This idea of having what it takes, of some people possessing and others lacking a kind of touch of greatness, is endemic to our discussions of sport but also affects the intellectual world. In tennis I remember disputing it most aggressively with regard to Caroline Wozniacki. Number one in the world for over a year in total, she often fell short at majors while winning smaller tournaments. Her best was the U.S. Open, where she made two finals and two semifinals. People said that although her fitness was undeniable, she didn’t have the “weapons” — the powerful shots — to make it all the way in a big tournament. My position was always pretty simple: If you can win six matches in a row against professional opponents, you can win a seventh, if the draw goes your way. That’s how things went for her at the 2018 Australian Open, and that’s how things went for Zverev at Roland Garros: Carlos Alcaraz out due to a wrist injury, Jannik Sinner suffering an odd collapse, and Novak Djokovic losing a thriller to the young Joao Fonseca — the latter two both falling after being ahead two sets to none.

It’s actually been a bad little while for the Greats of All Time in several sports I follow. In Starcraft: Brood War, the ultimate veteran Lee “Flash” Young Ho lost a seven-game final 4-3 against the younger player Park “soma” Sang Hyun. (It wasn’t his first close loss against a Zerg; I remember watching Kim “EffOrt” Jung Woo come back from two games down against him to win 3-2 in May 2010. I think it was during the week of the law review competition, which I neglected.) And in chess, Magnus Carlsen had quite a bad tournament, by his standards, in Oslo, coming in fourth out of six after losing once to contenders Wesley So and Alireza Firouzja and twice to the eventual victor Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu. Championship is an especially contested topic in chess right now because Carlsen has adopted a policy of eschewing the World Championship cycle, leading to a pair of champions, Ding Liren and Gukesh Dommaraju, who won the title during a short peak and then seemed to fall off.

As all this has been going on, I’ve been playing a lot of a new online game called 82-0. In this game you get to choose five NBA players from randomly selected team rosters, divided by decade rather than by year. The goal is to produce a team that, according to the game’s calculations, would likely win all 82 games in the regular season (the most a real-life team has ever won is 73). I’ve never been a big basketball fan, but the game has an addictive quality, and I’ve learned a ton about many great players from it. Growing up, I knew names like Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, and Alonzo Mourning, but not World B. Free, Bob McAdoo, Dominique Wilkins, or Adrian Dantley. I read that some people even preferred Wilkins to Michael Jordan in the 1980s.

I don’t know much about the greatest-of-all-time debate in basketball, though I understand it to have two central candidates (the greatest player within the system of the 82-0 game is clearly Wilt Chamberlain, who is not one of those two candidates). In other sports there are more. How do we adjudicate these things? Lionel Messi outperformed Cristiano Ronaldo in La Liga, but Ronaldo outperformed Messi in the Champions League. Now that Messi has won a World Cup, we do the math and find out that Messi was greater. Is that how it works? That’s the way people seem to want it to go in tennis: of the Big Three, whoever has the highest numbers is best. But what about someone like Paul Morphy, who quit chess because nobody was anywhere near his level? Or the tragically attacked Monica Seles? Do we count novels to assess a great novelist? The number of theorems proven by a mathematician?

In Starcraft, there is an important technique for Zerg players called “mutalisk clumping,” or “muta micro.” This technique was developed by a player called Shark, but first executed at a high level by a player called JulyZerg. In science, Shark would be the genius and July a kind of engineer. But in sport, the execution is what matters. The modern “whip” tennis forehand was — so I’ve read — actually developed by a mathematician, Antonio Arias, whose son, Jimmy Arias, was ranked as high as fifth in the world employing it, reaching the semifinals at the U.S. Open and the quarterfinals at the French. (It probably didn’t hurt that he was coached by the legendary Nick Bollettieri.) The name “Arias” doesn’t come up when discussing forehand greatness, though. Instead, you’ll hear the names Alcaraz, del Potro, Federer, Gonzalez, and Nadal. In mathematics, Grigori Perelman famously turned down the Fields Medal and the Clay Millennium Prize because the “Ricci flow” he’d used to prove the Poincaré conjecture had been developed by Richard Hamilton, who Perelman felt had not received enough credit.

A story I tell a lot: two years ago I was on a panel about the future of democracy in Vienna. One of my co-panelists was Michael Ignatieff, who in 2011 lost an election for Prime Minister of Canada in a terrible defeat for his Liberal Party. Watching and listening to them, we might sometimes get the sense that losing political candidates are uncharismatic or socially inept; I myself have said this about some of them. In person, Ignatieff was one of the most obviously charismatic, room-commanding people I’ve ever met, and it was my signal accomplishment of the night to redirect his attention to issues of political trust — like a small cat, socially speaking, guiding a lion. And of course this makes sense; many of the same skills and talents required to win an election are also required to get on the ballot in the first place. A political party couldn’t succeed without working that way.

I am convinced that Ignatieff could easily have been Prime Minister of anything. He did not lose because he didn’t have what it took. Nor did Zverev. Nor did Jerry West not have what it took to be the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, finishing second four years in a row. Nor did Aron Nimzowitsch, Viktor Korchnoi, and Vasily Ivanchuk not have what it took to be World Chess Champion. Four years ago I saw Marin Cilic play Carlos Alcaraz in New York. The match went until three in the morning. Before then I had not truly understood the unreal combination of agility and power that the game required. They both had what it took. But Alcaraz was a little better in the end — as he has been in almost every five-set match he’s ever played.

Similar issues, I think, arise when determining the “Greats” of Great Books. This is part of why I asked on Twitter what an “also-ran” Great Books syllabus would look like; that question was taken up on this platform by my colleague Henry Oliver. We feel sort of in our veins that Ovid might have had more of what it took than Apuleius, for instance. I have offended several people by suggesting that Derek Parfit could fit on a Greats syllabus and got into a heated argument (at a wedding!) with a political theorist friend of mine about whether Parfit was “greater” than Heidegger. Did Heidegger just have what it took to be a champion? A champion of obscurantism, maybe!

In fact, putting together a Great Books syllabus is sort of like playing 82-0. You need some philosophy, some fiction, some poetry, some history, some drama, some speeches, and you need some stuff from the ancient world, some stuff from the modern world, and some stuff in the middle — just like you need a center, a power forward, a small forward, a shooting guard, and a point guard. In addition to this, some people want writers with this ineffable sense of “Greatness.” In the history of thought, this is sometimes the Sharks and sometimes the JulyZergs. I don’t think Greats syllabi usually feature Polybius; even Montesquieu is rough going for them, but the Federalist Papers are good picks here in the United States. Is it because you can hear whipping through them that forehand of history which was only a geometry of twitches and snaps in the dark-roofed minds of their precursors? And yet elsewhere in the canon it is the very fact of being a crucial precursor that makes a writer great.

Well, what does make someone “Great”? Harvey Mansfield suggests in an interview with Tyler Cowen that “Great” people don’t make mistakes (he calls this “logographic necessity”); if something from a “Great” person looks like a mistake, we just have to figure out the really clever way in which they’re saying something else (usually exactly what we ourselves already think). Roger Federer, on the other hand, has noted in speeches that he only won 54% of points in his tennis career. Who are you going to trust about greatness? When you read authors like Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche — terrific essayists but only on the outskirts of genuine philosophical rigor — should you think that they were leaps and bounds better at writing and thinking than Federer was at tennis? Maybe Jannik Sinner’s collapse at the French was really a secret message about the nature of justice. That would be “great”!

I remember reading during one of the World Championship matches between Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand an article suggesting that Carlsen played a youthful, attacking style whereas Anand played a positional style characteristic of an older gentleman. While this fits our preconceptions about age, and perhaps our notions about Norwegians and Indians, nothing could have been further from the truth. Indeed Carlsen, like Djokovic, is the best ever at long grinds; in one of his best games, nicknamed “Hell in a Cell” on chessgames.com, he stunningly sacrifices a rook and a pawn for a bishop on move eighteen to gain a chokehold on Vladimir Fedoseev’s piece activity. But even that was only the third-place match at the 2021 World Cup; he was already out of the running for first! And what are we to say about the greatness of Rxf4 as compared to Ivanchuk’s Qg7 or Kasparov’s Rxd4 or Morphy’s Qg3 or Fischer’s Na4 (or Be6 in the same game) or Shirov’s Bh3? What about Anand’s own “evergreen” tactical masterpiece against Levon Aronian in 2013?

In talking about Starcraft the Koreans (who are so much better than the rest of the world at Brood War that we all say “foreigners” to mean “non-Koreans”) use the term “bonjwa” to indicate a player who is exceptionally dominant for a sufficient span of time. This era-relative notion of greatness has a lot to recommend it. But even it obscures the competitive nature of greatness. (Even bonjwas tend to win only at rates of about 75%.) If BoxeR hadn’t been around, would YellOw have been a bonjwa? What would have happened if only two of tennis’s Big Three had picked up the sport? What might Andy Murray have achieved if none of them had played? This is what’s great about the tennis film Challengers, which I discussed half a year ago at The Point. It makes clear that championship is in part, in the words of the musical Chess, a matter of “running for [one’s] life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind.” There is always a pack of chasing competitors who do in fact have what it takes. Nobody “wants it more” because everyone wants it as much as anyone could ever want anything. That ends up not even mattering.

In Infinite Jest Hal Incandenza’s brother Orin becomes the greatest punter in the NFL. Hilariously, David Foster Wallace has Orin’s old tennis instructors describe punting as a sort of tennis failure; as a player at their academy, Orin had been great at hitting lobs, but had never developed any other skills, and they think his punting is a kind of lobbing. For them, he leaned into his failure, and his success at football is just a kind of acceptance of his tennis mediocrity. In Amadeus, too, Salieri calls himself a mediocrity. And what was God’s crime against him? To make him the second-best composer in the world. You might think that he was the second-most-blessed, then. But the movie presents him as the only person who can see just how far short of Mozart he falls. He doesn’t have what it takes, he thinks, and moreover he is the only one who is good enough to really see that.

I don’t listen to classical music as much as I used to; I miss it. But here too I really wonder. One of my favorite piano concertos is Mostkowski’s second, his E Major. I used to listen to it while walking around and around this little island in South Bend between the Notre Dame campus and the downtown. And one of my favorite violin concertos is Korngold’s. I saw his house in Vienna, just as I saw a lot of Mozart stuff in Salzburg that same trip. Did Mostkowski and Korngold have what it took or not? In reality, Mozart and Salieri were friends who respected one another immensely.

Are great writers champions? Is Samuel Pufendorf, for instance, the Alexander Zverev of state of nature theory? Should we decide between Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides by counting the number of their surviving works? Is it enough that some names just feel or sound great and others quotidian — perhaps the way Heidegger and Parfit, respectively, do to my friend? Paul Bénichou says that the modern era “demoli[shed] the hero.” A writer like Thomas Hobbes might present all the things that went into an ideal of greatness as irrationalities that undermined social cohesion. The recovery of notions like greatness, nobility, and so on seems to fit well with the modern-skeptical approach of some new thinkers — neo-vitalists, for instance.

I am passionate about excellence and beauty, but I don’t think it’s so hard to find. I go nuts over Zverev’s shot around the net against Taylor Fritz, or the end of the third movement of the Mostkowski. I can’t find a video anywhere, but I can still remember the way BaBy used dropships and vultures in the first round of the third GomTV Classic in 2009, or the way Lee Jae Dong stood up in his booth during the last game of his semifinal against FanTaSy in the OSL that year. I adore Gareth Evans’s one-page paper arguing against vague objects, and Galen Strawson’s devastating two-pager “The Depth(s) of the Twentieth Century.” Some of the most arresting prose I’ve ever read was in a little-known novel called Giraffe by J. M. Ledgard.

Simple classification of people into types fixes the mistake of radical egalitarianism by introducing another mistake. Great champions best other great players, who do have what it takes. Nothing is destined: if the winners hadn’t been there, the losers would be the winners. Those losers are the great challengers. That is what most of us will be, chasing one another around with all we’ve got. Many of us, though surely not all, are capable of this excellence — all the more reason that we must challenge ourselves, and each other, to achieve it. We won’t win — not because we don’t have what it takes, but because so many of us do.

Here are a few arguments against that. First, analytic philosophers show by their actions that they, in general, think analytic philosophy is worth doing. And to think analytic philosophy is worth doing does imply certain commitments about what’s worth doing and about what analytic philosophy is capable of accomplishing.

Second, analytic philosophy is a discipline within a university, which has a purpose (I’m skeptical). So analytic philosophers are sort of tacitly committed to the notion that analytic philosophy can serve the university’s purpose — that it can produce knowledge, or at least virtuous knowledge-seekers, for instance.

Third, analytic philosophers, in their syllabi and in their research projects, characteristically make certain choices about what’s worth studying. We tend to think that Frege is more important than Hegel, that philosophical systems have “a lot of moving parts” and that good philosophy can be done in short, even one-page articles, that the medievals are of mostly historical interest, that arguments from people like Descartes and Leibniz should be presented in “updated” or “improved” form just as, say, Abel and Galois might be presented in a math curriculum as filtered through Noether’s approaches and later pedagogical insights. These choices elicit a sort of underground theory which we might call analyticism.

I won’t have much more to say about analytic philosophy in particular here. For the purposes of this essay, I’m interested more in the rest of the university and the intellectual world.

Here is one vision of the intellectual world and/or the world of the university. You have different areas of study, and people figure stuff out within their areas. Gradually, we all come to benefit and know more from everyone’s research. Chemists teach us chemistry, biologists teach us biology, economists teach us economics, sociologists teach us sociology, and so on. There is no conflict between disciplines because everyone is doing their own thing. Of course, there might be conflicts within disciplines. Chemists might disagree about chemistry, sociologists might disagree about sociology, and so on. That’s for the experts within each field to work out.

Here is a different vision. Thinkers and researchers start with certain questions. And the decision about which methods are appropriate to resolve those questions is itself a contestable one. Say that we are studying crime. Sociologists might come up with one type of theory. Economists might come up with another type of theory. Psychologists might come up with a third type of theory. Lawyers might come up with a fourth type of theory. These theories might characteristically reflect assumptions of their disciplines. For instance, sociologists might be constrained by the assumption that the phenomena they consider have explanations from social differences, while psychologists might be willing to consider explanations from individual differences.

The initial vision can also be challenged by pointing to a certain arbitrariness in the disciplines. Take political theory. It’s a bit like intellectual history and a bit like political philosophy, but it’s usually located within political science departments. Political theorists I’ve known often complain about the stats-heavy training common in contemporary political science. At Princeton I once saw a debate about whether political science really constituted a “discipline” (I put it in quotes because I don’t remember if that’s the word that was debated; it might have been “field” or even “τέχνη” or something).

Now one attitude political theorists and political scientists could have toward one another is this: Studying political theory is cool! And studying political science is cool! How cool that we all get to do cool stuff! But here’s another attitude, which I think is pretty common too. The political scientists say: The theorists incorrectly think that they can understand politics through a combination of first principles and old books, whereas we correctly think that we can understand it through empirical study and linear regressions. The political theorists, by contrast, say a variety of things, like: The empiricists incorrectly think that their little studies aren’t themselves of historically conditioned phenomena. Or: The empiricists incorrectly think that they can do better through experiments and studies than Plato and Aristotle could do from first principles. Or: The empiricists incorrectly think they can do experiments and studies without building in the very sorts of assumptions that political theorists consider and question. Or whatever.

I am not fully committed to this contestation theory of the university and of intellectual life, but I think there’s something to it. I have been thinking about it on and off for about a decade now, ever since I first learned the term “genetic confounding.” I had been taught in college that biological approaches to social phenomena failed to account for social confounds, but somehow nobody brought up the reverse fact. This made me worry about the possibility that the social and biological approaches were actually in some sort of political conflict.

The contestation theory should make us rethink the nature of interdisciplinary work. I’ve often been skeptical of interdisciplinary approaches to intellectualism, taking the view that one can pick and choose the worst of all worlds to make their chosen thesis: draw from the one discipline that supports premise P while all others undermine it, draw from the one (alternate) discipline that supports premise P → C while all others undermine it, and you can conclude some C which the internal standards of every discipline would take to be ludicrous. That particular argument against interdisciplinary work isn’t challenged by this idea. But a rather reverse approach, on which one must consult every discipline relevant to particular research question, might be in order. Of course, it’s hard to figure out which disciplines are “relevant” where — in philosophy there is a lot of disagreement about the relevance of empirical work, for instance.

The contestation theory might also make us rethink the nature of expertise. To the extent that disciplines are theories, experts in a discipline are really going to look more like people who are very knowledgeable about the state of the art on building on the assumptions of those theories. This is a common failure mode of expertise claims, in fact. Experts in DEI-laced disciplines, for instance, are often (though not always!) experts not in justifying the foundations of those disciplines but in the various theoretical extensions and manifestations of those foundations. I’ve been involved recently in various debates about aspects of Straussianism (not esotericism primarily, but logographic necessity and the nature of philosophic education). Straussians might similarly be thought of as experts in the results of applying certain methods, while their expertise in politics and philosophy is a matter of debate within the academy. Of course, person by person, there will be a lot of details you can trust people on — most Straussians know a lot about Plato’s Seventh Letter, for instance — but it’s not clear that the structure of the academy or the intellectual world involves any sort of univocal assessment of their expertise in any given discipline or subject matter.

That’s basically all from me on this topic for now — the contestation theory, that disciplines are theories and that different discipline-theories are in conflict with one another, no doubt deserves itself to be the source of some contestation. I think there are probably a lot of practical consequences that arise from it, about the nature of institutional neutrality, about funding structures, about what we can conclude from an idea’s passing peer review, about what deserves to be part of a university, about who should decide, and so on. For me, I’ve become a bit unsettled in my confidence in the non-theoretical nature of analytic philosophy. But, as our President would say, that’s okay — I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.

A year ago Sam Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, visited the University of Tulsa, where I was an assistant professor. One of the events he did was a lunchtime discussion with Michael Mosher, a professor of political science there and a friend of the Honors College, where I taught. The topic of the urban/rural divide in contemporary politics came up, and it struck me to ask whether there was a definitive work on the subject which compiled and assessed the many theories that had surely been put forth explaining that divide. Both mentioned The Country and the City, a 1973 book by Raymond Williams, but noted that this was more of a work of cultural analysis than empirical investigation or theoretical reflection. At dinner that night I mentioned my desire to take on this project, and my colleagues Rich Lizardo and Dan Walden, though encouraging, cautioned that it would probably take several years and several research assistants to finish this sort of thing.

At the University of Toledo, my research director is Kevin Vallier, a believer in the ability of artificial intelligence technologies to aid and assess certain aspects of intellectual output. It occurred to me after talking to him one day that this project might be a good test case for artificial intelligence in research. Through my fellowship at the Mercatus Center, I had access to a “Thinking” model of ChatGPT 5.2, and I got this model started on the project on a “Heavy” setting.

The project is, for now, complete. Its title is The Mountain is High, after an ancient Chinese proverb: “The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.” You can view it here. It includes appendices with the beginnings of my conversations with ChatGPT, as well as the reflections of ChatGPT and Claude’s Sonnet “Extended Thinking” model, which ended up helping us out a bit (as well as hallucinating a lot). This blog post is for my own reflections, which I worked through in a presentation on this project yesterday at Mercatus.

Let’s start with what went well. I asked ChatGPT to organize and categorize basically every theory that had ever been offered, and the plausible ones it could come up with that hadn’t been offered, as to the roots of the political divide between city and countryside. I asked it to look through all of human history, every human culture, for reflections on this topic, as well as in all sorts of contemporary disciplines and fields like history, economics, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, political science, political theory, philosophy, medicine, urban planning, public administration, law, criminal justice, and tons else. I also asked it to draw on novels, films, and historical accounts to bring a humanistic element to the writing. And I asked it to reflect on the methodological limitations of the project as well as its implications for normative political theory and political philosophy. The result is, I think, an incredibly thorough document of a type that did not exist before and of a type which I thought should have existed before. How could that not be a success?

I want to stress that to some degree this should probably be the central takeaway. These tools helped me accomplish something that seemed impossible to me, and they did it very quickly — barely over a month, start to finish. What’s more, I think they accomplished something that hadn’t been done before. In the process of the project, I myself learned quite a bit about the urban/rural divide as well as the specific histories and circumstances of a lot of different places. I encountered information about corn laws, asty and chora in ancient Greece, the Chinese hukou system, and so on. I found new interest in authors like Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Dickens. And I thought a lot about the warring impulses of urbanity and rurality in our modern times as well.

If you are motivated by the above paragraphs, please stop here for now and give it a read. See if you agree with my above assessment — I’m really curious to know.

I have some worries about the project itself. I cannot publish it the same way I publish other things. I don’t know if or in what way I stand behind it. There are a range of attitudes one can take toward one’s own work. Some of my stuff I think is just correct. Some of it I write from this kind of perspective: “I don’t think this is right but I can’t see why it isn’t. Maybe someone will help out.” Sometimes it’s more like: “I don’t know if this is right but I know it is plausible and hasn’t been said. So it should be part of the discourse.” I don’t have any of those attitudes toward what the LLMs have produced. One reason is that they found thousands of sources for me and synthesized them into a number of overlapping theories of the urban/rural divide, just as I wanted. This is really amazing, but I’m not going to read those sources myself, and so it’s hard to know how I can vouch for the project even in a limited way.

Another reason is the flatness of the LLM language. LLMs really have not figured out style yet. Their writing is just boring. Accordingly, when I find myself reading this project, I often don’t feel it hitting me in a way that makes enough of an impact for me to form my own opinion. Of course this is true of a lot of writing, but, for instance, if I found myself with so little of an opinion about a book I had been asked to review, I might beg off as not having enough material for a piece.

The “flatness” issue — which I did try, with just a little success, to address during the process, in part with what I called “zooming in” on the details of specific studies or of anecdotes from history or literature and “zooming out” to broader statements about the human condition — is particularly bad for this topic. The LLMs write, for obvious reasons, as though they have never lived anywhere. Nothing in either urbanity or rurality seems gripping, evocative, or memory-provoking to them. A different person running this project might ask them to lie and make up personal stories about the city and the countryside. Anyway, the absence of feeling that the writer has ever experienced any of the struggles in the text really threw me.

This extends even to the book’s title. An evocative old Chinese proverb that ChatGPT turned up, “The mountain is high and the emperor is far away,” struck me enough that I used part of it as the title. “The mountain is high” also seemed reminiscent of the project itself, its scope as well as the difficulties I had in getting the LLMs to understand what I was trying to do. But I also think the LLMs did not truly understand this proverb. It is also sometimes rendered as “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” The LLMs think of this proverb as emphasizing the distance rural people have from central authority. But in fact it names two authorities: the divine and the worldly. (I don’t know what relation they were taken to have in ancient China.)

If you think of Western films or Cormac McCarthy, it might occur to you that a real distance from the political law might be related to a felt distance from the moral law. Out in the desert, we might sometimes feel as though there’s no longer such a thing as right and wrong at all — this might be part of our experience of the place. These sort of overtones of the proverb did not enter into ChatGPT’s analysis of it at all. Now of course I might be wrong about the proverb, but even then there would be something more generative about my wrongness than about ChatGPT’s cleaner and simpler presentation. Behind it you can sense — not to flatter myself — the energy of a real person trying to make sense of the world and to live a certain way.

This made me think a lot about what we get out of reading to begin with. Take analytic ethics, for instance. There we treat (and I think this is good!) ethics like any other topic, assessing the relations propositions have to one another and figuring out what arguments we can make from purportedly surer premises to apparently more controversial conclusions. But when we read books and think about the question of what a good person or a good life is, we are probably also looking for the person or life itself which exemplifies a certain answer to that question — which makes that answer even seem possible rather than theoretical. If I had written The Mountain is High, some part of the conflict between an urban “side” of me and a rural “side” of me, I imagine, would have come out, I realized, and that conflict is probably also what’s motivating to me about the project.

It’s not just that the drama of this conflict is absent from the book — I myself haven’t worked through it at all. I am very little improved by the completion of this project. Perhaps it is a conceit of a certain kind of liberal-arts person that writing really improves us. But even in the technical sense, the composition of this book has not created an expert in its topic. It is a kind of black box to me as much as it is to you. No person is newly able to go give a lecture on the urban/rural divide because of this book. I don’t want to be too hasty about this: someone who started with this book would definitely be able to use it as part of some sort of overall journey to understand urbanity and rurality in politics. In fact, I think it might be the single best place to start such a journey. But I did not go through that journey as part of my role in creating it.

I have some other complaints about myself in the context of this project. I sort of feel that I “spoiled” myself, the way one might have in looking up who the killer is in a murder mystery before getting to the end in the normal reading of things. I don’t know what to make of this feeling. Overall, I don’t know what other responsibilities I might have when it comes to this project and topic. Should I share it widely, without having formed a burning conviction about it as it was composed, the way I usually do when I make something? Should I redo it myself? Will anyone even read it? Would I read a book someone sent me if they told me it had been created in this way?

Now that I am starting to have my own ideas about the urban/rural divide — here are three: moral authority might feel far away when legal or political authority is far away; the logic of the division of labor might apply to the separation of powers, explaining why authoritarianism might be more tempting in smaller communities; cultural and political identities easily picked up and shed by the urban elite seem frequently to be adopted by others for much longer (compare Robert Mariani’s recent “Dinergoth” piece) — I don’t really know how to credit the LLMs’ role in prompting them. I wouldn’t be having these thoughts if I hadn’t gone through this process with this project, and maybe that speaks really highly of these tools. But it is hard to know what to make of their genesis.

My colleague Elsie Jang uses the word “enfeeblement” to refer to the way that technology, especially artificial intelligence, can reduce our capacities by managing parts of our lives and jobs for us. I do not feel quite yet enfeebled by this project, but the temptation is definitely there. The difficulty of enfeeblement is that it feels like empowerment. It is so easy to think: Now I can review the entirety of world history in a matter of minutes. Now I can almost instantly create a table of twenty theories and relate them to one another. Now I can write a book in a month. But of course I can’t do any of those things.

That’s why the foreignness of the completed project is actually a kind of saving grace; I know that I haven’t done much of anything here. But I do think that the project may get me started on actually doing something myself. It might serve the same role for you, either through its content on the urban/rural divide or through the process I used in generating that content. If you’re interested in the process, the appendices will no doubt be of more interest to you than the final product.

But any reader should feel free to drop me a line about any aspect of it. Just don’t expect me to have much that’s too interesting to say about the urban/rural divide. Despite playing a role in making this thing, I’ve only just gotten started on thinking about it, and — well — like many others, that mountain is high.

I started by thinking about what we have now that’s like Oedipus. And I came up with a clear answer: film noir. Last winter, in the “Orgy Week” (as Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan calls it) between Christmas and the new year, after a Babygirl/Nosferatu double-header Christmas day (which you can now read about in The Point), I and a few friends watched a whole bunch of noirs, including classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, and Chinatown. In these films, as in others like Vertigo and as in Oedipus Rex, a detective-type character follows a mystery to a conclusion that is in some sense unwanted in large part because solving it requires that the detective learn something not just about the world but about himself or those he cares about. In the final analysis, the question consists to a large extent in the person trying to answer it, and the solution is simultaneously a kind of dissolution.

Why, I kept wondering, does Oedipus stick with us? Not because it’s “Oedipal.” It’s Euripides’s (yes, I prefer to add the possessive ‘s’) Bacchae that’s actually “Oedipal.” And it’s the Bacchae that fits with our modern therapeutic notions, too: that there is a danger in failing to know yourself and your own desires, rather than a danger in coming to know those things. That you had better solve the mystery of yourself, because if you don’t, you might just, like, explode. But once you do, you can, perhaps, be free. (This is the broad background perspective that Amia Srinivasan takes in a recent contribution to the London Review of Books about psychoanalysis and politics, which I didn’t like very much.)

We have achieved, to some degree, the liberal society. So why do we sometimes have this nagging feeling that there’s something still to be liberated from? This dread of being somehow determined generates many of the texts I taught in Tulsa in the fourth semester of our Great Books sequence. For better or for worse, something still seems bigger than or prior us, the way the God of the Book of Job or the gods of ancient Greece and Rome seemed bigger than humans. This could be history (Hegel), the sort of cumulative effects of the world market (Marx), ideology (also Marx), the unconscious (Freud), etc. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting (and perhaps Nietzsche’s views on morality fit this typology). These angry and avenging gods of our age are most characteristically called “systems” — the system of patriarchy, the system of white supremacy, the system of global capitalism, etc. I think the word appears in Arendt, but I’m not sure. A whole approach to literature, classified as “systems novels,” emerges from emphasis on these purported things.

As an analytic philosopher teaching Great Books, I liked to use Job to introduce the problem of evil and the practice of theodicy. But there’s another way to think about it, which emerges in A Serious Man, one of my favorite movies and definitely an adaptation of Job, which is a bit more existential. In this way of thinking, Job is just about the fact that we don’t have control over our own lives. The problem of evil is the question “Why do bad things happen?” But the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” can be read existentially: Why do I not have control over the moral character of my own life? Why do I not have control, ultimately, over anything? This is a question about not just freedom but power, and Machiavelli addresses it at the end of The Prince, writing that about fifty percent of our fates are down to circumstance and luck.

At Tulsa it was a kind of unofficial doctrine that people nowadays have a neglected thirst for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, which my (generally Catholic) colleagues identified with God, and which a Great Books program might address. I wasn’t a dissenter in this regard. But I think we also have a thirst, in terms of our view of the world, for the Bad — for some Big Bad which can explain why so many things we experience in the ordinary run of things are bad in their own little ways. As Clare Coffey wrote in a classic 2022 Gawker essay, “There is a strain of discourse that insists an inability to cope in one’s day-to-day life is in almost all cases a political problem, or even the primary political problem.” In this discourse, usually, “the real culprit is capitalism” — a classic “system” or Big Bad. (Coffey, in case it wasn’t clear, is rather skeptical of this approach to life.)

But the Big Bads serve, I think, a more important function, which is that they explain this feeling, the one I’m calling “existential,” that our lives are not only significantly bad but significantly incomprehensible, or in some sense not even our own. This is what Oedipus experiences. In solving the mystery of the murder, he solves the mystery of himself, and realizes that his entire existence has followed the plans of the gods, plans enacted in light of some wrong committed before he was even born (not everyone agrees on just what the wrong in question was, I think). He does not get to decide who he is. He does not even, for the most part, get to know who he is. And when he finally does, he sees that he is a catastrophe. This is not punishment for his “hubris” or “tragic flaw” or anything. It is just the human condition.

In this Oedipus is, in some sense, a quintessential “liberal subject” of a specifically anxious variety. This liberal subject is a private eye always searching for clues to the mystery of their curiously persistent sensation of bondage even under conditions of freedom and power. If anything is truly Oedipal, I think it’s the revolutionary optimism that imagines that this sensation could ever be done away with. In Oedipus Rex, as in many other tragedies and in many of the stories of Herodotus, it is our attempt to escape fate that seals it, and that leads to plagues and other curses. If we cannot accept the apparent Big Bads, whether they’re mercurial gods or mechanical systems, we cannot accept our own selves, small, sad, and silly as they turn out to be. That’s what I now take from the play, at least.

Mehdi Hasan, currently a journalist at MSNBC, formerly of Al-Jazeera, The Huffington Post, and The Intercept, has written a book called Win Every Argument. The title obviously indicates that he has this last sense of the word in mind, but this makes it hard to vindicate some of his claims about what makes arguing good. I don’t know much about Hasan, so this review won’t touch on the relationship between the stances he takes in the book and his own professional practices as a reporter and interviewer. Rather, I want to examine whether engaging in political arguments, in Hasan’s sense of the word and using the tactics Hasan outlines in the text, is really a virtuous and productive practice. “This book,” Hasan writes in the introduction, “is all about teaching you how to win.” Win in what way? By what metric? To what end? That’s what I wanted to find out in reading this book.

Hasan loves arguments, loves getting into it with people; the book makes that much clear. Why? He writes in the introduction: “Philosophically, I consider argument and debate to be the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the only surefire way to establish the truth. Arguments can help us solve problems, uncover ideas we would’ve never considered, and hurry our disagreements toward (even begrudging) understanding. There are also patent practical benefits to knowing how to argue and speak in public. These are vital soft skills that allow you to advance in your career and improve your lot in life. There are very few things you cannot achieve when you have the skill and ability to change people’s minds.” He slips, in this paragraph, between the first meaning of “argument” – the provision of reasons, the only way (but, with all due respect to Hasan, by no means a surefire way!) to establish the truth – and the second meaning of “argument” – a dispute or disagreement, closer to Hasan’s discussion of public speaking.

Even the dispute is incidental to a lot of Hasan’s advice, most of which just amounts to various kinds of guidelines for speaking in front of an audience. These tips range from the general (“make them laugh”, “listen, don’t just speak”) to the specific (the “rule of three”, “the art of the zinger”, how to write the introductions and conclusions of speeches) and ultimately to the psychological and personal (with chapters on confidence, staying calm, practicing, and research). But what about winning an argument when there’s no audience there? Hasan illustrates the success of his approaches by frequent references to viral online clips with high view counts. But what does that have to do with establishing the truth? And what about an argument with no audience present?

In Win Every Argument, Hasan is fully pragmatic, focusing on how to beat an opponent – how to “play the man,” including using ad hominem attacks (that is, insults) – and on how to win over an audience. Following the rule of threes, Hasan suggests that our logical rebuttals should follow the “three Cs”: character, credentials, and claims. That is: we should attack our opponents’ character and undermine their credentials before we get to evaluating their claims. This is a more realistic approach to persuasion than “playing the ball” and trying to say the objectively appropriate thing, he argues. Evidence, for Hasan, should come mostly in the form of what he calls “receipts” – anything that somehow weighs against your opponent. Some of the book’s examples of contentious exchanges, like Hasan’s interviews with John Bolton and Ilhan Omar, don’t even clearly have an argument to win – just an interview subject to virally attack. Hasan advocates for “booby traps,” in which people have forgotten their old public stances. This is just political opposition research – how to win a campaign, not how to win an argument. The ad hominem style begins to seem not like a means to an end but an end in itself.

At the extreme, Hasan seems here to be advocating for a particularly vicious form of motivated reasoning. You already know your side, and so your evidence-gathering should be a search for ways to take down the other side. But in the best kinds of arguments, we aren’t completely sure yet that our side is right. We’re offering arguments in the first sense – reasons – and our opponents are doing the same, and we’re hoping to thereby come to a better understanding of the world. Hasan stumbles almost by accident on some good techniques in rational discourse, like conceding when your opponent has a good point to make. But he always presents them as good public relations rather than good reasoning – for instance, concessions to the other side’s points can preempt and defuse those points in the eyes of the audience.

Anticipating his readers’ likely appetite for vague gestures in the direction of empirical science, Hasan cites various kinds of studies for his claims about what works in persuasion and public speaking. He even briefly discusses the replication crisis in social psychology, the area from which a lot of these findings were drawn, which I appreciated. Still, some of the science he tries to work in seems implausible. He justifies the Rule of Three – roughly, that slogans should come in three catchy parts (like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” or “veni, vidi, vici”) – by suggesting that any number greater than three will tax people’s working memory, while any number less than three does not provide enough repetition for people to see a pattern. Both of those seem obviously false.

Hasan also digs up a citation to support his broader approach to argumentation: the fMRI scans (ooh!) of Emory psychology professor Drew Westen, who says: “The political brain is an emotional brain.” According to Westen, in Hasan’s words, “Republicans often win because ‘they have a near-monopoly in the marketplace of emotions,’ while Democrats continue to naively ‘place their stock in the marketplace of ideas.’ This drives Democrats up a wall, as they cite policy propositions and figures only to lose out on inspiration. But the simple truth is that conservatives across the West know how to rile up and energize their base.” This is a common narrative: we’re stronger than our opponents, but they use tools we won’t – the Dark Side of the Force! – and so they win, against nature and against justice; so we must familiarize ourselves even with those questionable tools. Plenty of conservatives favor stories like this as well. But it’s never seemed to me that progressives are unfamiliar with emotional appeals or that conservatives are unfamiliar with things like “propositions and figures” (whatever that means). Rather, many people just search for an explanation for why their side – which to them seems obviously correct – does not win every political encounter in a landslide.

Such people, who are already certain about all their political beliefs, may well find Hasan’s tips useful. But we might hope for more: we might hope that the winning side of an argument, conducted rightly, has done better in some rational way – has deserved to convince the audience, and even the opponent, based on the strength of the reasons they’ve offered. There is a kind of “resource allocation” concern, too. The more time we spend on practicing our speeches, researching our opponents for gotchas, learning tricks like the Rule of Three, and so on, the less time we spend on our arguments in the philosophical sense – in making sure we have the right reasons for our beliefs, and on assessing our opponents’ reasons for their beliefs too.

Hasan’s confusion is, however, understandable. The role played by argument in democracy – according to Hasan, democracy’s “lifeblood” – is a dual one, though not in quite the way described above. On the one hand, we ought to be objective by our own standards: deliberation requires that we give our reasons for our political beliefs, in an expressive manner. On the other hand, we’re also called to be objective by public standards: deliberation requires that we appeal to others when we argue for our political beliefs, in a persuasive manner. Political commentators do sometimes criticize politicians and activists for speaking in a way that won’t convince anyone, and a broad faith in democracy seems to require that we think that convincing others has at least some rational import. But like the sophists of ancient Athens, Hasan teaches mere gratification of an audience. We should, like Socrates, challenge such rhetorical teachings, as inadequate to the intellectual and political role argument can serve. Otherwise, one can win every argument without having won anything of value at all.