HOST: Today we are delighted to welcome the one and only Odysseus back to the program. The hero of the Trojan war and former King of Ithaca needs no introduction. But it’s good to see you, sir.

ODYSSEUS. Glad to be back.

H. This is an exciting time because, as you know, people all over the world have been flocking to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and this has raised a lot of questions about you. Have you seen the movie?

O. I’m afraid so.

H. And what did you think?

O. It was completely absurd and offensive to my honor. If I were to meet Nolan I would be obliged to kill him instantly. In fact I’m surprised Athena hasn’t struck him down already.

H. What didn’t you like?

O. Anyone who has heard the songs of Homer knows that Athena was the wisest of the gods and the most powerful after Zeus. But in Nolan, she is a pale, washed-out silhouette, not much better than a shade from the underworld.

H. In Homer, Athena accompanies you in your adventures and guides you in your comeback. But isn’t it more glorious if you accomplish your heroic feats without so much help?

O. Absolutely not. All of us depend completely on the favor of the gods. The only difference is between those the gods give strength and wisdom and those they do not.

H. You spent seven years with the immortal nymph Calypso. You could have stayed with her forever and enjoyed her favors. Instead you returned to Ithaka to face the suitors. Why did you do that?

O. Nolan made Calypso’s island look like a nursing home. Making love with Calypso would have killed him. But, if I had stayed with her, you would never have heard of me. I would have no fame, no kleos, as we say in Greek, and that is what mortals live for. It is the kind of immortality we crave.

H. But you were already a hero of the Trojan War.

O. Heroes do not wind up on vacation with nymphs. And after seven years I was bored.

H. A goddess was boring?

O. Haven’t you noticed that the gods spend all their time and attention on mortals?

H. Yes, why is that?

O. First of all, because there’s no one else to praise them. They can’t stand each other. And second, because they have nothing else to do. Nothing changes on Olympus. Nothing matters all that much. It’s almost as boring as utopia. Mortals are much more interesting. We suffer, get broken, get killed. We pay for our mistakes. Our tears mean something. Taking risks, we gain immortal glory and a place in the song.

H. OK, you seek fame, which, as a clever Frenchman said, is to live in the dreams of others. Isn’t there something childish about that, to care so much what others say about you? The song is just a song, after all. We modern people aim to make our own choices and stand by them, without caring about God or gods or most other mortals. We want autonomy. That’s our idea of freedom.

O. Yes, to you the song is just a song. It’s what you call “art.” You pretend to be independent, but it is only a pose. Everything you do is to make yourselves bigger in other people’s eyes. You do not understand what is worthy of admiration, so you seek honor in trivial things—in possessions and titles and who you go to bed with. You are afraid to risk your worthless lives.

H. That’s a tough verdict, Odysseus. Was there anything you liked in Nolan’s movie?

O. The Cyclops was a dope, my wooden horse had no wheels, Circe was a crazy lady, and Matt Damon is a neurotic wimp who went to Harvard. I could have married Anne Hathaway twenty years ago. But the stupidest thing of all was the ending. After taking all that trouble to get home and butcher the suitors, I dragged Penelope out to sea instead of defending my kingdom. What was Telemachus supposed to do, open a cannabis shop? Nolan’s Athena was useless. It was bad enough when Dante sent my ass packing off the edge of the world. I get it—his Christian guilt got the better of him. But what was Nolan’s excuse? He massaged his own fame by smirching mine. And another thing.

H. Go ahead, sir.

O. Everyone knows that I was famous not just for being a good fighter but for my many-sided, polytropic mind. I knew better than anyone that speech is a weapon and that true and false are of no importance compared with strong and weak. That was why Athena loved me. And I was a master teller of my own tale. Nolan makes me not only a wimp but a lamebrain. In his movie, I don’t even get to match wits with the Cyclops. Instead, Nolan weighs me down with a pointless guilt about war that I would never have understood and still don’t. Has he noticed there are guys like Putin in the world?

H. I have to mention that it’s because of your trickiness that later Greeks mistrusted you as a heartless pragmatist. Shakespeare too.

O. Shakespeare makes heroes out of notorious wimps. Look at Hamlet. And those later Greeks went a long way down after the so-called philosophers got to them. Read a little Nietzsche in your spare time.

H. One of the biggest complaints about Nolan’s movie is that he left out your romantic adventures. Circe comes off as a crazy lady, as you said, rather than a sexual conquest; Calypso is strangely anodyne; and the charming young princess Nausikaa gets cut out altogether. OK, all that was unfaithful to the original. But when you finally got home, wouldn’t it have been easier to face Penelope if you could have told her you never touched another woman?

O. This is another of your wimpish fantasies. First of all, if I had said that to Penelope, she wouldn’t have believed me. She was no dope. Second, and most important, it was part of Penelope’s own glory that, instead of all those other high-class females—nymph, goddess, princess—she was the one that mattered. Women have their kleos too. The night I got home Penelope and I went right to bed, and I told her the whole story. And she loved it. Penelope was a heroine in her own right. Her cleverness and strength brought me more glory than any other woman could have. All the other heroes envied me because of her.

H. On that note, let’s have a round of applause for the many-minded man and his lovely wife.

O. In the old days you never had to ask.

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Christopher Nolan was so uncomfortable with the erotic dimension of Odysseus’s career that he monogamized the story of The Odyssey, in the process making it a lot less remarkable that the hero would return to his mortal wife instead of living forever with the beautiful and ageless nymph Calypso. It is perfectly natural for modern people to be protective of Penelope in this way, and to feel a shadow over Odysseus’s homecoming because he has been spectacularly unfaithful to his wife. And Nolan, of course, is by no means the first to have doubts about Odysseus’s character. In later Greek literature, Odysseus is often a heartlessly crafty pragmatist, as he appears, for example, in Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes (translated by Seamus Heaney as The Cure at Troy).

Still, there is a historical irony here because, if our monogamous culture finds the sexual dominion of ancient male heroes unpalatable, that is partly due to our classical heritage itself. The ancient Greeks and Romans stand out from the world’s premodern people in the degree to which they restricted male sexual freedom, having outlawed polygamy at all levels of society. Worldwide, societies permitting polygyny have historically been far more common than societies requiring monogamy.

One familiar place to see this is in the practice of the patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible; Solomon had seven hundred wives to go with his three hundred concubines. It was only much later, partly under the influence of Greek culture and Christianity, that Jewish teachers condemned polygamy. In a majority of world cultures, having multiple wives was a common privilege and a mark of status for males who could afford it, and so it remains today in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

There have been other traditions that glorified fidelity in marriage and celebrated it in literature. The love of Rama and Sita in the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana is a vivid example. Even there, however, polygamy is the norm, and Rama’s devotion to his wife turns out to be disappointingly limited in the end.

So the Greco-Roman prohibition against the accumulation of wives goes against the grain of elite patriarchal practice. Even Roman emperors were constrained in their marital connections, having to put away one wife in order to acquire the political advantages of marrying another. Few of the world’s cultures have been so exclusively monogamous.

No one can say exactly why Greek and Roman males gave up polygamy. It is tempting to associate it with Greek democracy and Roman republicanism, and there is indeed a leveling effect when the number of wives that rich men can monopolize is given a limit. But the aristocratic Spartans were famous for the degree of responsibility given to their wives. It has also been suggested that the Greeks associated the amassing of wives with the wealthy rulers of Persia.

In any case, it is a tremendous advantage for wives not to have rivals, and for powerful political families not to have corps of legitimate heirs vying for the succession, each backed by influential mothers whose entire existence depends on the dynastic success of their sons. The Ottoman solution to sibling rivalry, where new sultans had their numerous brothers and half-brothers strangled to prevent civil war, is only the most famous expression of this dilemma.

Jesus’s stringent prohibition of divorce added a further crimp to Western male sexual politics, and the medieval Church added many further restrictions, complicating aristocratic control over the continuation of the family line—restrictions on adoptions, on marriages with cousins, with the children of godparents, and with the spouses of deceased relatives (to keep property in the family), and there were very limited opportunities to turn bastards into legitimate children. Henry VIII was not the only one to face the difficulties of carrying on the line in the face of the Church’s rules.

(For an unforgettably painful picture of the woes of too many wives and sons, read the brilliant account of the life of Herod the Great in Book One of Josephus’s great history, The Jewish War. And for a powerful portrayal of the grim dynamics of polygamous households, see the fascinating, revolting Chinese novel Chin Ping Mei as I described it in an earlier essay.)

The fact that Greek and Roman men could have only one wife at a time did not mean, of course, that men did not have other sexual outlets or that their wives had anything like equal status with their husbands. Greek wives were kept at home and, though Roman wives had more freedom, it was within very narrow limits. Still, wives in the classical world had a prestige that looks forward to later improvement in women’s condition. It is telling that so many of the problems that lead to tragedy in Greek drama are created by women stepping out of their traditional roles. The adultery of Helen and Phaedra, the violence of Clytemnestra and Medea, and the rebellion of Antigone highlight the importance of married women and the fear they could inspire.

Monogamy and the defense of marriage are now conservative themes, but measured against the ancient regimes of multiple wives and easily dissolvable marriages, monogamy looks a lot more progressive. So when Christopher Nolan underplays the sexual dimension of Odysseus’s wanderings, repressing, we might say, his sexual and patriarchal freedom, he was responding to a trend that began with the Greeks and Romans and contributed a crucial element to the social character of the modern West—the increasing centrality, exclusiveness, and emotional resonance of the marriage bond. Penelope did not have the full benefit of these later protections. Even as the single wife she had sexual rivals. But the significance of her marriage and the couple’s devotion to it was a harbinger of things to come. As the Greek historian Plutarch observed, the wisdom of Odysseus and the virtue of Penelope brought them happiness, while the greed of Helen and the sensuality of Paris “created an ‘Iliad of woes’ for Greeks and barbarians.”1

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Ok, so now I have finally seen Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and read some of the notable reactions, most of which have been by prominent women, including Mary Beard, Alicia Stallings, Maureen Dowd, and Emily Wilson. I agree with just about everyone that it’s a great thing to have Homer and the classics getting so much attention, prodding people off their couches and back to the movies again. Maybe even reading the book! I got a sample of the public reaction in the elevator on the way out. People just loved the movie. Had this been my first exposure to the story of The Odyssey, I might have been carried away by it too.

I must confess, though, that I didn’t find the movie compelling enough to make up for the sensory battering it inflicts. Only in the last half hour or so, when Odysseus returns and faces the suitors, did I find myself getting involved in the story. I couldn’t help reflecting that, in Homer’s Odyssey, the return to Ithaka takes up twelve of the twenty-four books while Odysseus’s account of his wanderings occupies only four. Maybe it is understandable that Nolan shifted the balance toward action rather than interpersonal drama, but in doing so he curtailed what Homer obviously considered the heart of the story. Also, as if there wasn’t already enough action in his movie, Nolan even dragged in the Trojan horse, which is not described at length by Homer.

Of course Nolan was going to change the story hoping to make it resonate with a modern audience, so there’s no point in complaining that his Odyssey is not Homer’s. The question is, did he come up with a version equal to the opportunity that Homer’s basic narrative provides? For me he didn’t. None of Homer’s great characters comes to life in Nolan’s film, including (and especially) Odysseus himself. The hero’s famous craftiness and wit are entirely missing, and his aptitude for sexual adventures totally repressed, with nothing more than guilt to replace them. He doesn’t even enjoy the song of the sirens! As a result, Matt Damon’s fuzzy-faced performance seems aimless and bland.

I even found the film visually disappointing. In spite of the locations and the avoidance of AI, the scenes have very little spatial definition. Stories of Us versus Them need clear sides and boundaries to make the struggle vivid, whereas Nolan’s story-space is disorienting, claustrophobic, and always in shadow, with few moments of brilliance for relief, very little color, and not enough stillness to offset the constant roar and the frenzy of the editing. Nolan has mentioned being influenced by Kurosawa’s Ran in preparing for the film, but that film exemplifies exactly what Nolan lacks—the patience and the nerve to let a scene sink in.1

Two of Nolan’s choices require particular comment: the avoidance of eroticism and the absence of triumph.

One of the outstanding aspects of Homer’s Odyssey is the prominence of the marriage theme and the role of Penelope. She is a genuine heroine, her faithfulness and resourcefulness in resistance to the suitors making her a figure of wide admiration, in vivid contrast to other women in the story—the perfidious Helen, who incites the Trojan War in the first place, and her fierce sister, Clytemnestra, whose betrayal leads to the fatality of Agamemnon’s homecoming. Penelope’s trick of weaving and unweaving Laertes’ shroud to stall the suitors is a feat worthy of the crafty Odysseus and very much in his vein. The homecoming and reunion of the central couple bring a genuinely touching climax to the story. Theirs is a deep, loving affinity rooted in justified mutual admiration.

Homer’s Odysseus, though, does have his sexual adventures, and sex is part of his arsenal. Under instructions from Hermes, he forces the enchantress Circe to bed in order to conquer her magic, and he winds up staying with her for a whole year while his companions pine for home. Later, he spends seven years with the nymph Calypso. He also gives up a royal marriage to the beautiful young princess Nausicaa in the idyllic land of the Phaiakians. By cutting this part of the story, Nolan misses out on one of the most charming scenes in the poem, Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa as he emerges naked from the sea. Sexual charisma is both part of the warrior’s endowment and a perennial distraction from heroic goals.

Nolan couldn’t countenance such connubial waywardness. He makes Circe (Samantha Morton) into “something of a middle-aged cat lady,” as Stallings puts it, and Calypso (Charlize Theron) into a “fashionable beach therapist who gives him mood-altering lotus flowers to help with his PTSD,” in the words of Maureen Dowd2; the immortal nymph seems to be pushing middle age and offers little temptation to her amnesiac and drug-soaked guest. Homer recognizes female beauty as a power analogous to male strength—an aspect of life not usually foreign to the movies—but female sexual power is kept under wraps here as the women reviewers have been quick to point out. As a result, Odysseus is as faithful as Penelope with much less drama in the process.

Nolan couldn’t imagine that a genuine bond with Penelope might coexist with Odysseus’s erotic career, but in the ancient world no one would have imagined that a man of Odysseus’s standing and wealth, including human property, would have had only one sexual partner. (I plan to make this the subject of a future essay.) It’s unlikely, therefore, that a woman in Penelope’s position would have been surprised by her husband’s doings. The truly surprising thing is that Odysseus rejects eternal youth with a goddess as a lover in order to return to the backwater kingdom of Ithaka and the mortal Penelope. Like all the great heroes, he shows himself ultimately capable of overcoming erotic temptation in order to carry out his mission, but the temptation is there. By censoring the erotic aspect of the story, Nolan has drastically lowered the stakes of the hero’s choice and deflated the meaning of his return.

Now here’s a trick question: Is Homer a pro-war or an anti-war poet? Both answers look viable and have their champions. On the one hand, Homer glorifies warriors to the max. On the other, he loses no opportunity to show its horrors down to the grisliest detail. Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, looking back on his life from among the dead, even questions the value of his eternal name as a great fighter.

In fact, of course, Homer is neither a pro-war nor an anti-war poet. To be either one of these, you have to think that war is optional, a thing that could possibly be done away with, whereas Homer knows that, in his world as in ours, war is a simple fact of life.

In order to survive in Homer’s world, you have to be able to defend yourself at all times against all comers. A slight display of weakness begs disaster. Nolan begins his film by injecting a version of Jesus’s Golden Rule, and there is constant mention of “Zeus’s Law” with the implication that it is similar in spirit. Under the sway of these principles, the choice of war looks irrational and destructive. Nolan makes Odysseus a good modern man who regrets the need to kill and suffers from his epic success at it. But in Homer’s world of war, there are no regrets about violence. The principles are almost entirely ones of expedience. A good man is one who can do good to his friends and harm to his enemies—not necessarily in that order.

This is a problem for the coherence of Nolan’s movie because Odysseus’s return and victory must be a triumph, whereas it turns out to be a bloodbath with remarkably little glory attached. Odysseus winds up going into exile to avoid more bloodshed. He has gotten his wife back but both of them will lose their home. Was the slaughter even worth it? Was the moral distinction between Odysseus and his enemies sufficient to justify the elaborate spectacle of their destruction? The shadowiness and lack of spatial definition in the film feel like symptoms of this lack of moral clarity.

Since Homer’s time, many of the world’s great religions have tried to discourage war or mitigate its impact, and our modern outlook has envisioned war after war as the last. But war is still with us. To make all warriors guilty is to see war entirely from the guilty aggressor’s point of view and forget the people who need to defend themselves. The Odyssey has been playing in Ukraine since July. I can imagine audiences there cheering for the hero who returns to save his home. I can’t imagine them thinking he should feel guilty for resorting to violence against his enemies.

The ultimate results of Nolan’s adjustments to Homer turned out to be strangely paradoxical. By updating The Odyssey to suit modern sensibilities, Nolan made it far less relevant to our world than the original. By leaving out Homer’s gods, as I previously argued, he eliminated the parallel to our own unequal society, led by its billionaire masters of the universe whose projects and provocations make life increasingly as unpredictable as Zeus’s thunder. By turning Odysseus into a sexual saint, Nolan broke the always unsettling connection between eros and power, in the process reducing Homer’s sexually powerful females to nonentities. And by turning war into simple mad brutality, Nolan erased the distinction between aggressors and defenders so matchlessly dramatized in all of Homer’s work. Nolan gives in to the delusion that war is now merely a disease of choice and warriors mere candidates for therapy, when in fact warriors are no less necessary than they were in Homer’s day because all the threats are still there. Twenty-five hundred years after The Odyssey, human life hasn’t changed nearly as much as good people would like to imagine, giving us every reason to regret the indestructible relevance of the classics.

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For prophets of doom in many nations, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire offers an ever-ready point of reference, in spite of the fact that Rome’s extraordinary longevity was far more remarkable than its eventual decline. This came to mind recently as I listened to Mary Beard’s fine history of ancient Rome.1 I was struck in Beard’s account by the openness of the Romans to the many people with whom their conquests brought them in contact. Agglutination was one of their great strengths.

Romans did, of course, define themselves crucially by their family identities. Family name was a powerful bringer of auctoritas, the key Roman concept signifying the total value in power and prestige that social identity could bring. Still, Romans were little inclined to emphasize ethnic identity, linguistic conformity, or racial purity, a fact that is striking today when, in so many places, immigration and ethnic diversity are being resisted as threats to national wholeness. The Roman ability to accommodate different peoples is sometimes mentioned, and other empires—the Ottomans, for example—sometimes get credit along the same lines. Listening to Beard, though, I was particularly impressed by how deeply characteristic it was of Roman culture to assimilate what was foreign, an attitude that shows up in the city’s beliefs about its origins.

Rome’s favorite narrative of its founding envisions not a line of descent from a single figure or group but an opportunistic mix of peoples. According to the legend Beard recounts, Rome started out as a sanctuary city for fugitives, exiles, and debtors—a motley convocation of refugees and rejects. When these men needed wives, they seized them from the neighboring Sabines. The war that followed ended not in conquest but in fusion, with the two peoples merging under a joint kingship. In another, contradictory but coexisting story, later immortalized by Virgil, Rome owed its founding to Aeneas, a refugee hero from the Trojan War as narrated in Greek poetry, the Greeks being the providers of almost everything the Romans considered worth knowing. Greeks were everywhere in ancient Rome.

Roman identity was based on legal status rather than ethnicity, and Beard emphasises how exceptional this was in the ancient world. A male slave, freed by a Roman master, did not merely gain his liberty; he became a citizen, and his children were citizens without qualification. Greek cities rarely admitted outsiders to citizenship and manumission was rare, but Romans freed and enfranchised slaves on a scale that astonished and sometimes alarmed outsiders. As Orlando Patterson points out in his great book on slavery, the percentage of Rome’s citizen population with slave ancestors was extraordinary.2

Citizenship carried real protections. The case of Paul of Tarsus provides a vivid example. As a Roman citizen condemned to death as a Christian provocateur, Paul was able to choose beheading rather than the far more humiliating and painful death by crucifixion. The apostle Peter, not being a Roman citizen, was not so lucky.

Rome’s mode of outreach to those beyond its borders was, of course, not friendly, and even their allies were not always welcomed. The communities of Italy, who had fought Rome’s wars for generations without the rights of citizens, rose against the city hoping to gain them in the Social War of 91 to 88 BCE. Eventually Rome gave in, and with this concession, it absorbed the whole peninsula into a single body of citizens.

The expansion of the Roman polity reached its formal end in 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla issued an edict that Beard treats as a landmark—the Constitutio Antoniniana or Edict of Caracalla—extending citizenship to nearly every free inhabitant of the empire. Ancient cynics attributed the measure to a hunger for the taxes paid by citizens (improbable, Beard thinks). Modern historians still debate his motive, but the effect was to dissolve the last legal line between citizens and subjects across three continents. By then the point was almost moot because power had long ceased to belong exclusively to Italians. The day was looming when Rome would no longer be the center of what would continue for centuries to be called the Roman Empire.

Set beside this porous ancient structure, the modern nation-state look decidedly rigid. Modern nations imagine themselves as communities bound by shared languages and cultures and, in the hardest form, descent. Immigration, therefore, poses threats to purity and continuity that the Romans wouldn’t have expected. The United States, of course, was founded upon a different idea, and its power to welcome, however inconsistently employed, has been a strength, but it is a strength now under siege.

The Roman Empire, of course, cannot be idealized. It was a regime of privilege and force like all the others, and it was as brutal as any. It was no multicultural paradise. Beard points out that even Caracalla’s somewhat unaccountable extension of universal citizenship had a deceptive aspect. Once citizenship was universal, many of its former privileges had to be restricted. Still, status as a citizen, always a point of pride, was being more widely shared.

My honorable mention of the Romans may seem untimely. After all, imperialism doesn’t have much of a press these days, nor does its sibling rival, colonialism. (It’s interesting that the word society retains a fairly innocent neutrality.) We tend to forget that most of today’s nation states were united by conquest, and that such conquests have tended to bring relative peace within national borders, if not beyond.

So, Caracalla, what would you think of ICE with its ambushes and masks? The question can’t be answered for him, and to put it in proper context would take a book I’m not the one to write. Still, it’s a provocative fact that the Pax Romana, based on one of the more lasting political structures the world has seen, tended not only to extend but to lower rather than stiffen barriers. However different the circumstances of the modern world may be, Rome’s longevity suggests that the fear of strangers is not an indispensable source of political unity. If from no other point of view than national power, openness is both a sign of strength and a source of it. This is a truth to which American history used to be an example, and I hope it will be again.

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I still haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey yet, having postponed the pleasure till I can view it with friends and family at the kind of theater it was made for. Of course I have been reading about it for weeks now, and one of the things I have learned about it is that Nolan gives very little attention to the gods. Wolfgang Petersen did the same in his Troy of 2004 even though the Iliad, where the gods are more fully in evidence, requires a even more radical theo-ectomy than The Odyssey. The decision is no surprise. Homer’s gods have long been displaced from our heavens. I cannot help thinking, though, that by suppressing the gods from Homer’s world, these directors have removed one of the elements that makes that world most pointedly like our own. So let me ask, if Nolan hadn’t adapted his Odyssey for a modern audience, what kind of world could he have shown?

Homer, my friend, when you look at the world in front of you, what do you see?

It is a world with haves and have-nots—mortals and immortals. The immortals are beautiful, changeless, and perfect. They share all the advantages of mortal existence except its fragility. No permanent change can come upon them. So, when they are in need of entertainment, they look to the spectacle of mortals’ more consequential doings, and much of the chaos of human life derives from the overweening attention of the gods.

Because fame and respect are the only things that make life worth living, the immortals cannot get enough of them. They demand constant praise from mortals and the tribute of sacrificial offerings, and to cross them in any way tends to be fatal. Unfortunately, the gods do not get along with each other so, when they take opposite sides in mortal quarrels, it is hard for mortals to keep out of trouble.

All of mortal life, then, is a constant vying for the favor of the gods and the avoidance of their wrath, and the worst thing that can happen is to offend a god, as happens to Odysseus when he enrages Poseidon, god of the sea. No amount of diplomacy can guarantee mortal safety. In the Iliad, Zeus and Hera have a domestic spat and wind up sacrificing their favorite cities to each other’s vengeance. At a later point in the story, when Hera seduces Zeus using a charm from Aphrodite, many Trojans die grisly deaths while their distracted protector makes love with his wife in a cloud. It is very beautiful as well as very deadly and, from a certain point of view, even a bit amusing. Homer has a deadly sense of humor.

The immortals are justified in their whims because they have the power to enforce them. There is no other sense of good or evil, right or wrong. Pity is for the weak and honesty for the stupid. Among mortals it is the same. Odysseus is particularly admired for his vengeance and he is a genius of trickery, as his patroness Athena often notes with joy. Violence and deception are the instruments of the strong, and there is nothing to be said against them. The strong are simply better than the weak precisely because of their intelligence and strength. The natural hierarchy of power stretches from king to slave.

The heroes are those most closely allied to the gods and sometimes even have a share in their immortal nature. And they have the one kind of immortality that mortals can share, which is fame based on their deadliness to other mortals. The purpose of Homer’s poetry is to glorify the memory of the killers since otherwise their mortality would leave them forgotten—like leaves, as more than one of the characters notes, flourishing for a time but then blowing away.

Ordinary mortals, of course, are not unworthy of their own kind of respect, but it is a respect that derives entirely from how well they keep to their place and serve their masters. One of the Odyssey’s most lovable characters is Eumaeus, Odysseus’s pig-keeper, who has carried on loyally in a proper spirit during his master’s twenty-year absence. But when such people fail or get above their station, both the heroes and the gods take them down with relish.

The point of Odysseus’s story, then, is to exhibit the greatness of the great—to admire the power and saavy that allow him to avoid the wrath of Poseidon with Athena’s help, and to humiliate and kill all of those weaker and despicable beings who have denied him and his household the respect they deserve. The fact that Odysseus returns as a beggar makes the social meaning of his revenge particularly sharp. The suitors have been treating him like a powerless beggar, and the revelation of their mistake leads directly to their merciless slaughter. It is particularly chilling that, after the bloodbath, which is narrated in loving detail, it is young Telemachus who carries out the task of stringing up the faithless serving maids, but only after they have been made to clean up the bloody mess from the slaughter, a grim touch with broad resonance of later times.

Women in Homer’s world are the spoils of war, though among the immortals they have a far less subordinate role, more equal to the weight they carry in imagination than what they carry in any real world. Feminine beauty, though, is a kind of power to rival masculine force, and the joys of erotic experience are an intense relief from the tensions of war and adventure, as Odysseus’s dalliances with Circe and Calypso make clear. Women have cunning too. Penelope’s tricky handling of the suitors makes her a genuine heroine.

This is Homer’s heroic world, so different in its self-conception from our egalitarian society and from our conscientious moral sensibilities. It is beautiful and dramatic partly because everything has such an elevated glow to it and partly because life is such a clearly set up game with rewards so glorious, opponents so strange and frightening, risks so absolute, and pleasures so enchanting. Then there is the added pathos that even these heroes cannot compare with the ones who came before them. Listening to the song, we get to live the big life along with the heroes, rescued for a while from belated, subservient obscurity.

How different is this from our reality? Do we not continue to live in a society with heroes taking most of the spoils and behaving like gods and goddesses while their power puts them largely beyond constraint? Don’t Olympians like Musk, Bezos, Trump, and their ilk dominate by caprice? And if they are not immortals, they are certainly working on it.

The competition for fame and prestige explains just as much about human behavior as it did in the time of Homer, and produces much the same chaos, unpredictability, and pathos of distance between strong and weak. By leaving the gods on the sidelines, Nolan may have left out the part of Homer’s cosmos that lends its most perennial truth.

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Recently I wrote about why so many modern poets seem to lose energy and power as they move toward the end of life. Why do so few of them manage the kind of grand completion of their careers that we associate with premodern writers like Virgil, Dante, and Milton? I stressed the most important reason, which is that modern poets have to produce their own subject matter, their own, personal truth, rather than relying upon the traditional beliefs that held premodern cultures together. Classic literary forms like epic made demands that modern poets can’t meet. Another way to put this is that they are Romantic, which is to say haunted by the loss of tradition, of meaning, and of magic. Consequently they are thrown back upon the contingencies of their own experience—their childhoods, their passions, their separations, their despair, all of which they tend to exhaust or outgrow as they transcend their circumstances of origin. Famous, they become sages, but faded ones.

The great modern exception is W. B. Yeats, whose middle age was a series of triumphs and whose last book, published just after his death in 1939, contained a truly stunning series of great poems, among them “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “News for the Delphic Oracle,” “Long-Legged Fly,” “Cuchulain Comforted,” “The Man and the Echo,” and “Under Ben Bulben.” These poems are not only powerful in themselves; they sum up his whole career as a personal investigation of the deep issues of human life. Yeats made age and the passage of time his subjects in a way that only enhanced his power as he got older. His soul may have been “fastened to a dying animal,” as he put it, but it continued to “sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.” How did he do it?

One telling fact about Yeats is that his father was an artist. In the nineteenth century, so many young people with literary ambitions had bourgeois parents who wanted them to continue in the respectable, making-money way. The idea that they should became artists and poets was not welcome. Yeats didn’t have that problem. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter. He was only moderately successful but utterly devoted to his art, and there was never a question of his son taking up a business career. Young Willie was even discouraged from taking a job on the side. He had to be an artist full time. The whole family’s devotion to art was uncomplicated and complete. Whatever happened to him was going to be processed in an artistic way.

Yeats’s youth ran athwart the Victorian pattern of things in that his father was a true skeptic about religion, while from the beginning Willie had religious longings and intuitions, quite compelling ones even though they took a long time to find a direction. Unlike so many nineteenth-century artists, then, he did not alienate his family by relinquishing his faith. He was going in the opposite direction, back toward the religious spirit, but it would take a form that had nothing in common with any known faith or creed.

I mentioned that modern artists had to bear originality as a burden. They had to escape from tradition and its readymade myths and forms in order to make their mark. One of the main ways they did that was by drawing on pre-existing resources of imagination that were not part of the classical tradition but were rooted in the legacy of the folk—people, in other words, whose lives had not been separated by urban civilization from the natural concerns and rhythms of life.

Turning to the folk was not just a cultural strategy. It had political impact and was being deployed all around the borders of Europe from the late eighteenth century onward. Recording and celebrating national folk culture became a common strategy for peoples who did not have the classical literary heritage and Renaissance flowerings of Italy, England, and France.1

For better and worse, the nineteenth-century promotion of folk art and folk styles accompanied and supported the rise of the nation-state and ethnocentric nationalism. An early example is the Brothers Grimm collecting German folk tales as a seed for the German nation. It was also happening in Scandinavia, with the literary revival of Norse mythology and the compiling of the Finnish Kalevala. Medieval materials long since debunked in the Enlightenment were acquiring new interest. One of the most powerful, momentous, and fateful reinventions of folk sensibility was, of course, Wagner’s Ring, one of the most influential artistic works of the nineteenth century. In English culture, by contrast, folkish medievalism remained a relatively minor note, despite the later efforts of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The latest of the great revivals of national folk culture in Europe was the Irish Celtic Twilight, as it was called, and Yeats was one of its most prominent and energetic promoters, both as a collector of materials and as a director and writer for the Irish National Theater. Tales of faeryland offered Irish writers a spiritual and romantic charm and a connection with the Irish past, and it was easy to invest them with political meaning in the context of the struggle for Irish independence. Yeats was distinctive, however, in his way of appropriating mythical materials, because he had a positive, religious sense of their meaning and value. He did not think of the Irish folk only in the Romantic way, as people who were close to nature, simple, unspoiled, and not bourgeois, though he certainly did play that note. His poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” his signature work for the first half of his career, was a classically Romantic dream of escape from the city into nature. It was also the theme of greater poems like “The Stolen Child” and “Who Goes with Fergus?”

But Yeats also believed in the truth of his mythic materials. He saw them as spiritually vital, and he tended to connect them with the spiritual truths of other cultures. He was a student of world religion, and he saw religious materials ancient and modern as all pointing toward the same perennial, ultimate truths of the spirit. Even though he reconceived everything in an utterly idiosyncratic and personally inflected way, Yeats was not hampered in his imagination by the skepticism that governs the modern world. He believed in the spiritual truth of what he was saying, and it was not just his personal truth, even if his personal commitment to that truth was what supplied its artistic energy.

So Yeats had a mode of poetry writing that was not merely invented by him but that accessed a wider imaginative realm, one that possessed the solidity of truth while carrying enormous political weight as an assertion of Irish as opposed to English imagination and culture. Yeats’s connection with the past was not governed by a sense of loss. He was not seeking self-expression as merely personal and natural, but as a way of sharing a larger fund of wisdom that was still available for recovery. Among the ways in which Yeats was different, this last one, his penchant for belief, may be the most telling for his poetic longevity.

Another next enormous factor in the lasting power of Yeats’s imagination was the role of women in his life, beginning with his peculiar, three-decade passion for Maud Gonne, who was considered one of the great beauties of the age. If Yeats’s imagination was fueled by a sense of loss, it was here, in the erotic vein. The daughter of an Irish army officer, Maud Gonne was a revolutionary with a heroic image to match—grand, statuesque, and militant. She was as bold and politically aggressive in her stance as Yeats was intellectual and spiritual. He wanted a historically integrative nationalism, a gradually permeating culture-driven Irish politics; she wanted an immediate and, if necessary, violent revolution. To Yeats’s horror, she rejected his advances and married a fellow revolutionary, Major John MacBride, eventually one of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin. Maud preferred the man of action to the man of poetry. This was painful to Yeats in more ways than one. MacBride turned out to be an abusive husband, so Yeats spent a great deal of energy helping Maud cope with that terrible situation. MacBride was abusive not only to Maud but to her daughter, Iseult, a name, you may recognize, drawn out of Celtic mythology and Wagner.

Yeats’s stamina as a frustrated lover is almost as impressive as his stamina as a poet, and in some ways they were the two sides of the same golden coin. He proposed to Maud for the first time in 1889, and he haunted and protected her for some twenty-five years after, being refused for the last time in 1916 when MacBride’s execution finally left her free to remarry. This astonishing passion kept Yeats forever on the boil and allowed him to write many great love poems, including “Adam’s Curse” and “No Second Troy.” Even in the context of Victorian sexual repression, it took a special gift for excess, no doubt, for Yeats to go on being miserable over the same woman for the better part of three decades. He ignored his own sad advice: “And no more turn aside and brood/Upon love’s bitter mystery.”

Yeats did have other loves in the meantime, but they were not satisfactory. For our purposes, it is important to see that his love for Maud was a supremely poetic passion, not merely in the sense that it allowed him to write poems that fulfilled him in his poetic vocation. He would not, I believe, have been able to stand this long erotic trial unless the dynamic of poetry-writing had been so rewarding in itself. The idealization of and passion for Maud both allowed Yeats to endure his unrequited passion and to make it productive at the same time.

Yeats did not see his failure with Maud as simple romantic failure. It was much more meaningful than that. It was a part of the character of the age, which was upsetting the natural order of things between men and women and causing “New Women” like Gonne to break the normal chains of life and family and disrupt the old aristocratic order. In “No Second Troy,” Maud is shown to be a tragic figure because the age is not worthy of her noble nature. “Was there another Troy for her to burn?” With that single line, Yeats integrates his love story with a mythically inflected history while grounding it in the chaos and violence of his own time.

Yeats’s resistance to feminism and the New Woman is the subject of another, upcoming essay.

Yeats’s love for Maud produced a remarkable and strange set of tensions, but what came next was even stranger. When Maud gave Yeats his final rejection in 1916, he turned to her twenty-two year old daughter, Iseult, who also refused him. Shortly afterward, Yeats proposed successfully to the twenty-five year old Georgie Hyde-Lees. George, as he called her, was a highly intelligent and knowledgeable young woman with a great deal of book learning, including languages that Yeats was unable to learn. She was a devotee of his poems and of Yeats as a person.

The honeymoon got off to a slow start, which, as it turned out, was fortunately. Perhaps it was not sexually exciting for the couple, or they ran out of conversation sooner than expected. But Mrs. Yeats came up with an experiment that changed everything by taking up the practice of automatic writing. First it was a pastime, but before long the couple began to be amazed by the coherence and interest of the texts Georgie was producing and the answers she could obtain from guiding spirits. The result of this psychological and spiritual experiment was a mythology that Yeats found strangely congenial, being quite reminiscent of his own thinking, with which Georgie was very familiar. She became a kind of collaborator in producing a systematic version of his mythological imaginings. Suddenly Yeats had a new source of access to spiritual authority, a kind of grand astrology that explained why everyone was the kind of person they were and how every phase of history fit into a grand cyclical pattern. It became a comprehensive theory of everything, eventually published under the title A Vision (1925)

This sounds like a recipe for disaster—for fatuous idiocy or sublime silliness—and it is true that A Vision is now primarily of academic interest. The amazing thing is that it helped Yeats write many poems that worked their magic on readers whether they were familiar with his mythic-historical scheme or not. Yeats was able to preserve the personal, immediate, and poetic aspect of his work while deepening his thought and his imaginative process with the materials produced by his wife. What is more, she channeled the spirits to more or less dominate Yeats’s life, planning their daily routine, their travels, even their sexual schedule, all under the kindly guidance of the spirits. Having been made productively unhappy by one woman, Yeats was made productively happy by another.

My answer, then, to why Yeats was able to continue writing great verse even into old age is that he had a special capacity for productive erotic investments along with a total commitment to poetry, a belief in ultimate realities, and an ability to appropriate materials that were not consciously invented but still legitimately his to develop.

This access to tradition of a sort also helps explain another characteristic of Yeats’s work that sets him apart from other modernist writers. All the other modernists, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, recognized that Yeats was a special talent and that he was modern in the full sense, that his work was profoundly original, innovative, and finally inexplicable. But it is impossible to overlook the fact that, in formal terms, Yeats was far more traditional than the others. He was, like the major modernists, a poet of intense symbols and concentrated images, but he did not render them in fragmentary form. His work is not a congeries of displaced voices or reanimated quotations. He was neither a man of the fragment nor the segregated image. So much of modern poetry works by subtraction, certifying its iconoclasm by getting rid of rhyme, of meter, of standard forms, of everything that separates poetry from prose. Yeats uses rhyme and meter with no sense of confinement. He commands the full musical instrument of English poetry.

Finally, Yeats was able to make his own process of thought and imagination into a dramatic quest that transcended the personal. In his telling, every vision of the power of truth or the completeness of eternity led to physical depletion, the strain of mortality, and the need for renewal. “Love’s pleasure drives his love away,/The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.” In “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” the poet, searching for new themes to match the inventions of the past, finds himself returning to the same unpoetic origins that had fueled him all along, guided by a Muse who has been displaced into the lowest possible register.

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

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Last summer I gave lists of recommendations for Classic Novels, Novels Since 1900, Short Stories, History, Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs. For this summer I decided to venture into some beginning works of which no lover of literature can neglect: Art History, Religion, Philosophy, and Music. I am going to begin with Art History. I am not, of course, any kind of expert on art or its history, but it is a subject that gives me much delight, and I have benefited from the labors of those who know. Here are some good places to start if you want to learn more about them.

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Phaidon Press, 16th ed., 1995; numerous later reprints). This is one of my favorite books on any subject. Gombrich is concise, elegant, and penetrating as he shares the results of a lifetime’s study and contemplation. He moves easily from prehistoric cave painting to the twentieth century. I may also mention that his more specialized study, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, rev. ed., 2000; originally 1960), is a groundbreaking work on the modes of artistic representation.

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (Knopf, 1980; revised and expanded ed., Knopf, 1991). The Australian art historian is a witty, compelling guide to the complexities of modern art and its contexts. Despite my devotion to literacy, I won’t conceal the fact that you can also get Hughes’s point of view from his TV series with the same name.

Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art through the Ages: A Global History (Cengage Learning, 16th ed., 2021, 2 vols.) is an excellent resource, more thorough and detailed than Gombrich and with a much wider scope. The first edition was published a hundred years ago by the art historian Helen Gardner and has undergone frequent updates.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), provides a perceptive, influential, and politically grounded account of the way artistic representations work and how we look at them. Also connected to a TV series, which begins with a shocking scene.

Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Harper & Row, 1988). Like Berger, a groundbreaking critic on the politics of art, especially when it comes to gender. She is also the author of Realism (Penguin, 1971), a classic work on nineteenth-century painting.

James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008). Hall’s volume remains the standard guide to the iconography of Western art. Despite being a reference work, it is extremely enjoyable to read and of a portable size. His Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art (Routledge, 1996) extends the discussion to a wider range of artistic traditions.

The World of Art series (Thames & Hudson, inaugurated 1958). The many volumes, revised and reissued over the decades, make a great place to start on hundreds of subjects, and they are not catastrophically expensive. You can find book-length, illustrated treatments of, for instance, Impressionism, Performance Art, Georgia O’Keeffe, Art in California, Hogarth, Color in Art, The Art of Ukraine, World Textiles, Rembrandt, and many more.

YouTube Resources

We now live in André Malraux’s “museum without walls,” where images grand and sordid are everywhere, and it must be said that the age of mechanical reproduction does have its advantages. You can scrutinize and meditate on great works of art anytime, day or night. Google Arts & Culture, for example, provides a rich gallery. Many museums give digital access to parts of their collections.

Television has been one of the great popularizers of knowledge about the arts going back to the late 1960s when Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization series showcased the eye-catching potential of color TV. Clark focuses on Western art and culture, takes little in the political background, and his high-toned manner is a history lesson in itself, but the series remains worth watching. From the 1990s, Sister Wendy Beckett’s immensely popular programs like The Story of Painting are also highly instructive and entertaining. She is less interested in providing historical grounding than in observing and entering into the spirit of the works. Among more recent contributors, Sarah Urist Green provides expert guidance in briefer scope in The Art Assignment (2014-2020). She takes up a wide range of subjects and issues, including the many conceptual puzzles modern artists have produced about the nature of art itself. I haven’t yet explored her later Crash Course Art History (2024).

Like the series by Berger and Hughes mentioned above, these programs have the advantage of offering a single voice allowing viewers to make a personal connection and to gauge the perspective they are being given. They are the creations of brilliant generalists. YouTube now offers wonderful resources of another sort, brief treatments of individual works by experts on the people who made them. For a sample, try these short videos at AP Art History (from Khan Academy) and at Smarthistory.

Further Exploration

Once you have gained a general conception about art and its history, there are various directions you might go. You could explore anthropological work on the nature and function of art, which might be a good subject for another of my lists. Certainly you will want to learn more about artists who particularly interest you. For young minds, one of the best ways to get started in any field is to dive deeply into the work of an artist, novelist, poet, philosopher, or historical figure who specially compels you. Anther path is to read some of the classic statements about art that have shaped the discussion in the Western world. I list a few of these below.

Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). This, of course, is the granddaddy of all histories of art, focusing on the masters of the Italian Renaissance as it moves climactically toward Vasari’s friend and hero Michelangelo. The first book to treat artists as expressing distinctive personalities and art as a progress in style and technique.

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964). Baudelaire is one of the first great analysts of the character of modern art, which he sees as combining the eternal, which had always been the subject of art, with “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent” as viewed in the modern city.

John Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). Ruskin is an important social thinker and critic of capitalism and industrialism. He expanded the discussion of art beyond questions of taste and technique into the moral, political, and social realms. And he is a writer of grand, majestic sentences. His vast output is best sampled with a selection.

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford World’s Classics, 2010). The classic manifesto of “art for art’s sake.”

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968). Addresses what happens to the “aura” of works of art when they are detached from their original settings.

Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber (MIT Press, 1981; originally published in German as Prismen, 1955). Adorno is not one of my favorite authors, but even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, and he sniffs out one here, comparing the different ways of framing the experience of art accomplished by the poet Paul Valéry, the novelist Marcel Proust, and the institution of the museum itself.

André Malraux, The Voices of Silence: Man and His Art, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, 1951). A grand existential defense of art as humanity’s revolt against fate and the limits of the human condition. Malraux was prescient about the effects of mechanical reproduction on the making and reception of art.

Art in Theory: The West in the World—An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Paul Wood, Leon Wainwright, and Charles Harrison (Wiley Blackwell Art in Theory Series, 2020). This is a good place to find the classic theoretical positions about Western art with an expansion to the wider world.

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Premodern literature gives us many examples of poets who, as they aged, went from strength to strength as their ambitions grew, capping their careers with great accomplishments late in life. Virgil’s path furnished the model for a poet’s progress, ascending in ambition from pastoral to georgic to epic and culminating with the divine Aeneid, which he did not quite live to finish. Luckily his instruction that the incomplete work be destroyed was countermanded by the emperor Augustus. It is remarkable to think that “Burn the Aeneid” could have applied to a single, combustible object. Virgil’s greatest successors, Dante and Milton, lived just long enough to complete their masterworks, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, each in his final year. These are just the grandest examples, but there are many more.

When we consider premodern poetry, then, there is no reason to associate age with decline. Length of life and experience seemed to provide the basis for increasing literary power. Among modern poets, however, decline is the default, starting with the prime example, Wordsworth, while those young fellows like Byron, Shelley, Novalis, and Keats, by taking an early exit, seem, however tragically, to have made the best choice for their reputations. For modern artists, the personal cost of self-expression seems to be one of the guarantees of its value. As a later generation of Romantics was to put it, “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.”1

The reasons for this are many, but the primary one is that, for modern poets, the task facing poetry had changed. The poet’s traditional task was to provide an artistically satisfying presentation of inherited truths and stories for which the poet was not personally responsible. Poets were engaging in “imitation.” This did not, of course, mean anything like slavish copying. Virgil, Dante, and Milton spent their lives thinking about the received stories and doctrines that provided the substance of their works. They rethought and reimagined them to produce profound, intensely personal and historically situated renderings that combined adaptation and radical reworking. But they did not have to be prophets or revolutionaries. They were still working within a tradition. There was no reason for Shakespeare to invent the plots of his plays. More truth was to be found in venerable materials than in mere inventions.

However distinctive and remarkable their talents, then, poets did not bear the burden of that quintessentially modern demand—to be original. They were servants of truth, not its creators. It didn’t hurt, of course, that they were servants of a truth that itself was invented in response to human desires and fears and based on stories that gave all of human experience an indisputable meaning. They did not live in the disenchanted world of modern philosophy and science, but in a world of imagination, full of portent and resonance. The task of the poets was to interpret the pressing realities of their immediate experience in the light of pre-existing thought. Modern poets have to use personal resources to make up for the loss of agreement that modern culture has imposed.2

In one way, the burden of invention has been a gift to modern poetry. Poets—indeed, artists in general—have acquired a far more exalted social role than they ever aspired to in the past. For two centuries they became influential dispensers of meaning, the great interpreters of life. They were often called upon to replace religion.

Premodern artists enjoyed much less social standing. They were not only servants of truth. They also served the ruling forces that sustained and were sustained by that truth. They glorified the leaders of society, often with a servility that is now embarrassing. When we think of Leonardo, Dante, and Shakespeare as the master spirits of their ages, we are judging by standards that would have been incomprehensible to their contemporaries. How could an artist, a mere technician, be as important as a duke or a cardinal? From the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, being an artists was one of the most important and rewarding things a person could be.

So it isn’t surprising that modern poets burn out. They have a lot riding on their shoulders: to express the meaning of life based on personal experience in a way that is recognizably new without having access to the sublime, heroic ideals of the past or the major literary forms that sustained them. The epic that culminated Virgil’s career would be out of place in a modern setting. And then there’s the competition. A prose narrative form, the novel, once considered vulgar, took over a large part of the task of articulating the new relations between individuals and society. In response, poets, deprived of their grand resources, took refuge in the the lyric, making it quintessentially modern poetic form. When most people—even literary critics—talk about poetry today, they are talking only about lyric poetry. Narrative poetry is confined to a niche.

The lyric is, of course, a far less demanding form than epic or drama. It is the natural vehicle for short bursts of intense feeling and sudden recognitions, brief glimpses of meaning. It presents, as the French poet Charles Baudelaire so brilliantly put it, “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.” It is an atom to the universe of Dante and Milton.

Thus modern poets are trying to do a bigger job with smaller tools, and they are doing it alone. What is remarkable is how much they have been able to do with those tools. For example, here’s a poem by someone whose talent, nurtured in silence and isolation, didn’t burn out—Emily Dickinson.

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -

We can find no scar,

But internal difference -

Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -

’Tis the seal Despair -

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -

Shadows - hold their breath -

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death

Note first how personal Dickinson’s vision is and how fragile, something as fugitive and transitory as a “Slant of light,” though it’s type is recognizable—“a certain Slant.” It oppresses not just the poet but “us” too.

This fugitive personal perception has the oppressive power of “Cathedral Tunes,” a symbol of those older, premodern forms of agreement that modern poets must do without. Now the “Heavenly Hurt” is not exterior but in “internal difference/—Where the Meanings, are.” The poet must vouch for them herself.

Though poet knows she is taking up a task that once had cathedrals dedicated to it and now comes only with a private glimpse, she is more than capable of lending an aura of importance to her glimpse of “imperial affliction.” With a listening landscape and shadows holding their breath, she brings us to the brink of a mystical arrival. But the ending is ambiguous.

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death

These lines have been much interpreted. Certainly “Death” as the last word of the poem says something about the meaning of the “internal difference” made by the “certain Slant.” Still, the word “Distance” leaves us hanging. Like mystical arrivals of the classic sort, perhaps the experience is inexpressible in words. Or perhaps “the Distance” signifies that we are not quite there yet, not quite in the presence of death. Or are we on the other side of it? Is it what we see when someone else has died? Endings are toughest for the modern poet because the resources for moving back from personal to public statement are fewer. But the obscurity of Dickinson’s ending adds to the power of her poem. By not clarifying fully what the “certain Slant” means to her personally, she leaves us to find our own “internal difference.”

Modern poets burn out because you need this much talent and imagination to make private experiences powerful and meaningful to other people.

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It has been two hundred and fifty years since Thomas Jefferson affirmed the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and put his John Hancock on the page along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and the other colonial rebels. Today, America is having an awkward birthday celebration in honor of that day. Even the day’s names are inauspicious tongue-twisters like Sestercentennial and Semiquincentennial. Perhaps these sesquipedalian words are providing some worthwhile exercise for schoolchildren’s thinning brains. Meanwhile, in so many ways, the nation’s reflecting pool is showing Narcissus an image he does not fancy.

Jefferson’s ringing phrase is one of history’s great tributes to the irony and slipperiness of abstraction. What it really meant was: No more damned kings and aristocrats! It was a repudiation of the idea that most white men have to bow to a few others merely on account of the pomp and power of their ancestors. But in Jefferson’s mind, people who were not white men had so dim a presence that he saw no reason to spell out the limits of his egalitarianism. He took it for granted that it would apply only to white men. His failure to glimpse the true import and power of democratic thinking and feeling on both sides of the Atlantic, a growing historic force that sixty years later looked like an irresistible wave to the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, allowed Jefferson to erect an ideal for future generations he never intended for himself.

Four score and seven years later, Lincoln would make the pledge of full allegiance to the Declaration’s principle that Jefferson had withheld, in the midst of a war whose terrible costs purchased only a partial emancipation. By that time, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had already reworked the document to correct its exclusion of women in her Declaration of Sentiments (1848), beginning a movement that took three quarters of a century to achieve women’s suffrage. As W. H. Auden put it, “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”1 American history has been a constant and sometimes bloody battle “in the guts of the living” about the meaning and application of Jefferson’s words.

The discrepancy between America’s theoretical idealism and its actual practice has been a crossroads leading in two interpretive directions. The first holds that, compared to the world where democracy and equality were thought of as vulgar fantasies, America’s principles, no matter how imperfectly implemented—even to the point of travesty—are better than the alternatives. America’s devotion to Enlightenment ideals, however flawed, is still a historic force that almost no one wants to stifle. After all, it is these ideals that provide the critics of America with the standard by which they find it wanting.

The other option is to think of the American project as history’s great experiment in hypocrisy and that its ideals were nothing more than the ideological instruments that entrenched its elites and enabled its astonishing rise to world dominance. America’s democratic rhetoric was only the soft-power velvet hiding the iron fist. Since the 1960s, this view has been typical among scholars in the humanities and has become pervasive in academic culture generally. As I pointed out last Fourth of July, while providing a needed correction to the myth of American exceptionalism that once gilded our history, the post-Vietnam retrospective replaced that myth with a new version as sentimental and parochial as the first.

In the last year, though, things have shifted in a way that makes American idealism a little harder to discount. The current administration has been attacking the press and universities, gutting government agencies, threatening the integrity of elections, abandoning allies, drumming up trade wars, and reneging on commitments recklessly enough to make the most caustic critics of American history uncomfortable. The greatest irony of all, though, is that even the version of America as the reign of hypocrisy seems worthy of nostalgia under an administration which makes no attempt to conceal the squalor of its motives. When we have a president enriching himself shamelessly on an unprecedented scale, claiming there are no limits to his power (“Only my own mind.”), and talking about “shithole countries,” and when we have a vice-president saying that in today’s world Watergate would have been a “twelve-hour news story,” a little of the old high-minded hypocrisy would come as a relief.

As a wry Frenchman famously observed, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”2 Unfortunately, even that backhanded tribute seems no longer to be forthcoming. If it is true that American history has been nothing so much as a battle over the meaning and application of its ideals, I would hate to believe that the battle is now over and we have gone on to fighting about something far less worthy.

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Dear readers,

Minding Our Time, the AI-Human collaborative reference work I described in my last post, is now available on Kindle. Such collaborative products, I recently learned, are called centaurs. This four-footed hybrid is substantial, with 553 entries taking up 1637 Kindle pages, and the complexity of the process of turning my Word doc into an EPUB for Kindle without losing formatting was quite something. I couldn’t have done it without dear old Claude.

My goal for the project, as I mentioned, is educative, not financial. It’s selling for the minimum price, $0.99, I’ll be offering it free to online library services, and my next job will be putting a pdf on my website. (Kindle is better, though, because the links to the table of contents with names of individual entries work nicely.) Any proceeds that emerge will be donated to First Book. So if you’re inclined, don’t hesitate to check it out on Amazon and give me some stars or a review.

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Here’s the blurb—

Minding Our Time: An AI-Human Guide to the Thinkers of Modernity is a wide-ranging guide to the thinkers who have shaped, celebrated, doubted, and resisted the modern world. In more than five hundred biographical sketches, it surveys the philosophers, social theorists, scientists, critics, reformers, and visionaries who have grappled with modernity across five centuries, from Erasmus and Machiavelli through Nietzsche and Freud to Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Each entry sets a thinker’s life briefly in place and then turns to the heart of the matter: how he or she understood the promises and costs of the modern age, its science and secularism, its democratic and capitalist energies, its disenchantments and discontents. Taken together, the entries map the full landscape of opinion about modernity, supplemented by an introduction and a two-part index that groups the thinkers both by their stance toward the modern project and by the traditions and perspectives they bring to it.

The range is deliberately global. Alongside the central figures of European and American thought, the guide gathers the voices that have answered, challenged, and remade the modern project from every quarter: the Kyoto School philosophers of Japan and the Confucian and reformist thinkers of modern China, the Islamic modernists and their critics, the architects of Indian nationalism and spiritual renewal, the theorists of negritude, postcolonial critique, and Latin American liberation, and the Indigenous thinkers who have questioned the very premises of modern progress. The perspectives represented run the full breadth of human inquiry, philosophical and theological, scientific and sociological, anarchist and liberal and Marxist, feminist, ecological, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and many more, so that the modern condition is seen not from one vantage but from dozens.

The volume is the product of an unusual collaboration. As he describes in his preface, the editor, John Farrell, a literary critic and intellectual historian specializing in modern culture, selected the figures, prompted the sketches, introduction, and indexes, and shaped and refined the results. The draft texts were generated by artificial intelligence drawing on the public record of existing scholarship. The result is offered not with the authority of original research but as a uniquely comprehensive guide to further reading, and as an early demonstration of what thoughtful human-AI collaboration can produce.

For students, teachers, and curious readers alike, Minding Our Time is an invitation to explore the history of ideas through the men and women who thought hardest about the world modern people have made.

I have always been fascinated by the subject of modernity and the distinctive experience of being modern as scholars use the term.1 I have read many books about it and even written one myself. A few weeks ago I started thinking about some of them, and it occurred to me to ask ChatGPT to summarize a few so I could compare its versions against my memory. I found its summaries surprisingly accurate and fun to read. It did extremely well with authors I know intimately, summarizing the intellectual courses of their careers, canvassing their conceptual innovations and resources, and making connections with their influences. About authors that had faded in my memory, it was even more instructive to be reminded of their arguments and to learn interesting biographical details. And since the literature on modernity is so vast, there are many authors I’ve only encountered indirectly or had never even heard of until I searched for contributors from various directions. Reading about them in this concentrated form piqued my interest. I found myself collecting these five-paragraph intellectual sketches and using them to develop a new course of reading for myself about the subject of modernity.

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Before long I came to realize that my survey might have value for others and that it would be possible in a month or so to assemble an AI reference work on modernity and its critics the conventional equivalent of which would take scholars years’ worth of effort. It’s so easy nowadays to publish a Kindle book on Amazon that I decided to start a work-in-progress with five hundred or so of these sketches summarizing views of modernity from every perspective I could imagine, while making it clear that I am the prompter and editor of the volume, not its author. My working title is Minding Our Time: An AI-Human Guide to the Thinkers of Modernity.

Anyone, of course, with access to AI could prompt an essay on any of the 500 plus authors I’ve included. The value I add to the product is the selection of the list itself, some stylistic shaping and editing, the removal of obvious mistakes (which were quite rare), and supplementary grouping of the authors according to their points of view or fields of expertise—economists, Islamists, feminists, and so on. AI helped me with this, but it needed a lot of help in turn.

A hybrid project like this raises a number of questions which I’ll take up in future posts and in the volume itself, but I hope it demonstrates, in a small way, that AI need not be an entirely destructive influence on the humanities. This project’s value, obviously, lies not in any authority it holds on its particular subjects but in the broad picture it makes available of what has been said about the modern condition by those who occupy it—its makers, its defenders, and its many critics. To clarify that picture, I am also writing an introduction in which I canvas in a concentrated form the responses to various aspects of modernity that the entries, taken all together, bring to light. I hope both the biographical entries and the introduction will light paths for readers’ interests. Here on Substack I am going to share the sections of the opening section of the introduction with you along with the one on science.

The Modern Condition

To be modern is to live in a world that has been transformed to an overwhelming degree by human effort, ingenuity, and aspiration. Premodern people largely had to accept the conditions that life and their traditions imposed on them. Inhabitants of the modern world, on the other hand, can trace many of the major conditions of their lives and ways of thinking to specific projects proposed by individuals in relatively recent times. They live among transformations for which other human beings are responsible. All of the analysts of modernity covered in this Guide are not only observers but also examples of this collective condition of modernity. They experience its remarkable results and suffer its drawbacks.

Modernity as a movement began in reversal, in grand gestures of leaving the past behind. Its spiritual precursor was the Protestant critique of Catholic medievalism, and it has never lost its critical spirit. Its enemies were the superstitions that kept intolerance and ignorance in place. Its great resources were reason and a belief in the freedom to change—the key instruments of enlightenment. These instruments, however, fostered high expectations that gave new impetus to critique. The inhabitants of modernity, accordingly, have been obsessed with the critique of their collectively self-created condition. Indeed, historical self-consciousness is one of modernity’s distinguishing features. For intellectuals, a major part of being modern is being obsessed with what to make of being modern.

The critical and self-conscious character of modernity was truly inspiring while it could be directed primarily against its chosen enemies and against the obstacles it was hoping to demolish. Its critique was accompanied by astonishing practical results—science, technology, industry, prosperity, a revolution in the distribution of political power, and the proclamation of universal respect for human freedom and dignity. Figures like Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the American founders were prophets with exhilarating projects to sustain their aspirations, and the longterm results of their utopian proposals have altered much of the planet almost beyond recognition. But, while modernity still has its prophets, the dominant note has reverted to critique and, often, to lament. Modernity’s rhythm has been a swing from fulfillment beyond all expectation to deflation, regret, suspicion, and endless self-diagnosis. Below I have condensed the gist of modernity’s complaints about one of its major fields of achievement.

Science and Its Discontents

Science has not removed all the “inconveniences of nature” in a single generation, as Francis Bacon predicted, but it has gone a long way toward keeping his promise that knowledge collectively pursued would be a great source of technological power. It has brought the utopia of convenience to billions. But there have been consequences. To start with the most obvious, science has not provided sufficient understanding of human psychology to offset the abuses of the power it provides. It gives world-destroying weapons to creatures with brains only moderately raised toward enlightenment, and they use them on a massive scale. As we look into the future, the balance between creation and destruction remains unstable.

One of the major complaints of modernity’s critics is that science, by achieving what Max Weber described as “the desacralizing of the world,”2 has undermined the religious and moral resources that might limit its destructive applications. Religious curbs to freedom have taken on new, secular forms while the removal of religious rituals and consolations fuels new destructiveness.

Others see science’s power to explain all aspects of human life in material terms as undermining their very meaning and value. Such meaning as experience can now offer depends entirely upon assertions of the human will, which are often self-interested and always provisional, multiple, and subject to dispute. Yet there seems to be no place to escape the whimsically intrusive influence of the human hand. Romantic escapes into nature are a symptom of this problem rather than a solution. Intellectual systems of suspicion are another symptom. If such meaning as society can offer is nothing but a contrived system of myths, then paranoia is the only alternative, and the modern self starts looking like a feeble connection of potent technology with cartoonish myth, as portrayed in the works of Thomas Pynchon.

The detached perspective of science also derealizes the lifeworld presented by our senses. It frames everything as matter to be manipulated. Most ironically, at the same time as it enhances human power to a god-like degree, alllowing the human being to pose as what Freud memorably called a “prosthetic God,” science sharpens the perennial threat posed by determinism to human freedom and responsibility. The great, all-reforming initiative of human agency that is modernity looks in its own mirror and see the reflexes of a vastly complex causal system, with human decision-making just one local set of links in the vast chain of particles.

Another way of describing the result of this derealizing tendency is the emergence of what the Austrian Robert Musil so brilliantly portrays in The Man Without Qualities—subjects who cannot think of their own reactions and feelings as truly their own. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is the prototype. He is contemptuous of the people who are stupid enough to take their own resentments seriously, yet he is tormented by resentment all the same. His greatest fear is being absorbed into the utopian regime of predictably administered modern happiness.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all to the dream of science is that many modern writers resent even science’s fulfillment of Bacon’s utopian vision. The world of perfect convenience lacks the savor and excitement of struggle and adventure, which sports and games and even art cannot make up for. Another aspect of the problem is that implementing the results of science has meant putting social life on a more and more rule-governed basis. As Weber observed, the efficiency of the modern world depends on rationalizing and bureaucratizing human relations, excluding the charismatic appeal to ultimate principles and values. As portrayed in the writings of Franz Kafka, the bureaucratic world acquires an enigmatic complexity and facelessness as daunting to understand as God or nature had once been.

To many, bureaucratically administered happiness seems less than authentic, lacking in the risk that generates vitality. As Aldous Huxley’s World Controller puts it in Brave New World, “Happiness is never grand.” The behaviorist B. F. Skinner, in his novel Walden Two, insists that utopia must be a “world without heroes,” a world in which heroic action is no longer required, and in the title of a later work he makes clear where the mental adjustment to this condition would take us—Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

And while science, in company with technology and bureaucratic rationality, is the basis of all these problems, in modernity even its promise to deliver truth has come into question. It is more definitive in what it discredits than what it proves. Its ultimate account of the constituents of matter and their behavior remains involved in paradoxes, and philosophers dispute if anything at all can be pinpointed as the method of science. Is there is any reason to be committed to the existence of the quarks and charm and other theoretical entities posited by physics? Is there is any principle or finding in science, or even in logic itself, that is not subject to revision? Do science’s grand paradigms succeed each other in a rational progess of accumulation? Philosophers wonder. The power of pseudo-science has often proved catastrophic while the mark that separates it from “real science” remains a mystery.

Still, very few of modernity’s critics, even the religiously committed ones, want to give up the fruits of modern science or its benefits as a powerful and profound way of understanding so much of the world. There are some aspects of modernity which critics do consider to be reversible, but science is not one of them. Rather, the most common hope is that its way of thinking can be made less intrusive, less reductive, less alienating, and less opposed to the needs of the spirit.

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In last week’s essay, “The Rise of the A Professor,” I did not mention the fact that I, of course, was hardly immune to the pressures of grade inflation. Until my retirement last spring I was still giving a wide range of grades, but that range had admittedly narrowed over the years. In my early days it was A to C, with not many A’s and only a rare D or F for students who didn’t complete their work. By the end I gave more A’s than before and rarely went below B- or C+.

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One of the reasons I changed was that every time my performance was reviewed, even before tenure, I was told that my grades were quite a bit lower than those of my colleagues. This, of course, made me raise them. I didn’t want my students to lose credit because they wanted to learn about European Modernist Fiction or Renaissance Love Poetry. Grades are supposed to be a meaningful form of communication, and I was in danger of speaking an antique language. Still, there was a limit to how much I was able to change and still feel I was giving genuine feedback. I believe many professors are in this position.

One of my ways of raising my grade level was to offer extra credit. If, for example, students could write out the dates of up to a hundred important historical events on the final exam (no family birthdays, no sports) or if students in a poetry course could learn some poems and recite them to me, I would give them a boost on the final. Those poetry performances were fun; I always joked with the poetry reciters that I reserved the right to approach them on campus at any time in the future and demand a recitation of the verse they had learned. I don’t believe I ever exercised that privilege.

Over the last ten or twelve years I also gave more creative assignments, which leveled out the grading a bit and proved enlightening in an unexpected way. When, for example, I required everybody to write a poem, the best ones weren’t usually written by the students who excelled on conventional assignments.

The final exam was always the most difficult hurdle for my students because I really did try to see how much they knew about the texts we read. They had to identify passages and analyze them. But as I went along, I also based more of the grade on class participation. I did everything I could to involve everyone in the discussions. I called on people who didn’t volunteer, and there were student talks where everyone had to be ready on a random basis to come up in front of the group and speak. I tried to do all this in a way that wasn’t too hard on shy people. For students who didn’t miss classes, I didn’t give a lower grade for participation than the one they got on the final.

My evaluations didn’t seem to suffer for my lower grading, though I think there was only one class—it might have been the Tragedies of Sophocles—where everyone gave me the top rating. As I mentioned last week, student evaluators are extremely generous; they can forgive just about anything except unclear expectations. I suspect that in recent years my evaluations would have suffered more on account of my grading habits if I hadn’t been an animal well-known and long in place. Students didn’t have to wonder what to expect from me. I started every course by stressing the substantial work load and my high expectations. If the students hadn’t been up for it, most of them wouldn’t have taken my class. And some of them did drop early on, but being a senior professor, that didn’t have consequences, an advantage many people now working in academia do not enjoy.

I assume my antique grading was also tolerable because I gave a lot of very prompt feedback on written work, in my later years using audio files for my general comments on essays, which students especially liked. Some told me they listened to them over and over to avoid making the same mistakes. Students occasionally asked me what grade they were getting in the class, but at this point I can only remember two students coming to negotiate with me about it. One was a Harvard student who asked me not to fail him on account of financial hardship; the other was a graduating senior and student leader at CMC who told me I was about to give him his only non-straight-A. I didn’t raise his grade, but we are still friends.

One thing that I believe made it easier for me in the classroom than for many other professors of literature was that I taught the literary works we read as being about the things they seemed to be about—things like love, death, God, justice, the meaningfulness and absurdity of life. I enjoyed teaching theories about literature too, but as a separate subject, and mostly with irony. I didn’t think grand theories were necessary to understand a poem by Frost or a novel by Jane Austen.

I didn’t feel enormously stressed about the political hazards of class discussion, though I often taught books with sensitive political themes. Three or four years ago a student did rebuke me, politely and sincerely, on a course evaluation for a reason that took me by surprise. For many years I brought a bellhop’s bell to class to use as a “like meter” for an exercise I did with my first-year writing class. Every time somebody said “like” or some other piece of filler, I would ring the bell, and if the students could get through the class with fewer than ten rings, they would get a break from the daily essay for the next class. This is something they were very eager to do, so the challenge could be stressful, but on the whole it was a jolly occasion. While the class often failed the test, by the second attempt they always succeeded.

One day I still had the bell sitting on the table with me when the next class started, and one of the students asked me what it was for, which led to us lightheartedly playing the game for a minute or two. A couple of months later, though, on the course evaluation comments, I read that it was wrong even in play to discourage people from saying “like” because it is associated with a sexist view of Valley girls and therefore of women. Now of course I hadn’t said anything about Valley girls or women. Not using filler was just one of the things I worked on with my students attempting to initiate them in effective communication. This student’s correction of me, respectful and serious as it was, gives a good idea of the fine lines along which classroom behavior is policed by students in our day.

I am sharing all this personal information because the picture I gave of current faculty in “The Rise of the A Professor” is of a class of people demoralized through progressive marginalization on account of various institutional and social pressures. These pressures were operating through my whole career, but I think I can honestly say that I avoided them without inflating my grades into meaninglessness. So at least I can say it can be done, though I’m not sure if my own way of operating would work for others. My most basic assumptions was that, in spite of all the distractions and difficulties, many students still want a challenge and will respond to one if you put it to them in the right way.

There might, of course, be some self-deception involved in my relatively rosy view of my own teaching practice. I still had the belief, even during and post-Covid, that most of my students were doing the reading and that they couldn’t have participated in the discussions or passed the exams without having done so. This contradicts a lot of what I’ve heard from my colleagues in Claremont and elsewhere. I would not have been happy if I’d thought they were right.

If I was not self-deceived, then, how exactly did I avoid becoming a frazzled A Professor? All I can say about it is simply that I always took it for granted what we were doing in class was important, that what we were discussing was fascinating and had broad implications for everyone, and that everyone knew it. Many professors now have very elaborate, quasi-legal syllabi explaining their rhymes and reason. I didn’t negotiate about the syllabus and always stuck to it on time; I avoided explanations, justifications, and rationales that weren’t part of the subject itself. Everything procedural was explained in class, which was one of the reasons you had to be there. I used every minute of class time on the text at hand, and never asked students for feedback about what I was doing or surveyed their opinions about the course except for the required evaluations at the end. I relied upon student comments in class to tell me how they were responding to the material until the end of the final class meeting, when I’d ask them what were their most and least favorite readings and which ones were actually the best. Once a semester I had them over to my house for pizza and ice cream. Even that was carefully orchestrated so that everyone showed up!

As Robert Frost said,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

Describing them this way makes my classes sound like Sea World, and the takeaway sounds like a preening Just do it! Did I begin in daylight and wind up sleepwalking off a cartoon plank? A question for the loitering angels.

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When a friend of mine was teaching English at NYU in the ’90s, a student came to his office and told him “Doc, let’s face it—I need a better grade in this class.” He asked her what all the other students would say if they knew she’d gotten a better grade just for asking. Her response was, “It’ll be our little secret.”

Since student initiatives like this one are no longer necessary, Harvard and Yale have been in the news this week because both of them are trying to address the problem of grade inflation. Harvard faculty will be voting on whether or not to limit the grade of A to 33% of the students in its classes. Yale, the younger and therefore bolder institution, is considering a recentering of the grading scale at the subterranean level of B, a frightening step when you consider that an A- is now a mark of shame. But the going trend suggests that, if higher education continues in its current direction, soon there will be no grades other than A, which means that serious evaluation of student work will have ended.

I was lucky enough to spend my career (as decorously as possible, I now clear my throat)—forty-three years of classroom teaching—at institutions with great students, but I never came close to giving them all the same grade. Students and professors know that, in any class at a top university or liberal arts college—or anywhere else for that matter—there will be a number of students who are really keen on the subject and ready to excel in it. In a Literature class, for example, there will be a few students who are still readers. This can no longer be counted on, alas, even among Lit majors. Students of this sort can write literate and even witty essays, bring real questions to class, and are working to integrate what they are learning with what they already know. Not uncommonly, and to the instructor’s delight, some students will discover their love for the subject and the activities it requires during the course itself.

Not all of the top students will turn out to be A students and not all the A students will turn out to be top students. But there is a strong correlation.

Despite the fact that colleges have become more and more selective as the population increases, the percentage of these self-driven, in-the-moment students has noticeably declined. Scrolling has taken its toll. Books themselves have dwindled in the screen-dazzled collective imagination. As a student of mine told me: “The book—it’s such an awkward technology.”

Since 2008, of course, fewer young people are investing their college time in the Humanities. In the typical class I was describing, after a month or so of the semester, some of the best students will inevitably drop the course because they were taking it as a respite from their Econ or Computer Science major and the workload is proving too much.

In addition to the stalwarts, every class has a middle zone of students who are generally gifted, do their work, and want a good grade. Their attendance and commitment will vary depending on what else they are doing, how many extracurriculars, etc. There will also be some students who are making an effort but the subject matter doesn’t appeal to them the way they thought it would. Or they just aren’t good at it even though they are good at lots of other things, including what they’re majoring in. They will soldier through the semester in a creditable way even if it’s a struggle.

Finally, there will be some students who are having a tough semester for some non-academic reason. They are going through the difficulties young people have. Nowadays, mental health issues take a heavy toll. In the early decades of my career, it was rare for students to drop out of a semester altogether, but in recent years it’s been rare that all of the students who start the semester in my classes are still on campus by the end.

Given this scenario, it simply makes no sense, however gifted the overall student body may be, for all the students to get anything like the same grade in all of their classes. For everybody to deserve a straight A, all of the students would have to been chosen solely for their academic talents. They would have to be equally gifted in and enthusiatic about every subject they were required or inclined to take, as well as equally focused upon their studies and equally undistracted by the complications of life. These conditions will never be met. Even the most advanced classes will elicit a range of performance.

I do not believe grade inflation has completely demolished student motivation. Most students continue to be interested in learning things. Inflation hasn’t even undermined the value of grades entirely. Once an A- becomes a blot on one’s escutcheon, perfectionistic students will do their best to avoid it. But from everything I hear, it’s more and more difficult for professors to motivate their students and get the effort out of them that they used to take for granted.

The first people to suffer from this are we professors, and we do deserve to be blamed. But over the last several decades, many factors have combined to reduce the authority of professors in colleges across the country and diminish their control over what goes on in the classroom.

Probably the most important factor in the rise of grade inflation since the 1960s is the use of student questionnaires at the end of every course to evaluate faculty performance. People outside academia often do not know what an important role these questionnaires play in tenure and promotion decisions and in determining faculty salaries. Faculty teaching awards are given based on them. They even affect the ability to get a job in the first place since candidates for entry level positions are now asked to provide copies of their student evaluations from their grad school teaching. There’s also the very public online evaluations on Rate My Professor. So from the first day they step into the classroom, college teachers are being evaluated by the people whose performance they are being paid to evaluate without partiality. They feel the imperative to cherish or perish.

You could take the student evaluation numbers for any department and rank its members as teachers. Is there any reason to think those numbers would correspond to the actual quality with which they present their subjects? Everything I’ve seen suggests not. One of the reasons they aren’t worthwhile is that the students are phenomenally generous. That comes out especially when we interview them in cases for renewal, promotion, and tenure. But the faculty, being the perfectionists and former A students that they are, tend to focus on the negative. And so do the people who read these evaluations and use them in making decisions.

Even the evidence about the race and gender bias of such evaluations hasn’t discouraged their use.

The college ratings, especially those in U. S. News and World Report, are another factor in the weakening of academic standards. They reward colleges for turning students away in admissions but then they punish them for not keeping students around once they get to campus. This is just one of the reasons why the ratio of faculty to administration has shifted so drastically in favor of the latter. Every college is now an elaborate support system for keeping fragile students in school. The Covid crisis was its D-Day.

The fragility of students is real, but the concern for it threatens to replace the academic mission with one of mere survival.

Of couse, the tense political atmosphere in academia in the last decade or so has further undermined professorial confidence in the classroom. Professors fear being accused of racism, sexism, and miscues. Deans of Students provide behavioral training as part of new student orientation, and everyone has been put on notice. Faculty are required to take online sexual harassment training, and colleges have confidential channels where students can make anonymous complaints. Deans of Students across the country tend to act as advocates for students when any issue with faculty arises, and professors who detect cheating or plagiarism are hesitant to report it because the judicial boards of colleges and universities are reluctant to hold students accountable. Also, colleges have struggled to develop clear policies about the use of AI. Faculty no longer believe that students are doing their own work, but complaints about the use of AI are very difficult to substantiate. Many professors, deans, and institutions have their heads in the sand about the use of AI.

It also doesn’t help that so many students at top schools get special accommodations for expensively diagnosed learning disabilities. It’s astonishing, in fact, that learning disabilities should be so highly correlated with the talent and resources to get into a selective school. These students with accommodations have the option to take their exams in a private setting and with extra time. This complicates the giving of exams and strongly undermines the sense that they are a fair way of evaluating students, and my anecdotal sense is that fewer and fewer faculty give finals, which is too bad because, in my experience, final exams are one of the best ways of finding out what students have learned.

Faculty were always going to be sensitive to student evaluations, and pressure toward grade inflation was an inevitable result, but the surrounding factors I’ve mentioned have accelerated the process and made the evaluations much more fraught. A number of the professors I know have stopped reading them in order to preserve what’s left of their mental health. This tells me we are getting close to the point where the only serious grading in colleges and universities is being done by students.

The recent interest in addressing grade inflation has been brought about in part by the Trump administration’s attacks on the academic system, and many of the factors that brought it about in the first place were also external, especially the economic ones, while the political dimensions of the problem were more native to academic culture. One thing that stands out for me, though, is how the demands of the academic customer have changed. No longer is it the case that most parents send their students to college to be challenged and prepared for the trials of life. What more of them now want is for their children to be helped over the academic hurdles in as painless a manner as possible. The resources they bring to that mission have themselves become vehicles of status competition.1

Should Harvard limit the number of A’s? I really don’t know if that will help. One interesting alternative would to be include information about course grading curves on student transcripts, so if the whole class got A’s, the inflation would be obvious. But I can imagine perverse incentives coming from that too. No mechanical fix will do what is needed, which is to remove the array of competing pressures so that learning and professors can return to the center of college life.

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Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (c. 1568)

As we move further and further into the world of AI, I keep thinking about Jorge Luis Borges and his great story “The Library of Babel.” It presents the history of a universe consisting entirely of a Library—not the ordinary type but an infinite and total one as described by one of the aging librarians who have spent their lives shuffling through its corridors looking for the books that can explain its nature.

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The fascination of the Library is that, because it is total—“perfect, complete, and whole”—its bookshelves must “contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite).” Since it has been ascertained that no two books in the Library are identical, its infinity and lack of redundancy guarantee that it contains “all that is able to be expressed, in every language.” There is no truth, no secret, so momentous, or so trivial, that it cannot be found in one of the Library’s books. Among its treasures you can read

the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

Such is the beauty of the Library’s promise—that it contains everything that language can convey. But the frustration which goes with it is that the possible combinations of letters are so numerous that in only a few teasing instances does any of the books offer even a string of characters that make sense in a language anybody knows.

At the same time, the fact that all stories have already been told has exerted a demoralizing effect upon the Library’s inhabitants. “The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal,” reports the librarian. Suicides are “more and more frequent every year.” So “the human species—the only species—teeters on the verge of extinction.” While the Library endures.

The history of the Library is a kind of parodic version of the history of religious speculation about the nature of the cosmos. It includes the legend of a “Book-Man” who has perused the compendium of all knowledge, making him like a god and offering a heartening justification for the Library’s existence. The most illuminating curatorial response to the predicament of the Library, though, has been that of the sect of Purifiers, who in a “hygienic, ascetic rage,” tried to purge the Library of its excesses by destroying all the worthless books. Yet in the face of infinity’s proliferation, such efforts on the mortal scale, even the destruction of millions of volumes, can make no difference. Each destroyed volume, unique though it be, has “several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles” differing from it by only a character or two.

The fascination of the Library’s promise is based on the idea that language has a relation to the world that is independent of its users—that it holds wisdom and meaning like a container of hidden truths. If that were the case, it would even be possible to generate truths about the world by chance recombination. But the Library illustrates the nullity of that hope, and Borges’s story mocks the long history of superstition seeking to unlock the magic power of the Word.

What the books in the Library lack, of course, is authors, beings who have chosen strings of characters that some specific anticipated readers will be able to interpret according to their intended meaning. Because the Library’s books have no authors, to make sense of them you have to be your own author. To put it another way, in the Library of Babel, reading a book is no different from writing one. You would have to start by choosing from the alphabet a sequence of characters expressing a valuable message that someone else could decode. Once you have done that, though, you still have the impossible task of finding the volume containing your chosen sequence of characters among the Library’s infinite stacks. So much easier just to produce your own volume!

This is the point of the story’s brilliant epigraph, ascribed to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters….” A Library like Borges’s is nothing more than a material representation of any alphabet’s potential for meaning, though in the absence of authors that potential must go unfulfilled. The Purifiers were on the right track! Making meanings requires an act of choice, including some possible meanings and excluding others.

What does this have to do with AI? Well, from what I understand, AI’s method is to sift through the existing library of human communication—a library not infinite but extraordinarily vast—to look for patterns of probability in the usage-frequence of its characters. Like the books in the Library of Babel, the strings of characters it generates have no authors and no access to any world beyond the Library itself. Yet AI does have limits. Improbable combinations of characters have been excluded by the billion, leaving relatively common ones behind—combinations that gain their plausibility by preserving deposits of connection between the minds and worlds of past language users.

So when you get an answer from an AI bot using a Large Language Model, it’s as if a modern race of Purifiers has eliminated enough of the worthless patterns of use to leave you with something that might be valuable. Still, hard as it is to remember, there is no author standing behind it and no world to back it up. If you want to do anything with these authorless and worldless messages, it is up to you to connect them to the world and supply the authority to make them worth interpreting for others.

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A number of people have asked me how I manage to avoid being distracted by the chaotic barrage of news that is keeping everyone on edge. Of course I don’t entirely avoid it, but it helps that I’ve not been in the habit of watching news on TV. For the last few years I’ve been spending an hour or so reading news on my phone before I get out of bed in the morning. I take my dose early, get it over with, do some exercise, and over breakfast I read something that takes me beyond the moment.

Of course if there were something I could do about the moment on a daily basis, that would be a different story.

Not that I’m immune to other distractions. The rest of my day will inevitably include too much online chess. If that had been available 24/7 when I was a kid, I doubt I would ever have learned anything else. By now I would either be a grandmaster (very unlikely) or an ignoramus. Or possibly both.

In my Substack essays I’ve largely tried to avoid triggering my readers with Orwellian specters of doom, but one piece of news that caught my attention last week seems worth pausing over because it has implications that could be missed. I am talking about Anthropic’s announcement on April 7th that it is making its new tool, Mythos Preview, available to the US government and to other tech companies, even its rivals, because if it falls into the hands of evildoers before governments and companies have a chance to prepare themselves, the security implications would be catastrophic.

“Mythos Preview,” Anthropic reports, “has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—economics, public safety, and national security—could be severe.”

In a New York Times opinion piece the same day, Thomas Friedman elaborates: “If this A.I. tool were, indeed, to become widely available, it would mean the ability to hack any major infrastructure system—a hard and expensive effort that was once essentially the province only of private-sector experts and intelligence organizations—will be available to every criminal actor, terrorist organization and country, no matter how small.” Apparently Friedman isn’t altogether kidding when he says that parents will have to worry about their children taking down the power grid instead of doing their homework.

AI is giving individuals and small groups who know how to use it the kind of power that only companies and governments once possessed, and the potential for chaos and destruction is truly frightening. As tech-expert Craig Mundie puts it in Friedman’s column, “What we are about to see is nothing short of the complete democratization of cyberattack capabilities.” Indeed, what we are seeing is the democratization of almost everything that intelligence and technical facility can accomplish. Power and capability are coming from every direction.

I was discussing early inklings of this with my late mother, Verna Farrell, in 2023, and she glossed it brilliantly—“Everything’s taking over!” she said. The next stage that looms is “Everyone’s taking over!”

Friedman’s and Mundie’s reaction is to warn that the great powers, China and the United States, have to act. “It is now urgent that they learn to collaborate to prevent bad actors from gaining access to this next level of cyber capability.” The first thing that occurs to me, though, is that China is going to be in a lot better position to keep its citizens from gaining access to too much AI than the United States—which leads me to wonder how much longer that will continue. How much longer will liberal societies be able to allow citizens and private organizations access to instruments as powerful as the ones emerging from AI? The implications for democracy are harsh.

I’ve always been struck by how lucky it is, given the amount of energy stored in all of the matter in and around us, that eight decades after the Manhattan Project, nuclear explosives are still very difficult to make. What if the laws of physics had been slightly different and you could make the Bomb in your backyard? What if you could crash the power grid from your cell phone? Freedom would become a lot more threatening than it is now. With the democratizing of mayhem, keeping dangerous AI under wraps will create new impetus toward surveillance and restriction, and a tighter rein upon the freedoms we cherish.

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Last week I visited my friend Jonathan Bolton’s Harvard class on The Political Novel. The subject for the day was the Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s great work Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), and the discussion brought out beautifully the fascination of this book, which I think is one of the most truly successful literary experiments in modern fiction. The rapid and easy flow of thought among students and teacher took me back to the joys of the classroom at its best.1

Nowadays the essays in Thinking Out of School give me an outlet for the kind of thinking I did in the classroom, where things are broader and freer than in scholarly publication. In the classroom, though, you have the benefit that students (mostly) have read the book, whereas for my readers here the point is to say why they might want to read it. So I will do my best to avoid spoilers until I give the signal. I’ll end by telling you how things wind up and the questions it leaves you with.

(It is worth noting, though, that there is some evidence that people’s reports about their reading are actually more favorable when they’ve been given a summary of the plot ahead of time.)

In its conception, Kiss of the Spider Woman falls into one of the classic types of modern liberal narrative, what I might call the Bonding Experiment. Take two people from very different walks of life and put them together in an unusual situation that breaks down barriers and allows a new relationship to form. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an obvious example and, in the movies, In the Heat of the Night (1967), starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. This formula also works in a modified form in comedy, of course, and particularly romantic comedy. It has a utopian quality, though the outcomes aren’t necessarily all that hopeful, as the two examples I mentioned would suggest.

In Spider Woman the subjects of the experiment are Molina, a thirty-seven-year-old homosexual window-dresser who identifies himself as female, and Valentin, a twenty-six-year-old heterosexual member of a Marxist revolutionary group. The setting is an Argentine prison cell where Molina has been confined for illegal activities with a minor and Valentin for his political activities against a government that is under serious pressure from armed resistance. The two prisoners don’t necessarily start out hostile to each other, but they have very different views of almost everything. They do have something in common, though. Each has a dilemma of desire.

Molina’s is more evident. Occupying the emotional and imaginative position of a “real woman” who wants to be in love with a “real man,” his erotic longings are by their nature difficult to satisfy. He dreams about a waiter named Gabriel with whom he has struck up a friendship based on his show of sympathy for the working-class man’s frustrations with his life. Molina knows that this friendship will probably not lead to anything more. And this frustration is just an example of the general pain of his outcast status. His relationship with his mother has been the only satisfying connection in his life, and now he is cut off from her too.

Valentin, on the other hand, is not an outcast except by his own design. He is a creature of privilege who has turned against his class in search of justice. The problem is that he struggles to free himself from the biases, tastes, and habits acquired from his bourgeois upbringing. This is not an unusual problem. Most of the great revolutionaries have been ultra-literate creatures of the middle class; making revolutions and crossing class boundaries can almost be listed as two of the main bourgeois vocations.

In the case of Valentin, the problem takes an erotic form. He is separated from his beloved, a working-class “girl” who is also dedicated to the movement, but she is not the one he is missing. Instead, he longs for Marta, a lost middle-class lover who tried to keep him out of politics. Being younger than Molina, Valentin is in a more desperate physcical state of deprivation. He begs his cellmate not to mention food or women.

The erotic dilemmas of the two prisoners are interestingly askew. Molina identifies completely with his desire and the role in which he pursues it but cannot obtain his object. Valentin’s frustration comes from loving the wrong object. The revolution engages his will but not his bourgeois heart. Despite all their differences, both prisoners feel the mystery of desire and attachment. “What makes a face lovely?” Molina wonders. Valentin finds it strange that he is becoming attached to the characters in Molina’s narrations, “as if the mind has to secrete affection without stopping.”

Puig has set up his experiment in a very narrow space and he has set limits for himself as well. There is no authorial voice, only dialogue between the characters, supplemented by official documents and police reports. With no external narrator, readers of the book must be constantly coping with the angles of their sources.

There is, however, one penumbra of authority surrounding the story. Since readers of Latin American fiction were not accustomed to sympathetic treatments of people like Molina, Puig provides a running series of extensive footnotes detailing psychoanalytic theories about the origins of homosexuality. They run the gamut from classic Freudian speculations to later, more culturally radical critiques of sexual repression by leftist writers like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Puig does not intervene in the debate, but the cumulative effect of the notes is to educate his readers that homosexuality is not a moral issue and that the prejudice against it may be part of a larger cultural and political neurosis. At the very least the notes hint that there is far more going on than the surface of the story would suggest. It makes the two prisoners representative figures in a much larger erotic and cultural conflict.

It is not on the level of intellectual debate that the conflict will be addressed, though, but on the level of story. Famously, the action proceeds by storytelling itself or, in fact, story re-telling and the interpretation of stories. Valentin spends his days reading political literature, fortifying his theoretical grasp of Marxism, but in the evenings Molina entertains him by narrating the B-movies which have been a major consolation in his frustrated life. As a window-dresser he has a subtle grasp of the way the characters are clothed, lighted, and staged, and he is sensitive to the nuances of cinema technique. As a person whose own self-presentation demands mimicry, he is an expert semiotician, but his awareness of how cinematic effects are created does not distance him from their magic. In fact, it only enhances his absorption in these kitschy, melodramatic spectacles which, in his retellings, become brilliantly evocative and compelling.

The movies themselves deal relentlessly with problems of love, desire, and frustration, most unforgettably the movie about the woman from a mountain village (Cat People, 1942) who is haunted by a legend that if she ever becomes sexually aroused by a man, even the husband she loves, she will turn into a panther and tear him apart. Molina reconstructs his experience of the movie superbly. He identifies intensely with the heroine; quite proudly, in fact, he claims always to identify with the heroines of movies. Valentin, by contrast, prefers the panther woman’s tamer, safer foil, the assistant of the architect husband who loves him secretly and gives him sympathy. In the realm of imagination, it is Molina who is the revolutionary, standing out against the crowd, while Valentin somewhat sheepishly follows the norm. Politics and aesthetic response are intimately connected here.

Valentin naturally takes a skeptical view of Molina’s aesthetic preferences. He is particularly sharp with his cellmate for loving a Nazi propaganda film about a beautiful and famous French actress who starts out hating the Nazis but whose Wehrmacht officer boyfriend helps her understand why the evil Jews and maquis in the French resistance must be stamped out. Molina knows the film’s message is mendacious and wrong, but that does not prevent him from entering into its melodrama. And as much as Valentin rejects Molina’s political flexibility, he is captivated nevertheless by the aesthetic power of Molina’s accounts. The very legibility of the movies’ logic is part of their interest. Of the panther woman movie Valentin says, “It’s so coherent,” meaning that it dramatizes the Freudian logic of repression with such elaborate fidelity.

Still, despite his beguilement, Valentin would like to extract Molina from his escapist dream-life. He urges him to stop letting himself be humiliated for what he is and join a political cause. He does not realize that Molina has another plan, and here I will advise those who don’t want spoilers to read the book before continuing to read below.

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Until about halfway through Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Bonding Experiment takes its course in apparent isolation. Valentin believes in it with complete innocence. He tells Molina that they could be on a desert island. There is no one there to come between them. In fact, Molina has been put into Valentin’s cell to gain his confidence and extract information about his subversive activities. If Molina succeeds, he will be released.

Molina actually forbids Valentin from telling him anything about his political “goings-on” that would be helpful to the authorities. He does not want to compromise anyone. But when the warden steps up the pressure on Valentin by poisoning his food, causing intense diarrhea and pain, Molina is happy to offer motherly nursing and comfort. Then, at the nadir of Valentin’s sufferings, Molina convinces the authorities to provide a rich array of food supplies to convince the revolutionary that his trips to the warden’s office are actually for visits from Molina’s mother. So Molina turns from nurse to hostess.

Deeply affected by all this generosity and kindness, Valentin finally shows his appreciation by gratifying Molina’s sexual longings, even allowing him the intimacy of a kiss. Valentin does this out of gratitude but also because of his sympathy for Molina’s state of oppression and respect for him as a human being. Sex, he tells him, is “innocence itself.” But he has also been broken down by the effects of imprisonment and poison, and the emotional aura of the movies has played its part.

Molina’s duplicity is obviously aimed at seducing Valentin rather than helping the police. Eventually convinced that Molina’ will not provide valuable intelligence, the authorities decide to release him to see if he will make contact with Valentin’s collaborators, which Valentin, perhaps naively, has at last persuaded him to do. In the event, Molina, who seems to have tied up his affairs as if preparing for death, is killed by the revolutionaries who fear what he might confess. The novel ends with a long revery in which Valentin, in an opium revery after being tortured, experiences intense remorse over the death of Molina whose kindness he will never be able to repay. The story ends as it began, in fantasy.

During their discussions, the prisoners agree that the best movie endings are enigmatic and this conviction returns in Valentin’s last revery. The final words of Kiss of the Spider Woman are THE END, a classic film gesture that, by the ’70s, already had a B-movie feel. Here it only calls attention to the ambiguity of the climax.

So the ending is indeed enigmatic, leaving many open questions. Was the Bonding Experiment a success and a victory against social barriers even if it produced only a temporary and fragile exchange of mercies? Or was it finally nothing more than an opportunity for the two characters to entrap and exploit each other, leading to death for one and additional torture for the other? The metaphor of the spider’s weaving can go either way—towards enchantment or towards entrapment.

Is the novel an example of how human relations are inescapably poisoned under an oppressive regime in a culture that narcotizes its citizens with kitschy fantasy? Or is the relationship between Valentin and Molina just an example of what human relations always are—part exchange of benefits and part mutual exploitation?

Should we apply Nicholas Chamfort’s famous remark that “Love, as it exists in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises?”

How much irony should we feel when Valentin tells Molina that the two of them are on a desert island with no one to come between them when each of them is under the spell of absent forces and haunted by thoughts of others?

Is Molina’s relationship to movies a life-sustaining resource for him or an opiatic substitute for political action? Does his choice to contact the revolutionaries represent a suicidal attempt to imitate the movie heroines he has always loved?

Prompted by Jonathan, one of his impressive students noticed that the mention of Valentin and Molina watching the flickering shadow in their cell is an oblique reference to the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, where the prisoners who’ve never seen the real world mistake shadows for real things. Art is Plato’s prime example of shadow-casting, and the movie screen makes the metaphor concrete. We might think that, as readers of Kiss of the Spider Woman, we are being led out of the cave where Molina and Valentin are being held captive by movie shadows. But aren’t Molina’s narratives the most powerful part of the book, the things that have made it famous? If so, what does that say about art? Do we all really want to be prisoners?

Finally, how should these questions be answered? Based upon our experience of the book, what it means, how it feels to us? That would be Molina’s approach. Or should we bring our own, outside-the-cave understanding to the issues themselves, as Valentin would recommend?

Many of my questions have a natural and ready answer, which is, of course, BOTH. It is tempting to say that such is the advantage of art, that it allows us to see every side and keeps us from false choices. But could that be too much of a get-out-of-jail-free card for prisoners like us?

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In the previous posts subtitled “The Afterlife of Psychoanalysis,” I suggested reasons for the persistence of Freud’s influence in culture long after long his claims lost their plausibility as science. In “Why Freud Won’t Go Away” (Oct 15), I pointed out how he revived the figure of the medicine man or shaman which fulfills the perennial human dream for a spiritual healer. In “Freud’s Paranoid Quest” (Nov 8), I described Freud’s contribution, alongside Marx and Nietzsche, to the trend of suspicious decoding that has had so much appeal for modern intellectuals, including (especially) my fellow literary critics. Today I would like to discuss a third reason for the durability of Freud’s afterlife—the resonance of his account of the mind with Plato’s.

Throughout his career Sigmund Freud presented himself as a man of science—a neurologist turned psychologist who had wrested the human psyche from the wishful realm of philosophy and myth and submitted it to rigorous empirical inquiry. Freud’s claim to originality was bold to say the least. As Copernicus had displaced the earth from its cosmic centrality and Darwin had dethroned the human species from its position at the head of the animal kingdom, so, Freud claimed, psychoanalysis had removed the conscious mind from its privileged place in human understanding. Freud and his followers had descended heroically into the underworld of the unconscious, facing unpleasant truths about human desires and motives, such truths as made weaker souls quail. After millennia of naive idealism, the story goes, Freud had finally brought psychology into the modern age.

Freud’s theorizing did provide some novelties. He was the first, as far as I know, to suggest that infants who experience too much pleasure at one of their bodily orifices—the anus, for example—might develop a personality modeled on that orifice, becoming human anuses who go on retaining filth, compulsively controlling and organizing for the rest of their lives. Freud was the first to suggest that the aim of all life is death, that all creatures have a hidden death instinct driving us to return to that inorganic state from which our material constituents arose. And Freud’s theory of universal childhood desire for incest—the Oedipus complex—rooted in his reading of literary works and his own self-analysis, was certainly novel. Freud’s dynamic conception of the psyche also fostered a flamboyant new terminology, with cathexes, abreactions, transferences, and so on. No one can say he was not creative.

Beneath Freud’s clinical vocabulary, however, lies a structure of thought that is recognizably, even strikingly, borrowed from one of the key figures in the Western tradition—Plato. Freud did not simply arrive at conclusions that happened to resemble Plato’s; the resemblances are too systematic, too structural, and too well-informed to be accidental. What we find, on examination, is that the inventor of psychoanalysis owed a deep and still largely underappreciated debt to the most familiar and influential psychologist of antiquity. Indeed he made no effort to disguise it.

Freud learned Greek and Latin at school, and was devoted to classical literature. As a young man he translated J. S. Mill’s review of George Grote’s celebrated study of Plato into German.1 References to Plato are sprinkled throughout his work. The most obvious point of convergence between the two thinkers is the tripartite structure of the psyche. Plato, in the Republic, divides the soul into three parts: the reasoning part, the spirited part, and the desiring part. The healthy soul is one in which reason governs spirit, and spirit in turn disciplines appetite; psychological disorder arises when this hierarchy is overturned and the lower faculties usurp the place of the higher.

Freud’s structural model is not identical, but its family resemblance is unmistakable. The ego, the superego, and the id map imperfectly but suggestively onto Plato’s tripartition: the id is the seat of raw appetite, ungoverned and insatiable; the superego exercises a sometimes tyrannical moralizing authority that has something in common with the self-punitive shame of Platonic spirit; and the ego mediates between inner pressure and external reality much as reason finds itself between the demands of thought and appetite. In both frameworks, understanding the internal conflict among the parts of the psyche is essential, and health is a matter of achieving a workable governance among them.

More profound, perhaps, than the rough structural parallel is the shared conviction that the surface of mental life is not its truth — that beneath the world of conscious appearance lies a hidden domain of meanings, wishes, and forces that are the real determinants of human thought and conduct. For Plato, the world of the senses is a shadow world, a cave of appearances that most people take for reality; genuine understanding requires a painful ascent toward the intelligible forms that constitute the true structure of things. For Freud, the manifest content of the mind — its conscious beliefs, its rational narratives, its surface behavior — is similarly a disguise, a compromise formation produced by the censoring work of repression. Psychological reality lies elsewhere: in the unconscious, that subterranean world of wishes, fantasies, and memories that the ego has refused to acknowledge but that nonetheless govern it from below. In both cases, the project of understanding requires a kind of excavation—a movement behind and beneath the obvious toward what is hidden yet essential.

(It is a strange fact that many people still credit Freud with the discovery of the unconscious mind as if it had not been a philosophical notion central to the Western tradition. The possession of nonconscious knowledge was stridently attacked by empiricists like Locke, reasserted by Leibniz and various Romantic thinkers, and made the subject of a major nineteenth-century work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, by Eduard von Hartmann [1869]. Freud had a distinctive and particulalry dynamic version of the unconscious but it was one of many.)

It is in their shared theory of dreams that the convergence between Freud and Plato becomes most explicitly legible. In the ninth book of the Republic, Plato offers what is, by any measure, a remarkable precursor of Freudian dream theory. Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece, argues that in sleep, when the rational part of the soul relaxes its control,

“Then the wild animal nature, when filled with meat and drink, leaps up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—it, when it has parted company with all shame and prudence, insinuates that it may even have intercourse with a mother, or with any other man, god, or beast, or that it may commit what murder it will, or eat forbidden food; in a word, there is no uttermost folly or shamelessness that it will not venture.”2

The dream is not a random or meaningless entertainment; it is the revelatory theatre of our most forbidden desires, the stage on which the part of the soul that reason normally keeps caged makes its uncensored appearance. This is, in its essentials, Freud’s argument in The Interpretation of Dreams. For Freud, too, the dream is the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish; its apparently bizarre or innocent manifest content is a censored version of a latent content that tends, on analysis, toward precisely the monstrous wishes Plato identified—incestuous wishes above all, since the Oedipus complex stands at the very center of Freudian theory.

Freud’s machinery differs from Plato’s. He adds a repertoire of disguises for the shameful contents: condensation, displacement, secondary revision, the whole apparatus of dreamwork. But the fundamental claim is the same: strip away the disguise, and the dream reveals the animal beneath the civilized surface.

What both thinkers share, underneath this specific theory, is the more general conviction that the dream grants access to a level of psychic reality that waking consciousness normally conceals. For Plato, this is consistent with his broader account of the soul’s divided nature: the dream is one of the places where the mask slips and the soul’s disorder is exposed. For Freud, dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious mind, as he put it, precisely because the censoring agency of the ego is relaxed in sleep and the repressed material finds a more direct path to expression.

Crucially, both Plato and Freud insist that the movement toward hidden truth cannot be accomplished alone. Escaping from the cave requires a specific kind of relationship with a guide who has already made the journey. Plato’s dialectic is not a solitary exercise; it is an erotically charged personal encounter, and it is no accident that Socrates conducts his most searching philosophical conversations with young men whom he professes to love. The relationship between the philosopher and his interlocutor is charged in a way that is philosophically essential rather than incidental: it is Eros, the desire that reaches toward what it lacks, that propels the soul upward from the cave of appearances toward the light of the forms. The Socratic encounter is at once an intellectual and an erotic transaction.

Freud, who famously placed the transference at the very center of the therapeutic process, insisted that the analysand’s attachment to the analyst—including its erotic dimensions—was not a distraction from the work of analysis but its very engine. The patient re-experiences buried wishes and conflicts in the relationship with the analyst, and it is through this re-experiencing, that insight becomes not merely intellectual but therapeutically transformative. Both traditions, in short, understand self-knowledge to be achieved not through solitary reflection but through an erotically inflected encounter with a master.

The shared vocabulary here is telling. The Greek word anamnesis — literally, unforgetting, or recollection — is Plato’s term for the philosophical process by which the soul recovers knowledge it always already possessed but had forgotten in the trauma of birth. We learn, on this account, not by acquiring new information from outside but by being reminded of what we have obscured from our own memory. Freud occasionally borrowed Plato’s term and his whole therapeutic project is structured around an analogous logic of recovery: the patient has not simply failed to acquire knowledge of his unconscious wishes; he has actively, if unconsciously, repressed it, and the work of analysis is precisely that of bringing the repressed back into the light of consciousness. Like Socrates, the psychoanalyst does not instruct; he facilitates a recollection that patients must ultimately arrive at themselves. That both traditions reach for the same root concept—the idea that truth is not learned but recovered from an interior obscurity—is a measure of how deeply the Platonic problematic had shaped Freud’s imagination.

The doctrine of Eros is another bold carryover from Plato to Freud. His late speculative works—above all Beyond the Pleasure Principle—develop a theory of Eros as a grand life force binding things together, working against dissolution and death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud invokes Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium—the story of the original spherical beings split in two by Zeus, forever seeking their lost halves—as a profound account of the nature of sexual love. That Freud should turn not to any empirical study but to a comic speech in a Platonic dialogue when reaching for the truth about erotic desire tells us something important about the imaginative and philosophical resources from which psychoanalysis was built. The myth spoke to Freud with the authority of deep recognition, and his willingness to grant it such authority suggests that, at the level of fundamental speculation, he trusted the poets and philosophers of antiquity.

I am not saying that Freud was deliberately echoing Platonic notions. No doubt he believed he was providing the true grounds of explanation for what Plato had glimpsed in partial terms. Certainly both men were playing the ancient—and modern—quasi-metaphorical game of accounting for mental conflict by dividing the soul into rival camps. But the resonance of Freud’s paradigm with Plato’s gave it, I believe, in spite of its flagrant departures from common understanding, a feeling of rightness and familiarity that fostered its appeal.

The reader may be thinking that, while working broadly within the Platonic paradigm might have had some attraction for a classically educated person like Freud, it might not have had a similar resonance for the wide range of people who have been attracted to psychoanalysis. Here it is important to remember that between Plato and Freud stands the mediating figure of Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo (354-430), who performed the decisive operation of Christianizing the Platonic interior. In doing so, he bequeathed to Western culture habits of inwardness so deeply ingrained that by Freud’s time they had come to seem like simple human nature.

Augustine’s Confessions is, among other things, the first great psychological autobiography. Its structure is anamnetic: it is a project of recollection, a recovery of the self’s hidden history through an extended, searching dialogue conducted not with a human interlocutor but with God, who occupies the position of the Socratic questioner, drawing the soul toward truths it has obscured from itself. Augustine’s famous opening declaration that his heart is restless until it rests in God is a Christianized version of Platonic Eros—the soul’s deep longing for a wholeness it only dimly remembers. Augustine’s unflinching account of his own sexual compulsions, his bondage to appetite, his inability to govern himself without divine assistance, rehearses the Platonic drama of the soul in the register of Christian confession.

What Augustine added to the Platonic inheritance—and what proved so important for the subsequent history of Western inwardness—was the practice of confession as a formal institution: the structured, intimate, hierarchical encounter in which a burdened soul discloses its hidden life to an authorized healer and receives absolution and guidance. The confession is, in this light, the ecclesiastical descendant of the Socratic dialogue and the direct ancestor of the analytic hour. As I mentioned in my discussion of J. S. Mill’s mental crisis, this resource of culture had been suppressed in early modernity until it was reinvented by Freud.3 For Plato, Augustine, and Freud the ritual framework is the same: a hidden truth, an asymmetrical relationship of authority and dependence, a guided excavation of what has been concealed, and a therapeutic transformation that follows from the act of disclosure. When Reformation and Enlightenment thinkers dismantled the confessional as a Catholic superstition, they did not abolish the hunger it once fed. They left it unsatisfied, creating exactly the vacancy that Freud would eventually fill using a psychic architecture that could not have been more familiar.

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“I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It is always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” —Henry Adams

In my two previous essays I’ve been making the case that historical judgments about good and evil should be directed against systems, practices, and institutions rather than individuals. Even the people who are doing the most heinous things are, for the most part, ordinary folk who lack the will to question their leaders. They are not necessarily monsters or deviants who have been separated from their humanity by childhood trauma, and our tendency to envision them as such allows us to evade the direst implication of their atrocities—that any of these atrocities could happen anywhere anytime and that few of us are safe from being the victims of such crimes, or even the perpetrators.

But what about the bad people? Aren’t there any bad people to come in for their share of the blame? What part do they play? Let’s step back, look down, and see if we can come up with a job description for them.

All of us grow up in groups that initiate us in how to think and live. The content of such teachings varies enormously, but in general it is positive toward the group and its members, starting with the family and moving outward. Certain ideals are established that people are supposed to live up to depending upon the roles society considers them fit to occupy. Inevitably some people will do better than others in filling their roles and maintaining their solidarity with the group. Some will excel and be universally admired while some will be found completely unwilling to enter into the collective spirit or to care for the interests of other people. Even toward their own families they will turn out to be selfish, lying, thieving, conniving sorts. The types vary, from hostile and violent to coolly self-interested to simply too weak to be trusted. These are the bad people. I believe in them devoutly.

The problem with the bad people is that, except for the psychopathic chameleons among them, they tend to underperform their evil potential because other people don’t like or trust them, and they themselves lack ambition beyond a certain point. When we think about historical figures whose deeds we abhor, it is natural to think of them as brutes along one of these lines, and there are situations when groups of criminals do get together to oppose the common good of society. But in general it is not people like them who are the protagonists of history’s great miseries. Instead, it is the good people, the people whose education has wedded them to the interests of the group. They are the ones who mobilize others to mass action, wield grand rhetoric to evoke heroic ideals, focus hatred on the enemy, and risk their own lives in the cause.

So Henry Adams had a point when he said that “It is always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” It is the good men and women who work selflessly for the good of an evil system or an evil idea. If Robert E. Lee had been a self-interested character, he would have accepted the top field command in the Union Army in 1861. The Civil War might have been as brief as people expected at the time (though it might not have led to abolition). Lee had a choice between two systems, both of which he had served wholeheartedly up to that time. Forced to choose between them, he chose the wrong one.

Nazism offers an even more instructive image of evil when we recognize that its war against the Jews and other perceived aliens was a costly, dementedly idealistic quest on the part of a whole system to save the Reich from imaginary enemies. Fortunately it had the self-defeating effect of drawing energy and resources away from the larger, ideally motivated and even more insane costly and self-sacrificing venture of the war itself. Leaders like Hitler and Mao are heroic in the bad sense that they are the ones who call for sacrifice for the greater evil which they call good.

The destructiveness of heroes acting in a bad cause is one of the reasons why utopians always dream of “worlds without heroes,” worlds where there is nothing for heroes to do, the distinction between them and everyone else having been rendered obsolete. Unfortunately, over and over again the abolition of heroes in utopia has proven to be a heroic project in itself, leading to tragic results.

When horrors like the 9/11 bombing occur, politicians label the attackers as evil cowards when, of course, many of them are intrepid idealists sacrificing their typically young lives for a cause larger than themselves. They are good men in the sense that they serve and embody the ideals of at least some part of their society. Bad men would have stayed home. It’s enough to make you say Here’s to the slackers.

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Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist

If there is a Golden Rule for understanding our fellow human beings, it is that you have to take them one by one. The misapplication of general categories is the essence of prejudice. Even judging one by one, of course, is, to say the least, tricky business. We typically encounter other people in only one or two of the roles they play, and you never know how well performance in one role carries over to another. The same person can turn out to be a good friend but a poor mother, a good doctor but a bad sport. On top of that, even transient situations can have remarkable effects on people’s behavior, leading some psychologists and philosophers to argue that the very notion of character is overrated, there being no consistent moral center in people that endures regardless of situation. I do not share this degree of skepticism about the moral center, but I do believe that life offers us few examples of pure saints or villains.1

In “The Enormous Condescension of Posterity” (Feb 15), I was skeptical about the usefulness of moral categories applied to people in history. It’s not just that moralizing about the past involves applying what W. H. Auden called a “foreign code of conscience,” one that people in distant cultures or times wouldn’t recognize as governing their own understanding or behavior. It’s also that individuals are sufficiently guided both in their thought and their conduct by those around them that thinking in terms of good people versus bad people just isn’t very illuminating. To do so is to ignore the systemic and group-dependent nature of moral thinking, the situational character of action, as well as the mixed characters of most individuals.2

My fellow professors of the humanities generally disclaim a moralizing approach to scholarship. Under oath I think most of them would say that only systemic explanations can be truly illuminating in the same way that only systemic approaches to social problems can be truly effective. In practice, however, scholarship since the 1960s has taken on a heavily moralizing tone. It sees history, especially American history, as an affair of villains and victims. Recently, this hypermoralism has provoked a backlash. The current US administration and its allies have sought to suppress the discouraging facts of American history and recast them in the old heroic vein. This, of course, is just the same type of mistake with the roles reversed. (See my discussion in “Escaping the Myths of America,” July 1, 2025).

Good people/bad people is fun, of course, because we can make cause with the good people and because knowing who to hate and who to love is emotionally gratifying. Indeed, it is one of the pleasures imaginative literature exists to provide. And there is another, even more comforting side which is apparent in the way the Germans were portrayed in the decades after World War II. Both in popular and in artistically challenging novels and films, Germans were sadists, perverts, or psychopaths—people fundamentally not like us and not representative of the human race as a whole. (Once in a while a good German was thrown in to cast the others in relief.) Italian artists, ambiguously positioned given their country’s own investment in Fascism, led the way in the portrayal of the Nazis. Sexual deviance was a frequent accompaniment of Nazi sadism in movies like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (La caduta degli dei—1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). The Italian Fascists were perhaps even more exemplary in their depravity as shown in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò: 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even Bernardo Bertolucci’s brilliant film The Conformist (1970), which stresses its Fascist hero’s passivity and lack of genuine motivation, shows his need to conform as abnormal, rooted in childhood trauma.3 There is always a special explanation for evil.

Popular culture followed suit4 and of course no one can deny that the Nazi leadership offers sterling evidence for the sick-and-evil-Nazi thesis; the long nightmare of the war also showed that, once grand, atrocious schemes get off the drawing board, they attract and promote the sort who thrive on violence and hatred. But the starker fact is that Hitler’s designs were carried out by huge numbers of perfectly ordinary people many of whom started out with no special animus against the victims of the regime and whose behavior cannot be attributed to sexual factors or personal trauma. The sheer scale of the atrocities makes the thesis of deviance absurd. It is especially disturbing that, as Christopher Browning has noted, even though the Nazi officers in the execution unit he studied didn’t force soldiers to carry out acts of murder if they didn’t want to, only a few of them refused. It wasn’t their sick or evil characters that motivated the killers; they were just unwilling to step out of line.5

What makes this far more troubling than the sick-and-evil-Nazi thesis is that it means the Nazis in the mass weren’t so different from the rest of us after all. It is tempting to label them inhuman, but that is to disclaim the true implications of their all-too-human behavior. Demonizing and “othering” the oppressors in history, either as individuals or in groups, sustains the impression that “it couldn’t happen here.” It is not as ugly as othering the victim, but it is equally misguided, and it distracts us from the warnings that history can offer us about our own time.

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In the introduction to his landmark book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the British historian E. P. Thompson writes that he wants to “rescue the poor… Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying,” he goes on to say. “But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties (p. 12).

“The enormous condescension of posterity” is one of those rare phrases that is worth a whole library because it gives a handle to something that’s almost impossible to get and keep your mind around. For those of us looking back from posterity’s comfortable perch, how can we fail to be struck with wonder at the way all those pathetic creatures, who were supposed to be human in the full sense of the word, could have believed the amazing array of absurd and rebarbative things that history records on every other page? And how could they have acted out the most vicious of those beliefs not only without blushing but with comical pomp and pride? How is it possible not to feel that we, just because of who we are, would be immune to such follies and atrocities? Can it really be true that, given the same upbringing in the same circumstances, we would have thought and acted very much the way they did? Do we really need to utter that old superstitious hedge, There but for the grace of God go I?

Not only is the condescension of posterity enormous; it is almost irresistible. It is a reflex barely susceptible to conscious control. Yet it seems to me that nothing can be more essential for an educated person than to overcome the short-sightedness that enables this stroke of vanity.

In his attempt to rescue the “casualties of history,” Thompson has chosen to defend some of history’s more forgivable casualties. But the lesson should apply more broadly, even to those whose aspirations we do not see as “valid in terms of their own experience.”

I trust and believe that the readers of this essay will agree with me that slavery was and is an evil practice, one of the worst things that human beings can do to each other. We can be glad that, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has gradually been outlawed all over the world and is now regarded with abhorrence. But if you had been born before that momentous change and were able to do it, would you have been unwilling to buy, sell, and exploit other human beings as if they were mere property? The record says it is highly unlikely you would have refused.

For millennia, slavery was a normal practice virtually coextensive with civilization. People across the globe were enslaved for labor, sex, and fecundity. Economies depended on it and, in general, the objections were few. Parents sold their children into slavery. Boys were castrated when it made them more useful. It was a common occurrence that people who were born into slavery but achieved their freedom went on to buy and sell people for their own profit. In some places, as Orlando Patterson points out in his great book Slavery and Social Death, in some places there were people currently enslaved that had slaves of other own! Even during the struggle for abolition in the United States, some free black men owned and traded slaves. So did “civilized” Native Americans, in spite of their disenfranchised condition. And though it isn’t considered equivalent to slavery, in most places men had power over their wives virtually as absolute as over their slaves.

Not one of the most important teachers of humanity was opposed to slavery—not Socrates or Buddha, Moses or Confucius or Jesus. Dissenting voices in the traditions they founded were rare. Muhammad favored manumission and discouraged the enslavement of free Muslims, but Muslims were among the great slave traders of Africa. The religions that addressed the inequity of worldly arrangements offered otherworldly compensations instead of worldly freedom. American defenders of slavery in the nineteenth century cited its presence in the Bible as proof that it couldn’t be wrong.

Eventually, religion became one of the key abolitionist motives, but it remains a conundrum that, in the premodern era, when human beings were generally considered immortal spirits, enslaving them seemed natural, whereas modern secularism has moved entirely in the other direction.

Were the people who practiced slavery bad people? Undoubtedly the power they exerted over others made them more cruel and heartless than they would otherwise have been and blinded them to other people’s humanity. But did their being bad people explain why they owned slaves? Alas, no; it was simply normal.

Given its vast scope, the interesting historical question about slavery is not how it could have thriven but how, after all those centuries, it could have ended. The story is complicated but its outlines are well-known. Starting in the seventeenth century, voices against slavery and other privilege-based attitudes and practices began to emerge as part of a wider movement involving the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, democracy, and the rise of the middle class. It started slowly and eventually became the crescendo we now call modernity.

Public opinion changed slowly, but at some point slavery became a thoroughly contested institution, and those who continued to defend it had to justify themselves. As usual, people’s minds changed more quickly than their habits. It wasn’t easy for those who lived by other people’s sweat to give up their means of living. The middle stage of such transitions is the hypocrisy stage, and the hypocrisy of some of the most outstandingly modern and progressive thinkers, especially the American founders, was glaring. Samuel Johnson’s famous question remains apt: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

When we think of the vast suffering it caused, the story of slavery must produce moral outrage. But the scale at which such moral attitudes emerge and decline is so grand, and the grip of consensus is so strong, that moral judgment about individuals becomes hard to apply, and certainly there is no reason to feel virtuous by contrast with those who turned out to be “on the wrong side of history.” Instead, we should be ashamed for the human species and thank our lucky stars that some historical trends, some technological developments, and some unusual and determined people have permitted us to live in world where respect for human rights is normal and slavery is illegal.

So how will condescending posterity look at us? A lot will depend on the future.

The effect of future consequences upon moral judgments is a subject philosophers have discussed under the term “moral luck.” Though we claim to judge people’s actions by their intentions, in fact, on account of what Adam Smith called an “irregularity of sentiment,” our judgment is affected crucially by what happens next. Two shooters pull the trigger intending murder, but one of the guns doesn’t fire. Their intention is the same but the punishments will be very different.

How will our actions turn out? A hundred years from now, life on the planet might be going splendidly, issues like climate change, for example, having been solved by technological innovation. People looking back at our age might sympathize with the degree of uncertainty and political turmoil we had to endure, but they will applaud our scientific acumen. Those who called for drastic environmental protections will look like silly purists.

On the other hand, if in the next century the alteration of the climate has gotten fully out of hand, our posterity, living in a degraded, chaotic environment, will look back and think even of the most progressive of our generations as hypocrites who wrung their hands about climate change while living in houses much larger than they needed, speeding about in fuel-wasting cars and airplanes, and bingeing on electricity day and night. They believed all this was wrong, they will say, but their behavior didn’t change.

My point is not to threaten you with the wrath of the future. Going back to Samuel Johnson, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” It’s better than out and out scoundrelism, which has recently been on the rise. Rather, the value of this line of thought lies in the fact that the condescension of posterity is only a special case of the more general tendency to condescend towards anyone with whom we disagree, especially about identity-forming ideological issues. The benighted ones are not just wrong but contemptibly defective; history will consign them to the same dramatic irony that shadows all of its casualties.

Condescension keeps us from taking other people’s opinions seriously enough—from really listening to what they are saying and considering why they are saying it. It also tempts us into taking their opinions too seriously, as if they were marks of Cain, when few people have either the energy, the wit or the nerve to dissent from the views of those around them. After all, the Wilberforces, Kings, and Gandhis of this world are few and far between. The comfortable perch of posterity also allows us to take our own idealistic opinions more seriously than we should, when they are often as socially compulsory as the ones they oppose.