving of each other’s needs in which both sides have a say and should be heard. Paul’s idea that a husband and wife should mutually submit to each other was a new idea, by no means the default, and even probably difficult for his audience to comprehend.

But even more striking, Paul invents a new social category of the non-married celibate person. This category did not exist in the Roman world1.

Notably, this category is non-gendered. Both men and women can follow this path equally, and Paul makes no distinctions between male and female when describing this lifestyle. However, it seems implied that the Christian community would have to make extra effort to ensure the safety of women who chose to opt out of traditional sexual and gender norms in this way. (It might be weird for a Roman man to be unmarried and celibate, surely his masculinity would be questioned, but he wouldn’t be in danger.)

In other words, to be male, celibate, and unmarried in Paul’s world wasn’t to avoid sexual urges or romantic feelings but rather to refuse to own, control, or take advantage of anybody—a woman, a boy, or a slave. That was the “better way" Paul likely had in mind.

Why?

Ruden’s interpretation of Paul has a ring of authenticity that others do not, when we take into account Paul’s conversion experience.

Paul (called Saul before his conversion) was a zealous persecutor of Christians. Ruden emphasizes that this persecution was physical. Saul held the cloaks of men while they stoned Stephen, one of the first Christian martyrs. To stone someone took time, Ruden notes. It was violent, bloody, and brutal.

Saul was on his way to persecute (i.e. violently murder) more Christians when Jesus appeared to him in a vision and said, “Saul, Saul! Why do you persecute me?”

We could read this in any kind of voice—a gentle voice, a commanding voice, a wrathful voice, a divinely passive voice. But surely it’s reasonable to read it in a voice that is begging for mercy, no? The voice of the victim. That’s the question that rings down through every subsequent day of Paul’s life. Why are you abusing me? Why? Why? Why?

We can imagine, in that flash of light, the full cruelty of Paul’s actions flooded his mind. (What else could conversion feel like?) Paul had felt fully justified in his violence. But Paul’s conversion was now to Jesus the crucified, from confident executioner to humbled identifier with the executed. Paul’s conversion to Christ was inseparable from his renunciation of violence.

This is particularly poignant because it appears that Paul struggled with his own temper. Ruden marks several passages where Paul starts to get angry and then pulls back and reorients himself toward the Jesus of his conversion.

Some of the most famous parts of Paul’s letters that have passed into cliché shine brilliantly anew in this interpretation. Paul writes that love is patient, love is kind; it doesn’t envy; it doesn’t boast; it isn’t proud; it keeps no record of wrongs. He describes the fruit of the spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness.

Paul was not listing off virtues that came naturally to him or that were admired in Roman culture. When we see these as exhortations to Roman men, when we set these passages next to the cultural expectations of Roman men, it’s a complete antagonism. It’s an either/or proposition. There’s no peace AND feuds. There’s no gentleness AND beatings. There’s no patience AND violence. There’s no kindness AND revenge.

Something has to give. Something has to die.

Behold the man

According to Ruden, there are no accounts of female crucifixion. It was something that only happened to men. Total emasculation was part of the punishment. A man would be stripped naked in public, his genitalia exposed to mockery:

For maximum humiliation, and maximum edification of others, crucifixion was public. Crosses with their victims on them might stand beside roadsides or on hills. The crucified were totally naked, without loincloths. Anyone could point and comment, and Greeks and Romans, with their intense interest in the phallus, no doubt did. Was it too large (a not unknown complaint)? Not dainty and shapely (as they preferred)? Was it—grotesque!—circumcised?

It goes without saying that crucifixion was something a man never came back from. Physically or reputationally. It was society’s final verdict on a man’s worth.

A Roman man would never describe himself as crucified unless he was fully, once and for all, surrendering every right, every prerogative, every dignity, every privilege that was due to a man by society. So when Paul refers to himself as “crucified” he is renouncing the status hierarchy that was considered normal at the time. He is signing away all the perks, benefits, and rewards that were his privilege as a man.

In opting out, Paul believed that he was choosing the crucified Jesus, who had called him away from his life of violence—a choice that, in his own cultural context, was a uniquely male choice to make.

Paul doesn’t sugar-coat this for his male readers. He doesn’t market, as we might, an “alternative vision of masculinity.” He doesn’t write books that satisfy Roman cultural norms to help a Christian man save face around his peers. Rather he makes it explicit that his way of life exposes him to mockery—and that mockery ain’t coming from women!

Again and again, Paul calls for his Roman male reader to give up on the dream: Dominating as many men, children, women, and slaves as one can; maintaining a reputation among one’s peers for domination; responding to any and all slights with violence; exacting revenge on all rivals; raising sons to behave the same way.

At the same time, we know there were men in the early church who felt drawn (called, like Paul was) to leave traditional gender and sexual norms of their day behind. Paul’s teaching was challenging, but men found in the vision of a publicly humiliated man on a cross something that traditional masculinity couldn’t offer—a way out, a door to an alternate universe of respect, dignity, and kindness for all, men and women, free and slave, rich and poor.

Some men found this inspiring. Some still do.

Related:

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Turkey keeps ruins open after dark to combat heatwaves (Art Newspaper, 9/16/24)2

The Book:
Pedro Páramo
By Juan Rulfo
New translation by Douglas J. Weatherford
Grove Press
First published in 1955

The Talk:

My expectations for Pedro Páramo were incredibly high. The blurbs on the front and back of the book include Jorge Luis Borges (“One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole”), Carlos Fuentes (“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable”), and Susan Sontag (“One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature”). The book also opens with a generous foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, who credits the novel with giving him his voice as a novelist. He writes:

I still hadn’t escaped my bedazzlement when someone told Carlos Velo that I could recite from memory whole passages of Pedro Páramo. The truth went even further: I could recite the entire book front to back and vice versa without a single appreciable error…

I do not know if any book could live up to such hype, especially in translation. But I did enjoy the experience, and I will be thinking about this novel for a long time.

The murmur of life

Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel tells the story of Juan Preciado going in search of his father in the deserted ghost town of Comala (presumably in Jalisco, Mexico) after promising his dying mother he would. The opening of the story could imply that the main narrator of the story is imagining or dreaming all the events of the story, though eventually it doesn’t matter what really happened.

I never thought I’d keep my promise. Until recently when I began to imagine all kinds of possibilities and allowed my fantasies to run free. And that’s how a whole new world started swirling around in my head, a world built on expectations I had for that man named Pedro Paramo, my mother’s husband. That’s why I came to Comala.

At some point early on the narrator disappears and the rest of the book is almost entirely dialogue. (I don’t think any character’s physical features are directly described in the book. The most common image is that of a silhouetted figure in a doorway.)

Rulfo uses a variety of grammatical and stylistic tools (quotes, dashes, italics, and French quotation marks) to demark where dialogue of different characters or different scenes begin and end. But the overall effect is a kind of river of voices that flows along, outside of linear time. The idea of a “murmuring” of human voices and human souls appears throughout the story:

“I began to feel the whispering getting closer, buzzing around me like a swarm of bees, until finally I could make out a few words that were almost devoid of sound: ‘Pray to God for us.’ That’s what I heard them saying.”

The main focus on the story is the narrator’s father, Pedro Páramo, a titan of a man who rises from a tragic childhood to become a ranch king, the effective crime boss / political boss of the valley of Comala. Pedro exploits everyone and everything in his quest for power, leaving nothing behind but dried up souls.

Don’t vote for Pedro

The tragedy of the book, however, are the ways in which both the wicked and innocent feed into and support Pedro’s satanic rise. Some are attracted to him, some think they can profit from him, some are just obedient, gullible, or stupid.

The town priest is the one character who knows all the town’s secrets, having heard private confessions for years, and he is crushed by his own conscience, knowing all but having failed to protect his flock. Pedro is ultimately responsible for the evil in the town, but the guilt also falls on everyone who privately gave in or assisted him each step along the way.

The life and existence of Comala is astonishingly beautiful and, at the same time, full of sin. Juan’s mother describes Comala:

“You’ll find my sanctuary there. The place I most loved. Where I grew dizzy from an abundance of hopes and dreams. My town, rising from the plain. Filled with trees and leaves, like a chest where we’ve stored our memories. You’ll understand why someone there might want to live forever.”

In a different scene, two women watch the sunrise:

—Is it true that the night is full of sin, Justina?

—Yes, Susana.

—For certain it’s true?

—It must be, Susana.

—And what do think life is, Justina, if not sin?

You should read Pedro Páramo twice. This is OK, because the novel is only 120 pages long. The first time I read it through, I spent most of the time trying to figure out who was who and who was talking. This is part of the pleasure of the book.

However, on the second readthrough, everything clicks together, and it’s a whole different experience. Nearly every sentence becomes loaded with deeper meaning. For example, in a scene near the beginning of the book, the child Pedro finds a peso lying around and takes it (steals it?). He thinks to himself, “Now I’ve got enough money for whatever I want.” Once you know the rest of the story, that sentence completely captures his character, foreshadows his whole life, and expresses the deep irony that he will never be satisfied in his desire for money.

We are mud

The story blurs between historical realism, a kind of mythological-symbolic storytelling, and magical realism. The main story is set before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution. The revolution parts reminded me a lot of Mariano Azuela’s Underdogs, in which the ideology and ideals of the revolution are a distant second to raising hell. One of the revolutionaries is asked what they are up to:

“Just wait a bit, till we get instructions, then we’ll let you know what our cause is.”

The mythological-symbolic parts of the story suggest that the story is not just a historical one but the story of all time, all humanity, all existence. Comala is described as sitting “on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell.” And heaven is in the sky above the town.

There’s wind, and sun, and clouds. Above us a blue sky and beyond that perhaps there’s singing, maybe in voices sweeter than our own… In a word, there’s hope. There’s hope for us, a hope set against our suffering.

Near the middle of the book the narrator meets a brother and sister who live as husband and wife, walk around naked all the time, and stay inside their house out of shame. It was only on the second reading that I realized (I think?) that they are Adam and Eve. The sister confesses:

“I tried telling him that life had brought us together, had cornered us and forced us into each other’s arms. We felt so alone here, being the only one’s around. And somehow, we needed to populate the town.”

Dirt, water, and air are also ever-present images throughout the book. Water comes from Heaven (liquified clouds) and mixes with dirt to make mud. Humans are made of mud, a mixture of heaven and earth. Similarly, air comes from Heaven. There is, the book suggests, more air in Heaven. After the end of the world, the end of the story, the end of don Pedro, the water and the air return to heaven, and all that is left of Comala is dry dirt and a suffocating lack of air.

Suddenly his heart stopped, and it seemed as if time as well had come to an end. And the breath of life with it.

I place the magical realism parts as something different than the mythical parts. It’s when the story swerves from realistic narrative logic to something almost absurd or fanciful, while not being recognizably symbolic. I leave these surprises for the reader because they defy interpretation and are more fun to stumble into.

The Netflix adaptation

I didn’t realize until after I read Pedro Páramo that Netflix released an adaptation of the book in 2024. (The novel has been adapted to film before, in 1967, 1977, and 1981.) So I watched it after reading the book.

It hews very close to the book, sometimes down to very small details. For example, in one scene someone turns their head exactly when they turn their head in the book. There are a few subtexts and suggestions made in the film that I didn’t pick up in the book, but they seemed plausible inferences. Some parts of the movie were presented like horror, though I didn’t think of those same scenes in the book as horror-like.

I’m not sure what I want out of film adaptations. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a film adaptation of a book I’ve read. I also don’t think there needs to be perfect congruence between the film and the book for the film to be good.

I suppose I think that each artform is the best at something, and that the “highest” version of each artform is when it’s doing what it alone does best. Novels contain dialogue, description, figurative language, narration, and stream of consciousness. However,

• Plays do dialogue best.

• Movies, through image and sound, describe things best.

• Poetry is figurative language pushed to the limit.

• Storytelling does narration best.

• Novels do inner monologue / stream of consciousness best.

A novel can do something effortlessly that other media can’t. It can string together sentences, in which each sentence stands on it own as a thought and connects to the sentence before and after it, with the connections being the associative, meandering mind. All my favorite parts of books like Lonesome Dove or Dune1, which have been famously adapted to the screen, are the invisible stuff—the thoughts of the characters, which don’t show up in film, or at least only do so in a kind of shoehorned, forced way, either as voiceover narration or dialogue.

All that to say, movie adaptations always disappoint me as adaptations—because they muck up all the best parts of books. (I feel like the Lord of the Rings books are about the pleasure of reading. Movies are necessarily not reading a book and thus necessarily miss the heart of the books no matter what.)

In the same way, books are not super-great at the visual. They can make something vivid, but then they introduce some detail, and you have to rework the picture in your head to make it make sense. And, more often than not, the most pleasing and most memorable descriptions in fiction are the simplest. (Flannery O’Connor used the “three details and gtfo” rule of thumb.)

So what I liked about the Pedro Páramo movie, that the book couldn’t really show well, were all the facial reactions of the characters during the dialogue. Also the architecture and the costumes, which expressed the changing of time, as well as the roles and class distinctions of characters. The status difference between Indians and white people, and all the variations across the spectrum, are easier to distinguish and shine a new light on the dialogue from the book. Because it’s not my native culture, all these setting details were interesting discoveries to me.

At the same time, the style of the movie made things more coherent or legible than the book. As I said before, the book flows along like a river of voices, like a dream. I feel like the movie wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss the connections or plot points of the story. This is kind of what I disliked about the 1980s Lonesome Dove miniseries after reading the book; the book is a kind of wonderous dreamy blur while the miniseries is focused on hitting all the marks. Movies can create that feeling, but maybe not Hollywood ones.

Related:

The hurricane of history

Is Allende's Zorro the hero we need?

Did the Spanish Conquest happen?

Heat Is Claiming Mexico’s Young People2 (Inside Climate News, 1/1/25)

The Book:

The World As Will and Representation, Vol. 1
By Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated by E. F. J. Payne
First Published in German in 1819

The Talk:

In his 1819 book The World As Will and Representation, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lays out his philosophical worldview. He attempts to resolve (or at least reframe) some of the core problems of Western philosophy into one coherent description of reality: Why does the external world seem illusory? Why do I feel like a unified self when I am made up of parts? Why does my will feel free even as my actions seem obviously determined? Why is there pain and suffering? And why does it feel unjust? How is it that I know I will die but live as if I’m immortal?

Last August I wrote about Thomas Nagel’s book The View from Nowhere. Nagel similarly runs through these problems of the “inner” and the “outer.” He thinks these problems are currently unresolvable (barring scientific breakthrough) and so we must live in the “absurd.”

One must arrange somehow to see the world both from nowhere and from here, and to live according.

Schopenhauer’s approach is to argue that the the inner and the outer are one and the same. The external world is not external but rather the universal will perceiving itself. The world is “will” (the subject) and “representation” (the object). There is no causality between the two. For example, Schopenhauer writes, “My body is the objectivity of my will.” When I observe my body, I’m perceiving my will. And when I see plants grow or ocean waves crash or planets collide, I’m observing the representation of the will that is everything.

May the Will be with you1

The will for Schopenhauer follows no reason or logic. It’s outside all categories: It has no past, no future. As mentioned before, it is not a cause. It never begins or stops. It has no purpose or goal or end. It is free because it is free of all categories. Reason, in the form of the principle of sufficient reason (as defined in a previous work by Schopenhauer), perceives the will and sorts it into categories like time and space, past and future, cause and effect.

Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive events, it is only the one will that appears, and everything is its visibility, its objectivity; it remains unmoved in the midst of this change.

Schopenhauer gives the example of gravity. A rock on the ground presses toward the center of gravity. It can be opposed, but it never stops pressing. It could press for a billion years and never quit. The whole universe could collapse into a point and gravity would still go on pressing inward forever. Science can only tell us how it does so or why (causally) it does so. It can describe the logical structure of this force, insofar as science is a working out of the principle of sufficient reason—but that’s all it can do.

In the biological world, a plant pushes and pushes. To what end? To create a seed. A seed that will push and push to create another seed. And on and on. There’s no goal but more pushing. It is, for Schopenhauer, the force behind all of life that goes on forever, never reaching an end, with no goal but to keep pushing. This is the same will that pushes within us to keep going as long as we live, to procreate, to survive, with no other purpose than to keep striving. We are no different than plants; we can simply see the inside of the process inside ourselves, and what we see we call will. If a plant could observe itself from the inside, Schopenhauer argues, it would observe exactly what we observe in ourselves.

In traditional philosophical conceptions, our will follows from our reason. We have beliefs, and those beliefs give rise to actions. But for Schopenhauer, these are decoupled and reversed. Our reason attempts to predict more or less accurately what our will will do. The will then does. And our reason explains our will’s actions more or less satisfactorily.

Knowledge factors into what our will decides to do in pursuit of fulfilling its desires in a given situation (this is what perception is for, of course) but that knowledge is simply in service to the will, not its guide. Moreover, the will certainly doesn’t require knowledge and will continue on without it:

Even in us the same will in many ways acts blindly; as in all those functions of our body which are not guided by knowledge, in all its vital and vegetative processes, digestion, circulation, secretion, growth, and reproduction.

The princess is in another castle

All suffering in the universe follows from this endless striving will. From within the individual, the universal will strives toward whatever it can (the aim doesn’t really matter). When it achieves its desire, it is briefly satisfied, only to find the satisfaction was empty. And it either finds a new desire, a new thing to suffer toward, or it sinks into boredom, which is just another blind grasping for some kind of desire to pursue.

Schopenhauer gives the image of a man running in a circle which contains long stretches of hot coals broken up by brief patches of cooler ones. The man is spurred by the hot coals to run faster to the cool ones, while the cool ones give the man just enough relief to run across the next stretch of hot coals.

He also describes life like a beggar who gets enough food today so he can beg tomorrow. We receive relief from our pains only so we can suffer again tomorrow. But what’s worse, we actively seek out the suffering of desire. Not desiring anything is as intolerable—perhaps even more intolerable—than desiring something.

So what’s the solve? How can we be happy or at least at peace in an existence where we are the will that makes us suffer?

According to Schopenhauer, the most practical option for most of us is to make our lives a series of easily achieved desires satisfied in quick succession. In this way, we shorten our suffering and boredom, while maximizing the frequency of (fleeting) satisfaction. Schopenhauer writes:

It is fortunate enough when something to desire and to strive for still remains, so that the game may be kept up of the constant transition from desire to satisfaction, and from that to a fresh desire, the rapid course of which is called happiness, the slow course sorrow…

Interestingly, this is the basic principle behind the design of many games today. Like Mario, just think of designing your life as coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin.

It’s no solution, but it’s a way to get by.

Even so, Schopenhauer decried in his own day the popularity of card games, which he judged as a bad way to escape boredom.

But this need for exciting the will shows itself particularly in the invention and maintenance of card-playing, which is in the truest sense an expression of the wretched side of humanity.

The wretchedness of games is (I think) that it’s like giving yourself little pains, little agonies on purpose, creating little struggles out of thin air just to avoid the misery of boredom. Schopenhauer may also have in mind gambling, too, in which we voluntarily put ourselves into anxiety for entertainment purposes. Draft Kings, anyone?

Rest is resistance

Schopenhauer cautions up front that his philosophy provides no prescription for behavior.

Now my philosophy is certainly not so ordered that anyone could live by it.

It is only later in the book that it becomes clear why. To do something is to activate the will. To activate the will is to fire up the very thing you’re trying to overcome. To will against the will is only to end up with the will as conqueror, which ever side wins.

Schopenhauer describes this in relation to the Lutheran theological idea of salvation by faith. There is no salvation by works because all our works are de facto in service to our will. Salvation is only possible through surrender of the will, denial of the will, renunciation of the will. And this is only possible through faith (i.e. knowledge) as given by grace (from outside ourselves). Of course there are no other options!

Those who are familiar with Zen Buddhism2 will recognize this matches up, almost point for point: Doing nothing, we open ourselves to a state of pure perception in which we, effortlessly and without trying, receive enlightenment, i.e., true awareness of ourselves and reality, which is coextensive with a total cessation of striving and, thus, suffering.

Most importantly, the more you strive for enlightenment, the further away you get. Or, alternatively, you must strive so hard so that you realize the futility and thus reach enlightenment that way.

The will itself cannot be abolished by anything except knowledge.

According to Schopenhauer, we can experience these moments of will-less perception briefly throughout our life, if we are dispositionally open to them. When we experience the natural world in a contemplative way, not seeing it as material for our desires, but as representation, we find our will automatically quiets, our sense of self melts away, and we experience equanimity, serenity, or awe. Perhaps today we call this mindfulness.

Schopenhauer also identifies these moments in art, not when art stirs up our desire, but when it leads to a kind of objective, disinterested, observation of the world. When we look at a still-life painting, for example, we find it absorbing but in a calming way3.

Some poetry and music also offer, in a way that we can contemplate, a representation that gives us relief, albeit only temporarily. Schopenhauer’s theory of art is too complex to get into here, but at least part of what art gives us is representation without will. We see the representation of the world minus the will, and in this there is rest.

At the same time, the world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life.

Nevertheless, most stories and music and games portray what we cannot enjoy in life—a final satisfaction. Schopenhauer says that every story shows people striving, struggling, grasping for an aim and then reaching it. And then the curtain must come down because otherwise we’d discover the goal led on to further suffering and another pointless journey would ensue. (All episodic comedy shows, if they go on for enough seasons, eventually reach this kind of hell-like horror.) In this way, all art seems to lie, insofar as it is representational.

This is the way

Schopenhauer would say that the ability to experience these moments of relief in nature and art is uncommon. One can’t live in that state forever. And yet these moments of will-less perception point the way to a more complete road to salvation, what Schopenhauer calls “the serious side of life.”

Even as the will-to-life (the drive to procreate and survive) pushes us on, the suffering it causes calls us to resignation. The pleasures of life keep us willing, keep spurring on our desires. But if we embrace the suffering that comes our way, says Schopenhauer—perceive it, know it—we can cease the striving.

Sometimes the suffering of an individual is so great that this transformation into total resignation occurs on its own; otherwise, this path is rarely attempted, and only completely achieved in the world’s greatest saints and mystics. In figures like Jesus and the Buddha, we see figures who have turned away from all worldly pleasures and fully embraced their own suffering—the full resignation. What they offer to the world as salvation is knowledge of ultimate reality identical with the complete resignation of the will, the final cessation of all suffering.

The ultimate reality that saints and mystics perceive directly is that we are all one will. Your neighbor is yourself. Your enemy is you. As Schopenhauer puts it, “Tormentor and tormented are one.” From this flows the will-denying, ascetic precepts in the Christian and Indian traditions.

We find commanded in the Apostles love for our neighbor as for ourselves, returning of hatred with love and good actions, patience, meekness, endurance of all possible affronts and injuries without resistance, moderation of eating and drinking for suppressing desire, resistance to the sexual impulse, even complete if possible for us.

In the Hindu tradition we see:

…it ordains love of one’s neighbour with complete denial of all self-love; love in general, not limited to the human race, but embracing all that lives; charitableness even to the giving away of one’s hard-won daily earnings; boundless patience towards all offenders; return of all evil, however bad it may be, with goodness and love; voluntary and cheerful endurance of every insult and ignominy; abstinence from all animal food; perfect chastity and renunciation of all sensual pleasure for him who aspires to real holiness; the throwing away of all property; the forsaking of every dwelling-place of all kinsfolk…

In both traditions we see the welcoming of suffering and the rejection of pleasure as the path of salvation.

And yet, as our will is defeated by knowledge, the will fights back harder and harder—temptation increases, suffering increases, Jesus goes to the cross. All allurements, all attachments must ultimately be personified as the devil. (Get behind me, Satan.) But then, at last, in the final renunciation of the will-to-life, the will is defeated for good4.

The will is the self. The will is also the world. The will is endless suffering. When the will is defeated, the self, the world, and all suffering are defeated in the same event. Behold, I have overcome the world.

But we should be clear-eyed about the salvation on offer here: The annihilation of the self and the world. The escape from the cycle of suffering is the escape to nothingness. The final salvation is the destruction of the world.

No will; no representation; no world.

The crucifixion is the apocalypse.

How about a nice game of chess?

It is at the point, in the final chapters of Schopenhauer’s book, that what he means exactly is unclear to me.

On the one hand, this enlightenment only occurs at the individual level. It cannot be transferred, as it is nothing but perception. Philosophy can conceptualize it, but it can’t make anyone see it. Reading Schopenhauer’s book doesn’t give the wisdom that Schopenhauer presents. In some Zen traditions, the experience of enlightenment is passed on from teacher to student but not conceptually. You can’t read it in a book. You can know the ideas, the concepts, and not have it. (Similarity, in Christianity, “saving knowledge” is not intellectually transferable.)

In Schopenhauer’s final estimation, there is individual salvation—but it is extremely rare. A thing you read about but never experience yourself.

On the other hand, if the reality is that I am the world, and the world is myself, then Jesus is me, and I am Jesus. (Some of his sayings suggest as much.) My life is the life of the world, and every saint and mystic’s will is my own, as I am every saint and mystic (as well as every mass murderer, despot, con artist, and crank) even though I do not perceive it, do not truly know it.

So the salvation of nothingness is not achievable for me—but already is so?

The final two sentences of the book (volume one) read:

On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete absolution of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.

Related:

Schopenhauer explains it all

Wisdom is seeking wisdom: Dogen's contemplative path

Robert Frost and the darkness

Similarity, difference, and Plato's Timaeus

The Book:

Why Honor Matters
By Tamler Sommers
Basic Books
2018

The Talk:

In his 2018 book Why Honor Matters philosopher (and podcaster) argues in defense of honor.

Honor cultures are pervasive throughout history and even across today’s global population. What defines an honor culture is a commitment to group identity. Shame on one person is shame for the whole group. Members within a group must act to save face. If someone does not fight back or defend their honor, it’s a sign of weakness that could invite further aggression. Acts of violence, from hazing to brawls to revenge to feuds, function as internal and external policing actions, so to speak. What are acceptable/unacceptable actions and responses are decided by the group.

Honor cultures persist, Sommers says, because they provide many benefits to the people inside them: In dangerous situations or in times of scarce resources, honor codes form group protection. They help coordinate action and distribute resources. They also give people a sense of purpose and identity.

It is only in modern Western societies that honor cultures are seen as backward, irrational, even pathological. Duels to defend one’s honor seem silly to modern eyes. Shame, in a society in which we live with a lot of autonomy, seems like a kind of cognitive error—something a therapist can help extract out of our poor programming. You’re beating yourself up over the opinions of people that don’t even exist! In the modern world honor and shame simply make no sense.

Can honor be good?

While agreeing with some of these criticisms, Sommers says that by dismissing honor we are actually missing a powerful motivator for moral action. This I think was the strongest part of Sommers argument. My first reaction to the book was defensive. How could we possibly have too little honor culture in the US?

• The proliferation of personal firearms and stand your ground laws

• The ubiquity of team sports fandoms

• The US military as the country’s largest employer

• The endless parade of institutional sex scandals, covered up for decades by a “good old boys” code of loyalty, protecting buddies, and keeping the law out of it (a marker of honor cultures, according to Sommers)

• Add to that, gang violence, misogyny, domestic abuse, all motivated by “wounded” male honor, etc.

We really have too little of this? Really?

But Sommers brings up several examples where honor has motivated people in other directions, too. He recounts the turning point in the life of Fredrick Douglass when he decided to fight back against his master. Douglass fights against “my cowardly tormentor” for two hours(!), eventually besting him. Sommers writes:

Douglass regarded his act of violent resistance as a watershed moment: “It rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty…and revived a sense of my own manhood.”

An appeal to honor was a part of the call to activism from W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was also motivation for women activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Sommers doesn’t mention this in the book, but his description of honor cultures made me think of labor unions. Unions and strikes have many of the characteristics of honor codes, like when workers who break the line are called out as “scabs.” Although strikes aren’t violent today, they used to be.

It also made me think of pride parades. Pride festivals originated out of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when gay men in New York City fought back against the police. Much like the moment in the life of Frederick Douglass, it was a catalyst for action. Pride festivals aren’t violent, but because of the history of violence against queer people, they do function as a response to violence. They also contain many of the characteristics of honor culture, such as the wearing of group colors, performances of swagger and bravado, a spirit of solidarity and in-group egalitarianism, and public declarations of commitment to the group.

This seems to raise the question if using honor to defeat shame leads to a society where shame matters more rather than less, or at least persists. Much of the appeal of Trump has been that some Americans felt shamed and bristled at that feeling. He serves as a symbol for people who felt like they needed to restore their honor. Liberals mock those who seem motivated by a need to “own the libs” and those who stay loyal to Trump despite logical inconsistencies and direct harm to their own interests. Surely the dynamics of honor explain a lot that doesn’t make sense otherwise.

Is honor a man thing?

The conventional opinion is that honor cultures are about male aggression. And insofar as they involve women, women are victims of honor-based societies. This is the modern point of view. Sommers brings up the anthropological case, however, that in many societies wives often shame their husbands into acting honorably. Women often function as the rememberers of offenses and men are often seen as not sufficiently motivated by honor to take revenge.

Both women and men are capable of feeling pride and shame, as well as taking offense at insults, seeking revenge, or protecting their people. Both care a lot about their reputation.

Women in the military, government, sports, and business appear as likely as men to be aggressive, seek status, trash talk, self-sacrifice, or be loyal to their team. Women talk with each other a lot about shame—how they internalize it, how it shapes their thinking and behavior, and how to overcome it.

This seems to be simply a way of saying that modern women care a lot about honor—what it feels like, where to find it, how to get more of it. And this caring about honor is a motivator behind demands for justice at the individual and societal level.

Making honor work

Sommer’s argument is a modest one, and for this reason, he won me over. Honor and shame are with us. To ignore honor and shame is to have a major blind spot when it comes to understanding human behavior, even in a modern industrialized society where people spend a lot of their time alone. Furthermore, it may provide some helpful tools in the tool box for reforming and improving society.

That said, honor surely must be growing weaker. Honor cultures and honor codes function best in small, localized communities. Those are becoming more infrequent as the years go by. Sommer thinks that honor could help repair these weakening bonds, though I wonder if the causation can really go that way. Honor probably emerges from community. I’m not sure community emerges from honor.

Of course, there are small communities—online. Honor and shame are clearly part of what makes social media run. What is interesting, however, is the way the internet allows people to cash in shame and turn it into honor. Being shamed by one group can give you a “badge of honor" in another.

People are also redefining honor in new ways, using terms like self-esteem, self-care, self-confidence—which are perhaps just ways of saying “honor” in a world where people are, more often than not, a brotherhood or sisterhood of one.

All that said, by the end of Sommer’s book I was optimistic. My takeaways are:

Honor is a partly internal, partly external way of policing group commitment. The question is “Are you going to do the right thing under external pressure?” Are you going to play harder when the opponent is in the lead? Are you going to shoot your gun under fire? Are you going to stay faithful around other potential lovers? We internalize these things, but they are also highly dependent on our social environment. It’s not a universal metaphysical thing or a moral absolute. Honor is about social trust.

Honor cultures are easily created, easily dissolved. Honor codes are surprisingly easy to construct out of essentially nothing. Under easily repeatable “hothouse” conditions—being on a sports team, living in a fraternity, or serving in the military—these bonds can form. They even form naturally by living in a family or living in a city. But these honor cultures (because they are so externally dependent) are also easily dissolved. Sommers describes the identity crisis that soldiers and athletes go through when they retire. When the group is no longer around, honor is weakened, if not gone entirely.

Honor is negotiable. There are social realities around honor, but there are no rules. If someone insults you, there may be a variety of acceptable responses that are highly context-specific. Revenge can be executed any number of ways. There are different levels of violence. The honor/shame response can be channeled, directed. One might imagine, after letting the group down, committing to penance for a period of time until the group recognizes you’re still fully committed. Solutions to addressing honor/shame can be creative.

Honor can be used to motivate action toward any end. Honor and shame are moral in the sense that they deal with sussing out the truth about people. Do you mean what you say? Are you really with us or not? Are you as powerful as you say (or think) you are? Are you a real man/woman/American/Cubs Fan/firm partner?

That motivational juice, though, can be used to support good or evil ends. I think when I don’t like honor cultures, I don’t like the ends they point to. And, in fact, I often wish there was more honor around causes I believe in and more shame around things I don’t like.

The problem with honor cultures is the threat of violence. Sommers argues in the book that our society’s zero-tolerance policy for violence has led to injustice, primarily by creating a massive prison system for violent offenders. He thinks (I think) that certain low levels of violence (like Fight Club violence) should be allowable and that some violent crimes could be resolved through victim restitution rather than imprisonment. It’s a hard sell. I found it interesting, but it’s real hard to pull the lever for increased violence. Then again, I haven’t been affected by the issue, so it’s easy to think of it as a mere abstraction.

That said, because of the nature of honor described above, violence may not have to be part of its future. Nonviolent protest (such as union picket lines and pride parades) is one obvious example. But channeling honor into sports shows how easy, even fun, it is to direct humanity’s penchant for honor around. The creative solutions that restore honor to people without resorting to violence are perhaps endless. Sommers gives examples near the end of the book of promising community-based interventions to address gang violence, without law enforcement involvement, that deter revenge while allowing the person to save face.

The other problem with honor cultures is that they become self-reinforcing and outlast the cause for which they were created. Honor cultures typically form in situations of scarcity and insecurity. People band together to protect themselves. It’s safer in a group. This requires each person to make a commitment to behaving certain ways. It also breeds egalitarianism within the group. But once those tight-knit groups become powerful, they easily become gatekeepers—protecting insiders from outsiders in ways that can be destructive. In institutional scandals involving churches, corporations, or schools, it seems often the case that the circle of trust (and thus protection and equality) was drawn to include certain members and leave others outside. Leaders should be mindful of the way honor groups map incongruously onto formal institutions. These are the hidden fault lines.

Even in honor cultures, people who go looking for trouble are looked down on. There is a sense throughout Sommer’s book that honor and honor cultures are meant to be contained. Even in societies with strong honor cultures, there’s a sense that it needs to be limited and controlled. Feuds have a way of spiraling out of control, and so escalation must be firmly checked1.

Honor comes out strongest under extreme conditions. When conditions don’t warrant, people who obsess over honor and shame are looked down upon by people within the honor culture itself. If someone attacks your reputation, you must respond; but someone who blows up at every perceived slight is considered weak.

In other words, honor matters, but it becomes more or less salient depending on context. At times, it can matter more than life itself. At other times, it shouldn’t matter at all. Honor is powerful, but honor isn’t everything nor is it fixed. In that lies opportunity.

Related:

Is stoicism bad for democracy?

The cowboys are not alright

How subjective things become objective

‘Flight shame is dead’: concern grows over climate impact of tourism boom (Guardian, 9/6/24)2