So far in this series, I have argued that college represents a bad “default” choice, for a combination of financial reasons and the inefficacy of the “education” it so often offers. I argued that the trades, as an alternative, offers a more satisfying life, and that the grounding in reality that makes it more satisfying also makes it a better foundation for the development of virtue.

But lastly, I want to argue that the trades are also a better foundation for one’s intellectual development.

Earlier today, the creator “Womp Tomp” put out a short reel arguing against “getting into philosophy.”

Pursue wisdom, for sure. Untangle the confusions of your age, for sure. Seek the truth, yeah. But don’t get ‘into’ philosophy, God forbid. As an academic discipline, philosophy is useless. There’s no point. You will be more confused, more arrogant [...] it’s arrogant puzzle-solving mostly invented problems.

I generally agree with his reframing and preference for ‘wisdom’ over ‘philosophy.’ But more broadly, I would argue that for understanding what is — the truer sense of “truth” — one is better off pursuing activities over speech. This is because language has a distorting nature of its own, subject to separation from knowledge, as well as gamification and corruption, which Womp Tomp is alluding to in the academic jargon of philosophy.

This idea is in contrast with the sort of default framing that students are presented with growing up: either you work with your head, or you work with your hands. This is not to say that work in academia, business, law, etc isn’t working with your head, but neither is working with your hands not working with your head. And not all of ‘working with your head’ is the same. My wife and I have a joke that every job considers itself to be “solving problems.” An engineer doesn’t design and build things— he ‘solves problems’; a lawyer doesn’t navigate the law on behalf of a client — he ‘solves problems’; and so on. This is, of course, definitionally true, and completely useless as a descriptor. I have come to call this sort of thinking ‘categorical retreat,’ wherein a person retreats up a level of taxonomical categorization to confound any precision. Think of someone saying “it’s not a cat, it’s a mammal.” This rapidly becomes “it’s not a mammal, it’s an animal,” etc. Really, “cat” was the most precise term, and when we talk about work, problems, and the intellect, we would benefit from more precision, and not less.

Much of what gets described as “intellectual” actually has very little to do with solving problems per se, and more to do with the development of a certain fluency in the language of intellectuals. Indeed, one can say that the role of the intellectual is, definitionally, articulation. With this understanding, we see that cognitive ability is much broader than what is often called “intellectual.” In the matter at hand then, such an intellectual could be tremendously valuable, were it not for the pre-fabricated vernacular of intellectuals in culture. We need to be able to use words, and even make them — not for the sake of fitting into a social club, but to describe and convey the world to others and to ourselves.

But when words have no external referent, they become like “white ants” (to borrow a metaphor from Mishima), devouring even themselves. Much of online blood-sports debate world has gone this direction, turning into an ever-spiraling fencing match between sequences of words, and gauged according to logical consistency, and not against any kind of correspondence with the “real” world.

This adversarial ability is a kind of intellectual development, but it is development in relation to a very particular and narrow context, and with a very limited real-world uses. Being able to find “self-refuting” weaknesses won’t help you fix your drywall, or stop a water-leak, or make your car run again.

I am not trying to argue against logic or rhetoric — they are both eminently useful and important skills. But we should pause to ponder when “intellectual” began to refer exclusively to dealing with language and other people, and ceased to refer to cognitive ability more broadly, since the latter certainly applies to fixing material problems, whether that’s a grand engineering feat like building a bridge, or troubleshooting a light that isn’t quite working right.

What the trades offer to the broader project of the development of cognitive ability is a larger foundation of experience with physical things. These things serve as fresh, outside referents that can give rise to meaningful, and less self-devouring uses of language.

(I had to consciously use the phrase “self-devouring,” rather than “autophagous” there; my own instinct is for “intellectual” language, but in reality, nothing is gained with such pretentious diction, and much is lost in meaning for both the reader and the writer).

I am not saying “the trades make you smarter,” “people outside the trades aren’t smart,” or anything of that sort. Intelligence, as we have already established, can express itself in all variety of different directions. A brilliant person who decides to become a master video-gamer might do some brilliant plays — that we perhaps wish he had applied his talents in a different domain does not negate the brilliance of his plays. And yet, there is a difference here too, because the constraints that check the supposed knowledge within the parameters that define the skill carry their own moral-intellectual value. Regardless of how “smart” a gamer might be, he will not be as much of an intellectual as someone else is, or who he himself might have been, had he invested that cognitive potential into a different skill. This has less to do with an aesthetic judgment on the skill itself (though this also matters), and more to do with the nature of knowledge-feedback inherent in different domains.

Consider chess, as an example. All of the pieces are set, known and visible. The entirety of the board is limited to 64 squares, and is likewise visible. Everything is, theoretically, calculable. The goal is pre-set. In this way, chess is, in many ways, excellent training grounds for logical thinking. But is it like “the real world”? By all of the features of the game itself we have described here, it is not. A brilliant chess player does not receive the kind of feedback that applies in the real world. It trains the intellect in a particular, limited way.

At a certain level, all particular domains of intellectual development will fail to generalize completely. But this general failure does not mean that each domain of intellectual development is equal. All are imperfect, but some generalize more broadly than others.

In traditional philosophy, it is taken almost for granted that the most general (and therefore, most abstract) domains generalize the best. This puts domains like history, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, economics, and philosophy at the pinnacle of generalizable knowledge. Fields like engineering, medicine, and law fall somewhere in the epistemic middle, and at the very bottom are the trades — construction, combat, and general labor jobs.

But if we set the specific domain of study aside — i.e., if we forget the application of medicine to the body, and think of it instead as it pertains to how we learn and think — we find something curious. In the most abstract domains, we are thinking, learning, and postulating primarily through words, making the grounds for our thinking — primarily — the minds of other people. So long as the “product” is generally categorized as books, sentences, or formulas, the nature of the domain is in the mind. More specifically, it is in other people’s mind.

On the other end of the domain-spectrum, labor, combat, and construction all operate primarily against physical reality, meaning a faulty assumption or belief will be checked by matter, rather than mind, and checked with some immediacy. The specialty fields like engineering and medicine fall somewhere in the middle.

For the purposes of intellectual development, what matters here is that mind is adaptive, reflexive, and varying from moment to moment, whereas the nature of matter is constant. Wood retains the same tensile strength from day to day; metal is hard and foam is soft.

I hope I do not need to elaborate at great length how no job is a pure distillation of one domain here or the other, or how there are social skills required in construction, or that CEOs have to commute in physical vehicles, etc. What we are describing is the formative place in which a person’s mind dwells as they formulate the habits by which they solidify their intellectual character (and by which they are paid). The fisherman who comes home and reads a little bit of literature 2 nights a week will gradually acquire some literary knowledge, but his primary intellectual habit will not be one of a literati, but of a fisherman. It is the development of these habits which concerns us.

Nor — I hope — do we need to dwell extensively on the empirical reality we face, of higher-intelligence people choosing one sort of job over another. If a standard bell-curve of students sort themselves, such that all the 130+ students go into academia, all the 100-130 go into technical fields, and the sub-100’s all go into labor and trades, we would understand that the fields themselves did not “made them smarter” (or dumber). This is not axiomatically the case, but it is observably, generally, the case.

The rigidity of matter as a foundation for intellectual development creates a pattern of thought which leans toward empiricism over consensus. It builds from experience to a degree of confidence in what one knows, and comfort in acknowledging what one does not know, because the immediacy — and sometimes pain — of physical checks punishes wrongness more memorably than the slow, gradual, and sometimes hidden checks on falsehood in mind and language.

None of this should be taken as a condemnation of the technical fields or even the “higher,” general domains of study (philosophy, math, history, etc). As Mishima still supported language, just with a foundation in sun and steel, so too can we support technical and ‘higher’ fields of study starting from an intellectual foundation in the mental habits of the trades and their relation to the physical world.

For me, the trades have been less formative, and more therapeutic, perhaps even intellectually rehabilitative (as I’m sure you can guess from my writing). Even here, there is great value, though I would certainly recommend starting with the trades and then eventually graduating to other fields, rather than starting with history and literature and philosophy, and only turning to the trades as remedial cognitive training.

The cost of such a trajectory will be, ironically, other people’s perception of your intellectual prowess. While many people pay lip service to the value of the trades (even cognitively), no one will appear to be better informed than someone who has spent their entire life in one field of study. But if we are pursuing real intellectual development for ourselves, guided by a desire to navigate the world accurately and to live well, rather than to persuade others of ours skill, then this should be considered to be a cost worth paying.

When we consider the experience of a good life, the virtues of the trades, the philosophy of work itself, and the foundation upon which we develop our very intellect, I think there is a strong case to be made for rejecting the “default” path, for picking up a wrench and learning a trade — electrical, plumbing, carpentry, whatever the case may be. Encountering the physical world, in the spirit of Robert Pirsig and Matthew Crawford, is not just an alternative, but a superior foundation from which to build one’s intellectual disposition toward the world, and a strong foundation to build a strong life, financially, romantically, and spiritually besides.

Call me 30 years late to the party, but there’s something special about the 1997 “Silver Springs” that I think demands more attention than a passing observation about spite and art.

It’s not that the song itself doesn’t have plenty of attention. As of the time of this writing, it’s sitting at 82 million views on YouTube. But why? Why is everyone coming to see this song, specifically (according to YouTube’s “most replayed” graph) the minute between 4:10 and 5:10 when Stevie Nicks seems to be yelling directly at Lindsay Buckingham?

Do we just like watching the emotional train-wreck?

There’s probably a lot of that going on in the audience. But there are also a lot of emotional train-wrecks that get little to no viewership.

What we are treated to in Fleetwood Mac’s performance is a performance. For all we know, the entire thing might have been staged, like a WWE grudge match. Their (very real) history might incline us to believe it is entirely real. But it could be fake. Even if it is real, we can be certain their expressions were exaggerated — “acted up” — for the benefit of the audience. But I don’t think learning such information would reduce the appeal of the story of the song, at least not any more than learning that Brad Pitt was not actually Achilles in Troy. The performance invites us to immerse ourselves in the story. And if this story feels true to the audience, because it reflects real experiences they have, then its factual truth for Nicks and Buckingham is irrelevant.

So what is this common, experiential truth?

If we read the comments and listen to the female commentariat, what everyone focuses on is Stevie Nick’s “power.” Her performance is repeatedly described (by women) as “savage,” as a “power move,” and commenters seem to love observing how she “forces” her ex (Buckingham) to sing back-up vocals on a song that is simultaneously venting at and cursing him.

But these commenters miss that the visual effect of the emotionality is facilitated by Buckingham’s own choice. Earlier in the song, it appears that Nicks is trying to catch Buckingham’s eyes, but he’s looking elsewhere: focused on his guitar, or the crowd, or his own thoughts. When he finally looks up and she holds his look, and begins singing at him… imagine if he had simply turned away.

Where would the effect have gone?

What would Nicks have done? What could she have done?

For all this talk of Nicks’ power — which she unquestionably possesses — she is nevertheless only able to fully express this power with the facilitation of the object of her apparent wrath, who is not only playing guitar and singing with her lines, but is voluntarily offering her his gaze. Contra the commentators, she could not, and did not, “make” him do that. He is handing her power.

The effect for the female audience is a simulated fantasy of taking a man who has not heard or understood you, and forcing him to hear you. The proof of his understanding is the mirroring of your words in his mouth — the harmonic duet — which he delivers not only with virtuoso guitar-work, but with eye-contact. This culminates in a beautiful crescendo of anger, love, resentment, and bittersweet meaningfulness that gives the woman everything her brain has been drawn to in relationships since she first discovered she cared about men and women like this.

And men have the power to give this to their woman…

I say this as a man who — in 10 years of marriage — has only recently discovered the significance of this dynamic and the power of this fantasy. My wife and I talk fairly well together, but there’s always more to learn. And contra the example of Buckingham and Nicks (and Nicks’ fan-girls) the ultimate “power move” in a relationship is not “dissing” your partner in a stylish manner: it’s making them feel good. The power to make your partner feel good is the power to improve your own life, to control things, order them and shape them in a way that leads to good things for yourself, as well as the intrinsic pleasure of seeing their joy… and avoiding the intense personal anguish of seeing the pain in someone else that you caused. This means that the power-move on display was not Nicks’ incredible singing. It was Buckingham not looking away — his gift to her.

In an honest relationship between assertive partners, there will be complaints. And complaints can feel like criticisms, even disses. They’re usually not, but they can feel like it. And in the face of criticisms, the natural tendency is to get defensive — to attack back, to change the subject, or to retreat, and look away.

When Buckingham holds her gaze while singing back, he is doing what every woman fantasizes about. So powerful and universal is this fantasy that women are making T-shirts about it. It’s like an emotional drug, with the addictive qualities to boot.

That Buckingham only delivers this after everything is over and past salvation really brings out the bittersweet notes of their story. But ideally, their story doesn’t have to be everyone else’s story.

Aristotle talked about catharsis — “purgation” — in tragedy as a way to get rid of bad or dyscivic emotions, namely pity and fear. We watch stories of tragic heroes, not so that we can emulate them, but so that we can learn from them and rise above their tragic fate. And the Silver Springs performance really does feel like the performance of a tragedy. I believe a part of the attraction of this performance is an attraction to this purgation — of seeing the anger, irreconcilability, and fatalism toward our partners, and feeling it so that we can let it go. The actors on the stage become vicarious doubles for ourselves, and by vicarious experience and purgation, the experience becomes therapeutic — at least, for the women.

But for men, there is a different kind of value, to be found not so much in the performance but in the collective female response to it. If one can observe that, can understand the dynamic and the desire, then it can allow men to channel their own inner Lindsay Buckingham, not only to endure the onslaught of female emotion, but to even participate in it, as if you were a harmony to your partners’ own feelings.

This is not an injunction to become a doormat and a victim, to give up your own assertiveness and spirit and to proverbially roll over. This too is an important — and essential — component of both the fantasy and the performance. We see this in Buckingham’s posture, which — though varied throughout the song — often takes on a grudging, almost aggressive lowered position, accompanied by something like a glare… and yet he sings on.

The woman does not want a limp fish, so to speak. Being understood by a slave or a machine is no better than not being understood at all. She wants a man with heart and spirit, with desires and ambitions of his own, with fight in him… but who can still come to face her, to face her complaints about him, directly, not without self-worth and even disagreement, but with the power to set that aside, for a moment, and to mirror the emotions of his woman like still water.

There is that Nietzsche line about needing to be a sea if one is to receive polluted water without becoming impure. No man can, in fact, be a sea. But we can strive to at least be a kind of silver spring, which can in moments be calm, and which can return to placid stillness after storms.

For married men, or men seeking marriage — this should be an object of meditation. It won’t necessarily make everything calm, but understanding this fantasy might help in maintaining fortitude in the face of the emotions of your woman. The fantasy reminds us that a woman’s criticisms are usually less specific criticisms, and more often a general expression of not feeling heard or seen. To set aside your own defensiveness (for a moment) and face her, directly, while engaging with her harmoniously — even if there is discordance in the harmony — is an art that may save many relationships before they become tragedies like the one played out on stage for us by Fleetwood Mac.

I say this not as a master, but as a 10-year student of this art of relationship. There is no solution for all marriages, no cure-all to heartbreak, distrust, fear, hatred, and contempt. But I know that coming to understand the desires of the opposite sex, the ability to think as they do (without adopting it yourself), is essential. And I know that really looking and trying to understand their fantasies is a path toward this understanding. We don’t all need to pick up the guitar or the microphone (by all appearances, it may be better that we don’t), but we can and should learn from those who do, especially when their stories strike a chord in the audience and draw out a consensus of general experience.

We would be foolish to ignore such a thing.

I don’t mean to generalize. This is not about finding some formula for beauty, some tried-and-true guide for creators to emulate and imitate. In fact, what we’re looking at here might be especially desirable to avoid, if we remember these as trade-offs.

And yet…

I had the pleasure of introducing my sister and her husband to Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 live performance of “Silver Spring” recently. The fun part, for them, was enjoying the amusing juxtaposition of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, staring each other down with two decades of unrequited love and resentment, singing not so much to, but at each other… and then the camera cuts to Mick Fleetwood on the drums, seemingly oblivious to the flying daggers 10 feet away, and just having a blast.

But that humorous contrast aside, the song — and that very particular performance of the song — is so incredibly powerful and moving because of Buckingham and Nicks, not especially because of Fleetwood (as important as he is). There is a tremendous amount of unresolved spite that was channeled into the writing of the song in 1979, and it appears to have only grown and fermented with age, until it all seemed to burst out, in one moment, expressing itself and — perhaps, in finding that release — purging some of itself. It was finally seen.

Some argue that "the 1997 performance of “Silver Spring” is a candidate for best live performance ever, but usually higher on the list is the 2004 Rock Hall induction performance of the Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It is widely considered to be one of the most famous and powerful guitar solos ever performed, but as with “Silver Spring,” there is a background behind Prince’s guitar work. That background is that earlier the previous year, Rolling Stone had published a list of the greatest guitarists of all time — 100 names, and completely omitted Prince (for reference, Rolling Stone’s updated list (2023) includes a list of 250 guitarists and places Prince at slot 14).

Prince had been brought in to play a solo, as part of a joint performance to honor George Harrison, alongside Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Steve Winwood. But because the executives from the Rolling Stone happened to be sitting in the front row, Prince decided to hold nothing back. If you haven’t seen it, you really ought to. It was a tour-de-force of musical excellence, and at the same time, an expression of deep spite, which was really driven home at the end of the performance when Prince simply threw up his guitar and walked, as if he had a taxi to catch, or somewhere more important to be.

Some people have criticized Prince for “making it about himself,” when the performance was supposed to be about Harrison. But in his egoistic spite, Prince contributed something of his own to Rock and Roll history. One might say that spite contributed something.

Prince and Fleetwood Mac feel like particularly present personal examples of this, for me, though they are by no means the only ones. (Eminem’s entire discography might qualify). Indeed, the phenomenon seems to extend beyond music, into basically any domain of creative culture where a “chip on the shoulder” might push someone to extreme levels of excellence.

The cost, of course, is severe.

I was once at a pagan gathering in the woods in rural Oregon, and a Green Beret told me that I didn’t have it — “it” being the magical quality that distinguishes those that make it through special forces selection, and those that don’t. It was perhaps the most hurtful thing I’d heard in my life, to that point, so I asked further, trying to dial in what “it” was. Eventually, the Green Beret sort of arrived at the conclusion that “it” was, essentially, a chip on your shoulder. They all had something to prove — a dad that hadn’t loved them, friends who’d betrayed them, or a girl… some perceived inadequacy they were trying to “prove wrong.” This feeling ultimately isn’t resolved by their accomplishments in the military, but it does create some of the finest soldiers in human history.

I don’t think Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham improved things for themselves, in channeling their mutual resentment into song. That bittersweet wonderings about what could have been had they turned down Mick Fleetwood’s invitation in 1973, if they had stayed together as a duo, gotten normal jobs, and made things work… that could have been a choice.

Instead, they made beautiful art and culture.

I’m not saying that all spite is bad, or that all art comes from spite, or any generalities of that kind. But I am saying that in some interesting instances, spite not only creates art, but seems to create uniquely beautiful and powerful art. And that such origins of beauty are worth pondering and appreciating — both to deepen our understanding of what we’re looking at, in seeing the tension that is always at work in real beauty, and also to better understand art, ourselves, and perhaps something broader about life, if art can reveal such things to us.

I grew up listening to debates — Christopher Hitchens, William Lane Craig, Douglas Murray, Tariq Ramadan — and there are few things I enjoy more than listening to a good debate (debating myself would be among them).

As of the present moment, I’m about an hour into the Charlie Kirk debate between Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson. And it is a struggle for me to stay interested in this.

It seems that every election cycle, we complain about the quality of our political debates. The performative talking points and predictable deflections can be appreciated as a kind of art in their own right, but not the same art of debate that we traditionally elevate as good intellectual hygiene. In the world of ‘internet blood sports’, similar patterns emerge, with crass personal attacks, ostentatious condescension, catty psychologizing, or simply playing dumb (“I don’t understand...”; “I don’t see your argument...”) taking the place of the more politically correct rhetorical tactics.

As a matter of behavior, it should strike us as strange that we all seem to agree in deploring these things, but continue to watch them with such high regard, especially when superior alternatives exist. Just a few months ago, Alex O’Connor debated William Lane Craig in what I thought might have been the best debate I’ve seen in years. At the time of this writing, the two videos showing the debate hold a combined viewer count of about 668,000 views -- not bad, for such a high-quality discussion, over two months. By contrast, within 24 hours, the Wilson-Owens debate has amassed 3.8 million views. The attention is probably higher if we include the reaction-videos which will be coming (some are already out).

My prediction is that the clipped reaction videos from Candace, Andrew, and Jay Dyer will amass more views than the Craig-O’Connor debate.

This is not me being cynical, because I’m not trying to save everyone. But there’s definitely a psychological current that’s pulling the public in a particular intellectual direction, and contra the current-metaphor, that path leads into the cognitive shallows. We don’t have to try to save the world, but if we are thoughtful in our own choices, we can steer towards a better route.

I was talking with my wife about this and she said it reminded her of the distinction I had often talked about between traditional chess and “blitz” or “bullet” chess. Historically, chess games would play out over hours, sometimes days, as players calculated out lines and possibilities. But as chess came online, and became app-ified, shorter time limits became more fun and exciting, with people playing with 10-minute controls, 5-minute controls, or sometimes even 1-minute controls. Traps, gambits, memorized opening lines, and pure audacity is the path to victory in these kinds of games. But with similar ratings, a blitz or bullet player will get crushed, playing against an experienced player with FIDE time controls (usually 90 minutes).

They just haven’t worked those muscles.

The attraction of faster chess is three-fold. First, it’s simply more convenient. 90 minutes (per side, so up to 3 hours) is a pretty big commitment. But a bullet or blitz game is easier to sneak in on lunch break, while waiting for food, even on the toilet. More reps is better, right?

Second, it’s just fun. When I was a kid, I had no patience for Karpov or Petrosian; give me Mikhail Tal every day. The sloppiness of faster time controls lends itself to dubious gambits and questionable sacrifices, and to an overall style of play that makes chess feel more dynamic. Ironically, what ultimately wins in this style is memorized lines that actually make chess less exciting, the more one practices, but nevermind.

Third, it looks impressive to people who don’t understand what they’re watching. To someone who doesn’t understand chess, players rapidly moving their pieces appear to be far more skillful and intelligent than someone staring blankly at the board for 20 minutes before pushing a pawn forward one square. In reality, the latter case has probably done an extraordinary feat of mental calculation, exploring 4-5 possible moves, 10-12 moves down a sequence, trying to consider every counter their opponent might make, and what an appropriate response would be. Perhaps he considered one brilliant-looking sacrifice, but realized that 7 moves later, his opponent would have a way out, and that it wouldn’t work... and in the end, the simple pawn push was, in fact, his best move, as unexciting as it looks.

All of these incentives are at work in how we watch debates, and by extension, how we program ourselves to debate. IBS debates -- however irritating they might be -- look impressive. Watching Mister Metokur rhetorically annihilate someone feels similar to how Romans must have felt, watching a tiger devour someone in the arena. And the speed is fun. It’s fast-paced, it’s messy, it’s brutal at times, and people can make slip-ups that “ruin their career forever.” And its all packaged by marketing teams into convenient, short-form clips, so you can watch the precise (decontextualized) moment when party A “owns” party B.

(Invariably, both sides will farm out similar short-form clips, purporting to show how each “owned” the other).

For entertainment purposes, perhaps this style of intellectual gladiatorial combat is your thing. I’m not here to rag on anyone’s hobbies, but I am here to point out that as with chess, programming yourself with repetitious exposure to this variety of debate is not making you smarter. The other direction is actually closer to the truth.

Just the other day, I had this dynamic play out in a Discord debate with some Orthodox Christians defending the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG). I was advancing my own Ontological Argument Against God, and the following exchange took place (as a part of a much, much longer debate):

CB Robertson: When you say “things that are universalized between minds,” what do you mean? That a universal is created by common experience? Or some universal is presupposed in order for the possibility of commonality to exist? Or something else?

[ICON]: The latter. You listed all these qualities that happen in experience. But then other people have those same experiences. So it’s gone from something in your own subjective experience to something everyone shares, a universal set of facts and qualities. So how do you justify those universals?

CB Robertson: Okay. So suppose in a population of 100 people, 70 have a given experience (A), and 10 have the opposite (B), and 20 experience neither (C). (A) would be general, but not universal, in the sense we are describing, correct?

[ICON]: A would be general. Everyone experiences the qualities you laid out as apart of God in your opening.

CB Robertson: We’re getting there. Let me change it slightly — suppose 99 of the 100 experienced (A), but 1 experienced (B). Is (A) now universal, or is it still just general? I don’t mean to sound tedious, it’s just that since we’re talking about metaphysics, universals, and absolutes, the precise meaning of “universal” is really important.

(I haven’t forgotten about justification; this just has to come first)

[ICON]: Universal, all times, all circumstances. A is still general.

CB Robertson: Okay perfect. Now, one final iteration: of the 100, all 100 experience (A), but some of them imagine a possibility of, or have heard rumors about, others in some other place not experiencing (A), or that perhaps, at some other time, things might have been different... Given this, can we know, with certainty, based upon our experience, that (A) is, in fact, universal in the sense we were describing earlier? Or is it only universal in the colloquial sense (which is to say, general)?

[ICON]: A generality would be contingent on universal

CB Robertson: I understand that’s your position, but we’re still trying to establish the meaning of “universal” here. To rephrase the last scenario a bit more clearly: is a universal the sort of thing that experience could, even in theory, get you to?

Now, not to congratulate myself (though I think I outperformed the two primary interlocutors pretty handily, I also made a few mistakes), but the lack of precision in terminology -- in the context of an argument that hinges upon some important key terms -- is, I think, a symptom of sequence-thinking argumentation born out of the IBS world. Jay Dyer is one of the most famous IBS debaters, and this happened to be on his server -- these were, so to speak, his students. And when pushed, universals were both necessary for the possibility of experience, but also known through experience... but also known prior to experience (we actually didn’t get to a priori reasoning in the debate, strangely). In other words, they were simply assumed as a part of a sequence.

Later on, similar conflations between truth, logic, coherence, and correspondence got the second primary interlocutor all tangled up:

[JOSH]: you told me your interpretation of your claim “it is sunny outside”

and taking your interpretation, i showed how it was a logic claim

even if you interpreted it differently, i could still prove it was a logic claim

CB Robertson: Calling it a logic claim was your interpretation, not the reality of my language

[JOSH]: you yourself admitted it was a logic claim

CB Robertson: You’ve conflated your interpretation of all language with logic, axiomatically, with my intentions and meaning

[JOSH]: ^ [referencing previous comment]

CB Robertson: No I didn’t. Go back and reread

[JOSH]: ^ [referencing previous comment]

CB Robertson: I agreed after you’d clarified that truth meant correspondence. But you are now talking about coherence

That’s why I asked what you meant by true (I’m not trying to be pedantic)

[JOSH]: ok if truth means correspondence then do you agree that all claims are logical claims?

CB Robertson: No

Why would that change things?

[JOSH]: you literally just said you agreed after i clarified truth meant correspondence

CB Robertson: I agree that truth is correspondence, but some statements can be false, and logic, though a very useful tool, is not universal in describing all language

And while truth may be correspondence, logic seems to still be a coherence idea, as we’re talking about it

Now clarifying these terms (as you can probably tell -- and thank you for making it this far) can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, especially when dealing with someone who’s a little bit adversarial and trained to pursue their sequence on you to “win.” It takes a certain disposition of openness, patience, and curiosity to take the time to debate properly, just as it does to play chess properly.

Nietzsche famously said that philology was the art of reading slowly. I’ve argued that philosophy is the art of thinking slowly, and this principle holds as true in debate as it does anywhere else.

Presently, our patience is being tantalized by yet another temptation in the form of AI. While AI certainly can be a useful tool (I do, cautiously, encourage people to use it), it is also a dangerous tool, and cannot be relied upon as a crutch, or it will replace your leg.

A few months ago, I was trying to improve my chess game, and asked ChatGPT to come up with an improvement program for me. Ironically (but not incorrectly), it told me to get offline more, to slow down (only 15-min+ game, no bullet or blitz), and to record and re-play every game, on a physical board, without computer assistance in post-game analysis. In the same way, debating to improve one’s thinking requires slowing down, and is probably best done in person, with real friends, and probably without a camera recording the discussion.

Now, if anyone questions the value of debate, and thinks they are best avoided, allow me to share the debate I had with my wife last year on the subject:

Just as physical training improves the body, mental training improves the mind. But not all physical training improves you in the same way, or with the same risk profile; some of it will ruin your lower back, or your shoulders, and some mental training might injure you more than it helps. IBS debating, like political debating, I think generally holds more danger than benefit, but that doesn’t mean that debate itself is the problem.

It just means we need to direct ourselves less to Candace and Wilson, and more to O’Connor and Craig, in choosing what sort of mind we would like to develop for ourselves.

In cases like this, the old Scott Adams “really?” test should really be all we need.

“95.1% of men admit to using force to sleep with women.”

“Really?”

No. Obviously not.

But for fun, let's dive into this study called “Isolate, Inebriate, Intimidate” (O’Sullivan et all, 2026) that has been making the rounds as justification for the idea that all men are bad. The study basically argued that men are less guarded and more forthright in their actual behaviors when they get to respond anonymously, and so this obscenely high rate of forced sex — which is a synonym in colloquial English for “rape” — is more trustworthy than previous studies.

But off the bat, we see a bias in the intention and justification behind sample selection:

A sample of 3,011 self-identified men ages 18 to 34 (Mage = 27.31) was recruited in the Spring of 2023 using an online panel (Qualtrics Research Suite) that invited all men who met criteria into the study. The study was described as exploring positive and negative interactions between men and women in sexual situations. The consent form indicated that the survey was men’s opportunity “to provide their side of the story given that we have heard so much from women” about male–female sexual interactions, repeatedly assuring them of their guaranteed anonymity.

In other words, the sample size was aiming for men who had a “their side of the story” to tell. The design and focus fits the purpose of the study:

This research was designed to focus on men who admit to having intentionally and knowingly sexually aggressed against a woman who they knew did not want sex nor consented to it, including strategies to overcome her reluctance, circumstances, motivations, and positive and negative outcomes.

It can be argued that such a focus is the relevant part of the male population, because we don't need to study the guys whose behavior we don't disagree with. But the price of such a focus is the loss of any meaningful statement we can male about percentages in the totality of the male population, which is the stated conclusion of this study. The selecting criteria required that men have had sex with a woman within the past two years (excluding all men who had not, and who, therefore, had also not forced sex — about 30% of American men in this age range have never had sex). According to the study, the age range was chosen specifically because “[t]hese ages correspond to the age group with the highest rates of aggression.” Right from the design of the survey, we see research guided by a desire to prove a point, rather than to investigate a question.

Does it prove its point? This depends largely upon what qualifies as “force.”

The study lists 36 “strategies” which qualify as force or sexual aggression. These strategies include (among other things): asking her to stop pretending not to, using your money or status to persuade her, being persistent, and “[telling] her what she wanted to hear.” Evidently if the woman wants even a little bit of tension, trying to push a man to chase her for the thrill of it, then that's a “force strategy” by the man... and if the guy complains about it, that's also a force strategy.

The list also includes horrific things like using roofies, social threats, or physical threats to force sex, but the disparity in self-reporting is exactly what you'd expect. Whereas 40.6% of men reported “saying what she wanted to hear” “numerous” times, and 36.6% self-reported persistence as a “strategy” they had repeatedly employed, only 5.4% admitted to using drugs like GHB, and only 2.6% admitted to threatening to hurt. For reference, the generally accepted baseline for psychopathy in the general population is about 4%. A 95.1% rate of using strategies to force sex (which attempts to perfectly invert the usual psychopath/non-psychopath numbers) can only survive by grouping totally normal sexual behaviors in with genuinely violent ones as if they were similar. This inversion is accomplished by treating consent as something which can never be legitimately granted if it has been initially denied, since most of these “strategies” are not actually about force, but about attempts to attain consent. And in the judgment of consent, no involved women were questioned about their experience. If trying to obtain consent is “bypassing” it and the experience of the woman doesn't matter, then consent no longer represents permission of the individual, and becomes instead a kind of politicized checkpoint run by academic moral police.

Any worries that I might be straw-manning their methodology seems to be undermined by their conclusion, where they congratulate themselves and directly state:

Our reassurances of anonymity likely proved essential as 95% of the 2,689 men reported at least one effort to force such a woman into sex that they knew she did not want. In approximately two-thirds of those occasions, the men were successful in forcing sex. This study indicates that efforts to force women into sex are common and in fact now far better correspond to the high rates of forced sex that women report experiencing at the hands of men.

They literally think they just proved that 2/3 of men are rapists.

As a friend pointed out recently, if the majority of people are doing something, it is, almost by definition, not a crime. The real crime is actually in attempting to criminalize the normal. Such attempts always have something of a totalitarian flavor to them.

The real, empirical question would be to interview the women in each case, and ask — in the face of one of these “strategies” — if they felt that they had been violated in some way, at the time (and not as some kind of afterthought later) and to differentiate the strategies from each other. Once “strategies” like being persistent and being nice to a woman (one form of “saying what she wants to hear”) are separated out from drugging, physically forcing, or threatening with a knife, we might be closer to a meaningful number. By the self-reporting numbers of the research here, it looks a lot closer to less than 5% actual rape, and less than 15% morally questionable behavior (though even these are estimates, because we don't know what sort of precise incidents and contexts get grouped into these subcategories).

All of this is to say, if a statistic looks too extreme to be real... it's probably fake.

The following is the (very) rough draft of a dialogue I have begun, which may tentatively be called “The King.” This is part 1 of what is likely to be 8-10 chapters, which I might continue to publish here, sporadically as I finish the drafts.

Read more

In Part 1 of this series, I outlined some general criticisms of college as a default path. In Part 2, I compared different “philosophies of work,” contrasting the “default” path with the philosophies of Andrew Tate, Tim Ferriss, and Mike Rowe, and giving my reasons why I thought Rowe’s philosophy was superior. Very briefly, this superiority comes from grounding the experience of power and the development of one’s virtues in physical reality, rather than in social status or feelings of freedom.

But what are those virtues?

When we talk about virtues, we are essentially talking about the kind of person you become. The reader will have to forgive me for not enumerating the precise virtues with any real specificity (which would take a whole book), but in gesturing broadly towards different kinds of people — these kinds being discernable by nature of the differences in their patterns of qualities (virtues).

The benefits of Andrew Tate’s status philosophy — in its highest form — include Bugattis, hot women, wealth, fame, and power. The virtues one develops are all the sales, business, and networking skills which are necessary for those goals. The virtues necessary for the goal are the person you become.

Everyone essentially desires what Andrew Tate has, but very few people want to be what Andrew Tate is.

With Tim Ferriss, we instead contemplate a wrinkled and thoroughly marked bucket list, with trips around the world, competitions, dancing, surfing, skydiving, and any other sort of adventure we might imagine. The virtues developed toward these ends revolve around the efficiency and economy — both in work and in planning one’s adventures.

Probably a greater number of people want to emulate Ferriss than Tate (and not only because Ferriss is actually worth more than Tate). But I argue that from the perspective of who we become, even Ferriss’ philosophy is inferior to Rowe’s.

The Mike Rowe philosophy does not offer anything so grandiose. Instead, we get blood, sweat, and dirt. No foreman or general contractor I’ve ever met drove even a Mercedes, let alone a Bugatti.

But when we return again to this question of character — of “who we become” by the habituation of our daily activity — there is something eminently desirable about the trades that is lacking in the working pursuit of status or freedom.

I think this desirability has three distinct but interrelated components, based on our relationships with your self, with others, and with the world.

The World

As I mentioned in Part 2, there is something particularly healthy about a connection with the real world (i.e., physical reality), rather than in dealing with screens, projections, numbers, and the mercurial opinions of other people all day. The virtues in these other domains are unquestionably meaningful and powerful, but they often lend themselves to feelings of unreality and (related) self-doubt.

Working with physical objects — whether its electrical systems, plumbing, wood, stone, cars, or malfunctioning washing machines — one also develops a sense of the powers of one’s own abilities, not by the word of others, or by consensus, but by the effect of one’s hands on the world. This is an effect Matthew Crawford writes about in Shop Class as Soulcraft, where he discusses the development of manual competence in general (and fixing things in particular) as a path to understanding reality itself… but through this connection, to a kind of pleasure in one’s own power in this world. The pleasure in this power is in its independence from other people’s validation. Either the machine works, or it doesn’t. The building stands or it falls. The work “speaks for itself,” in a way.

Naturally, there are still hierarchies, and there is meaningful feedback from other people, even in the trades (particularly in matters of speed and pricing). But when we look at the visceral experience of our day-to-day actions, there is a difference in the object of the activity of constructing a doorway, or setting a toilet, versus constructing an excel report, or writing an opinion paper. The former are still for other people, but they exist independently, and stand as testaments to their own quality (or shortcomings) according to physical characteristics that one can master, in such a way that mastery feels like natural power, rather than something social. The excel report or opinion paper (like this substack) essentially exist only in the minds of other people. Again, there is real power here, but the reflexivity of people gives this social power a feeling of impermanence and uncertainty, relative to the power over physical matter.

The virtues of mastery in this domain bring with them the intrinsic pleasures of this asocial stability. But the non-social source does not mean that the virtues themselves are not social; they are primarily experienced as a feeling of “usefulness.”

Others

This usefulness is something of value to others, in material ways that often defy the ways we would most wish to provide value to others. We all want to be valued for our wisdom and profound thoughts. More often, people don’t care about our opinions on politics or religion — they just want their dishwasher working again.

One of the greatest moments of sanity I ever experienced was immediately after publishing my first book in 2017. It felt like such an extraordinary accomplishment, hitting the “publish” button on KDP late in the evening. The next morning, I had to get up and go to work again, and I distinctly remember being in a crawlspace, collecting decaying rat carcasses (I was an exterminator at the time), and realizing that I had just published a book — this monumental goal I had been working on for over a year — and that nothing had changed. Here I was, still, filthy on my stomach in a cold crawlspace, collecting rats in a plastic bag.

And in that moment, I felt this incredible — almost absurd — sense of perspective. In this perspective I saw a kind of cosmic joke, where the punchline was the absence of any permanent satisfaction in any kind of achievement, and yet the pursuit of achievement keeps us all driving forward, and that this pursuit is still good. These are words I am ascribing post hoc to an experience I had 9 years ago — not an idea, but a feeling, of amusement, perspective, and shrugging resolve to keep going because what else is there to do? Yes, I was very proud of my book, but at that moment, more people wanted me to clean up their rodent problems.

People’s desires are often abstract and social, but their urgent problems are more often material, and it is in our material skills that we become most useful to people when they are in greatest need. Whether it’s the water leaking or the lights going out, avoiding physical catastrophe is almost always more important than identifying and opinion on cultural, political, or “spiritual” matters. (Here, medical emergencies would also qualify, though we are not classifying doctors as being in “the trades”).

Not only do the skills associated with the trades make us more useful to others — by extension they often also make us more attractive.

The precise technical skills about construction and maintenance that come with a given trade are accompanied by more general qualities that are accessories or prerequisites to the job, which develop with experience in one’s craft. These qualities include:

• a certain mechanical sense in how things work together

• skill with your hands in holding, gripping, carrying, and manipulating things

• a general physicality in relation to the world

All of these are attractive to women and enviable to men, in a way that is direct, and not merely instrumental (i.e., “useful”). The reason why it is enviable and attractive may be grounded in its utility, but is experienced apart from its usefulness. I have worked for ultra-wealthy customers who seemed to want nothing more than to come down — to condescend — and be “one of the guys” with the laborers. This was, no doubt, a transient amphibious desire; the wealthy, of course, wish to stay wealthy, and the desire to momentarily fit in among “the guys” is paralleled by a desire among the laborers to mingle with the ultra-wealthy. But it is strange that there should be any kind of symmetry at all — that the rich should ever wish to emulate and demonstrate their own, manual virtues among the manual laborers, digging trenches and pulling wire. But such is often the case. Just as the laborers envy the wealth of the rich, so too do the rich often emulate the competence and virtues of the laborer, and the often underappreciated social respect granted to laborers.

We can know that this respect is not merely a matter of a low, unthreatening social status, because when a wealthy man is also manually competent (as with a man like Adam Carolla, a former carpenter), he gets the same kind of respect.

The Self

Our relationship with our self and with others concerns subjective experience of these virtues (either our own or somebody else’s). But not all of the value of virtue is grounded merely in how we experience it. A well made car functions well, and is “virtuous” (or “excellent”) in this regard, regardless of how the car itself feels about it. In the same way, we can be excellent in a manner that isn’t justified by our subjective experience, but by our own design and place in the world.

It can be easy to fall into Christian language when we talk about “design” or “ends” (telos), but one need not make any grand or supernatural assumptions to observe certain patterns in what humans are, what we are “designed” to do (perhaps by evolution), and a sort of “proper orientation” to others and to the world that is conducive to our functioning “as designed.” How can we act in a manner so as to become excellent human beings? What does it mean to be an excellent human being? Does an excellent human being always act based upon his own subjective feelings? Regardless of our opinions on the first two questions, only the Epicureans and Buddhists give semi-plausible answers in the affirmative to the third. But in fleeing from suffering — as the Epicureans and Buddhists do — they commit their own versions of the errors of Tate and Ferriss in mistaking the measure of a thing for the thing itself.

As Plato argued 2,300 years ago, status (or “honor”) is not itself virtue, but a sort of imitation or placeholder for virtue. When all is well, it represents virtue. So too, we might say, does money serve as a stand-in for honor — “credit.” And the freedom sought by Ferriss — perhaps loosely represented by Plato’s democratic man — sees his freedom as representing the power of money, even in the absence of money.

In the same way, pain and pleasure are not intrinsic evils or goods, but signals to the body about something else. The pain of a broken leg is your body telling you that something is wrong. Indeed, the absence of the pain, in the presence of the injury, would be a greater evil still.

I do not mean here to simply recite Plato’s Republic in brief, but to point to a simple connection between Mike Rowe’s philosophy of work and something like a teleology of man, and a foundation for virtue in this teleology. Tate, Ferriss, Epicurus, and Buddha all sought to escape the cave, or escape the Matrix. But by escaping the need to escape, by “going back down” into the dirty work of the cave, we embrace the totality of our existence and become at home in the world again, because the constraining confines of the cave, or the matrix, or pain, are — ultimately — not somewhere out there, in the world, but in our own minds. The desire to escape the Matrix is a desire to escape ourselves.

But ironically — as Matthew Crawford points out — the way to reach The World Beyond Your Head is not by pursuing a digital and frictionless ideal of our own desired state of existence, but by orienting ourselves toward material problems at hand, even if they are “dirty jobs.” This is a kind of duty-based ethics, not of Kant’s variety, but more akin to what we see in the Bhagavad Gita. We find commitments worth making, which bring about duties; and in the fulfillment of our duties, we create our selves — in precisely the moment that we reach past ourselves. And in this act of selfless self-creation, we become virtuous in a manner that transcends our feelings about things.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the teleological path of duty and virtue just so happens to be a path toward better personal and interpersonal subjective experience as well. These subjective experiences are signals, after all — but the signal is not the goal. To mistake the signal for the goal is to begin to see the underlying principle as a thing to be escaped from — as a “matrix” or a “cave.”

The trades serve as a therapeutic path and lifestyle, back into the cave, and into the virtues of reality.

Stay tuned for part 4.

After making a negative case for virtue ethics — as well as a longer, positive case for virtue ethics in relation to AI — I was recently asked if I could give a broader overview of the major theories of moral philosophy. Here, I will try to give a quick overview of what I consider to be the 5 major schools of moral thought — what they are, who they came from, their strengths, their weaknesses, and sort of where they sit in contemporary moral philosophy.

Let us dive in, in rough chronological order.

Divine Command Theory

Divine Command theory (henceforth “D.C.T.”) is the oldest moral theory. Preceding writing itself — let alone philosophy — D.C.T. does not have an originating thinker, although it has a number of prominent defenders against alternative theories, the most powerful probably being the French Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

D.C.T. argues that morality comes from God, or the Gods. Any moral ideas that come from humans are subject to the corruption of human desires, when they are not those very desires themselves disguised in moralizing language. If morality exists at all, it must come from some source above humanity. This source is divinity — the gods, or God.

Strengths

D.C.T. provides both moral clarity and social unity, especially when a society is united in religious belief. There are also psychological benefits to religious belief that are not easily separated from the moral theory that is contingent upon this supernatural belief.

Weaknesses

D.C.T. is subject to the Euthyphro problem, which asks “what’s moral when different Gods want different things?” Even if one supposes there to be only one God, the question still — in principle — separates morality from the will of God. There are also philosophical challenges to the existence of God.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics (V.E.) was advanced in a sort of early form by Plato, but distilled and is generally considered to be the creation of Aristotle, especially in his Nichomachean Ethics.

V.E. holds that moral action can’t be determined by some system, but good moral decisions are made by excellent men. “Virtue,” here, is just a synonym for excellence. So one pursues excellence, and in doing so develops character. Character means you have a large body of experience with things, and have made a habit out of good and excellent decision-making. From this combination of experience and habit, you will be well-positioned to make good decisions in general, and good moral decisions in particular.

Strengths

V.E. is arguably the most individually actionable of the theories. It also escapes all of the tricky conundrums that plague the systematic schools of morality, like D.C.T., Deontology, and Utilitarianism.

Weaknesses

Insofar as morality is both social in nature and is also arbitrated socially, V.E. is very difficult to use as a justification for any decision. For similar reasons, VE not only doesn’t provide much in the way of moral clarity, but often doesn’t even really provide moral answers to specific questions.

Deontology

Deontology (sometimes called “transcendentalism”) comes from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that in order for morality to be itself, it cannot have anything to do with consequences. Acts are either good in themselves or bad in themselves. The word deontology describes “duties,” and deontology argues that morality really concerns duties to particular kinds of behavior, in more or less absolute terms. According to Kant, for example, it is never permissible to lie, because the act of lying is wrong.

Strengths

“Moral clarity” might be an understatement here. Socially speaking, deontology is also phenomenal at winning debates.

Weaknesses

Deontology is completely impractical, and functionally speaking nobody actually lives this way. Philosophically, it also falls prey to a variety of different conundrums, pointing out cases where following deontological principles violate clear moral intuitions (the “Nazis at the door” thought experiment, for example, where lying to save a friend seems moral).

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism originally comes from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, but was refined by John Stuart Mill — who is often credited as its “creator.” Utilitarianism is essentially the opposite of deontology, holding that morality concerns consequences. Specifically, utilitarians care about positive utility (pleasure) and negative utility (pain). What creates more pleasure for the most people (or conscious creatures), or, perhaps more importantly, what reduces suffering for the most people, is what is most moral.

Strengths

Not only is utilitarianism fundamentally simple and clear, but offers the tantalizing promise of something quantifiable. For this reason, utilitarianism lends itself nicely to systems of all kinds, and also to more naturally to accountability.

Weaknesses.

Aside from the difficulty in achieving the promised quantifiability, utilitarianism suffers from a similar slough of conundrums pitting utilitarian logic against moral intuitions — the infamous “trolley problem” being one of the most popular ones. There is also a more fundamental problem in associating morality with pain and pleasure if one views these as signals, rather than merely as states of being with no instrumental meaning — such an interpretation of pain or pleasure would point to purpose for which “utility” is instrumental, and therefore utility could not be the basis of morality.

Moral Nihilism

Moral Nihilism (M.N.) can largely credited to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. MH is not the same as nihilism or cynicism; it does not reject values, but specifically rejects moral values as conflicting with — or, at least, having nothing to do with — what one might call “real” values.

In some formulations (Nietzsche’s) M.N. argues that what we call “morality” actually begins as a response to success, health, and happiness, making morality not just misguided, but closer to something like evil. In other formulations, morality is held to be simply incoherent (J.L. Mackie).

Strengths

M.N. is a philosophically simple and strong position (building its own strength upon the weaknesses of the other moral systems).

Weaknesses

Aside from M.N. not being especially actionable, it has a very difficult time explaining the ubiquity of certain moral intuitions.

The purpose of quickly mapping out these schools of moral thought is in identifying which frame someone is arguing when they present an argument that such-and-such is “morally wrong.” Such an argument can theoretically be made purely on the basis of moral intuition alone (as in, that seems wrong), but those same moral intuitions also usually grant that sometimes, a correct moral action in context is sometimes counter-intuitive, especially to an outside viewer who does not have all of the relevant information (as Yaweh argues at some length in Job 38-42).

But if two interlocuters are in agreement on values and on general moral frame, it can turn moral debates from a kind of social scolding contest into something more productive in the improvement of our lives or conditions, which was what morality (perhaps) used to be about.

It seems that one of the persistent criticisms of virtue ethics as a moral system is that it doesn’t give clear, concrete answers to particular moral questions.

Is abortion permissible? How about capital punishment?

Divine command theory gives an answer.

Deontology gives an answer.

Utilitarianism gives an answer.

What that answer is matters less than the feeling of clarity in there being an answer. We will of course observe that advocates of each of these systems still disagree with each other, as in, one Divine Command theorist will say capital punishment is permissible, while another disagrees. But both agree that there is an answer, and that if only we look hard enough at the framework and the facts, we can find the answer.

Virtue ethics, by contrast, does not promise answers — at least, not in itself. Whereas Divine command appeals to the gods, Utilitarianism to pleasure, and Deontology to the necessary logic of morality itself, Virtue ethics just kind of vaguely gestures toward the “virtuous man” as the arbiter. There is an assumption that there are really no “rules” that don’t come with exceptions, and it takes virtue (which here just means ‘excellence’ in disposition and knowledge) to see and follow the best course of action, in any given case. It’s a beautiful and functional way to live, but a somewhat unsatisfying framework to appeal to in discreet cases.

But perhaps this too is a strength?

I have noticed in recent years that one can think of “morality” in essentially two different modes: (1) as a framework for living and choosing how to act, and (2) as a framework for condemning other people. and I discussed this a little bit when we were talking about moral reasoning a few weeks ago. Much of what interests people in “morality” these days is actually the second of these. Indeed, much of the attraction to the Orthodox Christian version of deontology (as championed by Jay Dyer and Andrew Wilson) is explicitly this: how do I condemn someone if I don’t have an objective and coherent moral framework? The subsequent meta-ethical “debates” with outsiders are, at their peak, humiliation rituals for those outside the logic circle, basically rubbing the bewildered adversaries’ noses in the lack of justification for their own moral beliefs.

But when we look at these “debates,” something feels distinctly amoral about them, or perhaps even immoral. It doesn’t seem as if we are living — or speaking — in a morally superior fashion, on the other side of all this moral study, when the purpose is to condemn.

This is not to say that we should not condemn — we absolutely should. Some people act grotesquely immorally, and a just society requires that such acts be condemned. But the deontologists act as if a condemnation is not possible without a logical-coherence framework (the history of humanity is evidence to the contrary), or as if a logical-coherence framework provides an ounce of additional weight to the desired condemnation (it doesn’t, for the same reason). Their opponents are not relativists anyway — broadly speaking, they are utilitarians.

Ironically, utilitarians often make the same mistake. Sam Harris — with his Masters degree in philosophy — got up on stage and said that if you don’t think morality is about utility, then he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

What this looks like is two equivalently political sides (deontologists on the right, utilitarians on the left), imagining that they are speaking for the Only True Morality against bias and whim. The other side is bigotry or sloth and envy, wrapped up in moralistic rationalization, and we need hard, objective moral theory to justify a condemnation of evil. But in both cases, this manifests as a moral philosophy that is less constructed around choosing a better life, and is more devoted to the task of condemnation. The result, of course, is a race-to-the-bottom in adversarial debate, masquerading as morality in thinner and thinner masks of righteousness.

For this reason, the fact that virtue ethics does not offer very clear or direct answers to particular moral questions may actually be a blessing, and not a curse. The supposed ability of other moral theories to systematically answer precise moral questions — or to condemn those who answer them in the wrong way, from an ‘objective’ framework — may not be a benefit of a moral theory, but a sort of curse which draws the moral system into partisan conflict, rather than — and at the cost of — living a better life. Insofar as morality concerns right action, then the proper framework for judging a moral theory is not its ability to condemn others, but its ability to improve one’s own life. And on this point, virtue ethics remains unsurpassed.

Again, this is not to say that we should not condemn or debate. We absolutely should. But in doing so, we should be exceptionally careful in not transforming our own moral systems on the basis of what is most useful in condemnation, or we might — as Nietzsche warns against — become a monster in our pursuit of slaying monsters. Toward the end of not becoming a tunnel-visioned, moralizing moral monster, the ambiguity of virtue ethics may be understood as a virtue of the theory, and not a shortcoming. That it is less useful in internet blood-sports style debate may be a symptom of its superiority as a way of living, and not evidence of its inferiority on account of it being less powerful in adversarial debate.

Much of the discussion around Nolan’s Odyssey has revolved around the supposed influence of Emily Wilson’s “feminist” translation. Emily Wilson is an avowed and open feminist, and for months, we’ve been hearing that her translation was the primary influence or inspiration for Nolan. This discussion has led many people to see feminism in Nolan’s film where it arguably wasn’t there — particularly in the characters of Circe and Penelope.

But if we are to gauge whether or not feminism is present, in a scene or a character, we must first have an understanding of what feminism is.

This is a subject I addressed in an Office Hours video almost exactly a year ago, but I figured it would make sense to address it in writing, on Substack, for good measure.

I presume most of my readers are sufficiently sophisticated to know that feminism is not a synonym for egalitarianism — it is not “just asking for equality,” or any other such bailey retreats from the motte that is the actual worldview.

What is the actual worldview then?

We are often told that feminism “went off the rails” in the third wave, that it “really had some good points” in the earlier years. But if we go back to its origins, in the 19th century, we see this is a distinction without a real difference, and the the fundamental ideas which drove feminism from the first wave into the second and third waves were all the same, and that the evolution was not a departure from its core ideas, but its expression. So let us look at those 19th century ideas.

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned her “Declaration of Sentiments” (sometimes called the Seneca Falls Declaration). Stylistically, it was a cheap plagiarism of the already-overrated Declaration of Independence, but its assertions were far worse. In the Declaration, Stanton claimed:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

The claim is a declaration that the organizing principle of all societies in history has been sexism. This sexism was intentional (“having in direct object…”), institutional (“establishment of an absolute tyranny”), and malicious (“repeated injuries”).

To support this, she submits a selection of facts to a ‘candid world.’ But her facts are, of course, selected. Like the supremely overrated novel A Handmaid’s Tale, Stanton observes the hardships of women, and contrasts those with the privileges of men, but does so without also considering the hardships of men which women were intentionally and systematically protected from, in all societies, throughout all of history. Depending upon how one measures, these hardships arguably outnumber and outweigh the hardships endured by women. One strong piece of evidence for this is that women have — throughout all history — been roughly twice as successful in reproduction than men. Another piece of evidence is that men constitute approximately 75-80% of casualties in war, and closer to 99% of of war casualties in direct combat.

But even this kind of comparison hinges upon a tacit equality of measure, that a man dying in combat is equal to a woman dying in combat. Relative to women, men’s bodies are built for combat, in terms of durability, strength, and disposition. I need not bore the reader with explanations about how women’s bodies are designed around a different purpose, relative to men. The differences in treatment received by men and women — legally, and culturally — originate in these biological differences between the sexes, and these differences themselves originate in the very nature of humanity and animals more generally.

Feminism has — from its very inception — treated men and women as individuals, with no innate metaphysical relationship with each other. From this state of nature-blindness, it has focused in upon the negative experiences of the female sex, while ignoring its privileges as well as the negative experiences of men, and concluded the existence of a grand, gendered conspiracy, undertaken and perpetuated by all men, across all time, to oppress women for the collective benefit of men, as men.

This conspiracy is called “The Patriarchy.”

If it doesn’t advance the idea of the Patriarchy, then it isn’t feminism.

This may itself sound like a strawman of the modern bailey descriptions of feminism, about unconscious structural oppression by design and subconscious pursuit of power and benefit. Modern feminists might also point to examples of patriarchal societies in anthropology (which were very common in historically pastoral cultures of Western Asia and Southern Europe). But the sense of “patriarchy” meant in the anthropological sense is different from the sense of the word meant in feminist “Patriarchy theory.” The equivocal use of the former as evidence of the latter does not describe the intention or nature of what Stanton was complaining about, nor what John Stuart Mill and his wife were writing against in 1869, because (again) of the refusal to acknowledge the situatedness of the rules within a broader structure of society which has expectations of duty not merely from women, but from men as well.

And regarding the potential strawman, the distinction between a conscious conspiracy and an unconscious structure of benefit dissolves when a man is confronted with the feminists arguments, and rejects them, unpersuaded. In that moment, he becomes conscious, and complicit. Any argument that it’s only a structure of power disparity that he happens to benefit from, and not malicious intent, dissolves when he defends the existing structure, or at least doesn’t agree with the movement which seeks its abolition. The history of the feminist movement and its malicious treatment of men demonstrates the point.

When one considers the role that these rules served in the survival of the societies which incorporated them, the charge that institutionalized gender roles (for men and for women) were instituted specifically for “the establishment of an absolute tyranny over [women]” sound not just absurd and delusional, but ungrateful and malicious. The only psychological bit of evidence one needs to completely disprove feminist Patriarchy theory are a few examples of men willing to hurt and kill other men for the benefit of a woman. Going all the way back to Homer’s Iliad in the 9th century BC, this seems not only to be true, but thematically significant, even in historically pastoral and anthropologically patriarchal societies like those of the Myceneans and the Trojans. This is why feminism is always wrong, has always been wrong, and will always be wrong. It does not — and has never had — “a point,” because its view of history is skewed, its understanding of male psychology is borderline backwards, and its essential understanding of the human animal is incomplete. Men and women are constructed as symbiotic halves of a whole, with particular roles which suit the differences between them, and not as completely whole individuals that exist independently of the opposite gender.

But the subject of Homer brings us back to Nolan’s Odyssey and the characters of Circe and Penelope. Are these “feminist” characters?

One can certainly — and legitimately — read them that way. But I don’t think a feminist reading is necessary to make sense of them. Circe is depicted as a hurt and traumatized character, and she generalizes this to all men, based on some unnamed crime done to her by some unnamed of the past. But Circe is not the only traumatized person in the story. In fact, virtually everyone is traumatized in the story — not least of all the titular hero played by Matt Damon. Is the traumatizing agent “the Patriarchy?”

The answer is no. The traumatizing event is a deception — a “trick.” Nolan’s problem is not gendered at all; it is philosophical, almost theological, and Circe suffers from this apocalyptic fall just as much as Damon’s Odysseus, or perhaps less.

Feminism does not own a monopoly on victims, or upon female victims, or upon female victims of male aggression or abuse. Such characters can always be made to fit into feminist theory, or support feminist ideas, but they can often just as easily support arguments about the evil of one individual, or about much broader issues than mere gender conflict, such as misfortune, greed, or deception (as with Nolan). For this reason, one must be careful not to accept characters or events that can be brought up as evidence for a theory as the theory itself, when those same characters and events can be invoked as evidence of an alternative, better, and often competing theory. This, I think, is the case with Nolan’s depiction of Circe and even Penelope, who is (correctly) observing that her son Telemachus is not yet ready to be king.

Catholics often say that “heresies come in pairs” — there is the initial heresy, and there is the excessive response to the initial heresy. Just because feminism is wrong does not mean that everything that looks like it could be feminist is therefore supporting feminism, or doesn’t have some sort of artistic or epistemic value. I think we can criticize feminism without imagining feminism where it is not, or generally seeing things in a binary of “either X or Y.”

When I published The Hero and the Man in 2021, I argued that Christianity follows directly from the spirit of Homer’s Iliad, but that the Odyssey parts ways from the heroic ideal that we see in the Iliad. While the Iliadic hero strives for “immortal glory,” which is to say, recognition for eternity, Odysseus becomes “Nobody” in the cave of the cyclops. This identity is not merely a joke (although it is also this), but a thematically significant rejection of the heroic desire, and we can see this by way of the symbolic repetitions that persist throughout the story. The sirens sing songs of glory and wisdom, yet Odysseus restrains himself (or, rather, contrives to have himself restrained). Rather than coming home as a famous hero like Agamemnon, Odysseus chooses to arrive home in disguise, and ingloriously, like a beggar. His mother’s very name is Anticlea — “anti-kleos,” or “against glory.”

Perhaps most tellingly of all is Odysseus’ pattern of fabrication in his storytelling, giving alternative accounts of his identity to Eumaeus, to Penelope, and even to Laertes, his father. Many scholars have concluded from this that Odysseus is a compulsive liar. But why? Is he a liar like other compulsive liars? Or is his pattern of alternative identities related to his interactions with Polyphemus — the cyclops named “many-stories,” who embodies the bloody cost of heroism?

Read more

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that income (beyond a certain base threshold) is not a great way to go about choosing lives. We can look around and find countless examples of individuals with 6- and even 7-figure incomes who are not happy, in general or with themselves. Conversely, there are a great number of middle-income (and even poorer) people who are happy.

This is not a condemnation of wealth. All else being equal, more wealth is always better.

But of course, nothing is ever equal.

Entire domains of philosophy are devoted to the question of what constitutes a good life, and none of them (that I know of) simply say “more wealth.” So how should one go about choosing one’s life, and the sort of career which lends itself to the cultivation and experience of that kind of life?

We all have to work. In working, we all have a tacit philosophy of work: what is our relationship with work? Is it something positive, or something necessary, which we would hope to escape if we could? What is it in our work that is valuable, if anything?

The complexities of these questions defy a systematic categorization. But there are a few essential spirits at work, people who embody distinct and competing philosophies of work that are popular in the 21st century. These are:

1. Tim Ferriss — the “4-Hour Work Week”

2. Andrew Tate — Escaping the Status Matrix

3. Mike Rowe — “Get back to work”

There are undoubtedly others, and for individual readers, perhaps more compelling models for these respective philosophies. But for our purposes, Tim, Andrew, and Mike are sufficiently well-known that they work best as conceptual icons for the relationships with work we are trying to consider.

Before we consider these three, however, we should perhaps consider position zero — the unphilosophical or “default” approach.

The Default

The default approach to work is one of obedience and imitation. It is the logic of tradition, and it follows upon a sort of path laid out by society for you. In practical terms, this means graduating high school and going to college, achieving a four-year (or perhaps six-year) degree in some practical field — ideally in some STEM field, but a variety of different degrees will suffice, so long as it is on a track toward a high-5 or low-6 figure income.

To this end, the default approach is often relatively successful. But its problem is its thoughtlessness — which is not to say the people who follow the path are thoughtless, but that where work is concerned, they are often “going with the flow” in an unphilosophical manner. This can lead to important oversights, not only in practical matters (like the declining value of a college degree, as I argued in part 1), but in the relative weight of what is valuable more broadly. Many, many people get pulled along the default path, and wake up in their mid-30s with a decent job, a house, a nice car, and profound dissatisfaction.

Often this dissatisfaction is a bit of a “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” effect, and had they lived the life of adventure they imagined, they might have envied the one who followed the default path. Upon consideration of the options, someone might choose the default path — at which point, it is no longer a “default.”

We will come back to this, and contrast it with the rest, shortly.

Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss blew up in the mid-2000’s with his bestselling book The 4-Hour Work Week. In his book, Ferriss promised readers a path to “escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.” For Ferriss, real wealth was not actually about money, but about time and freedom. Ferriss advocated a life of systematic simplicity, a rigorous application of the 80-20 principle, and “hacking” the disparate costs of living around the world to minimize the amount of work you have to do to survive. Applying the same principles, one can embark upon all sorts of adventures (or do anything else you like) with the time you’ve gained for yourself.

Underneath Ferriss’ philosophy is a sort of gnostic approach to work, where work (the “9-to-5 grind”) is thought of as a kind of prison, and freedom lies in escaping our culturally-ingrained attachment to work, with a little bit of creativity. Gnosticism — the word refers to “secret knowledge” — is here meant as any worldview which holds an idea that the world as we experience it is a false world, and that there is a higher, “real” world somewhere else — perhaps in freedom.

And where work is concerned, Ferriss is not our only gnostic.

Andrew Tate

A much more recent philosopher of work is Andrew Tate. Tate blew up in the middle of the “red pill” movement. The term “red pill” was of course introduced to politics by political philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who has pointed out how his use of the term was immediately and independently co-opted by Nazis and by Pick-Up Artists. But in all three cases — indeed, all four, if we include the Wachowski’s Matrix (1999) — the idea of a “red pill” refers to a shift in understanding, of seeing things “how they really are,” rather than what you’ve been “programmed” to see.

If Tim Ferriss was unconsciously gnostic, Tate is consciously and intentionally so. For Tate, the ideal goal is not freedom, but status — and wealth, as a component of status. The “matrix” is the complex of mainstream systems (the news, education, entertainment, politics, etc) that drain people’s energy and resources and keep them trapped in a low-status position of mediocrity and subservience, like feudal serfs. Tate argues that all men want recognition and status, and therefore they should break free of the Matrix — which involves self-discipline, hard and fast work, and a certain kind of Machiavellian practicality in striving upwards.

Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe, the host of the Dirty Jobs show on the Discovery Channel, has discovered and championed a different philosophy of work for several decades now. He developed this philosophy while working aside various “blue-collar” workers, on farms, in welding shops, in water treatment facilities, and all sorts of other “dirty” environments.

Rowe’s philosophy really began with the observation that these people seemed happy. They were not trying to escape some Matrix, but were living in physical reality, and the sense of the reality of their world was reflected in (or perhaps a product of) the physical nature of their work. Rowe argues that people can make decent money — not extraordinary wealth, but respectable and comfortable income — by engaging in basic, direct, ‘ordinary’ work. This work is not something to escape, but something to embrace as a part of life itself.

Now, from these — the default, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Tate, and Mike Rowe — which is best?

When it comes to the more gnostic beliefs of Ferriss and Tate, the question seems almost metaphysical. The “matrix” metaphor (which Ferriss also borrowed in his book) is a tacit reframing of reality itself. But it is, really, just a metaphor. The alluded-to Matrix of Ferriss and Tate is not a simulation that replaces reality with a simulated alternative, but one which replaces your “true” desires with socially constructed ones — perhaps freedom with stability, or status with comfort. They are — as are the default and Rowe positions — claims about human nature, about what men value. With the exception of the default view, the presented philosophies of work here are really different claims about what approach to work most closely matches what men want from life (the default approach being less axial and more epistemic — it goes along the most seemingly-reliable path in the absence of knowledge, and there might be something to this).

So then our question is really: what do these different philosophies of work say about what men value most, in work?

Ferriss explicitly states his value as freedom, freedom being the launchpad for any variety of other pursuits one might wish to undertake. There is a sort of implied promise that anything is possible with freedom… but in reality, this promise is usually false. The accomplishment of anything difficult requires devotion and consistency, and this consistency becomes incompatible with freedom. As soon as you commit to a mission, you give up freedom in proportion to the seriousness of your commitment. If freedom is a value, it cannot be as a means to some end (or else we would just assert that other end as a superior value), but as a valuable experience on its own — an “end in itself.” What Ferriss tantalized his readers with were promises of travel and adventure, and for most people, this is what “freedom” more or less means.

But of course, there is no substance to this freedom. It is “fun” but not “satisfying.” A healthy person does not look back on a life of tourism with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Tate’s advocacy for the pursuit of status, makes a kind of basic, biological sense. Humans are social mammals, and as social mammals we are hierarchical mammals.

It's really not so bad to be a king. All at once your palace grows in wealth, your honors grow as well.

—Odyssey 1

But status is a kind of fickle thing, in terms of satisfaction. It is often much more powerful of a motivator to achieve than it is an enjoyment to have. When Tate was being interviewed by David Sutcliffe, he said “I think the only thing better than having everything you want is not wanting anything.” Tate also says (correctly) that most people who think they don’t want anything are coping. But it is still instructive to observe that the people who do get everything they want — in terms of money and status — still envy those with less desire.

Rowe is less explicit in exactly what he believes men value in work — in fact, in his TED talk, he seems not only to avoid explicit identification of a precise value, but even mocks the supposed “values” that others attempted to identify and attach to motivational board-room art, as persistently and often humorously at odds with the reality of work, and with what actually works at work.

In this way, Rowe’s approach seems to merge with the “default” approach, in beginning with what we don’t know, rather than beginning with some specific theory (as with Tate and Ferriss) which seems to invariably devolve into gnosticism. But what Rowe points out is that the “default” approach actually holds its own semi-gnostic bias, specifically against any kind of manual labor. The “default” approach is, in fact, Tate-lite, concerned with status and perception, but too timid to make a lifestyle out of it.

Of course, status is not an evil thing to be concerned about. As with money, it is better to have more status than less, all else being equal.

But as Ferriss’ freedom gives up the satisfaction that follows from well-executed commitments (to people or goals), and as Tate’s ambitious status-seeking is at odds with the almost Buddhist “freedom from desire” that Tate acknowledges as superior to his own status, the default contempt for manual labor is at odds with the satisfaction that the default man seeks because the world is material. The default-man’s contempt for manual labor sets him at odds with engagement with the physical world. While his views of work are not explicitly gnostic — condemning “the system” as a propaganda machine for the government or big business — he nonetheless moves towards a working life that is digital, bureacratic, sterilized, and in every way “above”, by means of “away from” any kind of work that involves the hands.

Here, Rowe’s philosophy parts ways with the default approach by embracing the “dirtiness” of manual work — not just physical dirt, but social dirt (the latter being the shield against the former). By embracing manual work, one develops a stronger relationship with physical objects and the physical world — not intermittently, as a hobby, but day-to-day, for years and years, on a path toward something like mastery.

On the other side of this kind of physical work, and this philosophy of work, is the development of virtue that is grounded in the physical world. There are virtues associated with Tate’s world and Ferriss’ world too, but those virtues — glorious and enjoyable as they might be — don’t carry the satisfaction of the virtues of labor because they are grounded in an ephemeral and primarily mental world that does not feel real even to them. Tate’s cars are very cool, but their value is in what they signify, the status they proclaim. That status exists in the minds of other people, and in Tate’s mind, to the degree that he is aware of other people’s awareness of his status. The same is true with Ferriss and his travels and adventures in Latin America and South East Asia; the feeling of freedom is an experience that exists through the experience of choice — by places one could have been, or things you don’t have to do. But the meaning of this freedom exists primarily in your own head, and can often fade with the novelty.

Again, this is not to degrade either status or freedom as valuable goals, but to point out that they are often unsatisfying as justifications or goals behind work because they separate us from the physical world.

By contrast, the virtues of manual labor connect us to the world, and to our bodies (especially to our hands). We develop relationships with kinds of materials, with the city and buildings that we work in — that we build or improve — and these relationships change how we experience new spaces. When I walk into a building, I notice the electrical work. In many ways, I can’t help it. My experience with electrical equipment (and to a much lesser degree, with trim carpentry) enriches my experience of the world.

Some of this enrichment comes from a feeling of competence in relation to my surroundings: “if something broke, I could fix it.” Again, other kinds of work have their own virtues and competences, but those competencies and feelings of power — though often more lucrative — are less physical, and less viscerally real in one’s own experience. The virtues of the trades come to exist less in the head, but in the body itself.

For this reason — if we ignore the nicotine and caffeine addictions — men in the trades seem on the whole to be psychologically healthier than men in academia, business, or the freelance “influencer” lifestyle. It grounds us in physical reality — often in the context of a team with other men, which is also beneficial in its own way.

As a philosophy of work, Mike Rowe’s is the most anti-gnostic, and therefore the most experientially satisfying — I would argue, also, the most metaphysically real — of the three or four described above. This is not to say the others don’t have points, or aren’t worth dabbling in. But the campaign against physical work we have seen — largely at the hands of universities — has not just inflated college costs while diminishing their quality: it has blinded us to the profoundly rewarding experience of manual competence and the happiness that Mike Rowe observed in those men.

A life in the trades is not mutually incompatible with other interests (like philosophy), but I would argue — as one who began in philosophy, and through philosophy discovered the virtues of manual competence — that the virtues of physical work are more important and more satisfying, and also ground the other virtues in reality itself.

Stay tuned for part 3.

In the hours after I first saw Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, I put out a first-view review and give it a 7/10.

After further reflection, I have decided to bring my score down to a 5.5/10 — not the worst film, and still with most of the virtues of a Nolan film, but with fewer of the thematic virtues of the Odyssey than I initially felt. I am writing this to explain my downgrading.

Wilson’s Absence

When I walked into the theater, I was specifically on the look-out for signs of Emily Wilson’s influence. Wilson has been mentioned as a key influence and inspiration for Nolan since at least October, perhaps further back. The distinctive features of her translation include:

• A “lying” Odysseus

• Odysseus as a failed (and culpable) leader

• A snotty, entitled Telemachus

• A somewhat sympathetic or victimized Cyclops

• An undeserving death for the suitors

• A pitiful death for the disloyal housemaids

Instead what I saw was an Odysseus who was so straightforward that he doesn’t even like to surprise hunting game, and who is a failure as a leader — and responsible for his men’s deaths — in no one’s eyes but his own (which, if anything, makes him more morally sympathetic). Telemachus is earnest, intelligent, and self-aware. The cyclops is not only as monstrous as in the book, but slightly more so for not speaking. The suitors are villainous and murderous, deserving their deaths completely. And while the deaths of the disloyal housemaids are not completely depicted, Melantho is clearly shown to be aiding Antinous, and is essentially killed by Penelope herself, in a particularly gratifying manner (pushed back into the room with the suitors — “you belong with them”).

For all the talk of Wilson’s influence, I didn’t see her at all, except perhaps in the dialogue, which was almost uncomfortably plain and contemporary, mirroring Wilson’s plain, “modern” meter. Or perhaps simply in inspiration: Wilson concludes her introductory paragraph of book one with Homer saying,

Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times.

Such a line could easily have gotten Nolan’s brain spinning up ideas to ‘tell the story for our modern times.’ The line deviates from other translations, like Lattimore’s “From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak…” or Mendelsohn’s “Goddess, start from where you will; daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too” and slightly one-ups Fagles’ “start from where you will—sing for our time too.” But this inspiration is not explicitly feminist, or really anything political at all, besides “modernizing.”

Wilson seemed — to my surprise — to be almost entirely absent from the film.

PTSD and Feminism

In addition to the absence of Wilson, I saw great significance placed upon xenia — the ancient customs concerning the guest-host relationship — as well as the theme of sacrifice, and ideas about the trauma of war and PTSD. All of this seemed thoughtful and well-researched to me. For the record, a PTSD reading is not a feminist reinterpretation; it builds upon a respectable psychological tradition in Homeric interpretation which really reached its peak with Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1995), long before Wilson’s 2017 translation came out. My interview with Adam Magers on his book Odysseus and the Oar (2024) provides further and more contemporary catch-up on this theme, preceding Nolan’s film and existing independently of Wilson.

Many people have made arguments that Penelope and Circe were essentially feminist characters. This would not be a feminist influence from Wilson’s translation, but feminism from Nolan’s own mind. I found this to be a plausible reading, but not a necessary reading. To me, feminism is Patriarchy theory, and the victimhood of Circe does not reflect a result of Patriarchy per se, but of the circumstances created in Nolan’s film, which are much broader (more on this shortly). Likewise, Penelope’s “feminist rant” felt (to me) less like something to do with the oppression of women, and more like an acknowledgment that Telemachus was not yet a man, and not yet fit to rule.

It was in the absence of these overt feminist themes, or an overly-political notion of xenia as an obligation to endlessly entertain infinite immigrants (Odysseus handily dispatches that particular idea with the suitors), that I initially gave the film a 7/10, hinging largely on the presence of Greek themes which I frankly had not expected Nolan to include at all.

But xenia does not have to be political to be badly done, and what Nolan has done, even in a somewhat apolitical manner, is both thematically false to the story, and false to reality as well.

Xenia

In Nolan’s Odyssey, xenia (addressed as “Zeus’ law”) is initially introduced as an obligation to guests which is justified by the possibility that the stranger might be a God in disguise. This makes the ambiguousness of the Gods not just a deviation from Homer’s Odyssey, but thematically foreboding to the story Nolan is telling. In the first few minutes of the film, we see Telemachus reject an appeal to xenia from Antinous, clearly stating that xenia is actually not an endless obligation to hospitality without reciprocity. We get something nuanced and precise, right out of the gate.

But this ends up being a kind of set-up for the transformation and expansion Nolan attempts at the end. The grand reveal is that the Trojan Horse itself was really a violation of xenia, “a trick!” — as Travis Scott awkwardly half-raps in the opening seconds — which breaks the balance of civilization and unleashes the “sea peoples.” And the “sea peoples” turn out to be none but the Greeks themselves; “you and I.”

This is apocalyptic in both senses. It is a sort of “end of the world,” depicting the Bronze Age Collapse, and is, at the same time, a “revealing,” deriving it’s meaning from the Greek negating prefix apo- (“away from”), and kalyptein (“to cover over”), from which we also get the name Kalypso, the nymph-goddess who covers over or hides Odysseus away for seven years. The horrors of the giant, cannibalistic Laestrygonians, the monstrous cyclops, Circe (who, in Homer’s story, is an attractive enchantress, but in the film is a damaged and aged old witch — herself seemingly transformed by the breach of hospitality of guests from some time past) and the dangerous sea itself, all of these parts of Odysseus’ journey are implied to be so dangerous and disastrous because the world is falling apart.

And the world is falling apart because of “a trick.”

It is at the end, at the revelation, that Nolan expands the concept of xenia from a very particular, theological custom that precisely detailed the reciprocal obligations between hosts and guests — a set of customs which does not prohibit warfare, even tricky warfare, or even raiding and pillaging vulnerable villages — into a grander, universal idea of “the Golden Rule.” It transforms an divine command ethic of organic and geographically-specific custom into a sort of Kantian imperative against all deception — even in war. Telemachus’ initial explanation to Antinous is not Nolan’s view of xenia after all. It is just his starting point.

One, of course, has to expect an epic as expansive as the Odyssey to undergo some omissions in a 3-hour film. But the omissions were not random, or mere time-savers. The episode of the Phaeacians (which takes up about a third of the book) had to be omitted because it showed a positive example of xenia, of an island people acting as good hosts, and Odysseus himself as a good and entertaining guest. Such an episode would (and, indeed, does) break the totality of the damage supposedly done by the Trojan Horse. And one could say the same about Odysseus’ first stop at the island of Aeolus.

The Blood Feud

But the omissions go backwards as well as forward. Not only do we lose the Phaeacians, but Nolan does his best to portray the war for Troy not as a battle over a woman, but a materialistic, imperial conquest, only thinly disguised as something mythic (and the casting of Lupita Nyong’o seems designed to emphasize this point of motivation). This idea erases the wrong perpetrated by the Trojans which started the whole war. Agamemnon is cast as a sort of aggressor ex nihilo, seizing upon on a minor offense as justification for military conquests which likely would have happened anyways.

One of the things I had initially admired about the film was the seriousness with which Nolan seemed to treat the problem of the blood feud. The blood feud was, arguably, the single greatest evil to pre-modern man, and the line between civilization and barbarism can arguably be drawn on the line between controlled and uncontrolled cycles of violence. The Trojan War is the story of a blood feud, with many recursive blood feuds inlaid within it (such as the intra-familial feud within the house of Atreus), and its resolution is so difficult because everyone weighs the value of the wrongs differently. The feud at the end of Homer’s Odyssey is resolved by a kind of deus ex machina, where Athena comes down and simply tells everyone to stop fighting. The idea of Odysseus anticipating the revenge of the suitors’ families and sending himself into voluntary exile seems like a plausible and thoughtful alternative answer to this very serious ancient problem, one that is maybe more satisfying to a modern audience (and to audiences in general).

But Nolan’s appreciation for the problem of the blood feud seems to diminish with his emphasis on the wrong of the Trojan Horse. In a way, he illustrates the very difficulty of the problem by re-interpreting — and thus, minimizing — the meaning of Helen and the wrongs of the Trojans. It is, no doubt, how the Trojans themselves might have told the story, whereas the Achaeans likely would have focused more on the wrong of Paris, which was no less deceptive than the Trojan horse. To focus only on one’s own side sounds like a saintly, almost Christian, moral approach to healing the world, but it does so at the cost of repaying wrongs with justice — which is to say, vengeance. Justice of this sort ends civilization, because the blood feud is justice, and the blood feud cannot coexist with civilization. But the absence of justice also ends civilization, because without justice, there is no check against wrongdoing.

This is the conundrum which the conclusion of Homer’s Odyssey attempted to address, and which the Oresteia advances much further.

This sort of complex paradox is replaced with simplistic moralizing in Nolan’s film. In the world of Homer, war is both terrible and glorious — equal parts “Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Dulce et decorum est.” It is comparable to Cormac McCarthy’s view: “before man was, war waited for him.” War is the state of things, and can even desirable, provided a man win glory and honor (in the form of wealth) for himself and his house. The tragedy of heroic death is a theme which is put forth by the ghost of Achilles in Homer’s version. But in Nolan’s story, we instead get the shade of Sinon, whose speech is not a reminder of the value of life, but a sort of general condemnation of deceit, no matter how necessary, no matter how well-intentioned.

The blood feud instigated by Odysseus’ justice against the suitors is resolved by voluntary exile, rather than the amnesty of Athena we get in Homer. But the exile is thematically centered around honoring the dead from war. It is a combination, an exile-and-penance in one, which conjoins the killing of the suitors and the blood feud with the wrong of the Trojan horse, as if those two were related, or as if either act were morally wrong in the original story.

Such a modern, moralizing view not only condemns Odysseus, but tricky humanity (andra) itself, ancient and modern. It is as if order itself, and civilization, is to be imagined as the default, but the wrongness of human nature brings it into disorder.

Responsibility

Matt Damon’s Odysseus does not bear the responsibility that Wilson would have him carry, for the fate of the men. Instead, Nolan holds Odysseus responsible for the death of civilization itself.

There is a certain irony here, in that Homer can largely be credited with the creation of civilization. Nietzsche explains this in terms of a sublimation of strife and contest from violent disorder into organized, eucivic competition; I argue that what Aeschylus does on the other side of Homer’s vision — with the mystical transformation of justice itself from ‘vengeance’ into ‘good intentions’ — creates the order we experience as civilization today, which would not have been possible without the vision of the shield of Achilles, and the foreshadowing of Aeschylus’ Eumenides at the end of Homer’s Odyssey. But this transformation is, itself, a cunning trick, a substitution of one concept for another. Nietzsche’s idea of sublimation of Eris is, likewise, another trick of myth. Odysseus — champion of Athena, the Goddess of wisdom, and arguably of civilization — is, in reality, not the breaker of civilization, but its builder. He embodies a human mode of knowledge that survives the disillusionment of the ideals of the heroes (this is the primary subject of my book The Hero and the Man). This is necessary because all idealism is necessarily built upon language, which is limited by its nature in the conveyance of truth — that way which can be said is not the true and eternal way, etc. But to the heroic idealist, such a man appears tricky and unreliable. He has not yet seen the constraints of his own ideas of morality, and so he condemns the man of many ways as a “scoundrel,” or perhaps as the breaker of civilization.

Setting this philosophical talk aside, we can simply look at Homer’s story: when Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he also restores order (an order which had been lost in his absence).

Odysseus

Insofar as Odysseus is “that man of twists and turns” (Fagles) or “that man of many ways” (Lattimore), Odysseus is actually absent from Nolan’s Odyssey. What we see in Matt Damon’s character is not a man who is one way in one situation, and another in another. Instead we get a fairly one-dimensional man, whose character is defined by the weight of his guilt and responsibility. The absence of the Phaeacians removes the jovial, storytelling side of Odysseus. The absence of the dialogue with the cyclops removes his cunning. The absence of his anger over the story of his moved bed removes a dimension of his humanity. Where as Homer’s Odysseus was polymechanos — a man of “many” stratagems and wiles, of which the Trojan horse was just one — Nolan’s Odysseus is a man of one, great, terrible trick.

Among scholars and Homerists, this absence of the light and playful side of Odysseus seems to be the most missed. While most theater-goers might not be able to name it, I suspect many felt the absence, the excessive weight of the character, relative to his bright and colorful Mediterranean source-hero.

Nolan’s Trick

There have been many people — most notably Jonathan Pageau — who argue that the entire film is actually Nolan’s trick, that the director is playing Odysseus himself, with a cunning story that is secretly conservative and traditional, cleverly disguised as a woke Hollywood film. The problem with this idea is that this would require Nolan himself to break the central “moral” of the story, betraying the trust of the audience. Will Nolan send himself into film exile after this, like his Odysseus?

The argument feels a lot like the “4D chess” arguments used to justify some of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, as secretly skillful disguised as fumbling simplicity. The pattern itself does not prove anything, but should be cause for consideration, whether these sorts of conclusions are based upon our direct observation, or if they are simply rationalizations, trying to make sense of how the director of Memento and The Prestige could put out a movie that feels so mediocre. And The Odyssey is mediocre. It is not a terrible film — there are still great scenes, great acting, and as a standalone concept, it almost borders on genius. But the casting and armor is, of course, terrible; the archery hurt me personally, the dialogue was not particularly compelling, and some of the acting was not so great. And the fact that it claims the Odyssey as its name — a step far beyond Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (2004) — brings some obligations to fidelity to the story from which it takes its name and characters.

I would compare Nolan’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses — borderline brilliant in its ambition, but ultimately fails in its execution, and does violence to the story it is attempting to one-up. In attempting to make a story of greater scale than Homer, Nolan has in fact made a story that is far narrower. It is no longer a story about the complexity of man, but a story about modern man’s conception of himself.

Conclusion

None of this should be taken as an argument that Nolan’s Odyssey was a “bad” film. It was full of all kinds of great tricks, including intertextual film references. The half-buried Trojan Horse was an apocalyptic visual call-back to Planet of the Apes. I heard someone argue that Helen’s scarring might have even been a reference to Harvey “Two-Face” Dent in the Dark Knight. There was great acting and good action scenes; the cyclops and Circe were marvelously done. The film work itself and the scenery were extraordinary.

But neither was it a “great” film. I am not sure, after dwelling further on the themes, if I can even call it a “good” film.

It was certainly a film.

If it had been its own film, in its own setting and its own characters, rather than taking from Homer, perhaps it could have been a good film. As I said in my initial reaction, I thought the overall concept was excellent. But Nolan’s Odyssey was not a standalone film; it was an adaptation of the Odyssey, and for me — on the other side of ignoring the supposed influence of Wilson, and seeing the film on its own terms more clearly — the thematic conflicts between the movie and its source became too jarring, too self-defeating, too ungrateful to really appreciate properly.

In the years after Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy, thousands upon thousands of confused readers picked up the Iliad for the first time only to be shocked by the realization that the story they thought they knew was, in fact, completely different from the movie they thought they had learned it from. I expect we are in for a similar few decades with this movie, though perhaps to a lesser degree, due to the conflagration of debate that whirled online in the months before its release. This online debate drew thousands of new readers into the source text (in some cases, even into the Greek), and while not everyone agrees. But for those who did not participate in the debate, the disparity between their beliefs about the Odyssey and the story itself will be greater than with Troy, because where Peterson maintained the themes (roughly) but expanded the events and altered the timeline, Nolan maintained the timeline and the events (more or less) while not just altering, but inverting the themes and the central character from the source text.

This was coupled with casting and musical choices which accentuated the feeling of the story being somehow subverted. It didn’t feel like a “woke” or political subversion, but a subversion nonetheless. There are no real admirable characters — no women that women would want to look like, or men who men would want to be. The overall feeling is — when it isn’t epileptic, claustrophobic, or boring — just sad. It is a de-energizing movie to watch.

What Nolan did here is not a crime. It is certainly an artistic choice, and there is a long and storied history of artists not just reimagining, but inverting the outcomes, themes, and lessons of traditional stories. He is certainly within his rights to create something like this. But so too is an audience, who enjoys Homer and Homer’s Odyssey, entitled to dislike adaptations and films which not only alter, but undermine the original story. This is how I’ve come to feel about Nolan’s movie.

Overall, 5.5/10.

This will be part one of (most likely) four pieces, explaining why I left college and pursued a life in the trades instead — first as an over-the-road truck-driver, then as an exterminator, and finally (presently) as an electrician. While I took some college, and ultimately wound up with a two-year Associates degree, I count it the least among my academic accomplishments, and felt that I learned far more about college than about anything else while at college.

It is not my intention to persuade anybody to drop out of college who is on a considered and intentional path which involves a degree. It certainly makes sense in many cases. But in too many instances, college is taken as the default, as the place you go to when you don’t know what you want to do. This is based on a very successful propaganda campaign to encourage everyone to go to college, based on associative logic which says that “on average, people who go to college make more money than people who don’t.” There are a few reasons for this, and a few reasons why this “average” is misleading and dishonest.

First of all, not all college degrees are the same. There are certain high-tier degrees (such as law, medicine, and the sorts of business degrees that segue into finance) that tip the scales of an “average” which do not transfer to generic business degrees, English degrees, or degrees in silly things like philosophy.

Consider the following number sets:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 2, 3

And

1, 1, 2, 5, 2, 50, 4

The (mean) average of the first set is 2.4, while the average of the second set is 9.3. However, the median of the two sets is roughly the same (2). If we imagine the first set is like not getting a college degree — with the numbers corresponding to salary magnitudes — while the second set is like getting a college degree, if you are not in the segment destined for 50 then the average is meaningless. Getting a Master’s degree in library science does not move you one iota closer to a seven-figure salary just because people with seven-figure salaries also have degrees.

This is, of course, an extreme example to demonstrate the point, but it is a point worth illustrating to a shockingly high percentage of college-educated people who don’t seem to understand the meaninglessness of averages in contexts where they don’t apply. More on this point shortly.

Now, it is certainly true that a degree is a checkmark that opens a lot of doors. More options means more job opportunities, and more potential income (because generally speaking, more options includes more higher-paying options). However, this degree is not an automatic ticket, nor is not possessing a degree nearly as much of an impediment as many are led to believe. In some fields, of course, one is not legally allowed to participate without a certification… which in turn, requires a degree. Medicine, engineering, and law all come to mind. But most people are not employed in these fields.

I once worked at a contracting company underneath Microsoft which nominally required a college degree. I applied, and stated — honestly — that I had no four year degree of any sort, and wasn’t planning on pursuing any in the forseeable future. But if you convey a modicum of intelligence and intellectual interest in other fields, the absence of a degree is very often no impediment at all. I was hired there, and worked on CRM database management with other people (who all had 4-year degrees) for several months, until I finally admitted to myself I hated it and moved back to over-the-road truck driving. In the weeks before I quit, my boss was offering me sales writing positions that would have moved me to Germany. In general, competence beats accreditation, because the credentials are just a manufactured voucher for skill for people who don’t know you yet. Once they know you, and understand your skill, they don’t need the paper.

But the problem with our current system is that so many people have been told that they need to go to college that for the last 40 years or so, virtually everyone — rather than a select few — has pursued a college degree. Presently, about 37% of American adults hold a 4+ year degree of some sort. In 1960, that number was 7.7%. The meaning of a 4-year degree has changed in the time between 1960 and 2026. It no longer means that you are uniquely intelligent, academically driven, or scientifically inclined.

What is more statistically meaningful now is the debt. As of the present, the average Federal student loan debt per borrower is hanging around just under $40,000.

Does this average mean anything?

Not if you’re going to become a surgeon, where you will more likely accrue $90-200,000 and pay it off within a few years after graduating. If we are being cautious around averages pertaining to incomes, we should be equally cautious in drawing conclusions about debts. But it is still something to consider, and in the absence of knowledge, debt remains a statistically more likely assumption about college graduates than intellect or disposition.

In brief economic terms: a college degree is a product which has rapidly increased in cost and at the same time, has increased in quantity. To accommodate the increased demand for degrees, colleges have (very obviously) reduced standards and streamlined the process of selling them, thus diminishing the quality of college degrees. But since the value of a degree is its relative rarity (i.e., in most people not holding them, setting you, the degree holder, apart from and above the rest), the value of the degree is also, independently, going down based on supply.

And employers are beginning to understand all this.

For all these reasons, college is not just overrated generally, but a bad idea by default — and that is only based upon the economics, and not on the political and the highly under-appreciated social problems that colleges are basically a designed to foment nowadays.

It is not my intention to promote the trades based upon their economic superiority to other career paths. There are certainly more lucrative ways one can spend one’s life. But it is worth pointing out that despite all the propaganda, one can easily work towards a $75-90,000/year career in plumbing or electrical work with no debt at all (indeed, you’re actually getting paid while you go to school), and for the more ambitiously minded who are willing to start their own business, $120-250,000/year is easily within reach.

I do not believe income (beyond a certain geographically determined base-threshold) is a good way to go about choosing lives — which is partially what choosing a career involves. The subsequent parts of this series will focus on these other dimensions. However, a certain threshold of income is important, and it is worth pointing out that many trades not only compete with or surpass college degrees, but do so without debt, wasted years, and the other downsides of university. Too often, time and debt are not factored in to the income comparisons.

For these reasons alone, it is worth considering ditching University aspirations for a tape-measure and a screwdriver.

More to come soon.

Less than an hour after finishing Nolan’s Odyssey, I recorded a review of the film, going over my initial reactions and thoughts about Nolan’s adaptation. Overall, I was let down by a lot of the details (like the casting and the archery), but was pleasantly surprised by the themes of the story, which seemed remarkably true to Homer. Xenia for instance — the “law of Zeus” — was portrayed in a nuanced manner, and the idea that it was merely hospitality (as it often is by open-borders activists attempting to appropriate ancient Greek customs for modern politics) was nipped in the bud by Tom Holland’s Telemachus within first few minutes of the film.

I have been writing about the Odyssey and about the problems with Emily Wilson’s translation for some time now, and was very on my guard for her presence in Nolan’s adaptation. Chiefly, I was looking for any signs of Telemachus being depicted as a snotty and entitled kid, or Odysseus being a “lord of lies” in his disposition, who “failed” in his leadership. What I saw instead was Tom Holland portraying an earnest and self-aware Telemachus, and Matt Damon portraying a deeply moral and sympathetic Odysseus who is not only not a compulsive liar, but is barely a trickster at all. The only person who seems to believe Damon’s Odysseus “failed” in the film is Damon himself, which tends to make a modern audience more sympathetic, not less.

Was I mis-remembering Nolan saying that the Wilson translation was the one to read in anticipation of his film, from back in October?

Read more

My wife recently harvested some of the rewards of her gardening work in the Spring (including the raspberries pictured here). She was commenting on how much more rewarding gardening and breadmaking has been for her over paid work, and I was reminded of Emperor Diocletian’s famous line, declining a request that he return to office:

If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you surely would never have thought to request this.

That such a man would prefer to be a gardener to an emperor may sound strange to those who believe in Lord Acton’s law, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely — the libido dominendi becomes an addiction that cannot be unlearned. We might interpret Diocletian’s rejection of political power as a kind of spiritual exhaustion.

But the alternative explanation is that from an experiential perspective — rather than what is understood by consensus (which is to say, politically) — what if gardening fosters a greater sense of power than politics?

Plato famously describes the tyrant as a pitiable figure, and infinitely less powerful than the Just Man, even though by convention, the tyrant is considered to be the most powerful imaginable man. While Nietzsche was highly critical of Plato, there may be a strange point of convergence in their philosophies where power is concerned, in the person of Diocletian. For Nietzsche, the feeling of increasing one’s power was not only not the same as, but often opposed to the opinions of the masses, and on at least this point, he and Plato (and Diocletian, perhaps) seem to be in agreement.

It might be possible then that those who wish to increase their own power might struggle to find anything more powerful than constructing a garden. This is not only an exercise in outward expansion, as a means to an end in moving towards conventional, social and financial power, but as an end in itself.

Readers here are likely familiar with the experience of power found in lifting weights, and this truly is a valuable and wonderful experience in developing power of the most literal kind. But — at the risk of heresy — gardening may be further along still. Not only does a garden sustain oneself, but one achieves a vicarious experience of growth outside of oneself. And yet this experience is felt internally. In a manner of speaking, while weight training strengthens the self, gardening expands the self, by expanding what one grows and develops and controls outside of and beyond oneself, with a degree of power that surpasses what politicians wield.

Naturally, these two activities (and many others besides) are not mutually exclusive. But to put this in Solar Idealism terminology, while the Father must be an ascendant Striker, he must also be an ascendant Lord of the Earth — one skilled in growing and nurturing things. Drawing lines and boundaries, establishing borders, planning — including the presence of light, the composition of the ground, accounting for time and weather and so forth — all of these emerge from the skill and experience of the gardener. It may be little wonder that Odysseus father, King Laertes, finds similar solace and power in his orchards, and George Washington graduated to the presidency from a farmyard upbringing and an early career as a surveyor, and like Diocletian, continued farming after voluntarily retiring from his political career.

Individual experience results may vary, but at the very least, you’ll have your own food.

American media cycles are always accompanied by a class of crabs whose sole purpose is to lambast anyone taking too technical of an interest in the object de jure.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, these crabs were the ones bemoaning how “everyone is a ballistics expert now.” With COVID, the crabs went after anyone they accused of believing they had become experts in virology. When voting season comes around, the crabs complain about everyone imagining that they are secret political scientists. The crabs, it seems, would have us all defer to experts, in all matters. But specifically, their own preferred experts — experts who disagree with the consensus are hacks, frauds, or grifters, cashing in for fame and money.

I have come to disagree with these experts in epistemology and social psychology. One must necessarily be a novice for some period in order to progress toward expertise, and a portion of that growth involves public discourse and debate. If a particular event serves as an impetus for interest, research, and a deepening of general public knowledge, so much the better for the public. And due to Christopher Nolan’s latest ventures, today’s object de jure seems to be Homer’s Odyssey.

I have been pleasantly surprised how quickly many lay people have gotten up to speed on many Homeric themes and ideas. This is not to say that we cannot learn from the experts — we absolutely should. And the experts should not respond to public ignorance by browbeating appeals to their own credentials — that is a sure way to lose the respect and trust of the people they are attempting to persuade. Rather they should respond to ignorance with arguments.

But when the experts appear to be ideologically captured or institutionally corrupt, so too should the public not respond with gesticulation toward general problems and throw out the entire library with a bad book, but respond with arguments of its own. It’s not like we can’t learn how!

As I’ve been listening and engaging adversaries online about Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and some of Nolan’s apparent choices in his upcoming film adaptation, I noticed that many of them are instinctively drawn, seemingly by inclination, to an anti-Odysseus perspective. They seem not so much persuaded by Wilson as attracted to her translation (over, say, Fagles) by her conclusion and tone. As with many of the people deciding to come to the defense of Odysseus, most of these opposers seem to be breaking open Homer for the first time in decades, perhaps the first time in their lives.

While I hope to provide ammunition to the defenders, the critics of Odysseus would do well to listen to the classicist Dr. Joel Christensen, a professor of Greek myth and poetry from Brandeis. Christensen argues against Odysseus in what I would call a more sophisticated and scholarly manner — and Christensen himself argues that a critical view of Odysseus makes the Odyssey a more sophisticated book. So in the name of sophistication and development — taking our understanding and skill up a level — I want to both encourage critics to read and listen to Christensen, while also addressing many of his arguments here, myself.

Christensen’s two major works on this subject are The Many-Minded Man (2022) and Why Odysseus (2026), which I will be reviewing after I read it (it comes out tomorrow). But we can get a window into his view of Odysseus through his conversation with Flint Dibble.

It’s a ‘complicated’ and meandering discussion, but it basically circles around the theme of suffering. We can consolidate his points into the following two arguments:

1. Odysseus is responsible for his own fate because he suffers

2. Odysseus is a bad person because he causes suffering

The argument that Odysseus is bad because he causes suffering is a fairly intuitive position to our modern utilitarian/deontological instincts. But this idea may not have necessarily been shared in the bronze-age Mediterranean, especially given the traceable history of Western moral philosophy; we can see where these ideas originated, far after the time of Homer. More likely, the people he wronged (and their relations) would call him bad because they had wronged him, but others may not have generalized. Indeed, we glimpse what was likely the “old” way of thinking from Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, where justice is conceptualized as doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies. A question can be raised about whether Odysseus perhaps does some harm to certain friends too, like Philoctetes, but the point is not to accept Glaucon’s take as ‘the truth,’ but to see the variation possible in conceptions of morality in relation to suffering, and to temporarily set aside our present, ideological notions of morality that we often assume to be universal, when often they are not.

More interestingly, Christensen later invokes some rather profound questions about suffering and identity, which should also cause us to question the absoluteness of the moral meaning of suffering.

The first argument that Christensen makes can be seen in his first book:

But before he recites this inset narrative, Zeus interprets the tale to come by providing a moral of his own: “Mortals! They are always blaming the gods and saying that evil comes from us when they themselves suffer pain beyond their lot because of their own recklessness!” (Od.1.32-34). Responses to the structural function and meaning of this passage vary -- it has ben seen as simply starting the action, even though many scholars have noted that Zeus’ language recalls the proem’s characterization of Odysseus’s companions who perished after they ate the cattle of the sun. The language of responsibility invoked here, however, extends beyond the proem and Zeus’s comments: throughout the epic, invocations of mortal atasthalia, recklessness, set parallel the fate of the companions with the suitors at the epic’s end. This initiates a theme that is integral to the Odyssey and its use of narrative: from the proem’s prolepsis to the bloody struggles at its end, mortals are described as bearing some blame for their own suffering. When such a theme not only initiates the epic but extends through it, almost any audience might wonder rather quickly where in this Odysseus’s responsibility fits.

Suffering, in this view, is itself taken as evidence of deserving, perhaps invoking the theodical notions of Eliphaz in the book of Job:

Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?
Where were the upright ever destroyed?
As I have observed, those who plow evil
and those who sow trouble reap it.

(Job 4:7-8)

But just as Yaweh came down from the Whirlwind to correct Eliphaz, to whom he says “you have not spoken the truth about me” (Job 42:7), Zeus is not saying ‘all mortals are (partially) responsible for all of their suffering.’ In Od.1.34, he very clearly alludes to an allotment or share of suffering beyond the mortal’s control. The invocation of responsibility is not a repudiation of fate, but an augmentation or addition. One can be wholly unresponsible for one ‘set’ of suffering, and completely and totally responsible for another. Contra Christensen, suffering is not a prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. Homer does not give any allusions to any idea that this suffering is distributed equally among mortals, though he does give us the hint that the kind of suffering that mortals are responsible for begins with what the gods explicitly warn them of.

On this point, the danger that Odysseus was most explicitly warned of -- and the only danger that is alluded to in the thematically significant opening lines -- is that of the Cattle of the Sun. This warning, Odysseus heeds, and passes on the warning to his men as well. But they ignore his warnings, and “they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness” (Od.1.7).

Echoing Wilson’s mistranslation of the opening lines, Christensen interprets this as Odysseus “failing”; he failed to preserve his men. But this logic would indict Zeus for exactly the recklessness of mortals that the God is claiming not to be his fault; it is their responsibility. Odysseus brought his proverbial horses to water, but he no more ‘failed’ in making them drink than the mighty Zeus failed in preserving mortals generally from needless suffering.

A point of agreement with Christensen: the Odyssey certainly is saying something critical about heroism, which expresses itself in a strange and almost mystical will to forgetting, whereas the archetypal hero of the Iliad strives to be remembered. How critical, exactly, is this criticism? Does the Odyssey amount to a complete repudiation of the ideal of heroism? Or is it a kind of check, asserting the ideal of the andra -- the Man -- as a sort of symbiotic paired-ideal, in tension with, but not necessarily repudiation of, the hero?

Based on Christensen’s arguments about “toxic heroism” elsewhere, and his harsh, moral criticism of Odysseus, it isn’t clear that these two things are separated for him, even though Achilles and Odysseus are juxtaposed as different kinds of men, with different essential desires. Odysseus seems to carry forward all the bad elements of the hero, with an additional layer of amoral instrumentalism.

But when we look at the specific charges made against Odysseus, what do we see?

Christensen asserts that Odysseus acted with hubris in the cave of Polyphemus the cyclops. His men told him they ought to take some cheese and leave (a point he ruefully acknowledges to the Phaecians: “it would have been better their way...” Od.9.228), but he insisted on staying, to see the occupant. After losing several comrades to the horrible cyclops, Odysseus cunningly manages to escape -- first by calling himself “nobody,” then with wine, then with the sharp stick... But again, he commits an act of hubris by shouting his name, telling the cyclops directly that it was Odysseus of Ithaca who blinded him. This is what leads to Poseidon’s wrath, keeping him away from home, and even leads to the death of the suitors, who were still several years away from their descent upon the palace of Ithaca. In many ways, everything else seems to be downstream from this act of hubris, according to Odysseus’ own telling!

But as Christensen himself points out, all of the most fantastic monsters (including the Cyclops) are retold by the unreliable Odysseus himself. What then is the Cyclops?

As with many other Homeric characters, a hint is found in the name. Polyphemus means “many stories.” He is monstrous in size, a destroyer (and devourer) of men, with no care for laws or customs, with a single eye. Symbolically, and linguistically, he appears to be a stand-in for heroism itself. Achilles, the prototypical hero of the Iliad is referred to by Agamemnon as “mightily in your might” (Od.24.40), which in Greek is μέγας μεγαλωστί -- Greg Nagy translates this as “so huge in your hugeness.” Here, size and strength are not conceptualized separately, and the Cyclops’ enormous size comes hand in hand with his strength (sufficient to move a boulder). As Agamemnon describes him, Achilles’ might makes him “larger than life”... at least in death. Because heroism also kills men -- Achilles especially. One could say that heroism kills other men through Achilles -- it is his longing for immortal glory that drives him to Troy in the first place, to slay Hector, to sacrifice the Trojan youths, and to cause the death of innumerable Greeks along the way, as vengeance against Agamamenon. He is singularly focused -- one might say “tunnel-visioned” -- upon his kleos, like a man with only one eye.

I am reminded of Yan Martel’s novel Life of Pi, which nominally follows the story of a young boy who loses his family in a shipwreck, and winds up stranded for months on a lifeboat with a tiger. At the very end, it is revealed that the “tiger” may not have actually been a tiger, that the tiger may in fact have been a symbolic stand-in for a particularly dangerous kind of person:

“In both stories the ship sinks, my entire family dies, and I suffer.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”

Perhaps Piscine Patel is telling the story differently to psychologically process the horrors he saw and the suffering he endured. Christensen -- very correctly, in my view -- analyzes the story of the Odyssey primarily through a psychological lens. We can understand the cyclops as a literal monster, or we can understand the cyclops as a kind of psychological force, which was not only found on this rugged island of sheep, but which was very much present on the Skamandrian plain, and which killed not a few, but thousands and thousands of men. Perhaps he is still killing men today, blind though he is.

How does this understanding of the cyclops change our view of Odysseus? Apocryphally, Odysseus tried to avoid going to war; he did not seem to be after glory, like Achilles, on the way over, though once he was there, he seemed to feel the draw of kleos as much as anyone else -- the intoxicating idea of having one’s name remembered in song. And recalling Zeus’ words about divine warnings from before, Odysseus received no explicit warning about the cyclops (Christensen makes a minor textual error in his video, asserting that his men warned him to stay away). But coming up with the idea of becoming “nobody” was not just the only escape; it was the actual mechanism by which a man can blind heroism itself (at least to himself).

But what of his shouting out his name?

The danger immediately preceding the Cyclops was the Island of the Lotus Eaters. Here, the danger was in actually becoming nobody, of forgetting their home and forgetting themselves.

If we maintain a psychological frame in understanding these dangers, we see a kind of structural foreshadowing of Charybdis and Scylla, of two (perhaps asymmetrical) extremes that one must skillfully navigate between. With the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops, the two dangers pertain to identity, of complete forgetfulness on the one hand, and destructive, larger-than-life stories on the other. It is in this frame that Odysseus deciding to shout his name (despite his comrades’ pleadings) takes on thematic significance in relation to what is signified by Polyphemus and the Lotus Eaters, seen together.

Is this still hubris? Hubris can mean “arrogance,” and it can also mean “excess”. But with the Lotus Eaters and Polyphemus, as with Charybdis and Scylla, Odysseus actually seems to pursue an asymmetrical middle position, rather than the extreme. He loses a part of his identity, but he retains a part as well. We can well imagine an alternative story where Odysseus slips away quietly from the island of Polyphemus... but at the cost of his name, his home, and all possibility of achieving his homecoming.

Many of the charges against Odysseus pertain to his actual homecoming in Ithaca. The treatment of the suitors, of the disloyal house-maids, and of Melanthius (which fulfills the curse of the swineherd Eumaeus in Od.17.239-246) can be analyzed through a lens of responsibility as laid out by Zeus before. For instance, were these people warned of their potential fate?

As it happens, they were. The suitors were warned by Telemachus (channeling Athena), by the seer Halitherses, and finally by the vision of Theoclymenus.

The disloyal maidservants (who were not punished for sleeping with the suitors, but for their disloyalty to the house which included sleeping with the suitors, as well as betraying Penelope’s weaving stratagem to the suitors) are not prophesied against directly, but indirectly, by connection to the suitors themselves. Earlier in the Odyssey, we saw in the episode of the island of Aeolus how miasma (pollution) was understood to spread by contact; when Odysseus and his men return after mishandling the bag containing the winds, Aeolus forcefully turns them away, out of fear and respect of the Gods:

O least of living creatures, out of this island! Hurry!
I have no right to see on his way, none to give passage
to any man whom the blessed gods hate with such bitterness.
Out. This arrival means you are hateful to the immortals.

Od.10.72-75

Aeolus’ inference turned out not to be correct, but was a safe and justified inference given Odysseus’ bad luck (meaning his crew’s bad decision). In the same way, the suitors were repeatedly and publicly prophesied with doom, yet maintained their course. If we are to maintain our adherence to Zeus’ distinction, we have no right to dismiss the responsibility and agency of the maidservants who chose to give “aid and comfort” to the suitors.

Note that this point does not magically change simply by choosing to translate “servant” as “slave” instead, as we can see in the distinction between the behavior of the two respective herding servant-slaves, Eumaeus and Melanthius. Their classification as “slaves” did not in any way force them to act in the same manner. From the fact that Eurycleia (another “slave”) has to point out the maidservants who had been disloyal, we can reasonably infer that many -- perhaps the majority -- in fact had remained loyal. It should be emphasized that this loyal contingent seemed to include many of the servants who had been raped by the suitors, since Odysseus refers to the suitors “forcing” his maidservants in 22.37, but himself sees some of his disloyal maids going very willingly with the suitors in 20.7-8. The interpretation is a little bit ambiguous, but the bland assertion that the servants had no agency because they were “slaves” is not just textually but thematically incorrect.

Does all of this make Odysseus a “moral” person?

Here we get into moral philosophy -- which I notice many classicists seem to feel very comfortable to wade in on, despite being experts in language and stories, not philosophy. But they should! And I am happy for these stories to serve as springboards for their own exploration of philosophy, so long as they (and their students) grant a similar license for me to dip my toes into Greek, like Homer and Plato (perhaps via Hansen and Quinn). We need not be crabs.

But in philosophy, morality falls within a few general moral theories. The five major categories are, in rough chronological order:

1. Divine command -- “what’s moral is what God or the gods say”

2. Virtue ethics -- “what’s moral is what a virtuous person thinks”

3. Deontology -- “what’s moral is the fulfillment of duty, regardless of consequences”

4. Utilitarianism -- “what’s moral is what leads to better consequences”

5. Nihilism -- “morality is a void term”

The judgment of Odysseus largely seems to follow from either a deontological or a utilitarian analysis. Without getting into too much detail, there are some serious problems with both of these theories. I am personally inclined toward virtue ethics, but what we see in Homeric epic is a world of explicit divine command thinking. In fact, we see, thematically, the foundations of what might later become virtue ethics, though we don’t get that explicitly until Aristotle (or, I would argue, Plato). Deontology and Utilitarianism arrived on the scene in the 18th and 19th century, respectively. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t earlier criticisms of Odysseus. There certainly were. Socrates -- a sort of proto-virtue-ethicist, and the cult hero of basically all of modern Western thought -- expressed a desire to interrogate Odysseus in Apology, implying some sort of moral fault. But Socrates also compared himself explicitly to Achilles, and spoke favorably in that regard connecting his love for truth with notions of the immortality of the soul that many modern critics no longer share.

When we look at Odysseus through the lens of virtue ethics (and divine command theory), we find him not just morally defensible, but morally exemplary. As is the case with many heroes, in fact, the idea of morally judging them seems silly on its face, like judging the word “judging.” These characters and heroes, in their extremity, often give us the depictive language to think and talk about these character qualities -- which we then translate into standalone virtues -- in the first place. We might, for instance, not have thought of nous -- a word that literally means “mind,” but has connotations of craft and mental connection with others -- as a virtue to care about and develop without Odysseus. This would make Odysseus not only moral, but a kind of moral saint, the source of a moral virtue, despite his shortcomings by the standard of subsequent moral paragons and standard-setters (such as Socrates). As Greg Nagy describes, we misunderstand our place if we think we are in a position to judge the heroes; rather it is they, as the standards themselves, who are the judges of us:

As you are looking through the window [the frame of the hydria], are you looking in from the outside, or are you looking out from the inside? My own answer is that the viewer is on the inside looking out and seeing a panorama of a heroic world out there, which is a world so immense that it will never be fully visible in the interiority of one’s own small world of everyday experience.

Ancient Greek Hero, 7G§4

As Christensen himself says, the Odyssey is a window into humanity and human nature itself. The desire to condemn Odysseus -- perhaps not here andra as “the man”, but andra as “Man” -- edges us closer to a moral condemnation of humanity itself. From whose perspective can such a condemnation authoritatively come? A mortal’s?

Exploring this question further seems like a one-way path toward Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and the idea of morality itself as an expression of ressentiment from the unhealthy, the weak, and the unlucky towards the healthy, the strong, and those beloved by the Gods -- or, perhaps, beloved by one of the Gods. If we consider “virtue” to be a moral category, then perhaps we need not go so far as Nietzsche, but we might still consider how far a moral condemnation of Odysseus constitutes a kind of moral condemnation of humanity, and to this degree, question the utility -- the morality -- of morality itself, against the standard of the man who, in the face of so many obstacles and so much suffering, and so many difficult choices, managed to save himself and to return home.

And if we do not condemn him (both rejecting the crabs that would have us “stay in our own lane,” disconnected, and refusing to be one ourselves) perhaps we may even learn something from him.

If you want to read more of my perspective on Homer and his significance to Western culture and thought, check out my book The Hero and the Man (2021).

P.S., if you read this, Joel Christensen, and would be interested in a debate on the merits of Odysseus (I caught your expression of interest in growing your social media following), I would be more than happy to engage with you… and learn from you, time permitting.

At the request of a close friend, I will try to publish “process pieces” — short articles going over what I’ve been reading, and where I’m going — for paid subscribers, that can give readers a window into my writing and research process. I want to keep the big, finished articles free, to the degree that I can, but I also want to keep philosophy something sustainable as a hobby… which means making a little bit of money. For the people interested in the journey, and not merely the destination, I’d encourage you to become a paid subscriber.

Those logistics out of the way, on to the first project:

The ongoing discussion about Emily Wilson and Christopher Nolan has sparked a much larger and broader (and, it seems, older) discussion about translation in general. What is the appropriate way to translate a work of literature from one language into another? Is there some similarity between translation from, say, Ancient Greek into English, and translating the words of an 18th-century English text into contemporary English understanding? Or simply understanding the words of someone you’re arguing with on the internet?

I recently did a reading of Professor Richard Whitaker’s criticism of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, which I discovered a day after publishing my own criticism here. It is a perpetual problem, discovering that conclusions one has arrived at independently were, in fact, already discovered and articulated much better by someone years before (this is called foreshadowing). This was somewhat the case with Whitaker’s 2020 piece, in relation to my own, though I can still boast of a few unique observations (the “it’s not fair!” addition in 2.64, for example), and Whitaker makes a few points with more academic precision than I was able to, a point which, I hope, exempts me from any serious charges of borrowing from a superior scholar.

But in combination, our two pieces I think gesture in the direction of something like a broader philosophy of translation, which, as it turns out, not only has a great deal of literature behind it, but has, in fact, an entire philosophical field dedicated to its study. That field is called hermeneutics, and it was pioneered by one Friedrich Schleiermacher, a Calvinist theologian and philosopher.

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Being the 250th anniversary of our independence — and the beginning of the war by which we won it — today has become a traditional day for content creators to be patriotic, to speak about guns, freedom, and gratitude for our country.

To that end, I would like to participate in my own way. As an American, a former service-member, and a gun-owner, I can think of nothing more patriotic than wishing for the further legal restriction and regulation of fireworks.

I am not being ironic. Bear with me.

Fireworks are exceptionally dangerous. Every year, people lose their lives or their hands to them, often not even by their own stupidity. Fireworks are high-explosives, and explosives are inherently dangerous.

But so are firearms, which — aside from personal self-protection — are a deterrent against a tyrannical state. How much of a deterrent is difficult to gauge, but we know that it is something that the government is aware of, and influences their thinking on certain domestic policy issues. Gun confiscations, for example, are a political non-starter, not because there is no demographic base of support for the policy, but because the state knows that to implement such a policy without some kind of slow build-up would mean violence.

And neither guns nor fireworks are as dangerous as cars. Cars kill thousands every year, and injure many thousands more. And what do we have cars for? Convenience? They allow us to travel slightly faster — nothing that public transportation or telecommuting in combination could not make up for. Mandatory 25mph governors on all vehicles could reduce traffic fatalities to zero overnight, and yet we do not do this. Why?

Because some things are worth risk. Sometimes, even convenience is worth risk, but of much greater value is the protective value of firearms, or the sheer enjoyment of shooting them.

So why ban fireworks?

The fourth of July is a celebration of independence from a tyrannical government. Whether or  not Britain at that time truly was tyrannical or not is almost irrelevant to the celebration of the spirit of freedom, which balked at even marginal tax impositions. This rebellious spirit is the foundation of our independence, and a central component of the American identity.

But how can we express this spirit if fireworks are legal?

The only thing more American than shooting off fireworks legally on the anniversary of our defiance of authority is shooting fireworks off illegally.

I am not advocating breaking the law, or doing anything dangerous or illegal (I would never do such a terrible thing). I am merely observing that it is admirable and more American to shoot off illegal fireworks than legal ones.

Today, more and more things are controlled. Social media is increasingly regulated and curated, less free and more censored. Our privacy is diminishing as government and corporate surveillance becomes more advanced and more disturbingly intimate. They know what we say, when we say it, and who we say it to. They know what we buy. They know what we drive. They know our hobbies, based largely on what we buy and whether our phone GPS registers more time at the gun range or the golf range. They know our porn habits.

And of course — like cars and guns — fireworks are becoming more regulated. They are outright illegal in many places.

America is not as it once was. Its values, its people, it culture, and its sense of self, all of these have changed. Things once considered “rights” have now become heavily regulated “privileges,” removed by the state seemingly on a whim. Some lines cannot be crossed yet (such as gun-confiscation), but the state is towing the line as much as they can get away with. Eventually, “normal” will shift, and the ratcheting away of liberty will advance.

Given the state of things, why should participating in the celebration of our country’s freedom be legal?

America is not the land of the free and the home of the brave. It hasn’t been for a few decades now. But it can be again. It can become both brave and free when its citizens take their freedoms, expressing a spirit of courage and independence in defiance of a controlling government. After all, how else could such a spirit be expressed, even in theory?

Fireworks should be outlawed, not so that Americans might be made less free, but so that the true spirit of the American war of independence which gave us our freedom might be retained in its character, and not merely as a historical abstraction. They should be illegal because only in defiance of arbitrary law can we know that we truly are free.

With that, I wish everyone a happy 4th of July. Have fun, stay safe, and if you decide to play outlawed tunes out of outlawed pipes, be sure to stay clear of the redcoats.

--

Originally published 2019

If there is one thing I have learned in debating with professors and academics over the past three weeks, it is that expertise in a foreign language by no means guarantees a correct translation. The translator brings all their assumptions (moral, political, and personal) into how they see and think of the words in front of them. In today’s climate, some of these assumptions become so brazen that the translation can go from merely misleading to downright wrong.

Earlier today, I found myself arguing with a woman named Liv Albert, who interpreted Odyssey 9.19-20 as “my name is Odysseus, I’m famous for my lies.”

The Greek line is:

εἴμ᾽ Ὀδυσεὺς Λαερτιάδης, ὃς πᾶσι δόλοισιν
ἀνθρώποισι μέλω, καί μευ κλέος οὐρανὸν ἵκει.

Which we could translate literally as:

I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who is known to all men for my cunning stratagems (δόλος), and my fame reaches to heaven.

The critical word is dólos, which can mean “bait” or “snare,” and the verb conjugation dólou can be understood as “beguiling” or “taking by craft.” Although this “guile” or “craft” extends beyond lying, it also encompasses lying and deception, meaning that while “lying” might be a somewhat limited translation, it appears to be at least a valid and plausible translation of dolos... right?

Besides, it’s not like Odysseus doesn’t lie...

The context of this opening section of Book 9 is a carrying forward from the ending of Book 8, where Demodocus the bard is singing of the Trojan war, including the famous Trojan horse (8.493, 511-513). Indeed, when Odysseus is asking for Demodocus to sing of the horse, he even describes the horse as dólon in 8.494. And when Demodocus is introduced, he is described by Homer as “...sing[ing] the famous actions (κλέα) of men on that venture, whose fame goes up into the wide heaven...” (8.74-75).

Indeed, we see a nearly precise repetition of the phrase kléos ouranòn from 8.75 -- “fame [reaching] heaven” where the Phaeacians do not yet know Odysseus’ identity, in 9.20, when Odysseus is identifying himself as Odysseus, using the language that described the heroes of Troy (including Odysseus himself) and of the Trojan horse. Odysseus is saying “I am the man you were singing of...”

Aside from the poetic symmetry, we are illuminated to the meaning of dólos by this symmetry; it is referring to the Trojan horse. Odysseus is saying “I was the mastermind behind that strategy.”

Now, in a sense, we could say that the Trojan Horse is a “lie”; Sun Tzu famously argued that “all warfare is based on deception,” and in this sense -- as with camouflage uniforms, operational security, and decoy maneuvers to protect your soldiers -- the Trojan Horse was, indeed, a deception. But if we are to translate MARPAT camouflage as a “lie,” we ought to distinguish this sort of military-tactical lie from the kind of lie that we associate with interpersonal dishonesty, and not multiply instances of the latter by conflation with the former.

Beyond the most technical of linguistic possibilities, dolos does not mean “lying”. A military tactic and a false narration are not lies in the same sense. In Greek, it is not the same word (we might look for something related to pseũdos), and in either language, they are not the same concept. When Odysseus introduces himself as the man from Troy, he is -- according to Homer -- telling the truth (which we can’t say in 24.303-304, where polymetis Odysseus says he will tell the complete truth, and then gives a false identity and story; polymetis does not mean “lying,” it at least precedes a lie, in speaking with Laertes; here, perhaps Wilson’s choice makes a kind of sense). His choice in language in the beginning of Book 9 is not primarily about describing or praising himself, but in repeating the language from the previous book to emphasize the sameness of the character in Demodocus’ song and himself.

With Wilson and Albert, the question really becomes: why are we trying to make him a “liar”? More precisely, why are they choosing to translate words like polymetis and doloisin as “lying,” when that is not what they mean?

One of my own great struggles with translation has been trying to get into the mindset of the past. It has been said that “to learn another language is to grow another soul;” I suspect that there is some hyperbole in this, but we certainly come to know other minds -- other souls, through language. One must set aside one’s own biases and interpretive frames (as best as one can, since completely doing so is impossible), and try to see what the text is saying on its own terms.

There is no real way to arrive at “lies” or “lying” from dolos in this way. Such a translation or interpretation is a symptom of moral (and perhaps political) prejudice that seeks out a condemnation of the male protagonist. This is not to say that Odysseus does not lie, but the tragic result of this political frame is that it will cause the reader to miss the beautiful symmetry that we see in the language between books 8 and 9, just as the people who interpret Achilles’ and Patrokles’ relationship as homosexual causes them to miss out the far more powerful connection between Achilles and his love of glory (the name Patrokles means “glory of the fathers,” via pater - kleos). Political and moral biases flatten the texts and make them more shallow. And this flattening isn’t just a Greek matter.

I have come to wonder if we have collectively missed out on something, in ditching Greek and Latin in school for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and other “practical” things. We complain a lot about the “polarization” of politics, but so much of that polarization is a complete inability to understand how other people might think which parallels the difficulties in translation that we keep seeing in modern attempts at “reimagining” and “re-telling” the Greek. What I have observed is that the people who are likely to mistranslate a word like doloisin from Greek into English are the same sorts of people who are likely to misinterpret a scholarly disagreement over a literature passage as “sexism.”

I don’t believe this similarity is a coincidence. I am convinced that the skill of translation, of slow exploration, looking at things from different angles, and setting aside one’s own moral and political identity while attempting to understand something, is a powerful skill that can, in fact, be developed through translation; by looking into old texts -- from people in another place and another time -- and turning that into English as best we can. I think abandoning the development of this skill in childhood (late middle school, and high school), prior to development of a more or less rigid moral and political self-conception, has inhibited the development of the very skill which is necessary for communication across political, ideological, religious, and moral divides. In place of something like real empathy, curiosity, and openness, we have created theoretical models that caricature how others think: “the fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God’,” thus we need never listen to anyone who disagrees with our notion of God, because he is a fool! And anyone who disagrees with Wilson obviously only does so because they hate women, etc.

Wilson herself is, of course, a possible counter-point to this, having herself learned Greek at a relatively young age. But I still hold that an exception does not prove a general rule, and even skill sets inclined toward the kind of open curiosity we are aspiring toward can be used for ideological abuse in a cultural climate which has become dominated by politics, under the doctrine that “the personal is political.” It is possible that the obsession with the “practicality” of STEM reflects a failure to appreciate the social (and ultimately, economic) importance of social connection and understanding that we move towards through translation across time. And maybe returning to Greek and Latin in high school might be a small move in the direction of the kinds of virtues and skills that can help us all move collectively past the political and moral impasse we have found ourselves in, of which mistranslations of Homer -- and mischaracterizations of English -- are a symptom.

Naturally -- as I must begrudgingly acknowledge, from these very debates with so-called “experts” -- translation knowledge clearly does not cure this intractable problem. But in conjunction with some basic philosophical training, it might be a step on a path back toward something like social reasonability and mutual comprehension, in a world that is literally dying over straw men.