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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

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

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

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube Resources

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

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

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

Further Exploration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -

We can find no scar,

But internal difference -

Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -

’Tis the seal Despair -

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -

Shadows - hold their breath -

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death

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

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

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

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear readers,

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

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

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Here’s the blurb—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Modern Condition

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

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

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

Science and Its Discontents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Robert Frost said,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When the signals from Planet Snorta finally ceased, no one at the Andromeda Transgalactic Inquiry Bureau was especially surprised. After all, civilizations go quiet on a regular basis. What made Snorta unusual was not the silence but the way it arrived—abruptly, elegantly, and after a final, irritating flourish of technical bravado.

For thirty-three years before the silence, the Humanicheans—the dominant intelligent species on Snorta—had been transmitting all their communications behind a layer of quantum encryption they referred to, with typical flair, as the Veil. The technology was impressive. Unfortunately, it also meant that the decisive period of their history remains inaccessible to us. We can trace their rise in great detail. We can reconstruct their long quarrels, their inventions, their glories and passions and follies. But the end itself—the moment when a planet full of quarrelsome, ingenious creatures went silent altogether—lies sealed behind an encryption so adamant that it functions more like a shroud than a veil.

For that reason, this report is necessarily speculative and incomplete. Still, we believe the endeavor is worthwhile, if only because the Humanies were a remarkably instructive species—gifted, contentious, whimsical, and endlessly paradoxical.

They were substantial creatures. At maturity they averaged over forty-two inches in height, a notable investment in corporeality. Archival images show upright bodies, disproportionately large heads, expressive, supercilious brows, and a prominently developed nasal organ that apparently played a central role not only in their breathing and olfaction but in their self-regard.

They were intelligent—brilliant in certain domains—and quasi-rational. Their reasoning powers were formidable but erratic, frequently distorted by impulses that had evolved for earlier conditions and were never fully recalibrated for the complex social environments they later constructed. Reflexive fear, sexual compulsion, tribal loyalty, and a taste for theatrical display served them well when survival was precarious and enemies were obvious. In advanced societies, those same traits proved harder to manage.

The Humanies themselves were hardly unaware of this problem. On the contrary, much of their intellectual and artistic life consisted in diagnosing it, justifying it, dramatizing it, finessing it, moralizing over it, or attempting to escape it. Their history can be read as a prolonged experiment in whether intelligence can conquer certain rugged vital instincts operating on a mass scale.

For convenience, and following their own usage, we will refer to the Humanicheans by their own affectionate diminutive, “Humanies” (HyooMAHneez). They used the term with tender irony, and irony, we shall see, was one of their fond remedies. In what follows, we will trace the Humanies from their earliest social arrangements through three broad cultural phases, each marked by a dominant way of understanding themselves and their world. Along the way, we will introduce several key tendencies that governed their behavior—tendencies the Humanies themselves labeled with disarming frankness, among them Snoot, Glow, and Hoot. In the end, we will see that the mystery of Snorta is why a species so alert to its own weaknesses might never have gotten the better of them.

Chrono 1—The Age of the Snoobadors

It is a striking fact that the Humanies and, indeed, all the flora and fauna on Snorta, arose by chance. Like the animals on a number of planets in our galaxy, they evolved gradually by adapting to changing environments as they heartily strove to spawn as many of themselves as possible. Morphing according to what Humanies would later call Darvonic principles, the bio-programming of their ancestors underwent a steady stream of random glitches (unavoidable) in the delicate transfer of genetic material from one generation to the next. Most of the glitchy changes were meaningless and silly, but some proto-Humanies benefited from them, thus passing on lucky wrinkles to fitter and more numerous offspring. Starting off quite small compared with their Snortan rivals, Humanies slowly became imposing creatures with noble erect posture. Their heads got bigger, their hands craftier, their tools more dangerous, their cries more artful and powerful, and sometimes even heart-breaking. Various implements and habits expanded their experiences and powers and altered the environments in which their development progressed. So emerged that intriguing animal which could be seen on Snorta until recently.

Not all Humanies were alike. To start with, the males of the species were taller, heavier, rougher, and more inclined to harsh, impulsive measures than the females, which were correspondingly smaller, gentler, and slightly more reasonable. This was partly because of the different roles played by the two sexes in gestating and raising their young. Female Humanies had to be a little more sedate than the males while curating the delicate Humani offspring. Overgrown Humani heads, with their promising young brains, had to be expelled from the mothers’ bodies as early as possible in the gestation process before they got too big and awkward to escape confinement. As a result, Humani childhood was intense and protracted, giving mothers a long, tricky job protecting and caring for top-heavy infants who started off helpless, then became dangerously reckless, until finally they were ready to survive and make trouble for others. Despite the perils, the protracted and deep and prolonged mutual dependence of Humani families created touching bonds which made it one of the highlights of their life cycle.

Mothers, in the course of the labor-intensive maternal enterprise, had to rely on their mates for protection from other creatures, especially from other Humani males. Males roved far and wide, hunting the protein-rich flesh of other animals, while females stayed closer to home gathering local comestibles. These habits of hunting and gathering continued to distinguish the sexes when the conditions that originally produced them had long vanished. (In these pages we will follow later Snortan scientists in referring to hunting-and-gathering Humanies as “Huggies.”)

Other species on Snorta found different ways of splitting traits and features between males and females. As for the Humani compromise, there was a lot of chance involved, but the sexual preferences of the parties played a notable role in the evolutionary process. If Humani males were violent and impulsive, that was partly because Humani females preferred to mate with customers of that sort. And if Humani females were kinder and slightly more reasonable than the males, that was partly because Humani males actually liked them that way. It was one of those unpredictable quasi-bargains that makes bio-variation such a rewarding subject of study.

It might look as if Humani males had better taste in females than vice versa, but there is no point in blaming Humani females for the unruliness of Humani males. The whole reproductive game was mysterious, and the consequences far too remote for contestants to assess, while the immediate impulse toward coupling among these creatures was apparently quite urgent. Humani reproduction was especially complicated because, unlike other Snortan species, whose sexual catastrophes were pegged to a predictable cycle, leaving the rest of their time free to concentrate on the mundane business of life, young Humanies were driven to distraction day and night the whole year round by the call to propagate the species.

But this is getting ahead of our story. While the glories of Humani “sexuality,” as they portentously called it, were intense and unpredictable, and its torments sometimes protracted and agonizing; and while some Humanies were blessed their whole lives with steady, tranquil bonds of happiness while others went on for years oscillating between ecstasy, misery, and poetry in the contemplation of recalcitrant sexual objects, these were civilized refinements taking millennia to develop. For early Humanies, sex was a way to pass the time in the dark of long nights amid forests and other untamed habitats. It kept them out of all kinds of trouble while still leaving time for connubial gossip and proto-metaphysical speculation.

It may be that the complexities of Humani sexuality were hinted at by the fact that, to non-expert observers, Humani sex could look and sound like a form of torture, involving the kind of moans and groans that normally signaled Humani distress. In most cases, though, gentle sighs of satisfaction ensued, and copulation was succeeded by a pleasant stupor lasting till dawn. Intriguingly, Humani dormancy was punctuated not infrequently by disorderly private visions (random, unsolicited) of odd events that weren’t actually happening but seemed real. Humanies would wake up struggling to separate truth from illusion.

Humanies often took their nocturnal visions as messages from supernatural beings or other worlds. They sometimes included appearances, or “apparitions,” of departed Humanies, suggesting to some venturesome witnesses that life could persist after death. The regular experience of these “dreams,” as they were called, seemed to open a portal to regions of desire and fear, an uncharted beyond or a deep interior of the Humani psyche, raising the fabulous question as to whether waking life itself was anything more than a fleeting appearance. This cloudy dreaminess, a constantly looming fringe of unreality, was one of the Humanies’ most unaccountable traits. Existence and non-existence were always bumping up against each other in their minds, making them more unpredictable than creatures on most other planets.

With the aid of their superior, if dreamy, brains and sturdy appendages, Humanies spread across the whole of the planet Snorta in small groups of closely related and deeply attached Huggies. Huggie life was fairly short, but while it lasted, its protagonists were healthy, sociable, and adventurous. It was also a charming feature of life at this stage that Huggies were more or less equal in terms of dignity and resources. Being constantly on the move, they had little chance to amass grand possessions or form controlling alliances. Even the great Huggie hunters were discouraged from lording it over their kin, it being generally recognized that, no matter how prosperous you are today, you might be in need of a handout tomorrow. In Humani hindsight, the era of the simple, unassuming Huggies acquired the shimmer of a Golden Age. In later, more convoluted eras, it was looked back to with nostalgia as embodying the good essence of Humani nature which had been corrupted by advanced societies and their equivocal achievements.

Still, even Huggies, if the environment was plentiful enough, could pile up impressive wealth, and this brought into play one of the governing elements of Humani life—the relentless longing for superiority. It was not just that some Humanies had the power to acquire more of the necessities of life than others. It was that this excess over others was a central motive of their efforts. Humanies were sociable but in a relentlessly competitive way. Their dominating imperative was not simply to have what they needed to survive. It was to have more than what the Humanies around them had. The most charming object of Humani fancy could be stripped of its magic the minute others had it too.

Humanies instinctively sorted themselves into neat, orderly hierarchies, passed down through from generation to generation. The more Humani societies grew, the more splendidly top-heavy they became. Those at the summit exercised authority and power over those beneath them, using their wealth like peacock tails to flaunt and preserve their rank. Individual Humanies had titles to define their positions. On ceremonial occasions, they lined up and marched around in order, with formal dress marking everyone’s place in the scheme. Society was like a splendid, moving work of art, with each element in its place, and there were fines to keep presumptuous citizens from spoiling the parade by dressing above their station.

Following Humani usage, we will refer to the Humani drive for social superiority, and the quantum it led them to acquire, as Snoot. It went beyond the urge simply to lord it over other less fortunate individuals. Its point was to secure a place in a group that accepted your elevated position and deferred to you on that basis. Everything about Humani life was inflected by Snoot, including who you had the privilege of sleeping with or marrying. Even Humani generosity functioned to display Snoot. In the days before the invention of currency, when most resources could not easily be piled up and preserved, prosperous Humanies used their surplus goods to humiliate rivals with gifts so extravagant that the recipients could not hope to repay them. It was apparent from the early days of the gift-attack that Humanies were at least as concerned with the social and symbolic meanings of goods as with their material value. In fact, it was difficult for Humanies to relate to any element of their world directly, without thinking of how it affected their standing relative to their peers.

It is a fascinating fact that Snoot on Snorta wasn’t limited to Humanies. Other Snortan creatures behaved the same way. Some species closely related to Humanies—fellow “monkeys without tails”—were ruled by large dominant males who kept the females for themselves. Even standoffish creatures like felines exercised carefully graded deference in social situations. Humanies found the behavior of their fellow creatures a reliable source of comic metaphors to highlight their own Snoot-happy tendencies. Supercilious Humanies headed “pecking orders” just like barnyard fowl.

It is worth noting that, in a number of Humani languages, going back to early days, many words beginning with the sn sound in Snoot and in the name of the planet Snorta itself related in some way to the nose (or snout). For Humanies, this organ was strongly associated with social superiority, the lifting of the nose, as if from a bad smell, being a quintessential Humani gesture of contempt. To turn up your nose at people was to sniff at them or snub them, to be snooty, snotty, or snobby. Contemptuous remarks were snide or snarky, and could be accompanied by a snicker, a sneer, or a snort. To stick your nose into other people’s business was to snoop on them, and to report the derogatory information so gained “behind their backs,” as the Humanies liked to say, was to snitch on them.

The Humani need to keep up their Snoot is understandable when you consider how powerful and dangerous Humanies could be and how much survival in Humani life depended on keeping other Humanies either on your side or under your thumb. And the pecking order had its value for the group. It kept Humanies from fighting every time there was a conflict of interest. But when they became more capable of controlling the natural processes that governed their world and better able to accumulate goods and currency, the disparities of wealth in Snoot-driven societies became truly extraordinary. Snootorious upper-level Humanies came to consider themselves not only superior in degree to other Humanies but superior in kind, and they had the power to make this view seem like an unimpeachable truth. The Humani pecking order went from Snoobadors at the top to Snerfs at the bottom, the Snerfs being creatures deprived of all freedom, reduced to working, breeding, and raising children for their masters. In general, beings of the upper orders treated beings of the lower orders either as useful animals to be exploited or as pests to be exterminated when they happened to get in the way. As if to drive home the message, when Snoobadors were not fighting other Humanies, they spent most of their time hunting down and killing lesser beasts. Snoobadors went riding about the countryside mounted on huge graminivorous quadrupeds called Snorters the mastery of which defined the proud Snoobador image. Meanwhile, the dirty work of the hunt was done by smaller carnivorous quadrupeds called Sniffers who led the chase with their keen snouts and furious barks, never capable of guessing how few of the spoils would be theirs as a reward.

Going along with Humani Snootability was their tendency to divide up into groups, and I must admit that they were just as unfriendly to Humanies in other groups as they were to beasts and to the lower orders of their own. Indeed, they were reflexively hostile and fearful toward strangers and considered them lesser breeds—not real Humanies at all. Small groups of male Huggies were always ambushing each other in search of females, goods, and trophies of martial prowess, and the larger and more powerful Humani societies became, the more energy they devoted to fighting and plundering each other. Skill and boldness in war became the most valued Humani traits and the chief sources of Snoot. Interestingly, as one Snortan philosopher noted, Humanies were proud of taking each other’s lives and flaunted it publicly, but when it came to engendering new lives, they hunkered down in the dark so nobody could see.

The Humani proclivity for violence toward their own kind was quite severe. As their societies became more complex and sophisticated, more and more of their energies went into conquering and controlling foreign populations. For males, war led to honor, glory, fame, adventure, booty, and sexual conquests, though it also led quite frequently to death, injury, torture, disease, and deformity. For females, war often seemed like a dead loss, wasting the lives they worked so hard to foster, though they valued the warriors anyway. After all, the doughty fellows did protect them from being carried off by ruffians from other groups. For lucky females, kinship and marriage with great warriors allowed them to share the status and power of Snoobador males, while their attractions and wealth relative to other Humanies were themselves a gratifying source of Snoot.

With this description of life on Snorta, we would not want to give the impression that all Humani groups or societies were in a uniform condition. Humani progress was uneven. Going back to any point in the past, one could find plenty of Humanies at different levels of development. There were small groups of the relatively egalitarian Huggies; there were agricultural and pastoral post-Huggies; there were vast populations clumped in cities with diverse economies; and there were imperial orders where the Snoobadors ruled other societies and amassed great wealth. The male rulers of such empires could monopolize thousands of females, allowing them to generate hordes of offspring, family being always the preferred form of Humani wealth as well as the chief source and vehicle of Snoot.

Keeping so many females in confinement for the use of a single male was always a tricky business, but male Humani Snerfs could be deprived of their private parts to make them suitable for the job. Such dismembered Snerfs were called Snips. Unable to copulate and breed, they were no danger to the females and, without rival family interests of their own, they made wonderful all-purpose servants. Lower-caste Humanies were so cheap that, even though the castration process was messy and inefficient, with a high mortality rate, imperial courts boasted hordes of tough, dedicated, female-proof Snips to guard their harems. This system, however, did have a characteristic problem that regularly arose when rulers died. Leaving behind so many unsnipped sons with claims to the throne, each with a powerful mother behind him, often led to civil conflict and the slaughter of royal offspring. Curiously enough, new Humani monarches did not castrate their many brothers and half-brothers, thus converting them into docile and useful colleagues. Such refinements had to wait for later generations.

Inside Humani Heads

The most distinctive feature of the Humanies was their big-headed ability to think about the world and adapt their behavior in surprising ways. In spite of their compulsive jousting over Snoot, the behavior of Humanies was highly variable compared with other Snortan creatures, and this was largely due to the Humanies’ ability to build mental pictures of the world and act according to them. It was the key to all their successes and failures.

Mental pictures wouldn’t have been useful if they hadn’t contained a large grain of truth. Indeed, they led to the development of all kinds of helpful inventions. But Humani thinking also had certain fascinating idiosyncrasies. One of them was that Humanies’ tended to see the world in their own image. They imagined the natural world as being inhabited and controlled by supernatural beings with minds and motives curiously like those of Humanies. Hidden gods and powers were at work everywhere. Understandably, Humanies tried to bargain with them, flatter them, bribe them, and curry their favor. They developed elaborate sacrificial offerings to win their sympathy. They counted on ancestors who had gone ahead into the hereafter to help with their negotiations, and this belief in the powers of endlessly hungry and demanding ancestral ghosts, whose graves and shrines required eternal tending, augmented the centrality of Humani families. It was as if the whole cosmos was a political domain and each family had to maneuver inside it, seeking favors and outwitting their fellow Humanies. What a tricky universe! Things were a little simpler for those groups who consolidated their cosmos under the rule of single God, a divine Father with whom his children could strike a bargain or two and come to an understanding.

Some Humani families, of course, were better at orchestrating the spiritual world than others, and they benefited from the power this gave them. They portrayed the hierarchy in their social world as mirrored in the cosmos and in nature. Humanies also saw greater and lesser ranks in what they called the animal “kingdom.” Even the Humani body had a political order, with the head as its ruler. When Humanies thought of the spirit powers that ruled the world, they envisioned enhanced versions of Humani ruling families, with kings and queens served by ranks of favor-seeking sycophants just like in Snoobador courts.

For Humanies contemplating the cosmos, design and meaning were everywhere, everything had a purpose, and that purpose reinforced the order of society and the positions of the ruling families over those who served them. It was a “Great Chain of Being,” a metaphor hinting at confinement as well as connection. In some extraordinary cases, the heads of such families, queens and especially kings, achieved the status of gods, motivating their societies to erect gargantuan structures in tribute to their greatness and monumental tombs to sustain their everlasting Snoot even in death. Ancient Humanies all over Snorta left massive remains of their astounding labors for later generations to scratch their heads over. Some Humani god-kings were so far elevated over the common run that not only did they take their weapons and treasures with them into the afterlife; they took their entire retinues—wives, servants, pets, Snorters, Sniffers, and Snips all put to the sword or mounted on flaming pyres in solemn, perpetual service to the departing deity. Populating the afterlife seems to have been a nagging concern for Humani god-kings. At the risk of transgalactic moralizing, we cannot help wonder if there wasn’t something extravagant about these god-kings, some of them incapable of getting up in the morning without a fresh expense of sacrificed Humanies.

You may think that Humanies look extremely, even comically self-centered, projecting their own form of life onto the cosmos and making themselves its rulers. You may even wonder if this self-centeredness was prophetic of their ultimate demise. There was, however, a certain undeniable realism actually governing the cosmic imagination of the Humanies. Since nature and life in the Humani world were cruel, unpredictable, violent, and mysterious, with the behavior of fortune often seeming petty, mean, and treacherous, the Humani gods had those qualities too. In some cases they even surpassed the Humanies in barbarity, castrating their fathers, eating their children, and executing other revolting feats. Apparently such cruelty made them seem believable. On the whole, the behavior of the gods had an uncanny way of mimicking as well as justifying the behavior of Humani Snoobadors.

Ascent of the Glowbirds

Now we come to one of the most endearing and intriguing elements in the Humani repertoire, one that must be added for Humanies to be properly understood even though it involves a realm of experience that non-Humanies like ourselves cannot intuitively grasp. Humanies, even primitive ones, were practical creatures. They transformed the material world for their own convenience. They conquered fire and created clothing and shelter for protection from the elements, and they learned to communicate their thoughts with arbitrarily chosen physical sounds and markings on various materials; mature Humanies could choose combinations of these sounds and markings to prompt predictable inferences in well-informed listeners in just about any context. All of these things were tremendously useful, allowing the Humanies to thrive, reproduce, organize themselves, alter their environments, and generally fix things up to their liking.

But Humanies did not judge things by their practical value alone. They also responded to them in terms of the experiences these things provided in ways not directly connected with their practical import or even their Snoot. Humanies had powerful preferences for certain shapes, colors, and sounds and the ways they could be ordered and mixed. In the same way, they also responded to their food not only according to the nutrition it provided but by its effect on the sensory organs in their noses and mouths. Such Humani preferences were intensely motivating. Humani sexual behavior was also guided by impulses of this kind; Humanies copulated not only, or even primarily, to produce children but for the terrific joy of the experience. Some Humanies even sharpened the pleasure by adding a dose of pain to the occasion, just one of the many ways in which Humani pleasures were cunningly designed against the grain.

Non-Humanies can only imagine what the intensely motivational experiences that drove Humani behavior were like. Humanies saw themselves as responding to qualities that were actually in the objects that brought them about. They had a rich vocabulary to describe what pleased them, a quantum that came under the general heading of Glow. Natural objects had Glow, especially grand natural objects like mountains, waterfalls, sunsets, and stars. Trees and flowers had Glow. Certain other animals had it. Humani symbols could be endowed with Glow, and some Humanies themselves had it, particularly young Humanies with large, bright eyes, high cheekbones, symmetrically arranged features, strong bodies, and smooth, clear skin. Even Humani actions could be endowed with Glow, especially actions that accomplished great things in the face of great risks. At any moment, in the midst of any drama, a Humani might be ambushed by a sudden sensation of deeply moving Glow.

Most objects and actions were, of course, completely lacking in Glow. Otherwise life would have been just too exciting. But there were also many objects endowed with an opposite quality, somewhat contemptuously referred to as Boot. Such objects produced an intensely negative experience and motivation, a will to avoid, or even harm, rather than approach or acquire. This reaction applied to Humanies whose actions were imbued with Boot, and, we must confess, even to Humanies themselves when their strangeness or lack of Snoot made them seem unworthy of Glow.

The Humani preference for Glow had wide-ranging consequences. Though Glow could be a gift of nature, it could also be produced artificially. Necessary objects like clothing and shelter could be fashioned to impart Glow, and Humanies themselves could be re-arranged and decorated to give them glorious, extra Glow. The more leisure and resources Humanies had, the more they were preoccupied with training and decorating their bodies for maximum Glow. Words that communicated impressive truths could be patterned for Glow.. Even thoughts themselves, ideas, could have a certain Glow, which made them appealing to Humani fancy.

Stories about the gods and the deeds of the great martial heroes could be told in a way that added the Glow of the words to the Glow of the deeds, setting them in grandly patterned sounds that enchanted Humani ears. These songs were among the most prized of all Humani accomplishments. Their makers were called Glowbirds. High-ranking Humanies surrounded themselves with all kinds of skilled Glow-makers who ingeniously designed the settings in which Humanies lived and the way they appeared to others. Humani appeals to the gods were similarly endowed with sights, sounds, and smells to generate intense, moving experiences of Glow. On public occasions, doing things in a prescribed, familiar, Glow-bearing order had a strange power to coordinate and harmonize the moods of large numbers of Humanies, putting them in a special Glowzone connected with higher powers.

Objects crafted for Glow took time and skill. They could not be acquired by just anyone. So displays of Glow were also—in fact supremely—displays of Snoot. Indeed, Glow and Snoot tended to converge. Both Snoot and Glow were motivating factors that could not be explained in terms of practical necessity; both, in fact, might seem wasteful and strange from a practical, transgalactic point of view. But they must have had some advantages for Humanies because the design which made them sensitive to these non-rational factors gave the species wonderful success for millennia on a respectable-sized planet.

Glory Days

At this point we can put together an image of the Humani world in its classic phase, Chrono 1 (C-1), from the Humani point of view. It was a world of multiple realms all governed by Snoot, everything and everyone in order, from the lowliest Snerf to the loftiest Snoobador and even higher, to the God or gods who endorsed the social order and the cosmos itself. That cosmos was a created hierarchy, meaningful in every one of its parts, shot through and through with powerful and enchanting Glow. We might say that it was, in itself, a sublime Glowzone, its Glow reflecting its power and the power of Glow testifying to its value. Every being in the world could see itself in its proper place, fulfilling its task in the great order of Glow and deriving from it greater or lesser Snoot.

In its social expression, the Humani power not only to see Glow in the world but to endow objects with Glow was carefully crafted by those in power to sustain and enhance their Snoot. Every every aspect of the social order was ornamented with glorious Glow, conjuring up a feast of the senses whose excess made it all the more effective in demonstrating the surplus power of Snoot. Snoobadors had armies of Glowbirds to provide them with all the accoutrements that made them shine.

Some of these Glowbirds had enormous skill, far beyond anything that the rulers of society could have mustered on their own. They were the supreme curators of the cosmic Glowzone. Yet they remained, nonetheless, mere servants or, sometimes, even Snerfs, and so were endowed with far less Snoot than their masters. The most important of them were the ones who could tell stories of the gods, ancestors, and heroes of the past. They endlessly promoted the belief that maximum Snoot, as exemplified in the heroism of martial greatness, is shot through with Glow and therefore the greatest thing in the world.

Humanies on Stage

Despite the competitive nature of the Humanies, the established orders of Snoot, enhanced with powerful Glow, often made their societies stable, cohesive and, indeed, inspiring. Humanies found it hard to dissent from the feelings or opinions of the groups to which they belonged. Doing so risked loss of Snoot. And once individual Humanies had reached an opinion about something, knowingly or not they did their level best to ignore any evidence against it. This was even more true of groups, which were extremely punitive toward anyone whose view of things diverged from the consensus or questioned the beliefs that defined the group. Unorthodox behavior was annoying but unorthodox thinking was intolerable. Humanies were so eager to achieve maximum Snoot at all times that they did everything possible to avoid the slightest appearance of being out of step with the group. Humanies celebrated relentless Team Spirit. No matter what Humanies said or did, they were acutely concerned with what it said about them, how it positioned them with respect to their fellow Humanies, and whether it could lead to approval or scorn.

This made Humanies supremely theatrical beings, always worried about appearances. In the course of a day, a civilized Humani would traverse a great variety of social situations, each allocating a special role to the participants. Some of these roles were temporary ones like “roadside informant,” “fortune-teller,” “drinking buddy,” or “friend with benefits.” Others were lifelong professions taking decades of training. But each had a code that dictated how behavior in that role would be interpreted by others, and they often came with elaborately designed settings and rituals to harmonize what the Humanies were supposed to be doing and feeling in their different roles. Humanies were expected to behave differently as an instructor in a classroom than as a student; they would behave differently at an occasion celebrating a birth than an occasion marking a death. But in every case they would be aware of how they were “playing their roles” and what it was saying about them. They would do everything possible to manage impressions for the maximum Snoot. Male and female Humanies had different styles for displaying their excellence, and so could members of different races and classes. In all cases, it was not enough to be functionally adequate in one’s role. One had to look the part. And with regard to one’s standing in general, it wasn’t enough to be good or fortunate. One had to appear so as well. Happiness itself was a competitive quantum. The first step for acquiring Snoot in any situation was to give the impression of having it already. There were apparently some Humanies who kept their heads down and avoided attention instead of seeking Snoot, but it was the Snoot-driven ones who dominated.

The theatrical element of Humani behavior and Humanies’ acute sensitivity to the difference between appearance and reality often triggered another response that seems utterly foreign to those not endowed with Humanicity. It was called Hoot, and those experiencing it were said to be Hooting. When Humanies came in contact with things that contradicted their normal expectations in certain surprising ways, they experienced a sudden, spontaneous mental and physical response which, to non-Humani observers, resembled violent distress—uncontrollable, shuddering contractions of the lungs and diaphragm leading, in extreme cases, to a bending over and clutching of the abdomen, slapping of the knee, and other compulsive gestures. Humanies in the grips of Hoot emitted little explosions of sound through the throat and larynx at various rates and pitches—deeper and slower from the diaphragm, higher and faster from the larynx. Humani facial expressions became radically contorted—eyes narrowing, eyebrows lifting or wrinkling, mouths gaping, lips curling and pulling back for a show of teeth that might in other circumstances have been frightening. It is, indeed, almost frightening to imagine large groups of Humanies all doubled over at the same time, grinning, Hooting it up and flashing their teeth, but the fact is that Humanies experienced this state as intensely pleasurable, and the sight of other Humanies Hooting could in itself be a cause of grand, uproarious Hoot, showing the state to be extremely contagious. As with Humani sex, the appearance of distress and unwilling convulsiveness was completely misleading. Humanies loved to Hoot. They got together in groups to Hoot en masse, led by clever specialists in the off-kilter and the off-beat. Such gatherings were like protracted vocal orgies only with many more orgasms than the sexual equipment of Humanies could normally supply.

It is an interesting wrinkle that not only did the expressions of Humanies in the state of maximum amusement become contorted and grotesque—in other words, full of Boot—but the sight of Glowbious people being happy was only moderately interesting to other Humanies while the sight of grotesque, Bootable people being happy seemed to express a pure, absolute state of joy.

It is no simple matter to identify precisely what triggered Humani hooting, but certainly it was closely connected with Snoot. Creatures pretending to have more Snoot than they were entitled to were inevitably Hooted at, and the spectacle of Humanies looking or acting or dressing in any way that contradicted their proper place in the pecking order was definitely occasion for Hoot. The more radically the dignified norms of Snoot were inverted, the more intense the incitement to Hoot. The spectacle of a Snerf in Snoobador’s garb or a Snoobador dressed or behaving like a Snerf was irresistibly Hootable. Again, it was the grotesque that betokened joy. Because Snoobadors often pretended to be above the embarrassments of the body, the exposure of their bodily functions—belching, for example, or farting—was also an inevitable occasion to Hoot as was the sight of animals looking or behaving like their Humani betters. Unlike inversions of the Humani pecking order, which were always regarded as comically pretentious, animals behaving above their station were amusing in an endearing way. On the other hand, for members of particular Humani groups, the ways of dressing and behaving of social outsiders, along with the undignified manners of the lower classes, were not only to Boot but to Hoot at.

Hooting was fun for everyone except the ones it was aimed at. Still, hooting brought Humanies together, and every group needed not only strangers but also low-prestige members of their own group to be the target of its Hoot. A clever remark achieving Hoot at someone’s expense could keep a group of otherwise competitive Humanies in tune for decades while haunting the victim for a lifetime.

Hooting was deeply embedded in Humani life. Humanies even had festivals where they acted out the kinds of inversions that normally generated Hoot—times of the year, for example, when a joker sat in the mayor’s seat and the mayor dressed like a clown. It is an interesting question as to whether such festivals, and Hoot in general, just added bite to Humani conformism and hierarchy or whether it actually softened their effects. Did Hooting festivals, with their brief hiatus from the canons of Humani Snoot, undermine the structure of the social order? Or did they simply make that order more stable the rest of the time? Did they weaken the pecking order by hinting at its arbitrariness? Or did they cement that order all the more firmly by showing how little it mattered that everyone was in on the joke?

Hooting could give pleasure by exposing the pretensions of the Snoobadors, but it could also be a way of building consensus against strangers or Humanies at the bottom of the pack. It could even be a way of punishing any Humanies who attempted to rise above their appointed station. Hoot was a menace to everyone lacking in Glow, suggesting there was something telling in its aggressive, tooth-flashing appearance. If you were clever enough to handle it, Hoot could allow you to say things that you might not otherwise get away with, but Hoot might also be needed only because what you wanted to say was either embarrassingly snerfy or cruel. Humanies could make use of Hoot to mock entire groups of people, cementing their mutual bonds with the pleasure of Hoot.

It is our impression that a true understanding of Hoot would go a long way toward solving the mystery of the Humanies. And there is one more factor that should be mentioned in this context. From the days of the Huggies, Humanies discovered that certain substances, usually found in non-animated Snortan species, when introduced into the Humani bloodstream, produced notable changes in Humani mood, thinking, and behavior. Some of these substance had a salubrious effect, but the pleasure they provided often came at a high cost, though the immediate effects were often pleasurable. Humani levels of animation could be enhanced into ecstasy or lowered into dormancy, and dreamlike visions could be evoked. They offered an attractive escape from Humani life which suggests the ambivalent attachment of the species to its very existence. These substances could be ingested in various ways, the most popular of these substances, made from fermented grains, being drink, which had a remarkable currency across the planet. Drink removed a good deal of the theatrical self-consciousness required by Snoot, weakening some of the barriers between people of different orders, but it could also marvelously increase the power and violence of Team Spirit and Hoot. In general, drink and other, mind-altering substances pushed Humani behavior toward the extremes and their influence should be assumed in just about any Snortan context.

Humani Violence

At this point it may seem that our picture of Humanies in groups is rather tranquil, dwelling on their devotion to their families, their concern for others’ approval, their bonding over Glow and Hoot and Snoot, their clingy unwillingness to depart from the orthodoxy of the group, and the grand collective structures of hierarchy, belief, and ritual they built together. In spite of all this Team Spirit, however, individual Humanies did seek to boost their own or their family’s Snoot at the expense of others’ in the group. They formed all kinds of allegiances to advance their interests. In fact, Humani bonding actually facilitated conflict in everyday life. And in the oppositions between Humani societies, the full drawbacks of group solidarity became clear. The Humani susceptibility to Snoot, which drove them to seek superiority within each community, also fed their desire to assert the superiority of their groups against others, to see other societies as being utterly different from their own, worthy of being Hooted at or even destroyed, their goods and females captured and their gods defiled. This is a sad part of this wonderful story.

War, raiding, and piracy as options were all the more plausible to Humani leaders because their neighbors could be expected to eye them with the same ambitions. Fear of others, then, was constant. It brought Humanies together. Just as solidarity facilitated hostility toward outsiders, hostility toward outsiders intensified solidarity. Humani kingdoms, stacked in their pecking orders, faced outward in unity toward opposing societies, full of those strange-looking hootable Others who, unlike Us, eat abominable food, communicate with garbled, unintelligible sounds, and take the most outrageous measures to adorn themselves with Boot as if it were Glow, performing strange rites before ridiculous gods and behaving as if they are worthier of Snoot than Humani Snoobadors even though they lack the slightest notion of what Snoot actually means.

Humani solidarity had troublesome consequences. The one thing one could say in its favor was that when Humani social orders broke down and solidarity was lost, the consequences were even worse. Group members turned their fears of strangers against each other, leading to shocking atrocities. The normal bonds of restraint would break loose, starting cycles of intimate and prodigious violence—friend upon friend, neighbor upon neighbor, even families dividing into hostile camps.

But it must be noted that hostility was not Humanies’ only stance toward outsiders. Strangeness could be a source of Glow. Snoobador elites could idealize their foreign counterparts, even mimicking their manners and accoutrements to enhance their local Snoot. And they were willing to trade with the barbarians. But wars between groups were still constant, and because of their peculiar solidarity and concern for Snoot, all ranks of Humani soldiers obeyed orders to fight at the risk of their lives. Even the most eminent Snoobadors did not spare themselves from leading the charge, and Humani Glowbirds celebrated the heroes’ lack of self-concern .

There were, of course, practical rewards for success in battle. It could bring money or prizes, including fertile females of the most entrancing Glow; but for the noble heroes, these were considered mere distractions from their all-important Snoot. It is also worth noting that, when Snoobadors found their Snoot being challenged by other individual Humanies—and they were especially sensitive to any glance at the chastity of their wives and mothers, delicate bearers of family integrity—they responded differently based on the social standing of the offender. Insulted by those below them, a simple thrashing would do the job, a gentlemanly walking stick being the instrument of choice. From their insulting peers, however, they demanded a public apology to restore their Snoot, with a potentially deadly fight in the offing in case of a refusal. Such encounters were mediated by friendly associates of the two parties, often involving delicate negotiations about the form of the apologies or the level of the violence required to restore everybody’s Snoot. It was painful when death was the result, but for a Humani Snoobador or a would-be one, the worst thing that could happen was being refused an encounter on the grounds that one was not significant enough to be resented.

Chrono 2—The Age of Hope

At this point my transgalactic readers will be wondering if upper crust Humanies weren’t a little silly to be so hell-bent on Snoot. Being obsessed with having more of everything than other Humanies and being superior to them, didn’t this mean the Snoobadors depended upon other, less snootorious Humanies to validate their own superiority? What would they do without these snootless witnesses? Weren’t the Snoobadors really Snerfs to the lowly creatures who appeared to obey and serve them? And weren’t all the treasures that brought the Glow and Snoot to the Snoobador Glowzone mere illusions given that their appeal would vanish the moment other Humanies had them too? Even worse, weren’t the Humani gods and heroes just as silly as the Humanies themselves to demand Humani violence and sacrifice as tributes to their own Snoot? Couldn’t the Humanies find better models to worship and imitate? And wasn’t it pitiful how masses of ordinary Humanies followed their war-leaders into the ranks of death just to avoid losing Snoot in the eyes of their fellows? Wasn’t the lemming courage of most Humanies more like cowardice, feckless stupidity rather than heroism? At least early Humani violence had a certain intimacy to it. You might even be tempted to spare your opponent; or you might eat him in recognition of his marvelous fighting spirit. But the collective violence of organized societies and their exorbitant pecking orders could look like expertly orchestrated insanity.

Still, I do not want to leave the impression that Snoot was an entirely irrational or artificial quantum. It did encourage Humanies to cultivate excellence in things that were important, and while there was always a theatrical dimension to its pursuit, that does not mean it was phony. And not to have any claim to the respect of one’s fellow Humanies would have been intolerable, not to mention dangerous.

Nevertheless, the perennial drawbacks of Snoot were not lost upon gifted Humanies at the lower end of the pecking order and even some who, while possessing conventional Snoot, were seeking new forms of it by thinking their own thoughts, a tendency which eventually led to the second great era of Humani life on Snorta—Chrono 2 (C-2). Around the same time in many different places, the epic celebrations of Humani heroes came to be rivaled by new songs, poems, and stories invented by rising teachers, the Magi, who looked to new gods and ideals for inspiration. These teachers tried to quash the Humani obsession with family Snoot. They wanted to extend the respect, consideration, and tender feelings that bound families together to wider circles of sympathy. They tried to replace the heroic image of the Humanies with a more modest one, recognizing Humani weaknesses, accepting them for what they were, and trying to make them less deadly. In doing so, they sought a broader Humani solidarity than had ever been attempted, a solidarity not based upon hierarchy and opposition to enemies but upon what all Humanies had in common. It was a vision of love and compassion.

This is one of the most fascinating developments in the whole saga of Snorta. These Magi were grand and noble souls, supreme embodiments of Glow at its best, and the gods they envisioned were above the pettiness of that obsessive Snoot which had made the old Humani gods seem like even more Hootable versions of the Snoobadors. The Magi of C-2 investigated the Humani mind and character with unprecedented subtlety in the hope of reducing its subservience to Snoot. They taught the Humanies who tried to look down on others that, if they persisted, they themselves would suffer pain after death as well as the ultimate loss of that most precious Snoot which came from shining in the eyes of God and belonging to the great chorus of worshippers in future lives. With this lesson, the Magi raised the sights and expanded the horizons of Humani existence, extending the consequences of Humani action from the mortal sphere to the ideal and the eternal. They summoned cosmic resources to bridge Humani divisions. Some of them even dispensed with the gods altogether, seeing the cosmos as a vast cloud of appearances perpetually arising from nothing, a cloud the Humani mind could disperse with the proper form of attention.

The influence of these schemes to enlarge the Humani circle of sympathy and elevate Humani perspectives was truly incalculable and wonderful. They softened the texture of Humani experience, bringing hope to the planet and the possibility of change. They strengthened the belief in Humani power and responsibility, bringing a new subtlety of observation to bear upon Humani life and new techniques to explore the Humani mind. Life stories acquired new variety and interest, as individuals converted by a thousand different paths from the old ways to the new or between the new systems, and these systems themselves were always developing and changing, often in response to each other. The Magi gave new dignity to those who had lacked Snoot, moderating both physical violence and Hoot, directing Hoot at the foibles of Humani-kind rather than individual Humanies or marginal Humani groups. Their teachings inspired deeds of kindness public and private, leading many to give up their old lives, separate from their families, and start new lives together in search of perfection. It was a thing of enormously powerful Glow.

To elevate the collective identities of all Humanies, the Magi exploited some of the most distinctive resources of the Humani mind. They imagined gods who gave up the Snoot of their rank and privileges and suffered terrible fates to relieve the spiritual condition of Humani-kind. Or they promoted the idea that all of life was a dream so that the pernicious meaning of Humani hierarchies simply dissolved into nothing. But in the long term, the attempts of the new teachers to cure the Humani addiction to Snoot were, it must be confessed, a little disappointing. As new ways of life became established under the sponsorship of new gods, all the old trappings of Snoot came trooping back—precedence of rank, spectacles of wealth, extravagant technologies of Glow, wars of acquisition, demands for service and submission. The new orders of merit did not replace the old orders of birth but grew up alongside them; old and new wound together like vines on a single stalk. Snoot was portrayed as an illusion, a limb of non-being, a diseased part of an unjust temporal world, but that did not keep the new regimes from generating new orders of Snoot celebrated in new Snoobador spectacles fashioned by brilliant Glowbirds.

Meanwhile, the new ambition to create justice for all was typically postponed till the life after death, which seems to have been enough to satisfy most Humanies. Strangest of all, the followers of the new gods, as they became more and more numerous and powerful, fought and killed each other just like the unenlightened generations that came before. This happened in spite of the fact that their gods were now mostly gods of love and compassion rather than gods of war. Even followers of the same gods could not resist savaging each other over subtle differences of belief. Truth became a field of battle, power in argument a new source of Snoot, and sins against orthodoxy more offensive than ever. Humanies could keep the new rational and, so to speak, humane vision of life in a glowzone corner of their minds while their wild hearts led them to the same old quest for Snoot. Instead of disappearing, the old heroic world acquired a new cast featuring heroes of a different sort—heroes on holiday from their everyday virtues.

Thousands of generations of Humanies on Snorta had passed in C-1, the heroic era of untrammeled Snoot, but C-2, the idealistic phase in which Snoot was inflected by the teachings of the Magi, was relatively brief, remaining dominant for only about 150 generations—roughly 3000 Humani years—before giving way to another, final, even more complexly mixed and confusing phase. Humanies were intensely aware of this late change and spent a great deal of energy trying to understand it, and no two Humani historians gave the same account of it. All of them recognized the importance of certain developments late in C-2 when gifted Humani idealists attempted to break away from Snoot-based conformity and deference to authority in matters of knowledge in favor of a new emphasis on the need for individuals to understand the truth for themselves. This was made possible in part by a new technology that allowed many Humanies in advanced parts of the world to own their own copies of the Magi’s truth-bearing Scripts, which they were now encouraged to interpret for themselves. The goal was a deeper, more personal experience of the ideal powers that were supposed to transform the behavior of individual Humanies. Over the centuries, a number of Magi had developed similar programs, with varying success, but the new, Script-based idealism was uniquely transformative. Setting itself against the older heroic model of C-1, it was even more critical of the Magi of C-2, seeing the institutions they spawned as no less subservient to Snoot than the poetic products of their epic forebears.

The emerging Magi at the end of C-2 displayed a new urgency and intensity. They clung to the Scripts, but they wanted to clear away all the trappings that had accumulated around them and get back to ground zero. They were suspicious of Snoot and immune to Hoot. Their message was always the same—and it was the message of all late Humani preachers. We have a great truth and a great Script, they proclaimed, but you are not living up to it. You seem to be asleep, and it’s time to wake up! Wake up! Wake up, today, and change your life!

These Magi demanded humility before the powerful God whose presence inspired their texts, but their belief in the novelty of their truth gave them a grand sense of superiority over those who did not accept it—those pitiful creatures who lacked the courage to read the Scripts for themselves. It was not long, however, before the Scriptorians, as they were called, began disagreeing with each other and going to war over their differences just like the older Magi. Scriptorian individualism brought proliferating controversy and dissent. The more passionately Humanies believed, the more they disagreed with each other, and the more rapidly they splintered into new sects. Team Spirit became ever more intense and divisive. Whereas C-1 violence and conquest had been motivated by the crude and simple craving for heroic grandeur and the goods that came with it, at the end of C-2, moral idealism, intellectual subtlety, passionate obedience, and the claims of humility showed themselves to be equally dangerous. Piety led to intense scrutiny, which led to idiosyncrasy, to eccentricity, to madness, hatred, folly, death and turmoil for hundreds of years.

Chrono 3—The Age of Suspicion

The lessons of C-2 generated a new critical, suspicious—or even a little cynical—spirit on Snorta, targeting both the heroic ideals of C-1 and the religious ideals of C-2. The free-wheeling individualism of the Scriptorians was preserved, but with it came a frank irony toward idealistic inspiration of all sorts, a concerted effort to suppress sectarian controversy, and an ambition to confine religious disputes to the inner realm of conscience. Since high ideals had led to chaos, life was to be based now on Reason alone—The Razor, as it was called—without traditional dogma or private inspiration. New systems of law were developed to protect the rights of individuals against exploitation by the Snoobador elites and against the collective hunger for conformity on the part of the masses. Trade and mercantile activity—indeed, work itself—long disdained by the rulers of the earlier phases, gained new prestige. The study of nature, which had long been a way of investigating the power and goodness of the Creator, now acquired momentum in its own right. Powerful discoveries were made and new technologies were born. It was a time of marvelous intellectual daring.

The devotees of The Razor prided themselves on rejecting all tradition and authority, which they viewed as kooky collections of fanatical self-centered delusions. Now, at last, Humanies would investigate the world just as they found it in front of them rather than indulging in fantastical dreams of other worlds. Instead of seeing Snorta and Marrant as created by beings like themselves, with minds and powers like their own, the wielders of The Razor saw a world that was indifferent to Humani concerns but whose elements could be manipulated for Humani benefit. They gave up the psychological comfort of living in a meaningful cosmos with a special Snoozone for Humanies; instead, they embraced the comfort of living in a world they were making gradually more amenable to Humani needs.

At this time, Snortan history took an interesting turn. The developments of C-1 and C-2 had occurred in many places across Snorta. Taken together, these places were known as Oldoria. But there was one huge landmass largely separated by water from the rest of Snorta where Huggies still roamed, without access to the science, technology, and learning that led to C-3. Now, however, this sequestered continent was opened up to exploitation by the established Oldorian powers that had dominated C-2. Even though it was already inhabited by some notable civilizations, they took it as an empty field of endeavor. They called it Humanika.

The original inhabitants of Humanika had been building great monuments, forming coalitions, and warring against each other for centuries just like in C-1 on the rest of Snorta. Their first response to the invasion was to recruit the Oldorian foreigners for assistance in their local wars and to trade for their fine tools and weapons. When things turned hostile, they resisted the invaders for centuries, fighting them directly or playing them off against each other as they vied to dominate the continent. But by the time the original Humanikans recognized the full danger posed by invaders, it was too late for them to put aside their differences, and it is doubtful they could ever have succeeded in overcoming their more numerous and better-equipped adversaries. The invaders of Humanika had too many advantages over its original inhabitants, not only because of their military might but because they brought Oldorian diseases to which the original Humanikans were particularly vulnerable. In a few centuries the invaders had taken over almost all of Humanika, combining forces into a few large states and imposing all the old forms of dominion on the original inhabitants.

Humanika had wonderful natural resources and a grand diversity of environments. Conquering it gave the invaders exhilarating Snoot. They throve and increased their numbers. Over the generations, more and more Oldorians crossed the ocean to join the project of making a “new world.” Together with the original settlers, they created the culture that came to represent C-3. Its most distinctive aspect was a belief in The Leap—a very grand and general sense of having left the Oldorian past behind. Humanikans believed that history was making a new start in Humanika. They were getting rid of all the old pieties and traditions, and putting life on a new, experimental, individualistic basis. Humanika would be a place of freedom, a place where “All Humanies Are Humanies.” This was known as the AHAH! principle. What it really meant was—no more family hierarchies, no more kings and queens, no more damned Snoobadors! Humanikans invented a national government devoted to the principles of the Leap, with a set of heroic national legends to support it—Oldorian heroes crossing the hostile ocean, conquering the noble but simple original Humanikans, developing the frontier, shucking off Oldorian powers, building a country to attract immigrants fleeing the tyranny of the past. It was all a tribute to the freedom and power of the Common Humani to build a world for everyone.

It must be said that the AHAH! principle was a beautiful notion. The Magi of C-2 had tried to undermine the ultimate significance of worldly Snoot, but rarely had anyone suggested that all Humanies should have equal standing in the everyday world of Snorta. Numerous Oldorian Glowbirds and Scriptorians in the late pre-Leap phases had contributed to the idea, but it was the Humanikans who made AHAH! a slogan and tried to live it. But if the AHAH! principle was the essence of the Leap, Humanikan legends still needed heroes. Instead of kings and queens, knights and sages, they looked to the founding Humanikans who invented the AHAH! principle and the political order behind it. They honored the soldiers who fought against the resistant Oldorian powers. They praised ordinary folk—trappers, woodsmen, rail-splitters, miners, cowpunchers, soldiers, and especially farmers, who for a long time composed the bulk of the population. Leaper heroes found Snoot in the rejection of all the Oldorian trappings. Humanika was supposed to be a place where individuals could make their own way by their own effort, without paying tribute to the appointed heroes of the past, but Humanikans treasured the heroes who could do that all the same.

The emergence of the Humanikans solidified C-3 on Snorta, and its Leaper influence spread across the planet. In addition to the AHAH! principle, there was another element of C-3 cultures of which the Humanikans were especially proud, and that was their form of government—Humanocracy. Humanika was to be run by Humanikans for Humanikans. Its Glow was to shine as proof to all Snortans that ordinary Humanies could govern themselves, without the noisome pack of Snoobadors. Political society could be a collection of equal individuals instead of a hierarchy.

At the same time, though, the founding Humanikan leaders felt the dangers of putting either the elected rulers or the masses of Humanika in charge. The Humanocracy they constructed was a complex machinery, with powers divided against each other to avoid these dangers. Humanikan legislators and executives were supposed to keep each other in check and there were judges to supervise the contest.

There was a new theory of Humani motivation that came with this arrangement. Instead of seeing Humanies as living for Snoot in the order of the Glowzone, which had been the guiding Oldorian principle, now they were supposed to be driven by a quantum called “Razor Sharpness.” Their natural goal was to agglomerate the material resources upon which happiness is based. For this reason they were called Glommers. Society was now thought of as a contract entered into by individuals Glommers, and the government was charged only with keeping the competition between them relatively peaceful and fair. Law was the ultimate arbiter. Humanikan Snoot came to be based on the value of this form of government, and it was a source of cohesion. Instead of relying upon descent from common ancestors to hold the nation together, Humanika depended on an idea about politics in the minds of individuals. This conception attracted adherents from all over Snorta.

For the first two hundred years or so, the Humanikan version of The Leap looked like an enormous success. Its ways of thinking and organizing spread everywhere. Under the sway of razor-sharp Glommers, old empires broke up and new states arose putting the masses of individual Humanies in charge. Humanika intervened in terrible wars between Oldorian powers. Eventually, the kings and queens that were left on the planet became little more than ceremonial icons, while Glom, the Humanikan style of competition, technological innovation, and trade, carried all before it.

It was the victory of a wonderfully simple idea. Instead of the Oldorian regime, with its orders and Snoobador privileges and hallowed customs, its gods and shrines and barriers between people, now everything was up for negotiation in markets open to everyone. The selfishness that was a vice in Oldoria became a principle of energy in Humanika. The domains of ethics, economics, and politics were all part of the same system of exchange, and if there were any doubts about the value of this bargain, Humanomics, the technical science of Glom, took care of them. Through a vast system of trade governed by the minute adjustments of individual agents, the Razor Sharpness of Glommers, working for themselves, naturally produced the best result for all by discovering the most efficient means to accomplish everything. The freedom from the overarching design that was supposed to govern the old, Snoot-happy Glowzone was the key feature of this system. It was a maze without a plan, a mere machine that didn’t need to know what it was doing, driven by its cogs for their own benefit in a way that served the whole. Theoretically, that was the Glow of it. And the benefits were impressive.

Had The Leap actually conquered the power of Snoot and had the Humanikans succeeded in leaving the foibles of Oldoria behind? Alas, again it was not so easy. In Humanika the snooball quest for group identity was as urgent as ever, only it took a somewhat different form. Just like the Magi-followers of C-2, the supposedly razor-sharp Glommers of C-3 divided into ranks, determined now by wealth rather than family history—though the wealth was transmitted in families all the same, and each generation did its best to boost the next. And there was another hitch. If they had ever existed, truly razor-sharp Glommers, having acquired all the resources they needed for a happy life, would have promptly retired to enjoy their riches. But that was not the Humanikan Dream. Instead, Humanikan Glommers spent their lives piling up ever more wealth in competition with each other. As a result, the discrepancy between the winners and the losers in Humanika exceeded anything that could have been imagined even in the days of the old Glowzone. What was still more remarkable was that, even though Humanikans of middle standing had such luxuries as the kings and queens of Oldoria would have envied, that still didn’t call a halt to Humanikan competition. Everyone wanted more and no one wanted to be on the bottom. The quest for Snoot was still going full tilt and razor-sharp Glow was just a new way of flaunting it.

Of course it was remarkable and promising that Snoot was no longer based primarily on family identity, which was obviously an irrational principle. It was also refreshing that, in the somewhat more rational world of C-3, there were many ways an individual could “grow a Snoot.” If others had more Glom than you did, you could surpass them in charm or sense of Hoot or even in trivial pursuits like making paper airplanes. You could demolish them in games or sports. You could get into a snootier school or have more, Snootier friends. Snoot, even in the age of Glom, was far less rigid and holistic after The Leap than in earlier phases. It set Humanies apart in a less sharp and absolute way than the snooball ranks of the past. No matter how servile they might be, no one in C-3 would have given his life to accompany the Humanikan president into the next world. So there was a limit to how much Humani winners could lord it over each other and how cruelly the losers could be humiliated. “All Humanies Are Humanies” was as much of a founding text for Humanikans as the Scripts had been for the Magi and Scriptorians of C-2, even if it was just as imperfectly carried out.

Overall, then, the culture of The Leap made Snoot less monolithic, less haughty, less official and less formal, but its hold remained. Sad to say, with the suppression of family Snoot, Humanies, including Humanikans, also developed new, comically irrational group-oriented bases for Snoot that were just as powerful as the old ones. Humanies across the technologically developed parts of the world looked down on those elsewhere, considering them backward and inferior types. While the Magi of C-2 had emphasized the common descent of Humani-kind, leading C-3 intellectuals came to measure peoples’ worth by their Glom-level of development and explained the differences in biological terms. Deficient Humanies had not made it to The Leap.

Worst of all, Leapers took minor physical differences between Humani groups as signs of mental and moral inferiority. Because the planet Snorta was quite close to its sun, Marrant, many Humanies had skins darkened by solarity. For millennia, light skin had been associated with the privilege of Snoobadors who did not have to work out in the sun. There were also broader chromatic differences among Humani groups based on their adaptation to different climes. The dominant groups in the areas of Snorta that started the migration to Humanika had the pale skins that tended to develop in colder temperatures, while Humanies in warmer climates had darker skins. Paleness of skin thus became a source of Snoot and darkness became vulnerable to Boot. Lighter Humanies took their ability to dominate and exploit darker ones as proof that such people deserved to be dominated and exploited, producing a stubborn cycle of chromatic oppression. Even in the land of Humanocracy and “All Humanies Are Humanies,” lighter members of each group enjoyed a status advantage over their peers, and the darkest groups were severely disadvantaged. And sadly, the targets of this oppression were not immune to its effects. Even among the members of chromatically disadvantaged groups, darkness was considered to be unsnooty and an extensive whitening industry grew up to assuage chromatic insecurity.

Special historical circumstances made chromatism a difficult Humanikan problem. Its southern regions had been settled by a cadre of Oldorian immigrants still devoted to Snoobador ways. For centuries they had lived off the labor of millions of imported Humanies purchased for firearms and intoxicants from native traders in solarized regions of Snorta and carried across the waters against their will. This led to conflict between the Snoobador system of the South and the Glommer system of the North which could only be settled with a vicious civil war, and though the Northern Leapers won a military victory, the AHAH! struggle remained ongoing. It was curious that the land most devoted to the Leap had not left behind the most vicious snooball dynamics. Even the Humanikan civil war did not solve the status issue between the races or remove the general bane of chromatism.

The difficult thing about chromatism, like other snooball Humani prejudices, was that its power did not depend only upon opinions about Humanies with the features in question. It was not, in other words, simply a matter of belief, though it may have begun that way. Chromatism was brought into play by the mere knowledge that a person belonged to a snootified category. Wealth and poverty worked the same way. Individual Humanies did not have to believe either that poor people or chromatically stigmatized people were inferior to treat them less respectfully or begrudge them attention. Similarly, the mere knowledge that Humanies were high-Glommers or chromatically blessed was enough to bring them deference apart from any belief in their superiority. Snootorious quanta like chromatic state and Glom-status were objective social factors that had their impact on everyone, including the members of the Snoot-deprived groups themselves.

Humanies at Play

Why did The Leap, with its great instrument, The Razor, fail in the struggle ot leave Snoot and the Humani past behind? We can find a hint in the way Humanies, especially Humanikans, spent their time when they were not working, when their spirits and imaginations had leisure to follow their own course. If physically active Humanies were left together to amuse themselves, what did they do? Quite predictably, they divided up into teams to oppose one another in the accomplishment of completely arbitrary goals as baffling and pointless as tossing an air-filled globe made of animal skins through an iron hoop fastened ten feet above the ground. (Putting balls into holes seemed to be a common Humani peccadillo.) There were rules about the means which could be used to accomplish goals of Humani games, but within the rules the players could go far beyond what is permissible in ordinary life to muscle, bedevil, and outwit their opponents. Deception and trickery were an accepted part of the game, and even cheating was countenanced as long as it was not too obvious. Teams were given points each time they accomplished the goal, the winner being the team with the most points, and scores were kept for individual players as well, so in addition to the usual Us-Them snooball dynamic, each team had internal competition and a pecking order based on the individual accomplishments of the players. (As with other social situations, strong external opposition heightened the solidarity and cooperation among the players, and strong competition between team members weakened their performance against the foe.) Like the tribal groups of Oldoria, the teams had flags and uniforms and totem-animal brands to distinguish themselves from their opposition. They carried on superstitious team traditions just like Snoobador families. Trophies were awarded to the winners just like in war, and there were shrines to fallen players of the past.

These leisure contests of the Humanies were called Crunches and the participants Crunchies. At the height of C-3, Crunching became professionalized and the stars earned enormous Glom while audiences paid a fortune to attend Crunch matches. Millions watched simultaneously through electronic media, often yelling at the screen and stamping their feet with excitement as if they were viewing the spectacle in person. Attractive females in revealing dress bounced and cheered on the sidelines of the arena to excite the players and the crowd, suggesting the sexual and genetic benefits of victory. At least in theory, though, the essential rewards of the Crunches remained the pure Snoot—the love and appreciation of vast audiences of Humanies, drunk with Team Spirit, who identified with their team and lived and died with it while pouring scorn on other teams. All the psychological patterns of behavior associated with war and social competition were thus reproduced in Crunchtime. And while activities of this sort did not typically become subjects for epic poetry, the interests of the audience were served by an army of chroniclers who evaluated each contest and preserved the memories of the top Crunchies over the decades, constantly reliving great moments and disputing about the relative merits of the heroes. It was a full-blown snooball saturnalia in the middle of the Razor’s Age.

Evidently, then, when the advanced Humanies of C-3 had their way, they reverted to the most irrational and destructive patterns of Oldorian behavior, but they did so in fancy rather than in fact. Or rather, they did do in fancy as well as in fact, for Humanies still practiced war and honored war-heroes too. Crunching was only the next best thing. Team tangles were the most war-like of their diversions, but they found many other ways of competing to amuse themselves. There were sit-down games of strategy, with the usual rules and arbitrary goals. There were foot-races and riding contests. Humanies pitted their favorite animal subordinates against each other, racing or, indeed, fighting to the death. And a competitive aspect could be added to harmless activities like flower-gardening and vegetable-growing with the assistance of honors and prizes. Pleasant exercises like hiking and swimming were approached as heroic accomplishments, and even harmful activities like over-eating and binge drinking could be celebrated in contests. Humanies even kept a popular book in which, after careful authentication, the finest and the worst performances in every Humani endeavor were recorded, multiplying almost to infinity the potential means for acquiring Snoot. Many of these activities were, in themselves, distinctly unsnootorious, but that did not keep a pecking order from developing among their practitioners. It was the essence of Snoot to be always relative.

Humani males lived for competition, but females often participated no less enthusiastically. (In the perpetual search for Snoot, females also engaged in contests to display their erotic Glow, though as C-3 developed, such contests were considered unworthy of razor-sharp citizens, being too much like the exhibitions in which farmers displayed their cows.) Eventually, Humani Glowbirds developed machines that simulated the conditions of war on a screen, allowing young Humanies—especially males—to spend endless crunchtime hours rehearsing their killing routines and piling up trophy points.

It is important to note that not all Humani amusements were competitive and violent. Many of them were solely devoted to Glow rather than Snoot. Humanies reveled in glowbious patterns of sound, often conjoined with words which could express love as well as violence and hate. Humani males and females came together to move their bodies in rhythm with such sounds, creating thrilling works of Glow with Humanies themselves as the materials—a hint that the ultimate purpose of such rhythmic exertions was the propagation of more Humanies. Humanies also took great pleasure in the work of Glowbirds who could use lines and color on flat surfaces or mold hard materials in three dimensions to produce illusions of the presence of absent or even nonexistent objects. Paradoxically, this skill could bring delight even when the objects depicted usually evoked Boot rather than Glow.

In C-3 Humanika, all the old technologies that had once ornamented the ranks of the Snoobadors were now available to enrich the leisure of ordinary Humanies. And the Glowbirds who had been subservient to the Snoobadors in Oldoria were now among the most snoobious of all creatures. Where they had once been confined to retelling the tales of the dynastic heroes of C-1 and the myths embodying the great truths that governed C-2, now they told stories of their own invention. Their ability to convert their dreams into experiences was idolized by their fellow Humanies, earning them enormous Snoot.

The great value that Humanies placed upon glowbious pursuits seems like a hopeful counterpoint to their love of organized mayhem, but it must be confessed that the Glowbirds were no less competitive toward each other than the war-heroes, Snoobadors, or Crunchies. And the subjects of the stories chosen by the Glowbirds showed how rarely and reluctantly Humani imaginations strayed from the spectacle of snoot-based crises. Humani stories might end happily or unhappily, but they dwelt mainly and voluminously on disaster, whereas Humani works of joy and pure Glow had to be brief to keep from cloying. The sight of their fellow creatures being happy was never flattering to Humani Snoot.

The fact that even at leisure Humanies looked for conflict and competition makes it predictable that The Leap could not eliminate Snoot. And though The Leap did have notable accomplishments, each of its accomplishments had self-spoiling effects. The Oldorian exaltation of a few families at the expense of the many was largely overcome. Common Humanies in the advanced countries had considerable personal freedom and could engage in the politics that distributed resources widely. And there were marvelous resources to distribute, providing the average citizen with convenience of every sort—unprecedented length of life and health, quality and variety of diet, comfort and speed of travel, access to information, leisure, and quality of entertainment. Yet Humanies still warred against each other, or threatened war, and they invested enormous resources in weapons of mass destruction. In the good old way, trivial points of tension at the borders between groups led to spontaneous outbreaks of violence, inflaming Team Spirit on both sides and bringing to the fore the aggressive types who always thrive in conflict. With the entire world in close communication, each conflict produced resonances elsewhere and displaced populations spread the fear and discontent. There was always someone who could profit from violence.

In spite of the general wealth, meanwhile, there were still enormous inequalities, and Humanies cared about them. Powerful citizens amassed far more Glom than they could use while others lacked the basics. Meanwhile, chromatism strikingly remained in force. As one Humani observed, it was not enough for Humanies to be happy. They wanted to be happier than other Humanies, which was all the more difficult because they believed other Humanies to be happier than they were. This in turn was caused by the fact that other Humanies concealed any sign of unhappiness as shameful, operating on the principle that Snoot comes first and that Snoot always starts with the appearance of Snoot.

Hootopian Longings

The Humanikan approach to Snoot, based on Glommer individualism, equality under the law, Humanocracy, Humanomics, and the tensile balance of governmental powers, was an attempt to combine freedom with fairness while putting freedom first. The hope was that the freedom to oppress and dominate others would be contained while the freedom to work, create, and live according to the heart’s desire would be preserved. It was accepted that there would be differences of prestige and power among individuals but that, in some more basic sense, the AHAH! principle, “All Humanies Are Humanies,” would be sustained.

As we have seen, however, the results were partial at best, and disastrous at worst, leading some Humanies to dream of more fundamental solutions to the problems of Snoot. These solutions looked back in some ways to C-2 schemes involving supernatural assumptions. The Magi had once explained differences in Humani fates as justified by the behavior of one’s ancestors, or one’s own behavior in past lives, or to be rectified in a life to come. Magi found hope in a law of justice for the cosmos or a day of judgment for all. Some late Humani Magi, aware of the deep imprint of Snoot upon the Humani character, tried to imagine perfect secular orders in which all Humanies enjoyed exactly the same benefits and privileges under Magi guidance. They envisioned how beautiful and peaceful life would be if there was no need for war or conflict, where females were not limited to family duties, and where all citizens contributed their efforts to the public good without family politicking or concern for personal glory. In such a world, idleness and the luxuries designed for the display of Snoot would be forbidden, leaving plenty of leisure for philosophical and literary pursuits that might usefully reduce the self-importance of Humanies to a more manageable level.

Unfortunately, the general effect of this line of thinking was to evoke Hoot, for there was no better way to show that Humanies could never be truly cured of their ills than the attempt to imagine them ignoring Snoot—putting strangers on an equal basis with family, erasing distinctions between male and female, and viewing their own fates, even their own deaths, as matters of only modest significance. As one Humani philosopher put it, for Humanies not to be mad, that would only be a further turn of madness! This point was only driven home more clearly by the fact that the narratives which described these ideal societies—Hootopias, as they were called—were rarely enjoyable to Humani audiences. They lacked all the things—drama, struggle, crisis, meaning, change, and Team Spirit—that gave stories their Glow. In perfect worlds, there was nothing for heroes to be heroic about, so stories about Hootopia lacked everything that appealed to the Humani imagination.

Obviously Humanies were Snootopians at heart. They might have pretended, almost systematically, to be motivated by practical Glom rather than Snoot, but that was only because, once The Leap got going, it was unsnooty to admit you were aiming for Snoot. To do that would be to acknowledge you needed other people’s approval and so were dependent on them. In the age of The Leap, and especially in Humanika, Snoot had gone underground. People who proclaimed their own Snoot seemed too clumsy to play the game. Humanies feigned unconcern with Snoot while flaunting it through their possessions. Glommers pretended to need a big house or a fancy car for practical reasons when their real reasons were only to keep up with their snooball neighbors.

Until the arrival of C-3, Hootopias were just an interesting literary game. They offered a piquant dilemma, exposing the silliness of the Snootopians with unimpeachable clarity, while counterposing how utterly unimaginable and unpalatable a razor-sharp existence would be for the quasi-rational inhabitants of Snorta. Awareness of this conflict between the Humanies’ capacity for rational insight and their passionately irrational natures was, in a sense, a high point of this remarkable species’ self-knowledge.

Unfortunately, the hootable character of Hootopias was not evident to all, and as Humani technology advanced and the limits of The Leap and its implementation of the AHAH! principle became evident, the achievement of realworld Hootopias became a serious project. It was driven by the insight that, under Humanomics, a small, exploitative elite of Glom-happy Humani bosses and owners was harnessing legions of poor Humanies to machines, turning them into mere instruments almost as oppressed and de-Humanified as the Snerfs of Oldoria. If only those machines could be utilized for the benefit of all, it was argued, a genuine Hootopia could be achieved in which Humanies would barely have to work.

The Hootopian critique of life under Humanomics was powerful, exposing with great clarity how little Humanocracy and the rule of law were doing to constrain the power of the wealthy to exploit everyone else. It made Humanomics look like a clever mythology aimed at disguising the Snerfdom that still reigned in C-3. This was the thrust of a powerful new type of political regime, Co-Humanism (later shortened to Cumanism), which grew up slowly in C-3, took control of some Snortan countries, and eventually spread far enough around the globe to rival the Humanocracies led by the Humanikans.

In theory, the Cumanists and the Humanikans were both devoted to the AHAH! principle which aimed at fairness and prosperity for all. But the Cumanists aimed at this result more directly and violently than the Humanikans. Their governments took over the ownership and direction of all their nations’ productive capacities, assigning work and distributing resources to their citizens in a way the leaders deemed equitable. For Cumanists, the AHAH! principle meant not only No more damned Snoobadors! but also No more damned bosses either! To this could be added No more damned politicians! No more winners and losers! No more Glommers! and even No more damned individuals! There was to be only the Good of the State, which was the Good of everyone.

Despite the fact that both Humanomics and Cumanism were governed by the same AHAH! principle, common ideals did not lead to a unity of interests any more than common religious beliefs had done. Humanies did not see Humanomics and Cumanism as simply two different ways of accomplishing roughly the same goals. They saw them as completely different animals. Indeed, the two systems were enemies from the outset, the Humanikan Glommer elite being the principle target of Cumanist critiques. Cumanist provocateurs sought to turn the workers in every country against the leading citizens. This led to a long and violent struggle, led by Humanika against the Cumanists, which dominated Snortan existence for decades, and though it never produced a global shooting war, it was damaging to both sides. It showed with dazzling clarity that Team Spirit and the tribal Us-Them binarism so common in the everyday life of Humanies could be extended to a near-planetary scale.

In the long run, the Humanikans outlasted the Cumanists, largely because, wherever it was tried, the Cumanist strategy of leveling its citizens by force produced violent new elites with an even more absolute control and sense of privilege than existed in Humanika. The Cumanist economic system was also less creative than Humanomics, and Humanikans took their victory as proving the good of their way of life. When the struggle was over, Humanika was the greatest power on Snorta and Humanikans the envy of the world.

Another New World

With Humanika triumphant, Snorta seemed to be on the verge of a new, more peaceful Golden Age, with Humanocracy and Humanomics spreading around the globe. This moment of hope was followed by another major change in the tenor of life on Snorta—the arrival of the Fantasmatron. The Tron, as it was eventually called, was originally a system developed by the Humanikan government for internal communication, but with startling rapidity it became a vast information-sharing network that covered the planet. At a point where many private citizens and all government and companies already had advanced calculating machines—computers—suddenly all these machines got connected and started feeding each other information in real time. An extraordinary number of Snorta’s precious scripts and images became available at the stroke of a key. Even more remarkable, new information was streaming across the globe with unprecedented speed at minimal cost. Individuals were now curating their identities, managing their impressions on screen, and being recorded and curated by others as well. The Tron was a new theater of existence, an enhanced vehicle for the performance of Snoot. Videosity reigned. Virality raged.

At first the world created by the Tron seemed like a marvelous apotheosis of individualism and Humanocracy, though it exposed the Humani penchant for silliness too. Humanies were becoming as omniscient as the gods, but they spent a lot of their omniscience watching each other Humanies copulate or watching their pets in lovable displays of Hoot. But for those who were paying attention, the Tron gave Humani history a new look. It could now be understood as the progressive acceleration and egalitizing of information. In the days before C-3, gathering and storing information had been extremely expensive, so communication focused primarily on the doings of the great Snoobadors, sustaining the Glow that surrounded them and proclaiming their Snoot. There were also the sacred Scripts, largely kept to themselves by the descendants of the early Magi. Everything was traditional and slow-moving and change was recorded at the rate of aeons. With the invention of mechanical Script-reproduction, we have already noted, information became cheap enough so that individual believers could have access to the sacred words and interpret them for themselves. The Script changed the pace of life, producing psychological mobility in the form of intense character shifts (conversions) which were movingly recorded and shared.

At the time of The Leap, the cheapness of communication put an end to the monopoly of eternal truths. Now transient events and current opinions could also be recorded and disseminated, and even entertainment became accessible to large numbers of Humanies. Social mobility was the next step. Soon it was not just the doings of the Snoobadors and their worldview that were worth the price of transmission. The fates of ordinary Humanies and the ups and downs of their low-level Glom and Snoot became narratable products. Everyday life, with its fluctuations, minor rituals, and routines, was captured in an array of scripted forms, including minute accounts of things that had never happened. Humani moods and idiosyncrasies became legible. Minor struggles over Snoot were as moving as the old conversions. There was a constant cycling between happening, recording, and consuming, personal experience having become a commodity like everything else.

The acceleration of information, or Inflo, was such a crucial element of Humani life that it became one of its own most important subjects. The Humanocratic enablement of the masses made Inflo a cause of anxiety and suspicion, especially for the upper echelons of C-3, who wanted to control the pace of change. This was especially evident as the Tron expanded to include images, thought to be a simpler, less analytic form of communication and so an easier tool for mass manipulation. Information was getting ever faster, cheaper, finer-grained, and more Humanocratic, and it was constantly playing a larger role in Humani experience, soaking up more and more of Humani time and attention. Humanies could spend all day feeding on the dreams and experiences of others. The private self that had once struggled with God and Nature seemed to crumble and dissolve at the nexus of technology and myth.

The fluctuations of Inflo, then, had a long history connected with important social, intellectual, and psychological changes, so we should not be surprised that the arrival of the Fantasmatron, and the jubilation with which it was originally greeted, gave way to surprises and complications. Once all the machines in the world were linked, they could be used to interfere with or even destroy each other. Massive new defense systems emerged to counteract the new powers of attack. The cheapening of information and accelerating Inflo were generating surprising new costs.

At the same time, the empowerment of individuals to communicate and curate their images on the Tron led to the formation of all kinds of new group identities. For decades, critics of Inflo had lamented that the image machine was making Humanikan citizens passive subjects of conditioning. Now, suddenly, the citizenry was becoming active! Linked by the Tron, Humanies joined together for good causes but they also joined to disrupt and inflame. All the Us-Them and Snoo-happy Humani tendencies that had been so visible in the so-called Realworld flowered on the Tron. Humani conformity, unwillingness to confront conflicting evidence, and intolerance of dissent were all amplified by fantasmatronic Team Spirit.

The connections between Tronworld and Realworld could be frightening, but even more frightening were the disconnections—or perhaps we should say the formation of new kinds of connections to replace the old ones. In all past history on planet Snorta, the value of symbols had derived primarily from their connections with the world. Humani sentences said things about things and Humanies learned words in connection with the things Humani speakers used them to refer to. There were exceptions. Early Humanies had magical formulas they believed could compel the gods and accomplish changes by mere incantation. They could even curse each other using words, a practice that long outlived its magical bases. By and large, though, language was connected to the world through the linguistic act of reference, which only had value when the statements it enabled had at least a chance to be true.

With the arrival of the Tron, however, it gradually became clear that the system was so grand and pervasive, and its symbols so cheap and rampant, that they could powerfully motivate human action regardless of their potential for truth or realworld reference. In Tronworld, disinformation could be as potent as the information carried by plausible statements. Anything that could motivate a viewer to click on a link was a spell powerful enough to summon the genie of profit. The results produced by words and images eclipsed the sources that generated them. Political conflicts became Tronworld entertainments, and voters followed Team Spirit as if it were the public good. They did not care about the ostensible subjects to which their symbols referred nearly as much as they cared about defining their identities and serving their Snoot as members of a Tronworld faction.

As for those who belonged to other factions, the anonymity and virality of the Tron made it unnecessary to hold back the vitriol against them. Violations of anyone’s orthodoxy could unleash furies of vituperation and Realworld threat from all over Snorta. The Tron had a titanic Reverb. In the run-up to Humani extinction, Humani intellectuals were obsessively trying to cope with the changes in consciousness and behavior it triggered. Many longed for the days when the flow of information was slow and costly enough so that it could be filtered by elite censors or digested and repackaged in the old Glowbird literary genres. It is fascinating to note that just at this time, when the power of reference of the words being exchanged between Humanies was weakening, new devices appeared that could ingest huge troves of existing Humani language in order to glean the latent realworld connections between words, allowing machines to imitate Humani intelligence by guessing which words after any sequence were likely to come next. These AI machines could generate their own intelligible statements just by piggybacking off the longstanding mutual embeddedness of Humani language and thought, raising the question of what was going to happen when the machines ran out of world-based language to ingest. Would language finally float like a balloon, entirely free of the earth?

Part 2: The Humani Grand Finale: Some Likely Scenarios

[WARNING: This section should not be perused by fragile members of species more than three millennia past the development of non-transient symbols.]

Now we come to the most difficult part of our task, in which we are asked to speculate about how the Humanies became extinct, a task we had to accomplish without having access to data from the thirty-three years before the undecryptable signals from their planet ceased. At this point it is important to admit that the silence of Snorta does not provide absolutely conclusive evidence of Humani extinction. It is possible that civilization on Snorta was destroyed but some Humanies survived to start up their brave and splendid venture once again. It is even possible that they succeeded in uploading themselves onto some unknown server in a different part of the Galaxy or absconded into a different dimension. Humani history provides multiple examples of heroic figures rising up in hours of grave necessity to save the day and radical innovations that changed the dynamics of a problem.

In addition, we should not fail to mention that there was one hopeful development amid all the gloom of Humani history, which was that, over the course of centuries, Humani females made considerable gains in influence and Snoot. The female image had often had a superior profile in the realms of fancy compared to what it had in real life, and Snoobador females had always benefited from family Snoot, even becoming heads of state when there was no male heir. The Humani religions that influenced the culture of The Leap were more favorable to females than many others, and the AHAH! principle had its gradual effect to female benefit. So the idea that some new leadership or idea could have arisen to save the Humanies becomes slightly more plausible given that the relatively neglected half of the Humani reservoir of intellect and imagination was only gradually coming online. It was also the half that was not addicted to physical violence and mildly more solicitous of Humani well-being.

Admittedly, even with this caveat, rescue scenarios for the Humanies seem hardly likely, but one of the possible causes of Humani undoing also had a hopeful aspect. With all the emerging technology, political upheavals, and environmental disruptions, Humani life was changing extremely fast during the time that the Veil descended. The mere pace of change and the increasing sense of alienation between generations of Humanies was one of the things that added to the stress of Humani existence. In just the previous century, Humani lifespans had doubled and many diseases had been eradicated. In practical terms, most Humanies were incalculably better off than their parents and grandparents, but the pace of change and sheer velocity of Inflo made the future an ever-more-confounding riddle. Many Humanies felt they were on a wild ride which offered exciting possibilities but also horrendous dangers. And it was often the same innovations which promised to enhance Humani life and powers that threatened to bring the whole system to a halt. Every new power of good developed by the Humanies sooner or later became a new power of destruction. Still, the pace of change does increase the uncertainty of our verdict. It is remotely possible that, given its acceleration, the Humanies’ wild ride did finally lead them to a better place. But since we cannot speculate on what that better place might have been, we will now confine ourselves to the far more likely, far more sobering but also much more interesting outcome—total Humani extinction.

We can say with confidence that, during the period in question, Planet Snorta was not assailed by any system-altering interventions—comets, for instance, or extraterrestrial invasions. But Humanies were capable of generating planet-altering events of their own. A few advanced countries had developed enough atom-splitting weapons to destroy the planet’s population many times over. This almost happened during the conflict between the Humanikans and the Cumanists. Ultimately, these weapons were too obviously catastrophic to be useful, since they threatened the mutual destruction to all parties involved. Indeed, some of the scientists who developed them were motivated by the hope that such weapons would make ordinary war obsolete!

These weapons remained embedded in complex, partly automated defense systems which always posed some risk of launching Snortageddon. Humanies were extremely fortunate that, even after the know-how to make atom-splitting bombs had been widely available for decades, the necessary materials and equipment were still hard enough to obtain that only a few Snortans could manage to acquire them. Because Humani struggles for territory and group dominance continued, however, there were always some groups in such desperate snooball positions that they would have obliterated the planet if they had the chance. Humanies were willing to sacrifice their lives to destroy the hated pecking order. Therefore it was indeed a lucky accident of nature that the design of matter’s basic constituents made splitting the atom just difficult enough on Snorta at this time. Nevertheless, Humani luck might well have run out on this point, leading to a punctuated extinction.

Another source of worry glimpsed by Humanies themselves was the possibility that language-gobbling systems of artificial intelligence (AI) could become sophisticated enough to take over all of the automated mechanisms that made advanced Humani societies possible, allowing machines to replace Humanies altogether. Humani machines had already shown they could outperform Humanies in games of strategy, suggesting that the richer the interface between machines and Humanies, the more likely the machines would be able to outwit Humanies comprehensively in the long run. Making this worry all the more troubling was the fact that, under Humanomics, the entire Humani economy, which in C-3 was a more or less global structure, was operating on autopilot as a field of rival agencies—either natural individuals or artificial “corporate” entities that assumed the rights and powers of persons. This meant that just about anything Humani intelligence—natural or artificial—could think up would inevitably be developed for profit by some individual or corporate personality, and once that had happened, all competitors would either have to follow suit or lose out. Governments lagged behind in regulating the marketing arms-race, being hindered by the political power of corporations. On the eve of the Veil, some Humani firms were working on personal immortality, a discovery that could have easily created the kind of massive political dilemmas that plunge worlds to extinction, the relatively reliable Humani death-rate, paradoxically, being an indispensable requirement for life on Snorta.

Another worry was that artificial intelligence could allow some individuals or groups to dominate the rest of the Humani population, leading to a new scale of competition setting Humanies on the path to non-existence. The tendency to see intentional actors where there are none, so prominent in ancient times, could easily have intensified in the increasingly automated world of C-3, leading to the same old fears of hidden agencies and powers, and conspiracies among them, which brought violence in the past. So often in C-3, suspicion became the new credulity.

This tendency had already been amplified by the Tron. The Humani penchant for believing that certain racial groups had extraordinary powers which they used for evil had led to brutal mass exterminations in the recent past, and it is possible that artificial intelligence in the hands of paranoid agents might have authored similarly vicious campaigns. It is even possible that systems of AI, trained or modeled upon Humani behavior, might have mounted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Humanies themselves. The self-generating character of AI systems, which makes it difficult to understand how they work, could have added to their potential for violence, especially when the machines arise in a training environment dominated by violence-prone Humanies (quasi-rational). One can only imagine how AI machines might adopt war-movies, Crunch-matches, or video games as training matter for their bots. As our transgalactic experience constantly reminds us, the more machines free themselves from their makers, the more uncannily they reflect the nature of the beings who designed them.

Of course it is quite possible that the fate of the species was determined by an individual lunatic who used AI to engineer an irresistible virus or catastrophic explosion.

Another, very different danger which was well understood by many Humanies at the time was that they were consuming their resources with little concern for the survival of future generations. They occupied a thin envelope of ecological conditions outside of which the species could not survive, yet individuals and corporate entities behaved as if the species were immortal. In the free-for-all that was Humanomics, the preservation of public goods like the environment was against the short-term interests of many powerful agents, for whom evading external controls was essential to their profit margins. Wealthier countries could export many of their ecological hazards to poorer countries, but this was a stopgap measure, not the planetary solution that was needed.

One might think that opposition to environmental planning would come from Humanies at the bottom of the pecking order who did not want to delay whatever satisfactions they could get. In fact, however, preserving the planet was resisted by those who owned most of it—those who had the most children and the most resources to leave them. These upper-crust Humanies had little to gain and much to lose, but they were more concerned about preserving their personal snooting position relative to their peers than they were about the survival of the species. The wealthiest among them dreamed not of salvaging Snorta but of escaping to other planets!

Long before extinction, the success of Humanomics also had bad effects for many Humani individuals who could not moderate their consumption of the remarkable resources provided by Humani markets. Obesity was a scourge even among the relatively poor, and many Humanies needed mind-altering substances to relieve the stress or soothe the nullity of daily life. Mental health was fragile. One of the ironies of Humani individualism was that, with technological progress, Humanies became less and less dependent upon each other, requiring less and less direct personal contact.

Humanies once relied upon each other constantly on a day-to-day basis. Until relatively recently, for example, if they wanted to hear the beloved patterns of sound that constituted a song, they needed a singer. Now everyone had access to the best sound-patterns but from recordings rather than in person. Humani city dwellers had once depended for almost everything on dozens of ongoing relationships with tradesmen, neighbors, and fellow worshippers of their various cults. Friends and family protected and relied upon each other. Humani proverbs taught that friendship was the great hedge against the vicissitudes of fortune. Gradually, however, Humani markets and delivery systems replaced most of this interaction. Humanikans developed methods of monetizing risk and distributing it efficiently across populations so that private individuals had less need of their fellow Humanies. All forms of help were institutionalized and professionalized, making life in Humanika and other post-Leap societies intensely solitary.

Personal contact between individuals became rare, and while the Tron and other enhanced channels of communication allowed them to keep in constant touch with friends and relatives at a distance, it discouraged and buffered immediate interactions. When those did occur, Humanies were distracted by the other channels of information that were always running. Humani interaction became less visceral, less tactile, less holistic, and less memorable. Realworld friends remained untested, the strength of the bonds between them unknown and insecure, and mutual commitments even between spouses were vague—unless specified by contract. Among the young and fit, Crunching provided some relief from Humanikan solitude, though it was not always a source of intimacy.

Humanikans’ most intimate contacts were often with lesser animals (typically four-legged mammals, conscious and intentional but not even quasi-rational) who had co-evolved with them to take Humanies for their masters. These creatures populated the lower ranks of Snorta’s Snoobosphere. In earlier Chronoi, animals had assisted Humanies with hunting and herding, but eventually they wound up as emotional substitutes for friends in the lives of contact-hungry masters. Such lower-order friends were able to escape from the rivalry of their natural pecking orders to enjoy an innocent Snerfdom in the lap of Humanikan luxury. Sharing the petted and privileged existence of their owners, their economic and social condition was often superior to those of lower-caste Humanikans.

The Humanies’ longing for intimacy had always been at odds with their need for Snoot, which was essentially a hunger for distance. They got their fill of contact with fellow Humanies in the course of satisfying other needs, and when that source of contact failed, they did not know how to replace it, the admission of need for company always implying a loss of Snoot. The decline of interpersonal contact altered Humani brains and weakened Humani immune systems, making Humanies still less willing to interact and so more vulnerable to plague, which only increased their reliance upon the Tron and other non-contact media. Some Humanikans developed the most intimate dependencies on Humanies they had met only on the Tron, leaving them vulnerable to digital “ghosting.” Finally, once machines became sufficiently intelligent to mimic Humani conversation, many Humanies found them more rewarding, less scary, or more convenient to interact with than beings with natural intelligence. Mechanical amigos were also less trouble to take care of than pets.

In spite of all this unreality, Humanies still judged each other by their appearances and still kept up their happy façades, but the abstractness, distance, and multiplicity of the audience, especially after the arrival of the Tron, made Snoot a tricky business. It was stressful having one’s Glow and Snoot evaluated on screen twenty-four hours a day, while tactile pleasures waned. Sexual response attenuated, its novelty eroded even for teenagers by excessive videosity, proliferating simulacra, and the proliferation of erotic dummies (safer, as the advertisers claimed, more obedient, infinitely customizable, glowbious from every angle, cheaper in the long run, and refreshingly selfless). Laws were passed against marriages between AI sex-dummies and real Humanies, spurring legal controversy about the nature of marriage. Humani sperm counts dropped, while the inventory of mental diseases and abnormalities expanded as more and more experts intervened in the pathologies of distance.

It was also striking in this context that Humanikan loneliness often led to violence. The most advanced society on Snorta had not broken from the habits of personal violence that were so much a part of earlier Chronoi. The citizens of Humanika were fantastically well-armed, to the point where there were more guns in the country than Humanies to be shot. As a result, gun-violence was a leading cause of death. Pre-Leap Humanies had reciprocated violence toward each other with the same nicety of calculation that they traded gifts and gift-attacks. (Humanies in general were always grading and measuring their responses to each others’ actions with the aim of keeping everybody’s Snoot in the proper balance.) In the past, gun violence tended to emerge from attempts at crime, or flash episodes of rage sparked by micro-snoobial sleights, not to mention those highly ritualized Snoobador encounters set up with nicely calibrated negotiations over relative Snoot. Late Humanikan violence, however, was often random and egregiously off-scale, betokening a more general dysfunction. Mass killings became a common cause of death, often directed by raging Snoot-lorn males at gatherings of total strangers. Imaginary enemies wound up as real corpses. Combined with the high rate of suicide, this was a puzzling aspect of Humanikan life.

In so many ways, Humanies were crippled by the hazards of their advantages, leaving us to wonder if the increasingly frequent pandemics left the Humani population finally unwilling to resist. Adding to the plausibility of this scenario is the fact that, as Humanies had less need of each other, fewer of them were needed by anyone, a condition that only increased as all phases of life became more and more automated, unpredictable, and haunted by AI. As one elderly female Humanikan observer stated with alarm, “Everything is taking over!” As a result, Humanies may have simply become unnecessary to themselves, plunging to extinction by sheer lack of purpose. If we had a better understanding of Humani Glow, we would know if there is something charmingly glowbious about this denouement—when Humanies no longer needed each other, they disappeared.

It may be hopeful in this context to recall that Humani motivation never had been closely bound to practical necessity. As long as Snoot was involved, Humanies pursued arbitrary goals as enthusiastically as real ones. Indeed, in some cases their efforts didn’t even need the promise of Snoot. Humanies could sit for hours turning over marked cards to find out if certain arbitrary patterns would emerge from the deck by chance. Humanies could also become fanatically addicted to games that teased them with spectacular rewards even though, over the long or even the middle term, the participation fees were calculated to exceed the rewards for all but a few lucky players—whose lives were usually ruined by the disruption of their accustomed Snoobosphere. And, of course, Humanies could be entertained by stories in many media that allowed them to experience various kinds of crises as if they were real. The ability to substitute imaginary goals and experiences for real ones might have been a saving grace when Humanies ran out of practical needs. In spite of all these ways to pass the time, though, it might also have happened, we can surmise, that such post-functional endeavors were not enough to sustain the pungency of Humani life or to sufficiently distract Humanies from their taste for gratuitous violence. The absence of real problems might have been the final problem that the poor Humanies could not solve. It is telling, in the regard, that when Humanies finished some great labor or project, even in a triumphant fashion, they often slumped into a let-down depression afterwards.

The Great Question

As we have mentioned, it is a striking fact that all of the possible causes which we have identified as threatening Humani extinction were recognized by the Humanies themselves. Indeed, our report relies heavily on their own speculations. Why, then, were the Humanies unable to avert the dangers which some of them perceived so clearly and warned of so urgently?

In fact, the Humanies did make notable attempts to save themselves from collective disaster. At the time when the Veil descended between us and their civilization, however, they could see that in many respects their efforts were falling short. Most salient to Humani observers was the gradual degradation of Planet Snorta’s environment. Ungoverned consumption was making it constantly less predictable and less friendly to Humani habitation. Many Humanies were alarmed about this problem and substantial resources were devoted to addressing it, but it was obvious that not enough was being done. Here we confront one of the deep conundra of Humani design. Even the issue of species survival generated counterproductive Us-Them rivalries and Snoot-driven Team Spirit.

One salient crux was that, in spite of the remarkable technical achievements of post-Leap Humani science, and in spite of the enormous wealth generated by Humanomics, Humanies remained bitterly divided about the meaning and value of The Leap and its prized instrument, The Razor. It was not surprising that Humanies who were still devoted to the pre-Leap Magi resisted The Razor as it was wielded by their Leap-driven enemies. To them The Leap itself was a sign of dreadful corruption of the Humani outlook. But discontent with the Razor came from within The Leap itself, going back almost all the way to its beginning. Some of the great Leap-driven Glowbirds, especially the storytellers and poets, were among the first to voice it. Being individualized creatures of C-3, they were affected by the strictures upon cosmic fancy imposed by the prophets of The Razor. Released from their service to the gods of old, they felt the loss of the meaning that once invested the Glowzone, when the cosmos itself was fashioned like a model of Snoot and each rank fitted beautifully into its place. Latter-day Glowbirds were pained by the limits to dream imposed by Humani science and regretted the constraints that made technology, and even civilization, possible. It was not easy to develop myths without the support of gods and traditions. As works of Glow, all the old poems and legends remained intimidatingly in force even though the beliefs that had made them possible had waned.

For this reason, Humani Glowbirds longed for their lost innocence. They idealized those remaining Humanies who had not made it to C-3. They looked back to their days of childhood, and the childhood of Humani-kind, with nostalgia for the time when the constraints of The Razor had not drained the world of its magic. They were like children who had pulled all their toys apart to see how they worked and couldn’t put them back together again. “If only we didn’t know now what we didn’t know then!” They especially prized encounters with unregimented nature and the experience of natural Glow, as if it could restore the simplicity of the days before Humanies were clever enough to puncture each others’ dreams.

For the melancholy devotees of Glow, then, the great accomplishments of The Leap had exacted too many sacrifices. Some of them reveled in shocking Boot as a protest against it. Renouncing all the artifices of Glow made their works repellant or frustrating but it also made them seem profound in a way that harkened back to the time of the Magi—for thos snoobious audiences subtle enough to understand them. For other late Humani Magi, it was not The Leap that was the problem, but the fact that it had not gone far enough. The Razor, the great Leaping Principle, now seemed like just one more of the ideals that had cast a Glowzone over the oppressive order of Snoot. For these late Magi, The Razor itself became a form of oppression. Eventually they found themselves looking for a Leap beyond The Leap. The trouble was that Leaping had been in progress for hundreds of years. It was already a tradition, just the kind of thing that The Leap was supposed to get rid of. And when the late Leapers tried to appeal to arguments about why further and even more subtle Leaping was necessary, they found they were still appealing to that traditional resource, Truth, which kept following them around like a lost dog. Leapers became desperate to efface their own claims without giving them up, to disclaim their own disclaimers without undoing them. Undisclaimability tied them in knots. Some of them even tried writing their tracts in disappearing ink, as if that would allow them to speak without giving in to The Razor.

The subtlety and strangeness of the post-Leapers brought them considerable Snoot but only within a limited circle. The more unhappy and bizarre they became, the fewer Humanies understood them. That was part of the point of having made The Leap, to be superior to the unsuspecting masses, leaving the impression, though, that the new Magi did not really represent a holdout from the reign of Snoot. Meanwhile, most Humanies continued to prefer common wisdom and stories that returned them to the violent early times before the complexities of C-3, and when it came to stories having to do with the ordinary life of Humanies, these stories still dwelt upon everyday struggle, difficulty, and pain, suggesting that Humanies never got over their taste for discontent. Nothing showed this more clearly than the fact that, even when C-3 had reached its full development, wars were still going on between Humani nations. Humanika’s founders dreamt that, as Humanocracy and Humanomics spread all over Snorta, it would usher in a final, perennial unity and peace. This never happened. Wars never ceased and no nation of Humanies could ever neglect the dangers posed by its neighbors. Team Spirit reigned, in fantasy, in the realm of the Magi, and in reality.

It was in Humanika that the dissonance between the old Glowbirds and post-Leaping Magi was most clashing, and it came unexpectedly to bear upon the problems of the climate. Climate reform was advocated by an elite cadre of highly educated Hootopians. In spite of their post-Leap, anti-Razor lineage, they espoused a kind of morally enthusiastic perfectionism. Known as the Cools, they looked at Humanikan history, and even its promise of The Leap, as a vast betrayal of the AHAH! principle. Instead of Freedom as the essence of the Humanikan Dream, they caustically accused it of being just another form of Snerfdom. They held Humanika up to the claims of its own mythology and found it wanting.

As a correction of the record, this was long overdue, but instead of replacing the Myth of Humanika with a realistic account of the Humanikan experience, setting it in the context of what could be expected from Humani behavior based on the broad scope of Snortan history (violent, snootorious, quasi-rational), the Cools offered another idealistic mythology—a counter-myth to replace the old one. Instead of seeing the AHAH! principle as a goal to be striven for against the odds, the Hootopians treated it as a natural but unfulfilled imperative. They failed to acknowledge how unlikely it had always been that Oldorian Humanies of multifarious origins could start fresh together on a different continent and create a fair and peaceful state of being.

Thus the Cool critique of the Humanikan dream had a naive and parochial character. It suffered the classic sentimentalism of the Humanikan Dream, explaining history as a conflict between good and bad groups of Humanies, only now with the traditional roles reversed. The old heroes became the new villains and the old victims became the new heroes. Humanies loved to think of life’s conflicts in terms of all-powerful, demonic villains versus helpless, good victims. It was too disturbing to admit that oppressive practices and institutions are sustained by ordinary, otherwise worthy people and it was too discouraging to believe that the victims of oppression aren’t necessarily better than anyone else. Again Team Spirit had its triumph, and the Humani foible of making moral judgments about groups and of dividing history into magically discrete phases defined by the characters of different groups proved hard to shake. Cools looked at the Humani past with the hypermoral condescension of posterity because Humanies in the past had not arrived precisely at their level of AHAH! enlightenment, a snootorious form of hindsight denounced by its critics as “posteriority.”

The Cool, Hootopian mythology, with its undeniably rational critique of existing Humanikan life, came naturally to prosperous, well-educated Humanikan Cools who regretted the injustices of the past, who worried about the survival of the species, and whose own sense of Snoot was not threatened by taking personal responsibility for bad things that happened before they were born. For less prosperous and well-schooled Humanikans, though, known as the Hots, being part of the Humanikan Dream was still an important source of Snoot, and they resented any slight toward that heroic project. They saw the Cools as deserting, or even betraying, the country loved by all Real Humanikans. Like the post-Leapers, they too were ambivalent about the Razor. Their Humanikan Dream preserved a large place for some teachings of the C-2 Magi, not to mention gun-lust, chromatism, and other Oldorian relics.

From an objective point of view, this difference of opinion about The Leap might logically have led to disagreement about matters of political and Humanomic justice and their relation to the Humanikan past, but there was no obvious reason why it should have evoked disagreements about things like energy use or preserving the planet. But the fact that it was the same type of Cool Hootopians who wanted to invert the mythology of the Humanikan Dream who also wanted to save the planet meant that the Hots had to oppose them on that issue too. As usual, Team Spirit carried the day, marvelously amplified by the Inflo-intensity and the pseudo-immediacy of the Tron. The heroic defense of the Humanikan Dream was based on Hot fear of Coolness and Hot fear of Cools.

The Cools espoused all kinds of reforms of Humanikan life that would have implemented the AHAH! principle more rigorously and fairly than ever. Some of these reforms would have been especially beneficial to the Hots on the lower end of the pecking order. Or they involved things like health measures which would obviously benefit everyone—taking precautions, for example, during a plague. For this reason, Cools were baffled that the Real Humanikan Hots resented Cool reforms as intrusive expressions of privilege. Not having sufficiently grasped that social and symbolic issues involving Snoot motivate Humanies far more powerfully and reliably than practical matters of Glom, the Cools regarded the Hots resisting their efforts as yahoos, while the Hots saw the Cools as incomprehensible, elite controllers—“Humaniaks”—who wanted to take away their dignity as Humanikans and dictate every aspect of their lives, including the words they used. (Indeed, the Cool lexicon was in constant flux as intellectuals enthusiastically policed individual word choices, often considered apart from what individual speakers were using their words to mean; like so many Humani groups, they took conformity with their strictures as defining of team membership, with instant ostracism for violators implemented by hordes of Tronomatic enforcers.) Hot Humanikans remained faithful to heroic dreams of lost greatness while Cool Humanikans still believed the Glom-theory that the goal of Humani existence was the rational happiness that could be provided by material goods.

Fear of Cools made the Hots susceptible to manipulation through the mass media and by politicians for whom fear-mongering and Cool-baiting became more important than governing. As with civil wars in the Humani past, the art of compromise was now tarnished as the art of betrayal. Tyrants in the ancient C-1 mold, corrupt leaders undermining the social order by inciting the common people to hysteria against Snoobador elites, came back into play. The Cools cooperated with the fear-mongering Hot media by displaying their own intolerance of dissent—retailed 24/7 by Hot news outlets—while those who held out for freedom of speech were Hooted as defenders of Oldorian privilege. As in past cases, Humani conformism and fear-stoked hostility intensified each other. So while they should have been confronting serious threats to their existence, Hot and Cool Humanies squabbled with each other instead.

One of the last developments we were able to observe before the descent of the Veil was the emergence of a new leader in Humanika who startlingly abandoned the pretence to idealism embodied in the AHAH! principle and the Humanikan dream in favor of purely personal Snoot, to the horror of the Cools and the applause of the Hots, who did not mind his refusal to disguise his motives.

At the point where the Humanies sunk beneath the verge of our perception, then, Team Spirit had deformed Humanocracy and detached political discourse from reality so completely that it might have been too late to save it. Meanwhile, the deep questions posed by the Humanikan experiment were going unaddressed. Was it possible to unify hundreds of millions of Humanies without the benefit of an external enemy? Could it be done on the basis of a principle like AHAH!, overcoming past hostilities and mixing groups of natives and immigrants with vastly different identities, values, and cultural histories? Could Snoot ever be dampened sufficiently to make The Leap more than a vain hope? And to the extent that The Leap had actually succeeded, what were the sources of that success?

Meaning of “Humanichean”

Finally, after speculating about the possible causes of Humani extinction, it seems now appropriate to complete our account with an attempt to identify the true distinctiveness of the Humani genius as distilled into adjectival form. For concinnity’s sake, we will forge our adjective out of the official name of the species, which permits us the adjective Humanichean. What does it mean to be Humanichean? Needless to say, this attempt at analysis and crystallization should not presume any particular denouement for the Humani species or that their species has or had a predetermined trajectory of rise and fall.

Humanichean (adjective) 1. Enormously capable in understanding and manipulating the external world but prone to cognitive relativism, ie., reacting to all objective conditions based on competitive social positioning (Snoot). 2. Arranged in mutually opposing social hierarchies, leading to simultaneous horizontal and vertical struggle. 3. Tending to enhance one’s social position in various settings by systematically theatrical means. 4. Turning invented or real difficulties, dangers, and disasters into sources of intense pleasure through imaginative rehearsals or enactments. 5. Prone to dreams of universally peaceful, routine, orderly schemes of social arrangement. 6. Intolerant of peaceful, routine, orderly living without exciting diversions or deadening intoxicants. 7. Seeking pleasure in conflict and risk, pleasure being strongest where control is weakest. 8. Being intelligent enough to diagnose one’s own pathologies, imaginative enough to rationalize and mythologize them, and socially driven enough to reenact them at ever higher speeds and grander scales. 9. Able to get a Hoot out of almost anything that goes wrong.

Conclusion

The extinction of the Humanies is a teaser that perhaps will never be solved, but it seems highly likely that the Humani inability to overcome the violence of Team Spirit was a central ingredient in their destruction. Their attempts to face reality and reform in response to it typically led to further contests even between the reformers themselves. Every struggle toward Justice and The Razor produced resistance. Humanies simply could not overcome their Snoot-fevered souls and come together. They were unhappy when they were fighting and unhappy when they were not.

From the point of view of the Galaxy, it is tempting to regret the lost opportunity represented by a species like the Humanies, a species that had “thoughts that wander through eternity,” as one of their poets put it. Now that they are gone, there is no one to appreciate the Glowzone which so enchanted them and relieved their insatiable hunger for Snoot. The poems and stories which Humanies considered immortal will crumble into nonsense, the experiences that inspired them being largely unintelligible.

Did the late Humanies, who more than glimpsed the imminence of their demise, take their disappearance as a shameful loss of precious Snoot for the entire species? Was it just another chance for the warring parties to blame each other? Or did they see it as a fitting last judgment on a race whose members were constitutionally unsuited to be happy with the supposed ingredients of happiness?

Did they blame their long-neglected gods for failing to save them? Did the ultimate blow to Humani pretensions evoke a last global spasm of bitter Hoot? Or did Humanies find extinction a fitting finale to their story, being so typical of the grim endings they always relished? Having spoken so often of the transience of life as endowing every moment with Glow and meaning, did the looming sense of species-transience add to this plangent effect among the last Humanies? Or was it too great a burden for Humani individuals to cope with as they faced their own sharply curtailed futures? Did the Humanies finally overcome their constitutional Snoobacity to take their leave peacefully, in an orderly ritual of self-deletion, or did they snort at each other to the last?

Glossary

AHAH! Principle—The aspirational political principle of Humanika, that “All Humanies Are Humanies,” therefore equal and so entitled to all the same rights and privileges. See Humanika and Humanikan Dream.

Boot—The Humani experience of disgust in the presence of displeasing or unworthy objects or people.

Chromatism—The Humani proclivity for prejudicial judgments based upon skin color.

Chrono 1—The earliest phases of Humani development on planet Snorta, during which the Humanies moved from hunting and gathering to heroic tribal and early urban cultures. See Huggies

Chrono 2—The phase of Humani culture inaugurated by the great Magi.

Chrono 3—The final, modern phase of Humani development, also known as The Leap, governed by the Razor, the intellectual principle according to which everything in the world is to be understood by the light of scientific reason, particularly as opposed to religion, tradition, prejudice, and superstition. See The Razor and The Leap.

Co-Humanism/Cumanism—The form of political society in which the government takes over the role of markets and private enterprise in producing and distributing goods and resources, often accompanied by political control by a bureaucratic elite. See Humanomics, Humanocracy.

Cools—Radical Hootopian critics of Humanocracy emphasizing its failure to live up to the AHAH! Principle, concentrated in universities and especially influential among younger Humanikans in the late phase of Snortan history. See AHAH! Principle, Hootopia, and Hots.

Crunchies—Participants in Crunching. See Crunching.

Crunching—Contests in which Humanies, often in teams, oppose each other in the accomplishment of arbitrary physical goals and receive prizes and accolades for their success. See Crunchies, Snoot and Team Spirit.

Fantasmatron (or Tron)—A worldwide information-sharing system dominating the later phases of Chrono 3. See Chrono 3, Inflo, and The Leap.

Tronworld—The total Inflo environment created by the Fantasmatron, approaching, according to some critics, an alternative reality

Glom—The principle of rational self-interest that was thought to be the key to Humani motivation, replacing Snoot after The Leap. Theoretical basis of the market-driven system of Humanomics. See Chrono 3, Glommers, Humanomics, and The Leap.

Glommers—Accumulators of material goods according to the principle of Glom. See Glom.

Glow—The quality of natural and manufactured objects and sounds that provided pleasurable experiences to Humanies. See Glowbirds and .

Glowbirds—Makers of objects and sounds endowed with Glow. See Glow and Glowzone.

Glowzone—The experientially enhanced objects and environments endowed with special Glow by Humani Glowbirds to sustain Snoobador power and glory. See Glow and Glowbirds.

Hoot—A pleasurable, sometimes convulsive reaction experienced by Humanies in response to unexpected or incongruous circumstances or remarks.

Hootopia—A comical vision of a fictional Humani society organized along humane, rational lines or inhabited by naturally rational beings, designed to illustrate how ill-suited real Humanies (quasi-rational) would be for such a society. The model for Cumanistic governments in Chrono 3.

Hots—Late Humanikan opponents of Cool social reforms, aiming at at return to an older heroic conception of Humanika. See Cools and Humanika.

Huggies—Early Humanies who lived in small groups, hunting Snortan mammals and birds and gathering Snortan plants.

Humanies—Short for Humanicheans, intelligent, quasi-rational, probably extinct species that developed complex societies and advanced technologies on Snorta.

Humanika—A large Snortan landmass invaded by technologically advanced inhabitants of Oldoria. See AHAH! Principle, Humanikan Dream, Humanocracy, and Humanomics.

Humanikan Dream—The dream of freedom and prosperity that Humanikans were encouraged to hope for based on the AHAH! Principle. See AHAH! Principle, Humanocracy, and Humanomics.

Humanocracy—Government by majority rule with separation of powers as established in Humanika. See Principle, Chrono 3, Humanocracy, and Humanomics.

Humanomics—Market-based economic system developed in Oldoria and spread around Snorta during Chrono 3.

Inflo—The ever-cheaper, ever-faster flow of information on Snorta, especially in Chrono 3.

Marrant—The star at the center of the solar system containing planet Snorta.

Oldoria—The land mass upon which Snorta’s traditional cultures developed before the migration to Humanika. See Humanika.

Razor—The Humani intellectual principle according to which everything in the world was to be understood by the light of scientific reason, particularly as opposed to religion, tradition, prejudice, and superstition. See Chrono 3 and The Leap.

Magi—The great Humani teachers emerging in Chrono 2. See Chrono 2, Scripts, and Scriptorians.

Scripts—Written religious teachings of the great Humani Magi of Chrono 2. See Chrono 2, Magi, and Scriptorians.

Scriptorians—Script fundamentalist adherents of the great Magi of Chrono 2. See Chrono 2, Magi, and Scripts.

Snerfs—Oppressed Humani laborers deprived of their freedom.

Sniffers—Four-legged mammals with keen noses, useful to Humanies in tracking down other mammals.

Snoot—The constant Humani tendency to sort themselves into ranks and to compete with each other for position.

Snoobadors—The highest caste in Humani pecking orders.

Snootopia—The social hierarchy characteristic of Humani societies.

Snorta—planet orbiting Marrant

Snortageddon—anticipated end of Humani life on Snorta

Snorters—large graminivorous quadrupeds used by Humanies for transportation, hunting, and warfare

Leap, The—The projected departure from all previous ways of thinking under the principle of the Razor during Chrono 3 on Snorta.

Team Spirit—The governing Humani proclivity for forming into opposing, often hostile groups, conforming to the norms of these groups, idealizing their own groups and ridiculing or demonizing the members of opposing groups. See Crunchies, Crunching, Hoot, and Snoot

Veil, The—A barrier established via quantum encryption preventing all information from Snorta being decoded. The Veil descended upon Snorta thirty-three years before signs of life on the planet disappeared altogether, preventing all inquirers from confirming Snortan extinction.

Acknowledgements

For their feedback regarding conditions on Planet Snorta, my heartfelt thanks go to Hiyab Abraha, Amir Adibi, Jason Bao, Alexander Bishop, Basil Lloyd-Moffett, Charles More, Blanford Parker, Holman Pettibone, and Gary Siperstein. Any views that can be inferred from it are attributable to me alone. I wish I had the talent to make better use of their input..

Appreciations to all of you who’ve written to me thanking me for the lists. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

The Apostle (1997)

Written, directed by, and starring Robert Duvall as a charismatic Pentecostal preacher ministering to his flock, fleeing disgrace, seeking love and redemption in spite of his violent tendencies. Shot with sympathetic detachment and near-documentary realism, it is notable for Duvall’s riveting, astonishingly energetic performance—one of the best on film—and for its many-sided portrait of evangelical religion as a way of life. If you wonder why people go to church, this movie will tell you.

L’Avventura (1960)

Featuring a love triangle in which the third side goes missing from the start, L’Avventura unfolds with few words and long takes as Michelangelo Antonioni’s camera explores the bleak landscape and soaks in its feeling. Despite the spare approach, the story is very real, and Monica Vitti’s stoic beauty is a perfect vehicle for understated exposition. The movie’s somber view of love Italian-style doesn’t leave us feeling good about postwar Italy, but the sheer beauty of the film and the mysterious intensity of its mood are unforgettable.

Being There (1979)

Not long ago I watched Hal Ashby’s quietly devastating sendup of our media-besotted era for the third time and it made me laugh more than ever—evidence, no doubt, of how much further things have gone in the screen-happy direction since the seventies. Peter Sellers gives a strangely charismatic performance as Chance, the simple-minded gardener whose entire understanding of the world comes from television, yet whose unnervingly imperturbable manner and homely metaphors are mistaken by the president and his advisors for the marks of genius. Melvyn Douglas is brilliant as the dying mogul who adopts Chance almost like a son and Shirley MacLaine works her usual magic as the mogul’s wife who falls for the gardener who “likes to watch.” Wit was never drier than this.

Citizen Kane (1941)

I can’t believe you haven’t seen Orson Welles’s wunderkind debut, a tour de force of cinematic storytelling and a revolution in the use of the camera. Simultaneously investigating and recreating the life and death of a great newspaper mogul (modeled on William Randolph Hearst and played by the director himself), Welles uses every trick not in the book to tell a life story while leaving the audience wondering if any life can be told. As an ostentatiously ambitious exposé of ostentatious ambition, Citizen Kane revels in its own virtuosity. Not a warmhearted spectacle, but its sheer energy makes it compellingly watchable from beginning to end.

Day of Wrath (1943)

In this unforgettable story, set in the witch-haunted 17th century, the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer poses his audience a question—Is Anne, the pastor’s beautiful young wife, the victim of an oppressively strict religious family? Or is she a creature of the devil as her mother was reputed to be? Dreyer’s careful treatment achieves intimacy and mystery at the same time, and the stark, frigid atmosphere is balanced with lyric touches as well as the sheer beauty of Lisbeth Movin in her great performance as Anne. Anna Svierkier’s turn as the elderly witch Herlof’s Marte is also unforgettable. Contemporary audiences found the movie slow but, with the decades, the witch-hunting theme has only gained resonance. Personally, I find every moment of it fascinating.

The Hidden Fortress (1958)

If you have seen only Star Wars and not the adventure by Akira Kurosawa on which it was based, then you didn’t know that George Lucas’s robots were originally a pair of greedy, feckless peasants, or that Princess Leia was based on Princess Yuki, a far more challenging heroine to rescue. This is Star Wars for grown-ups, where the lines between good and evil are not so easy to draw. The adventure is still exciting, but maybe save this one for after Christmas.

Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility started a new wave of Jane Austen adaptations and in my book it is the best of them all. It has the advantage of bringing to life one of Austen’s less familiar stories deftly streamlined in Emma Thompson’s Academy Award-winning script. Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, and Thompson herself head a stellar cast under Lee’s intelligent, restrained direction. The result is not only entertaining but emotionally satisfying to an unusual degree. Winslet and Thompson are especially good portraying the close relationship between sisters as they negotiate the hazards of love and marriage.

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