You can find all these across the internet and in print, quite often and quite egregiously on this very site. All of them annoy the hell out of me. I’d appreciate if you could support my righteous crusade and pledge never to make these mistakes.

apropos

I saw this quote in a book I read recently (a book tragically full of similar mistakes): “The illustrative anecdote of the doctor’s dilemma is very much apropos the sentimental society lady, as her daughter Lise’s condition as a paralytic requires much of her attention and, in turn, most of her love.” What does apropos mean in this context? Well, certainly not what it’s supposed to mean.

Apropos (or the equally respectable apropos of) is taken from the French preposition à propos de, meaning “concerning” or “with respect to.” The most common English use is the phrase apropos of nothing, which introduces a non sequitur: “Apropos of nothing, what are your thoughts on Melville?” A positive use might be, say, “Apropos your email, could we call to discuss things in detail?”

Yet many writers have begun using apropos as nothing more than a fancy synonym for appropriate. In the quote above, the author seemingly meant to say that the anecdote (which you may have discerned comes from The Brothers Karamazov) paralleled the mother’s struggles. Why couldn’t the author use appropriate for or fitting?

Well, it’s obvious why people make this mistake: apropos looks and sounds like a fancy synonym for appropriate. As we all know, writing is better with more fancy foreign-language synonyms. Bonus points if your readers don’t know them.

Apropos is never a necessary word and rarely the best. If you’re not sure how to use it, avoid it. If you’re sure how to use it…avoid it most of the time.

Now, there’s a caveat. After a great deal of misuse, some dictionaries now accept that apropos can be an adjective meaning appropriate. But while dictionaries have caved, stylists have not: usage authorities maintain that apropos should stick to its French meaning rather than suffering this pointless and illogical extension.

momentarily

“I’ll see you momentarily!” What does this mean? Well, historically and logically, it means, “I’ll see you for a moment.” Yet across the language, this has been mangled to mean “in a moment.” Some stylists blame airlines: in their pursuit of stuffy formality, airlines prefer long words and jargon to short, logical phrases. “We’ll be landing momentarily” is slightly longer and less colloquial than “in a moment.”

This can easily lead to ambiguity—when someone says, “I’ll talk to you momentarily,” do they mean briefly or soon? Most people would assume that you mean the illogical modern sense, but confusion would be natural.

Correct uses of the word are generally unambiguous—“The rainbow was only there momentarily”—but careful writers should recognize the possibility for confusion.

optionality

I originally believed (or at least hoped) that optionality was confined to sports. For a while, I only heard it from poorly edited sportswriters and circumlocutory coaches. Unfortunately, I was wrong. It is a stain on writing from sports to finance to coffee. In any field where people think jargon equals intelligence, you will encounter this absolute disaster of a word.

Unintuitively, the intended meaning is not “the state of being optional” but rather “the state of having options.” Celtics coach Brad Stevens gave a great example of its poor use a few weeks ago: “I would say that it's a move to keep us at a very competitive level and give us optionality moving forward.”

Adding the -ity suffix to an adjective creates a word meaning the state of having that quality: something with functionality is functional rather than having functions; something with accountability is accountable rather than having accounts; and something with visibility is visible rather than having vision. Something with optionality should logically be optional.

The worst part of optionality is that there’s a perfectly suitable synonym in vogue: flexibility. To have flexibility (note that to be flexible is often better—“we’re flexible” rather than “we have flexibility”) means to have many choices available. This is a sounder (and better sounding) option.

Of course, optionality is correct when used to mean “the state of being optional”—for a weird example, “The optionality of pepperoni on pizza means that it’s not an essential ingredient.” It’s a bizarre word that might never be your best choice.

self-learner

This is an illogical synonym for autodidact. Autodidacts do not learn themselves but rather teach themselves. Autodidact is a fine word as is, but if the Greek seems too stuffy, its English equivalent self-teacher is a natural and logical parallel to the common phrase self-taught.

I suppose that self-learner could theoretically be used as a noun for one studying oneself, maybe through meditation or intense reflection. But don’t apply this to Buddhists: they can’t study themselves since they have no self at all.

Through my humble condescension, may you be freed from the scourge of these words forever.

Subscribe now

Share

This is a short essay from my notes on the pitfalls of vulgarity in modern writing—where it’s warranted, where it’s unnecessary, and how good writers ought to think about it.

I’d like to call vulgarity a trend among younger writers, though it’s nearly universal. While fuck, shit, and the like were rare in all but the most informal contexts, they’re now common features of huge swaths of speech and writing. Enshittification is everywhere, self-help titles are full of ironically censored F*cks, and politicians across the spectrum swear at every turn.

Why is this? The greatest draw is authenticity: a well-placed shit makes authors and speakers seem real, especially crucial in the low-trust environment of internet writing. A sharp reader is constantly looking for AI-generated content, advertising, mis- and disinformation, and plenty more forms of manipulation. Vulgarity is noticeably human in a low-trust age. It can put the writer in a colloquial position free from careful criticism—and it’s easy to see why this is especially valuable in politics.

But good writers want careful criticism. If you’re proud of what you write, you should want a serious response; inviting readers to pay close attention is a real and important skill. This doesn’t mean writing humorless prose full of stuffy formalisms, but writing conversationally (colloquially might be the better term) doesn’t mean writing like you’re screwing around. Reckless vulgarity begets the latter.

And excess vulgarity can be a crutch for undeft writers. Good writing (formal or not) sounds natural without any adverbial fuckings or references to that shit. Bad writing most often sounds inauthentic because it clumsily tries to put on airs. Readers will know right away if a writer was hunched over a thesaurus working on a poor impression of an academic (or, worse, a poor impression of Tumblr’s impression of Neil Gaiman’s impression of classic literature). But for such a pretentious writer, shoving in a few random bits of slang and vulgarity might be enough to distract inattentive readers.

A careful reader can see through this illusion. What once was genuine and informal now often appears insincere and overwrought—you will find all sorts of writers across the internet blending vulgarity with sesquipedalian excess. (You might recall that old meme about a cromulent fuckrustable of a day.) Excessive vulgarity betrays a dated sense of humor that will leave readers’ eyes rolling.

Is vulgarity always to be avoided? In a time when all writing is trending towards informal writing, vulgarity is sometimes the right choice—if you swear in speech, then you shouldn’t preclude swearing in writing. But don’t think that writing dick and asshole excuses you from the hard work of writing well—and I beg you not to add more vulgarity than would be natural.

If you read this far, you’ll probably enjoy my rant about the horrible misuse of whom in place of who (along with broader thoughts on pretentiousness, power, and grammar).

If you want an undeft writer’s thoughts on writing (and other things), you’d love to subscribe.

Subscribe now

Or share with the most excessively vulgar person you know.

Share

Despite our mediocre efforts, we have entered the Slop Ascendancy. The internet is infested with content that’s had almost zero effort put into it by either creator or consumer. It’s formulaic, comforting, and thoughtless. The whole point of consuming slop is to hide from thinking for a while. It offers enough stimulus to keep the mind from wandering, thus leaving the viewer unencumbered by the weight of human existence for a while.

As you may have heard, not everyone is happy about this. Legions of critics, journalists, scholars, and amateurs have risen up to offer whatever resistance they possibly can. But that’s boring stuff to read, isn’t it? Long papers, slow essays, whole books—I mean, who wants that? And thus the Slop Ascendancy has given rise to a new industry: anti-slop slop. We’ve all seen it, though it’s a tricky little form. It’s a bold stand against the tides of automated crap and effortless content that have conquered the internet, a brave assertion of the dignity of humanity, and a cry for hope for the future of art. The issue is that it’s basically the same as the stuff it attacks.

Anti-slop slop—conveniently abbreviating to ASS—doesn’t really criticize, educate, or edify. It’s a tribal signal. By liking and sharing ASS, you’re indicating that you are far too smart for the sloppish dregs of social media. The goal is not to engage with either slop or non-slop but simply to show that you’re the kind of person who prefers the former. It’s sometimes literally AI generated, though I don’t think it has to be: it’s slop all the same if it’s formulaic Content made to attract thoughtless engagement and meet that addictive need for righteous anger.

I can’t really fault people for a posting some ASS here and there. If you want to post a dumb meme or snide take, go ahead—I’m far from innocent. We don’t have to be serious and scholarly 24/7, nor do we have to abandon every in-joke and meme. But if we want our reading and writing to be worthwhile, we should ask ourselves whether we’re actually working to educate ourselves or just pursuing our preferred version of mindless entertainment.

I’m more inclined to fault the people selling ASS. I am not interested in naming names—and I genuinely don’t think my readers or friends are ASShats—but you will find this brand of post all over the internet masquerading as serious analysis. It’s every bit as shallow as the stuff it criticizes: it rarely has anything to say beyond “AI sucks!” or “The Literary Establishment must be destroyed!” It’s hostile: it insults and degrades its opponents with a tone of inquisitional fervor. Sometimes, it literally is AI generated. Go to Twitter and you’ll find plenty of Traditional Aesthetics accounts posting AI-generated reading lists and quotes. Substack is not free, of course, and there are plenty of literary ragebaiters who don’t use AI yet make slop nonetheless.

Most importantly, ASS reminds you that you’re one of the smart ones. You’re part of the rebellion, the learned, the based, the lovers of literature who’ll stand proud against the coming tide of idiocy. By virtue of reading ASS, you’ve proven that you’re immune to any of the computer-generated garbage infesting your parents’ Facebook feeds.

Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we like mindless nonsense. As David Foster Wallace argued, television isn’t stupid because people are stupid. It’s because the most universal pleasures of humanity are also the most basic and unrefined. Sex, gossip, crass humor, feeling like part of the tribe—almost everyone enjoys these, and those who don’t probably spent years and years learning to resist them. Plenty of us are ashamed of these habits. You’ve probably found yourself a bit too invested in online drama before, right? Have you ever watched some trashy reality show and felt ashamed at how much you enjoyed it? These things are so popular because they’re mindless defaults.

But those who’ve read Wallace’s brilliant “E Unibus Pluram”—which should be all of you, by the way—know how smart writers and marketers can disarm any audience concerns by indicating that they’re In The Know. They can put a hand on your shoulder and say, “Look. We both know you’re too smart for this. But hey, now that you and I have this little secret, why not have some fun? You’re immune to it, after all—you aren’t going to become one of those drones who looks at everything uncritically.” ASS taps into this power brilliantly: how can it be slop if it mocks slop? Never mind that it’s all the same rage-baiting nonsense and substanceless memes that you’d see anywhere else. It’s for lovers of literature! Like you!

In McLuhanesque fashion, we could reasonably argue that the medium of the internet tends towards slop. The diverse possibilities of the internet will slowly coalesce towards the same thoughtless doomscrolling. McLuhan explicitly described content as a distraction from form—while we’re busy arguing about what a work is saying, we’re ignoring the much more important matter of what it’s doing.1 This is the basic function of ASS in succinct terms: it criticizes its medium to obscure its medium. Edutainment is so popular because it offers all the fun of slop without any of the guilt.

But if we’re to follow the McLuhanist line, we’re left with a difficult question: can the internet offer anything but slop? Because the concern isn’t the content itself but the habits of consumption it engenders: even thoughtful and interesting YouTube videos or Substack articles are part of the same medium that begets doomscrolling, Subway Surfers split screens, and constant flipping between different tabs. We can’t hide from our environment.

Honestly, I’m not confident that we can win this fight. There’s one natural way to use the internet: not as a reader nor as a speaker but as a Consumer of Media. We’re at the mercy of the insidious Algorithm—both as readers and writers (or, I’m sorry, Users and Content Creators)—which of course could be fixed if we just devalued Slop (e.g., whatever’s popular) and promoted Thoughtful Content (e.g., what my friends and I write). Unsurprisingly, even the resistance has become a sloppish grift—and hey, here I am making the same cheap analyses for clicks, and here I am admitting that I do it to cut off any criticism. I don’t think that I’m part of that tide of thoughtless click- and ragebait—I can assure you I’m not using AI, at least—but is there any way to stay Out of the Game on here?

That’s a genuine question—I want to know if and how I can write not just for the content cycle but for actual thoughtful interaction. Certainly, it will never be rewarded—there’s just no way that serious writing will outstrip memes and ragebait—but is it even possible? Can a reader thoughtfully engage rather than Consume, or does the medium demand that relationship of distraction?

We cannot reappropriate the Slop Ascendancy’s weapons against itself. To fight back, we must look for altogether different forms of communication—that might mean desperately fighting for a return to the printed word or hope for an altogether different means of using our technology. But don’t think that a Good Algorithm is coming along to save us. The content may change; the form will not.

My rebellion is so rebellious that we’ve circled back to being conformists. You too can conform using the button below:

Subscribe now

Depending on who you ask, media is either a tremendously useful term for our cultural moment or a degrading offense against art. Its current use is seemingly a back-formation from the term “mass media”, originally 1920s advertising jargon. “Mass-media” referred to media that would reach large audiences; “media” later came to mean newspapers, television, and radio in general.

From this use, media has been extended—and abused—to mean any work regardless of scope, audience, or intent. Beyond television, radio, and news, media now refers to video games, books, films, music, and essentially everything that would have once fallen under the term art or entertainment. In a culture defined by such a multiplicity of formats—think about how recently film, radio, television, and recorded music did not exist, to say nothing of the countless new media (mediums?) emerging with the personal computer—I can understand why a generic term is desirable. Media might simply capture our environment better than its alternatives.

There are, of course, unimpeachable uses of the term media that I don’t intend to criticize. The media of film, radio, painting, or video games are fine to discuss. Media studies is unimpeachable, and obviously media is a necessary technical term within the field. But can we extend it beyond these strict senses to refer generically to almost every—or literally every—bit of human creation?

And yet I stand firmly with the critics: I refuse to use the word media where any alternative exists, I hate how media literacy has replaced the far better critical reading, and there is maybe no phrase I loathe more than consume media. I don’t think there’s a perfect alternative to media in all cases, but that’s one thing I hate about it: it’s treated as far too generic of a term. A more specific word almost always works better: you can most often use a medium’s specific name (just say video games or television), and when you can’t, terms like art or entertainment are generally better.1 For one, they’re not nearly as ugly. (It feels like I’m stressing every syllable when I say media—coming from a long line of iambic peoples, I would like a bit of a rest.) Much more importantly, they capture a sense of aesthetics that is almost entirely lacking in media—a term that instead takes the form as the critical object.

Marshall McLuhan, the founder of media studies, argued that all human artifacts are “media” insofar as they are means of mediating either our interactions with other humans or the world. Following this definition—a reasonable one, I’d say—we might say that media is a perfectly acceptable generic term. Yet by that same logic, we might ask ourselves why we don’t just say artifacts. Is media nothing more than its best synonym? Is there no reason to prefer one over the other?

Obviously, this isn’t the case. Media has its peculiar denotations and connotations. By describing something as media, you are inviting the reader to think of it in a particular critical light, not with an eye towards content or aesthetics but towards its form as an object of communication. McLuhan, of course, took content as ultimately incidental to meaning. The medium is the message. To speak of art qua media is not to speak aesthetically, but rather of the social form engendered by the art form—its message is the mode of interaction it entails.

What emerges from media analysis is not an understanding of the work itself but rather of the context that produced such a work and the context that such a work produces. This, to be clear, is a useful line of inquiry. My intention isn’t to discredit McLuhan nor to pretend like our cultural context is pristine and unbothered by the last century of technological development. But I would like to ask whether media draws us away from valuable elements in favor of one element of the whole—an element that threatens to overtake everything else.

Of course, we’re not beholden to one technical use of the term. The fact that McLuhan defined it in this particular way does not mean that all our usage is constrained by that definition—the technical meaning of just in case2 does not make the idiomatic use is wrong. Yet I don’t think media has genericized to the point of losing these old associations. Ironically, part of the reason it can’t be generic is that it makes its objects so painfully generic—they become interchangeable.

Part of my disgust at consume media is how ugly it is: media is a hideous word and consume is too mediocre to save it. It’s unnatural and cacophonous. But beyond its aesthetic shortcomings, it suggests this gross imagery of indiscriminately devouring whatever’s in front of you. It encourages us to relate to art as nothing more than an object to meet an animalistic need.

Using media to refer to all aspects of entertainment is like using calories to refer to all aspects of food. It removes any of the unique charm or individuality that makes these objects what they are—in its place is merely its quantifiable power to end a craving. This is art as distraction. This is art as nothing more than a brief antidote to boredom, an insatiable hunger for more media.

Media encourages us to disregard aesthetics in favor of abstract social form. Maybe this is the appropriate term for our era—as Walter Benjamin wrote, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura [broadly, its immediacy, its uniqueness] of the work of art.” Maybe art is anachronistic. That’s a serious take, by the way—we might no longer live in the sort of society where art points to a unique category.

But what if we as readers—or, I say with disgust, consumers—aspire to something more? Even if we’re losing our sense of works of art as aesthetic objects—not just social forms or interchangeable calories—that doesn’t mean that we must participate in the transition.

This is certainly some level of overdetermination: simply, I hate media because it’s ugly, awkward jargon. Better terms are available. The philosophical context isn’t meaningless, but my concern is basically aesthetic. Writing is uglier when you prefer media to art.

But I do fear that the trend towards media signals that our age isn’t concerned with beauty. We consume. To be media literate means to deftly navigate these objects—to understand their intention, context, and structure. It does not teach us to appreciate them. Though it’s unfashionable now, criticism is still my preference. We can and should approach a work thinking about the work—not on a meta-level, not as an example of a form, but as an aesthetic object in its own right. I’m not saying to abandon those pursuits, but I don’t think we’re in any danger of losing them. Focus on the greater risks. Aesthetics needs our attention now more than ever.

If you’d like a mechanical reproduction of my new writing, subscribe for free below. (Or upgrade to paid and I’ll give you something with aura.)

Subscribe now

Or share this with a media-illiterate friend.

Share

What posture is Dante in when he reaches towards the flames in Purgatorio XXVII? Is he inclining himself towards them? Is he using his hands to shield himself? balance himself? Are his hands joined? separate? splayed?

Is this a useless question? Some might say so. Its effect on the meaning of the poem is small. Translators concerned with precision should obviously care about small details like this, but what does this matter to us as normal readers and interpreters? Why should we worry about the minor details at the expense of the grander context of the poem?

Once upon a time, I think I would’ve rolled my eyes at this apparent pedantry. Why are we wasting time on the pointless details when we could discuss the substance—the themes, the symbolism, the meaning? Undoubtedly the most cringeworthy episode of this habit came during my sophomore year of high school: in my English class, we had to read Henry James’s A Turn of the Screw for our class unit on ambiguity. A friend (shout out ) and I kept criticizing our assignment: decide whether the ghosts were real. It’s not supposed to be answered, we argued. The point is the effect of the ambiguity, and we’re much better off focusing on that effect. This culminated in me emailing my friends a mocking parody of my teacher talking about Animal Farm’s themes of animal cruelty and ethics in farming, which my teacher found and did not enjoy. Mrs. Budacki, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.

Personal embarrassment aside, I’ve come to realize that I was just wrong. No, it’s not that important that we resolve whether A Turn of the Screw is actually about a ghost or about a delusional woman trying to hide her crimes, but the ambiguity doesn’t exist outside the concreteness of that question. Rifling through evidence, comparing cases, and looking to the smallest details of the text for any proof either way isn’t a distraction from James’s project. That is the project. And neglecting the practical for the symbolic only threatens to make our concern for the text abstract and weak.

These are not shallow conversation by any means. Often, they’re the arguments that require the greatest depth of attention to the text. The attempts to resolve that little practical question in Purgatorio have spawned literal centuries of argument. Still, there’s no definite answer. Dante writes:

In su le man commesse mi protesi
guardando il foco e imaginando forte
umani corpi già veduti accesi.

Translators still differ and always will. Robert Hollander renders the description of Dante’s posture as “I bent forward over my outstretched hands/and stared into the fire.” “Those who argue that Dante has joined his hands,” Hollander argues, “do not deal with the fact that the other three times in the Comedy when he uses a form of this past participle of commettere (to commit) it never means 'join together,' as most take it to mean here.” Many of Dante’s greatest English-language translators disagreed: Allen Mandelbaum renders it as, “I joined my hands and stretched them out to fend/the flames;” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow concurred, writing, “Upon my clasped hands I straightened me,/Scanning the fire.”

You will notice that there are various symbolic nuances to each of these: does Dante take some pleasure in the fire? Is he doing everything he can to avoid it? Is he curious despite the pain? These implications are small, but they quite obviously matter.

Like almost every bit of ambiguity in the Divine Comedy, dozens of careful commentators have offered their own explanations. Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, two prominent modern scholars, collected seven commentators’ arguments on the matter for just a small overview of the long debate on this line. Hollander was convinced by their argument “that Dante is holding his hands toward the fire, feeling its heat on them and attempting to keep the rest of his body as far as possible from the flame behind those extended hands, while he bends his head toward it, peering into it.”

We can’t trust any argument as definitive. Dante wrote without precedent: we can’t point to other writers’ use of commettere to suggest what the verse should mean. Though it’s an exaggeration to say that Dante invented Italian, it’s no exaggeration at all to suggest that his use was sui generis, taking the Florentine dialect to a new world altogether.

Among the Comedy’s 14,000+ lines, you can find seemingly small arguments like this everywhere. Was Dante’s Minotaur a traditional depiction or a bull’s body with a human head? Did the souls in Paradise reside among the heavenly bodies or were they only temporarily away from their place in the immaterial Empyrean to greet Dante on his journey? Did Count Ugolino truly eat his children in a fit of rage, or does the timeline of his death suggest that he starved too fast to have consumed them?

Dante wrote with an immense attention to detail. So much of the Comedy deals with what we might term the physics of the afterlife: how does Dante’s corporeal body compare to the incorporeal shades? Where does the sun stand in relation to Mt. Purgatory, and where then to Jerusalem and Italy? What is the cause of the inverted gravity of Paradise? How many miles across are the circles of Hell? How could any wind spawn in the uniform temperature of the center of Hell? Readers have joyously responded with that same level of attention and precision: these questions are mostly answerable and we want answers.

It’s only human to want to make these questions answerable. And I’d argue that this curiosity—the drive to ask “what’s really happening? Why?”—is not much different from the metaphysical curiosity that drives both philosophical inquiry at large and our most beloved works of philosophical fiction. For Dante to ask how a physical body contrasts with an immaterial soul is not much different from Eliot asking what would happen to a St. Teresa-esque woman weighed down by the social mores of the late Georgian era. An even more obvious example is, of course, Moby-Dick, which blends Melville’s philosophical reflections with his somewhat insane scientific theories.

Why is it that these questions have earned such a bad reputation? Why don’t serious poets and novelists concern themselves with explaining the scientific and “logical” boundaries of their absurd worlds? Well, there’s one obvious explanation: these are the questions genre readers ask.

For literary-minded readers, it’s easy to roll our eyes at this seeming brass-tacks nonsense. What a waste of life it is for George R.R. Martin’s fans to obsess over the physics behind ten-year winters! How pointless it is for fantasy authors to devise elaborate economies that stop the plot before it starts!

The perceived issue with these questions is that they distract from the art. If we get bogged down in the minutiae—the imaginary physics, the convoluted bits of plot, and the precise details of the local economy—how will we ever worry about the aesthetic heights, the moral depths, the things that actually make a work of literature great?

This is not an irrelevant concern. It’s possible to neglect the aesthetic and thematic elements nearly altogether in focusing on these ostensibly shallow questions. Stephen King mournfully wrote in his book On Writing:

Nobody ever asks me about language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper.

And it’s a sad thing indeed that King’s readers never ask him why he writes things the way he does. It’s also sad that nobody asks the DeLillos or Updikes or Styrons about plot, logic, and practicalities, things that readers might unfortunately label as “worldbuilding.” This is not to say that Updike needed to better establish Rabbit’s lore or that Gabriel Garcia Marquez should’ve hashed out the intricacies of his magic system, but it does mean that a novelist ought not to think that these questions are pointless obstacles to a grander aesthetic vision. Writers don’t have to follow perfectly scientific logic—that’s a mistake that far too many genre writers make—but every writer must follow a logic of sorts, no matter how ad hoc it may be. Yes, it matters whether the Fellowship could’ve just rode the eagles to Mordor: for the story to cohere, there must be an answer. “That happened because there wouldn’t be a plot otherwise” is a bad justification. It betrays uninterest in a huge part of the work.

A work’s aesthetic principles may allow or demand illogic. Ionesco’s plays wouldn’t work if they were logical by any of our definitions of the word. They challenged reason. Even then, these challenges were spawned through intentional manipulation of our day-to-day logic: he exaggerated the rational world to the point where its omnipresent irrationality became obvious. But in the context of narrative, a work’s aesthetic principles don’t neatly proceed from nor precede its plot principles.

But digging deeper, we can find a fundamental cause of this split: science and the humanities have split. From Dante to Melville, there’s no obvious divide between philosophical and scientific answers—and certainly no obvious divide between the scientific and the theological. Explaining the movement of the heavenly bodies and the nature of original sin are part of the same task in the Comedy. Though Melville wrote Moby-Dick in a time when the split between the empirical and the philosophical was certainly underway, his boundary is much fuzzier than ours. His infamous cetology reflects a paradigm where aesthetic answers suited zoological questions—don’t forget how much science and philosophy was presented in dialogues and poetry.

As the philosophical and aesthetic retreated from the real world and science took command of Experience, our vision of art became more detached from these physical concerns. (And I’m not much of a fan of labeling the study of the purely abstract as the humanities. Science ought to be a humanity.) Does this mean that we must concede logic as a whole to the distinctly non-aesthetic practice of science?

I don’t believe it does. Asking for clarity and detail doesn’t have to mean disregarding aesthetics or symbolism. To the contrary, these two pursuits can and should dovetail into the same search for understanding.

An unreflective obsession with practical factoids—“What is the conversion rate of copper to silver?” “What is this kingdom’s tax policy?” “How narrow is the walkway in this part of Purgatory?”—can be an obstacle to reaching towards another level of understanding. I don’t think we should call it a higher level of understanding necessarily. They aren’t separable.

We ought to accept literature on its own terms. But good fiction has logical and consistent terms, not a pure disregard for the inferior questions beneath its totally idiosyncratic and unimpeachable project. We as readers should not forget that the effect of fiction is rooted in the practical nor that it’s aimed at the philosophical. Writers, of course, should not be content to neglect these questions either. If they don’t matter, then why should the story matter at all? We should ask ourselves about language and plot and everything in between. The substance of the story is not within any one place; the substance is the relationship between diverse parts.

You might consider accepting my terms and subscribing—or, the bold idiosyncrat that you are, you might set your own and pledge a subscription.

Subscribe now

Or share with a horrendously shallow reader.

Share

…is misusing “whom” for “who.” Let me explain.

I don’t consider myself to be much of a grammar snob. My family is entirely made up of born-and-bred Pittsburghers, some of whom still say yinz and none of whom would see anything wrong with saying “The car needs washed.” In speech, I err towards the dialectal more than the standard. Still, I try to write with “correct” grammar with occasional allowances for dialect,1 though there are doubtless mistakes—some subtle, some severe—throughout the 100,000+ words (!) I’ve spewed across Substack. Given my preference for dialect and my own imperfect grammar, I try not to get upset when people mess up their, they’re, and there; I let misplaced modifiers and danglers sneak by me; and I’m not going to get on your case for using less for fewer, though I did harass my brother about it just a few weeks ago. If it’s a mistake everyone makes, I won’t say much about it.

I will not stoop to calling myself a descriptivist for many reasons. It’s not just the absurdities of the academics who’ve slowly but surely won the Usage Wars nor even my disdain for the wide swaths of the internet who’ve taken their definitions of descriptivism and prescriptivism from a few decade-old YouTube videos. It’s mostly that I’m someone who wants to write clearly and compellingly (which, by my read, means fairly strict grammar with a solid helping of idiom) and the descriptivist camp tends to label all such attempts as elitist devilry. There can be no correct English. Any insistence on distinguishing that and which or controlling your commas will get someone asking why the hell this matters.

And maybe the prickliest nuances are unnecessary—great writers make plenty of insignificant mistakes—but what happens when we decide to rid ourselves of any consistent standard? Ignoring grammatical conventions is awfully solipsistic. Sticking with your own style no matter how far it deviates means prioritizing adherence to your neat little inner state over helping your readers understand. Maybe that works for you. If you’re just writing for your own sake, then you can make your rules as you please. But I write to get my thoughts out of my head. Escaping myself and reaching others means accepting that my ramblings must be mediated by and transfigured in writing. In a real sense, they will no longer be mine. That’s a good thing. And that mediation requires that I conform to the expectations of others—it just feels right to me is not a suitable criterion.

But I’m sympathetic to many descriptivist motives. In part, descriptivism has found such a wide audience because most grammatical pedantry is genuinely offensive. And not just implicitly or accidentally: if you went and looked at a hundred or so instances of grammatical correction online, I would bet you that a supermajority are either snide dismissals or not-even-veiled personal attacks. I am not innocent of this2 and I’d bet that you aren’t either. If a friend of yours said, like, “You and me should check out this bar sometime,” you’d never consider pointing out the mistake, right? Alright, maybe some of you would—this is Substack, after all—but sane people would ignore it. Now, if someone in an argument said, “You and me are talking past each other. This is what I’m saying…” you could easily think, “Shit, a grammatical error? I win!” And how smug would you feel saying, “lol, it’s ‘You and I’ idiot” as you leave triumphant?

And then there’s the far worse use of Standard English as a tool of racial abuse. Plenty of conservatives like to browbeat every bit of black dialect and unsubtly imply that black people are too stupid for standard English. Of course, those conservatives are rarely masters of grammar themselves—I’m reminded of my high-school health teacher telling a few black guys, “He be? That’s real good English.”

Though of course, today’s preeminent prescriptivists are pretty far on the other end of the spectrum: as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his evergreen “Authority and American Usage,”3 the strictest prescriptions for language come from advocates for political correctness. Demanding that mental disorders or illnesses become neurodivergence, that guys not be used as a neutral address to a group, that they displace he as the standard pronoun, that the homeless become the unhoused, etc. etc. etc.—that’s all straightforward prescriptivism, and those prescriptions carry a lot more social weight than any obsolete proscription on split infinitives. Advocates might argue that the difference is that these are tools to eliminate inequality rather than enforce it: it’s taking the tools of elitism to create equality. Still, the fact remains that it’s an ideologically motivated attempt to police language. I don’t think it’s hard to understand why people feel targeted when sociology PhDs tell them to watch their tone or risk losing their jobs.

The average experience of prescriptivism will always be uppity bullying, whether it’s from your arch-Republican high-school teacher, self-righteous academics, or the nerdy kid who thinks he’s the first person to discover Pink Floyd. (At least you can shove the latter in a locker.) I don’t think it’s unfair for people to associate prescriptivism not just with some shadowy academic Establishment but with the very concrete jerks we’ve all met. And thus even good-faith bits of grammatical concern come off as snobbish and condescending: you are implicitly aligning yourself with sneering racists, embarrassing dorks, HR managers, and everyone’s least-favorite middle-school English teacher.

Some of this is childish frustration (it’s probably time to let go of any grade-school resentment), but all these examples of prescriptivism point to language’s frightening potential as a weapon. Dramatic as it may sound, all of those demands—when someone shuts down he be or you and me or homeless—are ideological sorties into day-to-day language. These symbolic battles are the battle. As George Orwell argued, there’s no better way to stop opposition than to make it literally inexpressible.

But language isn’t an irredeemable tool of destruction. Yes, it can plainly be used to target others for selfish ends, but the fact remains that it’s the only thing bridging my mind to yours. I think it’s in the interest of everyone—writer or not—to ask how we can emphasize that connection and lessen the vicious struggle. And I’d contend that the best way to make language clear, shared, and meaningful is some form of prescriptivism.

And, of course, I’m talking about my perfect brand of prescriptivism, not any of those loathsome variants. But this ideal is far more common than we realize. While the stereotypical prescriptivist remains the old academic who hasn’t left his ivory tower in decades and readily enumerates polemics against the solecisms ravaging contemporary English, I’ve found that most real-life prescriptivists are surprisingly colloquial in the best sense of the term. Take the estimable Bryan A. Garner, author of Modern English Usage. (The cover says it’s “the authority on grammar, usage, and style,” and you’re supposed to judge by that, right?) Read anything he’s written. Watch a video of him. He sounds natural. Like, more natural than people who haven’t thought about grammar once in the past decade. And far from a staunch defender of the ivory tower, Garner’s generated a ton of controversy trying to make legal writing accessible to nonspecialists. His prescriptivism is a legitimate means of making language accessible—sometimes harder to use but always easier to understand.

Take David Foster Wallace, self-proclaimed grammar SNOOT and obviously great writer. His writing is natural. It is—dare I say?—conversational. He reads like he’s actually addressing You, The Reader, a task that many have attempted and most have embarrassingly failed. And plenty of those failures sought conversationality by neglecting standards for grammar and usage. If you eliminate all the layers of prescription, your writing will not sound more human; it will sound like a rambling inner monologue transcribed verbatim.

These prescriptivist are real. Their philosophy is achievable. Their work is accessible—as a matter of fact, it’s far more accessible than the academic tomes justifying descriptivism. For as easy as conversational writing might sound, it’s only achieved through tremendous amounts of deliberate effort. Conversational writing is not and cannot be unmediated thoughts thrown on a page. Creating a conversation demands that you understand your reader incredibly well: you need to know where their mind will go, predict their questions, and learn how your prose sounds in alien ears. You won’t be there to shepherd them. You only have the words on the page. If your writing is ambiguous, what can they do—ask you to clarify?4

Ungrammatical writing is unempathetic. “Who cares? They’ll get what I mean” is genuinely solipsistic: it’s assuming that everyone can just read your thoughts. (Or, worse, that you’re such a genius that people will spend all the hours necessary to untangle your ill-formed sentences.) If you want to get something across to the reader, you’re doing them a disservice by making mistakes like, “The schools which embrace AI are going to pay the price”; “The next generation of readers will not be raised in school, they will be self-taught”; “Those who study often will prosper”; “Even admitting that he made mistakes, Kant was still a genius”; or “Let’s talk between you and I about some important lessons.”5 Some of those are “unempathetic” in the sense that they’re indifferent to the reader—you’re not doing enough to help them—but worse, all are insidiously manipulative. Far from being dialectal and natural, these are all bits of pretentious puffery. It’s a thin veneer of “intelligent” language that instantly betrays its own lack of substance…but only if you know what to look for.

Descriptivists, both popular and academic, still find their way into overwrought academese all the time. Pretty much all of us slip into that register. We are all aware that Intellectual Language creates rapport. All of us—at the very least, anyone who’d read this much about minor grammatical errors—want that rapport. For as much as the philosopher-burnout archetype has flourished on social media for years, we still wind up using elevated language when we want to be taken seriously.

Standard English is easily weaponized. We use it—all of us, more or less—to dismiss our opponents. This is an awful part of the language. But what’s the answer? Should we get rid of all standards and hope that it works out? While we often use Standard English as a ploy for respect (whether calculated or unconscious), we still acknowledge that everyday speech simply isn’t commensurate to every issue. Like, do you believe that we should talk about ethics, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy with thoughtless informality? Lazy jokes about rizzing Hegelian e-girls or “just killing the kid in the Omelas hole” are funny for half a second because they’re such obvious misuses of language—little Wittgenstinian vacations.6

We need this shared space for serious conversation. Maintaining it demands rigor and intentionality: good speech and writing are not accidents. Standard English is not going away, and that is not some cynical concession that we’ll always be manipulative bastards. It’s because we’ll always need to be understood.

Prescriptivism is often a weapon. But while the predominant prescriptivists may be the cruel Establishment looking to cow students into submission and remind the proles of their inferiority, there is a real and enduring strain who want to be understood and want you to understand. They want to disarm the weaponization of Standard English, turning it from an incomprehensible mess of clauses and jargon into a platform for human-to-human relationship. They want to avoid a register that merely projects authority and find one that creates meaning.

This article genuinely started as a brief few words on why I hate misusing whom for who, though I hope this tangent will eventually amount to something of value. All that said, I’d like to actually explain my original point.

To be clear, I have no problem with using who in place of whom. English has largely rid itself of its accusative case (i.e., the case used for objects) and I don’t think we desperately need it here. Sure, it adds some clarity—that’s the excuse I give myself when I write whom—but I think we should accept that who is always an acceptable replacement for whom. Whether it’s ideal is another thing, of course.

But what I cannot stand is when people try to grandstand as grammatical cognoscenti by using whom without the slightest clue of how it works. Whom is the object of a verb (“You met whom?”), a preposition (“You went to whom for advice?”), or an infinitive (“You want to fight whom?”). You never use it for the nominative—i.e., as the subject of a verb. It’s never right to say “my friend, whom swims” or anything to that effect. Of course, this is occasionally tricky—to take a page out of Garner’s book (literally), “the man whom they thought was the enemy” is incorrect.7 (It’d be easy to think that whom is the object of thought, but it’s the subject of was.) The simple heuristic is that if you can replace it with him/her/them, it’s whom. If you’d replace it with he/she/they, it’s who; e.g., “You met him [whom?]?” “You thought he [who?] was the enemy?”

When you’re using whom, you’re sending some uncertain signals that you ought to consider. Are you a snob? Are you a manipulative rhetorician? Are you genuinely concerned with clarity? Using whom in place of who is most often a sign that someone’s either (1) or (2). (Again, legitimate mistakes happen.) It’s often a tell for language abusers who want you to think that they’re wise and mighty, clever and authoritative. Most likely, they believe that they are. Whom is their application to the elite club of bullies and browbeaters who always have the upper hand in an argument. At best, it’s the product of nervous insecurity. I can excuse that more than manipulation, though I’m no fan of the fakery regardless.

A misplaced whom indicates language meant to intimidate and impress. It’s a reminder of all the reasons to distrust rhetoric and fear formal language. If we want to end the linguistic arms race (impossible, but a worthy aspiration), we must criticize every such attempt to weaponize it.

Misusing whom is a hideous crime with an obvious motive. Whenever I read it, I seethe. If (let’s be honest: when) I ever commit it, please harass me. Word crimes committed out of ignorance are generally unimportant—there is no merit to dressing down every random mistake that your average English user makes (and plenty of these “mistakes” are no mistake at all in a particular dialect). But word crimes committed to claim a false authority are a threat to all the trust clear language creates. I think we should all take some degree of just satisfaction in attacking that pretension.

If you’re someone whom—I’m sorry, if you’re someone who wants to read this much about the cultural nuances of whom, it seems reasonable to subscribe.

Subscribe now

Or share with someone who ought to gain some grammatical deftness.

Share

Incoherent as this may sound, it’s somehow working. People are trying to automate all the fun out of these games. I’ve got plenty of firsthand experience with these players who, for whatever reason, want to let something else take care of the hard decisions. It’s pretty obvious why people want to hand over the hard decisions in, say, work or writing. It’s much weirder in the context of a board game where the hard part is also the fun part. We play because it’s satisfying to struggle with these problems.

Alright, maybe that’s not why everyone plays board games, but it’s certainly why I do. I’m a fan of many long complicated board games: most games in my fairly extensive collection run somewhere from two to ten hours; they have as much as eighty pages of rules and guides; and yes, most of them are only played like once every two years.1

But there’s one—well, three, but let me explain—game in my collection that’s long, unbelievably complex, and somehow still gets played every month nearly without fail. The undisputed pinnacle of my collection of many-hour games is 18xx, an unfortunately named series of board games (the Facebook, Reddit, and Discord communities are very often mislabeled as porn) offering a painfully detailed simulation of the financial misdeeds of 1800s railroad barons. (Entries in the series are mostly named for a year in the 1800s—1829, 1871, etc. etc.—thus the 18xx moniker.)

I personally own three games—1882: Assiniboia, 1880: China, and 1824: Austro-Hungarian Empire—though I’ve just come to treat them collectively as “Trains.” We don’t really say, “Let’s play 1882,” or, “Let’s play 1848” (my friends have their own small collections as well); we just say, “Let’s play trains,” a phrase that delights our wives and somewhat disarms their disappointment that we spent all Saturday hunched over a map of Saskatchewan’s railroads.

I loathe how people label anything nerdy and convoluted “autistic,” though I think that 18xx is what most would describe as an autistic board game. It’s long—depending on the game, it lasts somewhere from three to ten hours, pitting two to twelve players against one another in a financial free-for-all to the death. It is, of course, complicated: rulebooks are about twenty pages minimum, full of details on initial public offerings, train obsolescence, methods of embezzlement, bankruptcy (and how to force other players into it), and so on. Different games in the series simulate rebellions, wars, annexations, volcanic eruptions, communist takeovers, and stock market crashes. It is universally recommended that players use poker chips rather than paper money: poker chips make each transaction just a few seconds faster, which can easily save several hours over the course of a game. 18xx can easily become a hobby unto itself almost entirely separate from board gaming at large; quite a few fans play literally nothing else.

The Old Prince 1871 is finally getting a wide release after years of only being available handmade, so please subscribe to help me buy a copy.

Subscribe now

This is most of the spiel I give when I’m trying to convince someone not to play the game, because I don’t want someone to sit down for a five-hour board game and quit after thirty minutes. Here’s the much more important part that I typically save for last: this game is unbelievably fun. Like, not “fun” in the sort of intellectually satisfying way that Scrabble gets when you put down a big word. It’s fun in the sense that we are yelling, arguing, laughing, sinking with our heads in our hands, and asking each other when we can play again the instant the game is over. I played this game at my bachelor party. Plenty of alcohol has been spilled on all of our different versions. If you’re willing to get past the barrier to entry, you will absolutely be rewarded.

Maybe more than anything, 18xx is just an absolute labor of love. There are hundreds of games in the series covering basically every railroad on earth and beyond.2 Most of them are self-published by fans; a lot of them are only available handmade (and yes, the handmade copies are expensive—up to $175); and all of them are aimed at the rare sort of person who just genuinely loves three-to-ten consecutive hours of brain-burning problems and simulated bankruptcy.

(I should take a moment to mention that most games in the series are playable online for free at 18xx.games—like most of this series, it’s nothing more than a product of fans’ passion. There is a free tutorial, and yes, it is worth the effort.)

This game, of course, is not for everyone. I have learned over time that there are dire consequences when I don’t offer my please-don’t-play spiel. Of course, plenty of people just play and don’t enjoy themselves—that is bad enough, and I have learned that simulated trains can bring a grown man to tears. But the most frustrating phenomenon—even worse than the unenthused players, even worse than the early quitters—is the now-common experience of seeing someone try to play the entire game using ChatGPT.

In pretty much every game I play, someone will try to ask Chat or Claude or Deepseek to explain the rules—this has taught me that there are apparently no chatbots anywhere close to parsing complicated rulebooks effectively. That’s mostly inoffensive, though it’s always a bit frustrating to correct its many misconceptions. Much worse is when they begin to ask ChatGPT for strategy advice—what company should I bid on in the opening auction? What routes should I target if I run the Pennsylvania Railroad?

These bits of advice are almost always bad. Often, they’re just based on fundamental misunderstandings of the game: your chatbot of choice will often recommend impossible moves. Pretty often, other players just wind up telling the chatbot player what to do, and they’re rarely inclined to disagree.

These players know that their moves are bad. They know that they’re not gonna win this way. But AI isn’t supposed to help them play optimally. It’s a means to stop playing the game altogether.

The mythos of AI emphasizes its capacity for optimization: it will work better than you can, automate all your meaningless tasks (and quite a few meaningful ones), and unlock a level of productivity that we never thought possible. Yet all but the most ardent believers in the singularity must admit that for the average user, AI is just a means to withdraw from activity altogether. Students aren’t using chatbots to help them write papers—they’re uncritically pasting prompts into ChatGPT and uncritically submitting the output, no matter how many errors it may make or how easily a prompt trap might be set.

All of this leads to one question: what’s the point of letting a computer play your games for you? Why do people want to employ AI to withdraw from what should be a fun and unforced activity? And you might think it’s just for the social element, but leaning on AI means withdrawing from that as well: while other players are arguing, negotiating, joking, and laughing, the chatbot player is often staring at his phone and thoughtlessly acquiescing to other players’ proposed moves. It’s abandoning the whole activity. Sure, the game might be a means to the end of socializing, but participating in it is constitutive of socializing: being in that problem space together facilitates real social interactions, not just some shallow supplements to the real socializing above the game. (I’ve seen more than a few autistic board gamers speculate that autistic people love how board games offer a neatly structured social space.)

You’re probably thinking that these guys3 just made a mistake joining the game and decided to phone it in until it was over. But here’s the weird thing: all of these players have asked to join again. All of them. I have plenty of friends who’ve sworn off playing any of my long board games again,4 but for whatever reason, these bold few who ask Deepseek about the strategic nuances of the Trestle Bridge Company still want to join us.

And though plenty of you are probably thinking, “Just kick them out. Don’t play with them,” I still want them to come back. Because I get it. At some level, they want to enjoy this game. At least, they’d like to be the type of person who enjoys this game. They genuinely see the appeal of the camaraderie and the strategy. They’ve just been trained to take an easy route that takes them out of the game altogether.

There is perhaps no term more controversial among board-game hobbyists than “multiplayer solitaire.” It’s generally used as an insult for a modern style of game where players basically do their own puzzle and compare scores at the end. It’s almost a weird form of parallel play.

For some hobbyists, there is no worse conceivable insult for a board game. This is inherently a social medium: the whole point is to sit there face-to-face with someone screaming about the relative values of wood and sheep in Catan. The multiplayer solitaire experience intentionally reduces this tension: it hides scores, prevents negative interactions, and lets everyone expend a little bit less emotional energy on the game. For some people, that’s perfectly fine. Do you really want to see your whole plan implode? Do you want to slink home thinking of the whole table laughing as your corner of the board collapsed in embarrassing fashion?

For some of us, the answer is yes. We want those explosive moments. We want those difficult problems that will bite us in the ass if we answer incorrectly. That’s the whole point. Much of the appeal for those select few 18xx devotees in the world is that it’s unabashedly full of tension and conflict in an era when so many board games prefer to avoid bad feelings at all cost.

Humans, on the whole, tend to follow the path of least resistance. It takes a good deal of conscious thought and effort to avoid simply defaulting to whatever feels good and demands the least of us. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to say that this habit of ours shows that we aren’t capable of anything better. Even the people trapped in the worst excesses (or deficiencies?) of laziness are quite often aware that there’s something they’re missing out on—I’m sure that plenty of you reading this, ye learned scholars, have thought to yourselves, “Man, I wish I had the time/energy/attention for reading or writing or art or complicated board games or…”

I’ve learned that when reading a bilingual edition of a book, it takes incredible effort to avoid turning to the translation whenever you don’t understand something. Like, yeah, I could try to take a minute to decipher a grammatically unusual question or an odd bit of vocab…or I could just flick to the other page and let someone do the work for me. It takes conscious willpower to avoid the easy way out. Maybe we can endure that for a page or a game or whatever it may be, but what happens when that easy way out is staring you down at all hours of the day? The constant temptation to do things the easy way will wear us down eventually—I don’t want to blame anyone who gets stuck in that rut, because it’s really just the basest part of our human nature at play.

It’s cliche but it’s true: most good things in life demand hard work. Relationships, art, craft, study, whatever you’re thinking of—you need to resist the temptation to give up early. I’m worried that we’re training ourselves to have a constant escape the second we experience any minor difficulty.

Every age must ask whether its innovations take away something meaningful. To use an appropriate example, railroads “optimize” transportation. They transport far more things far faster and far cheaper than any human couriers could. But they demand a new structure, both socially and economically: they push us towards rapid expansion, change the centers of local community, and forcibly restructure most forms of economic life. Is this worthwhile? By what measure can we answer that question?

I’m afraid that in the pursuit of an abstract optimum, we’re going to get closer and closer to simply excluding ourselves from all the activity that once made life worthwhile. We’re now threatened by the constant anxiety that something else could do these things better, whether it’s writing or playing games or reading or composing a heartfelt message. Human life is full of inefficient friction. When you take all that away, I’m not sure what’s left.

Genuinely, 18xx does something to satiate our strange human need for unanswerable questions. No, it’s not sufficient—nor could any board game be sufficient, though I’m now thinking of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and the notion of a “game” combining philosophy, art, religion, and all of man’s pursuits of absolute meaning—but there’s something illuminating about the fact that humans, by nature, create problems for themselves. Do not expect AI to discriminate between the monotonous problems of daily life and the meaningful problems of curiosity.

Do you, as a human, enjoy pointless inefficiency? Then why not subscribe to me for more of both?

Subscribe now

Or share with someone totally withdrawn from human life.

Share

Prisoners of the American Dream

Mike Davis

Davis makes some masterful, nuanced arguments that rarely overextend their evidence—an elusive accomplishment for popular nonfiction—and offer genuine insight with a healthily grounded sobriety. You can disagree with Davis in plenty of spots, but he’s not one of those sloppy “cultural critics” who abuse fascinating nuggets to create huge history-spanning theses.1

His thesis is not quite as straightforward as the title implies: it’s less concerned with the American Dream and more so with the internal divides among the American working class and the different logics of accumulation throughout the 20th century. The most basic question of the book is, “Why did a workers’ party never emerge in America?” The answer is a multilayered combination of genuine class mobility; racial and ethnic divisions; political-machine infrastructure incentivizing ineffective alliances with the Democrat Party; successful infiltration of American labor unions; growth driven by domestic consumption, thus incentivizing enriching American workers; and a whole bunch of other things that I didn’t always understand. All of this coalesces into the eventual transformation to the logic of “overconsumption,” Davis’s term for the upward transfer of wealth developed throughout the 70s and reified in Reagan.

Prisoners of the American Dream is not a book that’s meant to be distilled into a few paragraphs, which is maybe the best thing I can say about it. This is not a twenty-page essay stretched into a 300-page book like many bits of popular nonfiction. It’s using its space and using it well.

But for as clean as his arguments may be, I do have to fault him for his prose. Representative example: “It is no exaggeration to claim that a fecund synthesis was temporarily achieved between the highly participationist and egalitarian tradition of struggle…” You will find overwrought bits of classic Leftist Prose like this on nearly every page. While the book was going to be hard to understand no matter what—he’s approaching a difficult topic with actual nuance—I think it would’ve been a lot smoother if he cut some of the clutter from his writing.

Still a great book. Worth a read.

The Great Divorce

CS Lewis

I want to say that Lewis’s greatest merit is as a stylist, but I think he’d take that as a horrible insult. Nonetheless, this is an extraordinarily poetic work—something like a prose Divine Comedy both in content and lyricality. Part of the merit and difficulty is probably that Lewis is never very overstated with his prose: he’s content to encounter something, write a beautiful description, and move on.

In terms of content, it’s genuinely challenging to one’s own pride (read: my pride), which is probably the praise he’d prefer. Lewis just gets how people work. He knows why people do things and what people think. He’s an educator at heart, and he has a very sharp sense for what the reader, student, or character will think next.

Lewis is efficient in a good way—only ever dwelling on something worth dwelling on—and just a simple pleasure. I hope that in time, he’ll be recognized for his excellent Writer’s Writer merits (but again, maybe he’d enjoy the fact that he’s not a Writer’s Writer) and shake off his unfortunate association with the inferior GK Chesterton.

Heinrich Heine: Lyrics Poem and Ballads

Translated by Ernst Feise

As a selection of poems: exceptional, great pieces from many of Heine’s different stages of thought and interest. Great, great selection for any fan of his work.

As a translation: more mixed. Feise takes on some difficult constraints: he sticks to Heine’s line count, maintains consistent rhythm and rhyme throughout, and generally tries his best to create a formal parallel to Heine’s work in English. The sacrifice: much of Heine’s most evocative idiom and description is lost. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large—but as the literal meaning goes away, so too does Heine’s oimagination and power.

Feise’s translation is impressive in many respects, but I suppose not really what I want—at least in part because I just wanted an aid to my spotty German. Obviously, “faithfully” translating poetry is a fool’s errand because there are a few dozen meanings of “faithful” that inevitably butt heads. I’d probably prefer a more literal rendering, but that would make it much harder to maintain Heine’s musical prosody (many of Heine’s poems were set to music and still endure today in song). A lot of Feise’s translations lose some of the energy and originality of Heine’s original, but the alternative is writing stuff that’s basically in a different medium altogether—still poetry, but hardly ballads.

Ernst Feise, if you were alive, I would have to commend you for doing so much in pursuit of the impossible. I don’t know if it’s entirely successful, though to quote Umberto Eco, “Translation is the art of failure.” Feise is a solid failure by my read.

Subscribe for more exercises in the many arts of failure.

Subscribe now

Share

This is, I think, ridiculous, though I’ll leave my extended thoughts on the argument in the review. But while it might be ridiculous and bizarre, there’s another important thing to consider: it’s pretty funny. Trying to discern why old philosophers were so awkward and bizarre is a laughable exercise, both in the sense that it’s probably stupid and in the sense that it’s good fun.

Haidt, unfortunately, built this whole chart just to accommodate two men in one small corner. What of the rest of the chart? Where should we place the other heroes and villains of the history of philosophy—Aristotle, Hume, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Anscombe, Derrida, Nietzsche, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and so on?

Much as Fichte sought to complete the system of German idealism—a system that may still be incomplete depending on your perspective—I believe that we good-humored philosophers ought to complete the system of Haidtian autism. He gave us a framework and a small corner; now, much as Aquinas filled in Aristotle or Rorty filled in Wittgenstein, let us systematize philosophical autism once and for all.

If you would like to join this little Autism Zone of ours, subscribe for free (or pledge your support)

Subscribe now

Haidt defines his original chart on two axes derived from psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. On the Y-axis, we have empathy, “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to those with an appropriate emotion.” On the X-axis, we have systemizing, “the drive to analyse the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of the system.”

Already, this poses some problems. What are we to make of, say, cynical philosophers who are nevertheless concerned with understanding the minds of others? What are we to make of philosophers who might have a sort of “systemizing” personality but who nevertheless contend that there is no worthy system to follow?

Beyond that, it’s pretty clear that among the whole population, pretty much every philosopher is gonna be above the 90th percentile for systemization. Nobody writes a whole book of philosophy without some manner of systemizing urge. As such, I think we’re best off taking the chart as relative to the average philosophers. I’m not going to explain everyone I list, so feel free to come up with the strangest justifications for why some thinkers are where they are.

And let me take this moment to state the obvious: this is subjective, unscientific, and meant to be funny, and I will obviously make some absurd placements that will leave you agape. I hope your rage leads you to comment, restack, and even share with friends to encourage them to angrily read this little piece.

Let me start by simply trying to fill out these edges: how will we handle some of these difficult thinkers? Who sits on the edges? What are some basic points of reference to follow?

I started by copying the divine Haidt’s chart and building from it. Now, there’s one initial problem: are all these philosophers in the Autism Zone to some extent? Recall that this chart is relative to the average philosopher—as such, someone on the bottom left (for example, Nietzsche) might still be in the autism zone in absolute terms. If you think that philosophers are on the whole a less empathetic bunch, then maybe you’d take figures so far as Wittgenstein—or maybe even Anscombe, or maybe even Pascal and Kierkegaard—to be autistic as well. The divine Haidt did not leave us clear instructions: how far should the philosopher-specific chart extend?

There is, further, the caveat that one’s thought is not indicative of one’s character. I put Plato down in low empathy because his philosophy largely takes emotion and passion as something to be transcended, or at least controlled—as such, “emotion” is only to be understood as a means to dominate it. Should we focus on the personal lives of these thinkers or try our best to determine whether their work is autistic in itself?

Wittgenstein is maybe the most difficult case of all—starting with him might have been a mistake. His early work claims to offer a totalizing view of all philosophy; his later work denies that there is any point to philosophy except clearing up its own confusions. He was sometimes very harsh as a teacher, but he had a devoted circle of friends to the very end. Certainly, he was concerned with the feelings of others: he spent years going to everyone he believed he’d wronged to personally apologize for his mistakes, ranging from his closest friends to the students he’d beaten.

Still, all of this is somewhat complicated by the fact that he was very obviously autistic. There are quite obviously good, considerate autistic people who nonetheless struggle to understand the feelings of others. Wittgenstein could be an obtuse bastard, but I don’t think “unempathetic” is the right word.

The answer to all of this is simple: this is a ridiculous exercise and we’re making up the rules as we go. Moving on, let’s try to answer the question that’s on everyone’s minds: are the analytics or continentals more autistic? Let’s add some key figures from each:

Now, Heidegger presents a pretty big elephant in the room: can we call him “empathetic” given he was a Nazi who had extended romances with a few Jewish women? At the very least, that shows a pretty tremendous ability to ignore how his lovers were feeling. Still, “bastard” and “low empathy” are only correlated, not identical—there are high-empathy assholes and some low-empathy friends.

Here’s another problem: I don’t really know where Derrida should fall regarding empathy (and I’m not going to take the petition as evidence that he was unempathetic—again, bad=/=unempathetic), but I really didn’t know where he should fall regarding systemization. On the one hand, he created quite an all-encompassing framework for approaching problems of meaning and communication; but on the other hand, this system is largely presented in a sort of gestural or poetic manner, not quite proceeding through reasoned argument but rather through a complex mixture of techniques from philosophy, history, linguistics, and literary criticism. His system is quite unlike Kant’s or Bentham’s, but is it a rigorous system nonetheless? I’m going to lean towards yes.

And what do we make of, say, Quine? Without a doubt, he’s a far-right systemizer, but the issue of “empathy” is rearing its head once more: should we consider how his philosophy is generally not that interested in subjective persons as evidence of low empathy, or should we look to the apparent consensus that he was a good friend and good teacher? Again, these are the consequences of making things up as you go.

Lastly, I’d like to congratulate myself on finally having the guts to put someone else in the Autism Zone: congratulations, Kripke and Russell! Analytic philosophy certainly has a more superficially autistic flair to it. Whether that’s reflective of the personalities it attracts is another question—still, I think that by most people’s eye, the analytics win the autism race handily.

Let’s conclude with trying our best to flesh this out with some more major thinkers from history:

Is Aquinas history’s most top-right thinker? I don’t know—given his mix of mysticism and maybe the closest anyone’s gotten to a rigorous and complete systematic corpus, I think he’s a good candidate. Marx up there might be a contentious one, though I think his personal life suggests that he belongs there: he was apparently a devoted father, wrote many love poems to his wife, and felt absolutely incensed at the human suffering he saw throughout Europe.

And, of course, I had to put in one bottom-left candidate: Diogenes the Cynic, who loved to offend and loathed to systematize. Generally, I think those without either empathy or an urge towards systematization simply won’t write philosophy. If you hate people and hate logic, why would you bother with this whole dull affair?

What trends do we see emerging from this data? Well, I notice one: it sorta looks like a guy running.

Surely, this means something—though I, too, will allow others to complete my system.

Help me complete the system of Haidtian autism by subscribing—super-help me by paying.

Subscribe now

Or share with someone firmly in the zone.

Share

During my freshman year of college, my friends pitched in to buy me a book for my birthday: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. (Recently, he earned a lot of attention for his 2024 book The Anxious Generation. I’ve heard it was good, though I’m much more skeptical after reading The Righteous Mind.) I think they got it because I was way too rigid and argumentative on moral issues—more than once, I got into a mid-party shouting match or unwelcome lecture about why everyone was wrong and I was always right.

I’ve stumbled across that book a few times in the years since and cringed remembering just how frustrating I must have been. Often, I felt guilty that I hadn’t read it then. Maybe it would’ve helped me understand where my friends were coming from; maybe it would’ve made me a more productive interlocutor.

Thankfully, I’ve learned that I had nothing to feel bad about. The book would’ve been less than useless. For one, its underlying thesis is basically that there’s no logical resolution to these disagreements—all you can do is hope that these differences sort themselves out if we’re friendly enough. For another, I think it would’ve made me so angry and self-righteous that I would’ve never shut up about it, thus looking like a pretty ungrateful asshole to my friends who got me the book.

Haidt’s overarching contention is that moral reasoning evolved for a somewhat selfish purpose: it is a “full-time public relations firm” for our self-interest. There’s a bit more to it, of course: Haidt advocates for the controversial theory of “multilevel selection,” i.e., that natural selection was not just about what individual creatures survived but also about what groups of creatures survived. Occasionally, selflessness is the best adaptation even if it harms the individual. Moral reasoning exists first so we can flourish within the group and second so that our groups better cohere.

Underneath the facade of reasoning, almost all of our moral thought is reducible to justification for intuition. Almost the instant we perceive a moral issue—murder, theft, cannibalism, incest, and so on—we pass judgment on it based off a feeling. Afterwards, we try to justify why we felt that way, but we rarely accept that we’re wrong. When we’re “morally dumbfounded,” we say something like, “I just know it’s wrong.” That knowledge is mere emotion.

I’m skeptical of Haidt’s anthropology, sociology, and psychology, though I don’t have nearly enough experience to raise a significant argument against those. I feel much more comfortable criticizing his philosophy despite my limited expertise, because this book’s philosophy has the depth of understanding you might get from a lengthy Wikipedia excursion.

If you want more scathing reviews like this, you can subscribe for free. If you pledge, I’ll write a scathing takedown of an author of your choosing.*

Subscribe now

*Not really. I try not to accept bribes.

You might say it’s unfair to criticize a work of psychology for its philosophical merits, but I’d like to raise two objections: first, moral psychology is very much in the philosophical court (it’s my hope to study moral psych in philosophy if I can scrounge together funding for grad school), and second, Haidt himself takes philosophy as his starting point. The first part of the book is dedicated to defending the Humean proposal that reason is and should be the slave of the passions. Its rivals are many: first is the “empiricist” model claiming that morality is developed through experience (exemplified by John Locke). Second is the “nativist” model that moral intuitions are implanted in us before birth (either through divine gift or evolution—Darwin is Haidt’s example).

Haidt dismisses both of these in the span of a few pages—and, to be fair, I don’t think he needs to offer too much consideration on either. He does, however, spend much of the book wrestling with a third proposal: the “rationalist” contention that humans have an intuitive capacity for moral reasoning that develops as we grow. Much as children eventually figure out that a tall glass and a short glass might have the same volume, children also go through various stages of moral development, moving from blind respect for authority to an understanding of social convention to abstract moral principles.

While Haidt offered only the briefest looks at nativism and empiricism, he considers quite a few accounts of moral rationalism. Psychologically, he attributes the view primarily to Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget, two 20th-century thinkers whose work mostly came in clinical psychology. But long before any clinical trials, the rationalists were already active in philosophy. He considers two philosophical accounts of moral rationalism: that reason ought to be master over the passions, a view he attributes to Plato, and that reason and the passions are equals, a view that he attributes to…Thomas Jefferson?

I’m open to discussing Jefferson’s merits as a philosopher. (I recently wrote an article on his philosophy of education.) But if Haidt wants to offer a philosophical overview of moral reasoning, he is doing the reader an obvious disservice by citing Jefferson as one of his very few examples. Is Jefferson actually a significant example in the philosophy of moral reasoning or just a convenient set piece to help Haidt’s argument?

I don’t want to assume bad faith on Haidt’s part, but his overview of moral philosophy is inexplicable. Somehow, Haidt never once mentions Aristotle nor any of his descendants. I don’t mean he doesn’t offer a real account of Aristotelian ethics or that he only name drops him to dismiss him—I mean he literally doesn’t mention him a single time. This, I believe, is because Haidt knows he’d have to defend his proposition that reason is the slave of the passions against the nuanced and compelling Aristotelian account that reason conditions the passions and orders our relationship to pleasure and pain. It’s easy to beat up the strawman that we’re rational creatures who’re unfortunately plagued by emotion. How would Haidt’s argument hold up to real scrutiny?

Maybe the most egregious bit of indifference is Haidt’s treatment of Kant and Bentham: early in the book, Haidt often cites Kant as one of the worst examples of “the rationalist delusion” (“the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the Gods or brings us beyond the ‘delusion’ of believing in gods”) but doesn’t actually discuss his philosophy at all. Finally, about a hundred pages after Kant’s first mention, Haidt briefly explains his system…as evidence that he was autistic. This is also his explanation for utilitarianism: Bentham, too, was autistic with a natural affinity for systematization but a near-total lack of empathy. Bentham fits quite neatly into Haidt’s Autism Zone (yes, this is a real chart) while Kant just barely escapes it by virtue of his legendary dinner parties (yes, that is his evidence).

Beyond anecdotal evidence—there are plenty of autistic Kierkegaardians sitting in the top middle and they can be found all over Substack—I’m just shocked that this is how Haidt treats, what, two of the five-ish most important moral thinkers in western philosophy? He’s not, he insists, saying that Kant and Bentham’s systems are wrong because they were autistic, but he does blame them for “philosophy…retreating from observation and empathy…placing ever more emphasis on reasoning and systematic thought.” By the way, is that even true? What about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and many of the other proto-continentals of the 19th century who placed an emphasis on the poetics of philosophy and the preeminence of the individual consciousness/conscience? What of the revival of virtue ethics, a tradition focused on moral habit over moral reasoning? All sorts of prominent strains of philosophy—existentialism, ordinary language philosophy, poststructuralism, phenomenology, you name it—challenged the preeminence of reason and the systematization of thought.

There’s a reasonable explanation for this: Haidt’s actual claim is that the psychology departments where he studied were dominated by rationalism. Much of the book is presented as something of a memoir of Haidt’s research. I think I’m too biased to judge whether it was narratively compelling, but it never felt especially interesting to me—and, far worse, Haidt often leans on it as a replacement for actual argument. A pretty common structure of argument in the book goes like this:

1. Controversial premise with uncertain motivation.

2. People used to get REALLY mad at my friends for saying this.

3. But we don’t care!

4. Therefore, controversial conclusion.

Haidt, I’m sure, is aware that he’s trying to pull readers’ heartstrings. This is best/worst exemplified by his defense of E.O. Wilson—an advocate of “sociobiology,” attributing the development of human behavior to natural selection—where Haidt focuses on how he was harassed by the Woke Mob for false accusations of racism. By the way, they weren’t false. Wilson privately advocated for J. Phillippe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist who used Wilson’s work to argue that black people had evolved towards r-selection—producing more offspring and paying less heed to their children—while white and Asian people had evolved towards K-selection, prioritizing quality care for fewer offspring to ensure a higher rate of survival.

To Haidt’s credit, Wilson’s support for Rushton wasn’t public when The Righteous Mind was published, but he still refused to consider that these “sociobiological” ideas might be dogwhistles. Meanwhile, Haidt loves to look at how the views of, say, Plato, Jefferson, Kant, Bentham, and so on are full of implicit assumptions about human nature, society, and human good. The “rationalist delusion,” he claims, is almost always an excuse to demand power for philosophers and scientists. Yet for whatever reason, his own arguments and beliefs aren’t subject to that same unpacking: while his opponents are judged for everything implicit in their arguments, Haidt and company are just perfectly straightforward lovers of science here to offer you unloaded propositions. Please don’t mind the calipers and phrenological bust sitting over there in the corner.

Quite appropriately, the book gives off the appearance of a reasoned argument without much substance underneath. Haidt anticipates the arguments of his strawman critics and sets up elegant enough section summaries to make it seem as though each proposition logically flows from the the last. It is very easy to confuse digestibility for soundness in a lengthy argument: if you can follow a writer’s meaning across 400 pages, you’ll probably think it makes sense. (And, hey, that’s an example of Haidt’s argument—rhetoric over substance!)

The biggest gap that Haidt leaves—and one that a reader could easily miss—is that he spends very little time with actual examples of moral reasoning. What do we make of moral dilemma—a situation like, say, the trolley problem, where two moral intuitions run afoul of one another? How does a moral person resolve such an issue when intuition is insufficient? What do we make of people changing their minds about issues?

Regarding dilemmas, Haidt is pretty dismissive: though he talks a bit about the trolley problem, he seems pretty convinced that everyone just makes their choice through intuition and invents reasoning to back it up later. Deontologists are just deceiving themselves creating a rule to back up their feelings of disgust at, say, pushing someone off a lifeboat to keep it afloat. (He says nothing about the frequently unintuitive claims deontologists both argue for and live by—never lying, for example.) He never really accounts for the fact that often, we feel genuine distress and uncertainty: people don’t know what’s right. Are these just people with defective intuitions? How do they escape those conundrums? Haidt, I imagine, would probably just say that those people do have a hidden intuition from the start but need time to justify it.

Regarding moral development, Haidt does take a few brief moments to discuss how reasoning sometimes overcomes intuition. He cites here a study where students were asked to reason about the ethics of incest. One group was asked to respond instantly about whether an incident of incest (consensual, between brother and sister, using multiple forms of birth control, and never known by anyone else) was immoral. Another was asked to read an argument in support of it and wait a few minutes. This group was further subdivided. One read an intentionally poor argument: “The two made love, so there’s more love in the world.” The other read a stronger argument: the underlying issue with incest is the potential harm to a child, a concern invalidated by birth control.

None of the students who’d read the weaker one were willing to change their minds. On the other hand, some of those who read the stronger argument did change their minds, admitting that despite their intuitions, it didn’t violate their harm-based ethic. Haidt…doesn’t really care. He says that this shows that morality can be “more of a two-way street” between passion and reason, but doesn’t concede the very obvious counterargument he constantly avoids throughout the book: we’re most often morally irrational in practice, but isn’t moral rationality nonetheless possible and desirable? Empirically, we see that people can do it—maybe it’s infrequent, but it obviously happens. Ironically, Haidt falls into Hume’s is-ought gap: though he shows well that we struggle to act from reason rather than intuition, why should we then reject the ideals of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, or Kierkegaard who urge us to tame our passions and follow a different sort of ethic?

The book likely would’ve been better if Haidt just cut out most of the first 300 pages and wrote about his actual subject: the psychologies of American liberals and conservatives. Everything else is window dressing. Conservatives, Haidt argues, place equal emphasis on all six moral “taste buds”: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty (primarily in the sense of community or nation), sanctity, and authority. Liberals care about the first three but are either indifferent to or actively opposed to the latter three. Neither is necessarily bad; they just prioritize different aspects of the same moral spectrum. That’s what he really wanted to say, and he could’ve saved me a few hours of my reading life if he just said it.

This gap can’t be bridged by reason—rather, it’s bridged by relationship. Liberals and conservatives are increasingly polarized largely because they’re increasingly socially divided: we rarely interact with those on the other side of the spectrum, and for a conservative without liberal friends or vice versa, it’s incredibly difficult to concede that the other side is even sane. Whatever group identity the US had is rapidly fragmenting into ferociously opposed political clans. To Haidt’s credit, that obviously came true, though it was already a work in progress at the time of publication in 2012.

Is there any hope? I suspect that Haidt knows deep down that his argument is incredibly cynical: we are, by nature, inclined towards deceit and selfishness broken up by occasional episodes of tribalistic fervor. As Haidt puts it, we are “90% chimp and 10% bee.” Of course, that leaves room for 0% humanity.

Haidt offers a blueprint for exploiting our nature without suggesting that we can get past it: we can’t make ourselves more rational, but we can do our best to try to inspire groupish feelings between ourselves and our opponents. We can try to emphasize commonality over diversity, approach debates as friends rather than enemies, and force our congressmen to socialize again. Seriously, that last one is a big part of the closing chapters: in 1994, congressmen stopped living in DC full-time with their wives and children, and this led to far fewer friendships across party lines. I don’t think this is without merit, but it feels like Haidt just argued that our society is missing an arm and offered a bandaid. (And though I can’t really blame him for this, I do think he failed to realize how important social media was.)

I have two pithy comparisons in mind for this book. The first: this is a parody of After Virtue. Where MacIntyre takes the unresolvable debates of modernity and offers a coherent path to discussion, Haidt takes these debates and shows why they’re hopeless. There’s not really anything to say other than, “It’s gonna suck if we start killing each other, right?”

The second: this is a bad Malcolm Gladwell impression. While it mostly nails the reductionist arguments that make you feel smart, it falls short in one very important department: while Gladwell writes amazingly readable, efficient prose, nobody ever taught Haidt how to use a comma. There are grammar and style errors on every page—mostly innocuous, but errors nonetheless. Without the veneer of rhetoric, there’s really nothing here. In a bold and subtle formal move, Haidt demonstrated the emptiness of moral reasoning by writing a whole book without any substance.

If your intuition made you read all this, then reasonably you have to subscribe, right?

Subscribe now

Or invite others to this hivemind we’re building.

Share

Twenty years later, Doyle has been overwhelmingly vindicated. Its 2006 printing was a success that has led to further reprints, constant argument, and a place in the canon of Internet book recommendations. It’s earned a tremendously dedicated fanbase—it has earned the epithet of “the perfect novel” per Morris Dickstein’s 2007 review. That review has defined almost all later discourse: so many have come out to defend or attack the book’s supposed perfection.

Often, those praising Stoner as a “perfect novel” backhandedly downplay it: the typical take is that the novel, a straightforwardly executed bit of realism, is less ambitious than its lauded contemporaries. This is not Gravity’s Rainbow nor Naked Lunch. It aspires to do something small and achieves it without much experimentation. Technical excellence on its own might justify Stoner’s reputation, though I don’t think it explains how it’s managed to inspire so much argument. What keeps so many coming back to it if it lacks that grand ambition or vision?

Perhaps part of its endurance is how straightforwardly critics can attack it. How, critics ask, can a book so grossly misogynistic and ableist could be considered “perfect?” Stoner discourse has a smooth feedback loop: every wave of praise inspires an effortless wave of polemics decrying Williams’s apparent decision to tie disability to moral failure or—much worse—to blame Stoner’s wife for his decision to rape her. Such criticisms inspire further responses, etc. etc. etc.

Williams said privately that he saw Stoner as “a kind of saint.” Yet his failures are glaringly obvious. The reviewers denouncing his many failures—whether marital rape, infidelity, emotional neglect, or implicit ableism—argue convincingly that Stoner is far from a hero. At least not morally: his only substantial display of principles comes when he insists on failing a colleague’s favorite student despite departmental pressure. Even as a scholar, he’s no genius. The one point of praise—and I do think this is a compelling point—is that he lives for his subject, whether that’s out of love or simply because he finds nothing else gratifying.

But it’s this obvious weakness that makes the book so compelling. I welcome and encourage this criticism of William Stoner, because I have no interest in Stoner as a hero. It’s precisely in his failings that he’s so compelling to me: Stoner is a man full of vice—passive at best and cruel at worst—who nevertheless finds a meaningful devotion in an idealized university that is rapidly disappearing. This, to me, is the enduring dream of Stoner: a world where an unexceptional man with an unexceptional background can find a genuine home and devotion in the intellectual life. Precisely because Stoner is flawed and typical, we can imagine ourselves in his place, living that same life of single-minded study. Now when the university where William Stoner learned and taught is gone without a replacement, his devotion is all the more compelling. A small man with a small, beautiful life—Williams offers us this man to admire and mourn.

But what are the consequences of this admiration and nostalgia? In reading Stoner, we see a romanticized vision of the university of the past—one full of flaws and imperfections but still tantalizing. At best, this might be an inspiration to fight for something better than what we have: a world where those unheroic learners are admitted to the unselfish pursuit of truth. Yet this nostalgia can paralyze the imagination, leaving us stuck on lost pasts in the absence of a real future.

If you want more essays like this, subscribe for free below. If you really want more essays like this, pledge a few dollars as well.

Subscribe now

Now many years since first reading it, the scene that’s most vivid in my mind is only indirectly about Stoner’s life. It’s a monologue from his friend Dave Masters about the nature of the university. Criticizing Stoner’s idealism, he tells him, “You think there’s something here, something to find…Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.” Stoner, a farmer’s son drawn to the university by a genuine encounter with the beauty of literature, is still under the illusion that this is a place to make a sacrifice for the sake of the world—whether the students, society, or the ineffable pursuit of Truth.

Contra Stoner, Masters contends that the university is a sacrifice society makes for them: “It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent.” Far from a house of grand ideals, it’s a place for men like them (occasionally women as well, though Stoner’s university is nowhere near egalitarian) to retreat from a world they can’t endure:

so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear.

For their own selfishness and incapacity, these men—“the dispossessed,” as Masters calls them so confidently—are given a peaceful place to hide. Stoner silently listens while their friend Gordon Finch (an unspectacular student of literature who later becomes dean of the college) offers unreasoned disagreement; he has nothing more to say than, “I think you go too far.”

This, then, is the dream of the university: not a place for heroes, not a place for geniuses, but a place for the people who can’t handle anything else. For those of a peculiar constitution, there’s nowhere else to go.

For my generation, told in the wake of the financial crisis of our youth that the humanities were worthless and truth doesn’t pay, it’s easy to want that unheroic intellectualism. Flawed men could join the university. Men without particular genius could join the university—the sum of Stoner’s career is one short book and many years teaching survey classes. If he’s a saint, he’s a saint without any unusual virtue other than a love for his subject.

The university as a shelter for “the dispossessed” (which I must put in quotations every time because it’s too damn self-pitying for me to say unironically) is gone. It’s been replaced by the university as professional education. Everything must be strictly useful—and, moreover, everything is directed towards the distant Real World outside the university. Stoner’s university, lonely and selfish as it often was, offered something for the men who could not find satisfaction in such a Real World, or maybe for those men who were too afraid too try.

Now what are we to say? In reading Williams’s recollection (the novel is not autobiographical, yet everything seems to be submerged in the thin haze of memory), we mourn the life we never had, the intellectual privilege we lost by a stroke of bad luck. It’s easy to envy a pitiable man like Stoner: if someone like him could have this, then don’t I deserve the same?

This self-pity—whether it’s Masters’s, Stoner’s, Williams’s, or ours—leads to a sort of mournful resentment for all involved. They look at these lives with self-aggrandizing pity: as Stoner prepares for death, he decides that “thoughts [of failure] were mean, unworthy of what his life had been,” a quiet victory to conclude a life that seemed so insignificant. For all of Masters’s cynical bandying (“the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth,” as Williams describes), Stoner’s final judgment is sheer triumph in spite of his small career and brief contributions.

Through it all, Stoner and company seem to treat the university as a divine right. This is where they belong. This is what they’re owed. And we as readers can easily fall into this belief as well: the university is a divine and immutable institution, discovered and not created. But of course, that university is gone without much of a way to return—now, we can do nothing but reflect in stillness, overwhelmed by nostalgia for something that we never knew.

To escape this, we must reckon with something Williams and his characters never quite did: the contingency of their world. Far from an immortal community of truth-seekers, Stoner’s university was a momentary oddity. What we’re experiencing now is largely a return to the norm.

Shortly before graduation, Sloane, a teacher of Stoner’s, asks him what he intends to do once he finishes his degree. “Are you looking forward to the day when you emerge from these cloistered walls into what some call the world?” he says. Such religious allusions are constant in the novel’s reflections on the university: Masters in his monologue calls it “like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God.” (To what extent Sloane’s grandeur is similarly ironic and cynical, I’m not sure.) The university is a new iteration of those divinely ordained and preserved institutions; academics are the new contemplatives.

So many people throughout the novel—Sloane, Masters, Stoner, and perhaps John Williams—try to offer academia this divine timelessness. It is a continuation of millennia-old phenomena. It is a divine gift to man. Yet is this really the case? Is this some eternal privilege like Masters implies—a continuation of an earlier intellectual world?

The nostalgia for the “timeless” university falters under scrutiny. For how long could a farmer’s son find a home in the academy? William Stoner was born at precisely the right time. A few decades earlier and there would be no land-grant colleges offering affordable degrees to men like him. A few decades later and no universities would ever offer a tenured position to a scholar of medieval literature with one insignificant publication under his belt.

Stoner doesn’t recall a timeless institution. It memorializes the brief moment when the selfless university was accessible to poor, pathetic men (along with a few women who snuck in). It was not perfect—the novel does not shy away from the frustrations of academic politics nor the sheer monotony, and the overwhelming misogyny is clear both in Stoner’s treatment of Edith and in Katherine’s punishment for her affair with Stoner (whether Williams intended the misogyny to be clear isn’t certain)—but it was maybe the only moment in history when a poor farm boy could go study literature for a living without any extraordinary circumstances. Maybe Stoner saw little fanfare at release because, so far as its contemporaries could see, it did nothing but document the only way of life they’d known. Sixty years later, it’s a time capsule.

I don’t consider William Stoner a hero. I don’t consider him an especially admirable man. That’s precisely what draws me to him: a memory of a brief time when someone like him could live in such devotion despite his insufficiencies.

Left uncriticized, this fantasy paralyzes us. If we obsess over the departed world occupied by the likes of Stoner and Masters—the men who found their little world away from the world—then all that’s left to do is to endlessly lament or hopelessly dream. A straightforward return to the university of the past will not come, nor should we uncritically embrace the old university with all of its elitism, exclusion, and isolation. Whatever comes next demands an unbending imagination that won’t abandon its ideals nor take them as an excuse to fade into nostalgia.

Nostalgia can spurn on the imagination, though it can also freeze it. Will Stoner’s university serve as an inspiration for us to think about where the life of the mind can endure as the university disappears, or will it monopolize all the possibilities and keep us obsessed with a world that’s never coming back? Something new might come—but certainly, it will not be the same as what we have now.

Elain Showalter argued that Williams made Stoner “a blameless martyr, rather than a man with choices.” Though I don’t think this is necessarily true—Williams gives us the tools to criticize whatever saintliness there may be in Stoner—it elucidates the worst dangers of Stoner’s paralytic idealism: we can view ourselves as suffering victims with nothing to fight for except our own hearts and minds. The sacrifices Stoner makes are foremost for himself—this is not merely because they are selfish, but because they take place entirely within his lonely world.

Stoner is a novel for idealists—who, as it turns out, make up quite a large piece of the reading population. At best, it’s an inspiration to realize that another world is possible. But an unreflective reading leaves us as helpless victims hoping for a long-gone world rather than bold builders of a world yet to come.

I hope some of you suffering idealists will subscribe—or, otherwise, share with someone else suffering from a paralyzed imagination.

Subscribe now

Share

Jokes aside, I’d like to share a bit more about the books I’m reading, because lately I am reading a lot (somehow at 28 on the year) and would like a better way to collect my thoughts and get some manner of response. I hope some of you have read these and have something argumentative to say in response—if not, I hope you’ll read the ones that I liked.

Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

A clarifying book for Percy readers: makes explicit a core concern of his that drives the rest of his work, that being the strange metaphysical inversion of a world that physicalizes the spiritual and spiritualizes the physical. Percy fancies himself a pursuant of the middleground: an earthbound love for God that does not lose sight of our plain, physical humanity.

Has many of the exhausting characteristics of those 70s/80s male novelists, most especially a tendency to associate the pursuit of meaning with the pursuit of beautiful women. Percy somewhat criticizes this though nonetheless affirms it in other ways, and without quite a clear picture of love’s sacrifices (as usual, the perfect woman is just waiting there to save him…). This is not to mention the exhausting, nonsensical politics. Percy’s that kind of conservative who thinks he’s too smart for the normal conservatives and therefore must invent his own enlightened centrism. Book also has more than a few moments that come across as frustratingly racist on Percy’s part.

With that said, still a decent novel. Much, much less subtle than The Moviegoer for better or worse. I wish he would’ve stuck to the metaphysics without the politics, though I think he’d contend that’s the whole point. Cynically, it’s only really worthwhile because The Moviegoer is good—I don’t quite think that’s true, but it feels fumbling and unreal where The Moviegoer feels fumbling and entirely real. (Though, again, that’s a book about a horny man looking for his saving lay.)

Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell

At heart, a book about a man’s tremendous admiration for his father and the generations before him. Unbelievably poetic at its best—Bell has this odd structural thing going on where he starts in almost a historical register, setting his characters alongside historical events, then slowly moves down deeper into the thoughts and inner lives of his characters as the history becomes more and more background rather than justification.

I feel a need to say that it’s a bit uneven: though the historical register I mentioned might have been a stylistic choice, the book does feel a bit clumsy with its history early on, often stuck between offering simple reports and creating convoluted reminders that this is happening at the same time as [other event Bell happened to think of]. But the majority of the book is far closer to excellent than mediocre; its weaknesses are excusable. Really just an incredible novel.

(For a bonus recommendation: I gave this book to my Homestead born-and-bred father, who proceeded to read the whole thing and then instantly started re-reading it. If you have any love for Pittsburgh, you will love this book.)

Eamon de Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland by Tim Pat Coogan

Coogan starts the book promising to avoid the "Scylla of hagiography and the Charybdis of denigration." I'm not sure why he bothered with this preface, because he comes nowhere close to navigating them successfully--God help the crew with Coogan at the helm. The proceeding 700 pages are certainly full of facts and research, though absolutely constant, constant editorialization and interpretation that ruin any attempt at fairness.

Coogan presents a sort of Schroedinger's Dev: if he makes a pragmatic move, he's a power-hungry hoor who can't let anything get in the way of his influence. If he makes an idealistic move, he's an indecisive fool who simply doesn't understand the game he's playing. So often, you'll see Coogan simply assume that he can read Dev's mind to perfectly interpret the rationale behind any move--truly, his biographical research must have been exceptional, because almost never does he concede ignorance or openness to interpretation. All of this is most obvious in the sections surrounding the Treaty and civil war, where Coogan cannot help but imagine these strange perspectives that have no purpose but to maximize Dev's guilt.

Still, I read 700 pages of it. Maybe that was a mistake--I wouldn't really recommend it. But, again, the facts are there, and a reader can still pick out the instances of Coogan's personal animus (like the several pages dedicated to Dev's mismanagement of the Irish Press, where Coogan was a longtime employee) to get a good account of the life of the long fellow. If you're looking for a fair yet critical biography, my advice is to look elsewhere; if you just want to read 700 pages about why this man hates Dev, go ahead.

Absolution by Alice McDermott

Striking. McDermott is a bit excessive in explicating her characters’ psychology—she does not leave much to the reader in trying to decipher Charlene’s psyche especially—but what emerges is still a fascinating and nuanced picture of American and female guilt and responsibility.

In some sense, it’s about how destructive power is for its holders—America, Peter, Stella, and Charlene being the most prominent subjects there. Two victims in an unjust power dynamic. McDermott flirts a bit with apologia for this behavior, though I think she does enough to stay critical and conscious thereof.

Its prose is too modern for my taste—it has that weirdly ethereal memoir-esque quality that’s dominated lit fic for the past decade—but not quite so bad to keep me from enjoying it.

The Boarding-School Girl by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya

Good, though unspectacular. Probably much better in Russian. Feels somewhat torn between being a novel of ideas and a novel of psychology—simultaneously trying to be a nuanced portrait of different versions of despair and a dialogue on the lives and places of women in 19th-century Russia.

This certainly fits in stylistically with those titans of the 19th-century Russian novel—driven first by human lives, second by ideas, with plot and events landing somewhere on page five on the list of concerns—though it doesn’t quite land in the same way. The characters occasionally felt confusing—like, something slightly above or below a human being—and once that intense realism dissipates, it just turns into a philosophical dialogue with a lot of space between its major philosophizing. To some extent, I blame myself: I probably could’ve paid closer attention. Still, maybe I could blame the book for never commanding it. (Though I do think that’s unfair.) Not a book I particularly intend to return to.

There’s a decent chance in my mind nobody will read this. If you read and enjoyed it, please indicate that through any of the following means:

-Liking

-Commenting

Leave a comment

-Subscribing

Subscribe now

-Sharing

Share

Or you can send me a letter indicating your pleasure. DM for address.

I was obsessively into metal as a teenager. I don’t mean Metallica or Pantera or anything that you’ve heard of. I was into metal bands that released a single demo in the 90’s recorded in a garage. All of my metal had a minimum of two adjectives appended in front of it: Depressive suicidal black metal, cavernous death metal, funeral doom metal, crossover thrash, you name it.1

I can assure you that each of these are real subgenres of metal, each with very dedicated fanbases. As a 15-year-old desperately looking to build some kind of expertise, I was a warrior of genre specificity. Nu metal is not metal, despite the name—no, you cannot tell me that Five Finger Death Punch or Slipknot are metal. Screamo isn’t metal; and while we’re at it, let’s be very clear that metalcore and deathcore are not metal. Don’t even try to tell me that Kiss is metal. “Death metal” is not a generic term for anything loud and distorted.

All of this, I imagine, sounds dull, exhausting, and pretentious to an outsider. But it was crucial for me. The online metal scene needed these distinctions. Communities were under constant attack by people who had no clue what they were talking about. There was always the specter of Limp Bizkit fans threatening to take our little corner of the internet by storm. So many people would post Five Finger Death Punch or Avenged Sevenfold only to see their posts deleted for posting non-metal. Most went away pissed. A few were curious and wondered what the hell we meant when we said that wasn’t metal. Generally, people assumed that we just didn’t want anyone else in our special little club.

But that wasn’t how we saw it. To us, this was defending our existence. Passersby with a limited interest in the genre came in with zero knowledge and insisted that the scene lower itself to their standards. They wanted our communities to conform to tourists instead of residents. Gatekeeping was necessary to keep the community in the hands of the people who cared about it.

We—and I kind of cringe to say “we,” because it’s not like I mattered—had all sorts of slang and jokes about this reputation. You might’ve heard them called “posers”; some communities like to call them “wimps” or “the false.” People would call the metal scene “The Hall.” We called worthwhile metal “TRVE.” I promise these were all said tongue-in-cheek to some extent or another.

The day that my favorite obscure metal subreddit went private, they proudly posted “Our Gates Are Closed” at the front and center of the page. If they wanted to call us gatekeepers, then fine. We would keep the strictest gate they ever saw in their damn lives.

That subreddit didn’t survive long after closing. The most active accounts either quit or were suspended—interest went down, and the new restrictions meant there would be no new blood to keep things alive. Along with my tiny little corner of the scene dissipating, I found my interest moving elsewhere. I never lost my affection for metal, but I found myself diving into Grateful Dead and shoegaze soon after. (Two genres—and yes, Grateful Dead counts as a genre—that scratch that same itch for obscure tapes and devout fanbases.) I even let myself enjoy some of the obnoxious nu metal like Papa Roach and Slipknot that I hated throughout my early adolescence. Years later, I’m a bit too uncomfortable with the various strands of satanism, racism, and misanthropy running through extreme metal to return to it wholeheartedly, though I still enjoy a few bands here and there.

There are plenty of noxious things about the extreme metal scene that I’m happy to disown. But despite those darker sides that I can’t reconcile myself with, I struggle to renounce that strict insistence on a standard. Was it often stupid and childish? No doubt. But I don’t think that it could’ve been any other way.

Subscribe now

There’s a certain fragility to these online communities. The unprecedented accessibility of the internet has changed the game entirely on these sorts of small scenes. If you wanted to be an extreme metal2 fan in the 80s, you had to want to be an extreme metal fan. Your local rock stations weren’t playing Mayhem and Emperor. Your record store wasn’t selling Sarcofago or Beherit.

It was this obscurity that created scene staples like tape trading and zines. If you wanted to get into black metal, you’d better be willing to go out of your way for it. You’d better be ready to write some letters to find a lo-fi copy of an already lo-fi Darkthrone demo. And if you couldn’t find anyone, that was it.

Of course, this kept the scenes small. Most people would simply have no exposure to any of these bands. If you were a kid in rural Pennsylvania without a solid record store, a local scene, or an alternative radio station, tough luck. It’s a narrow gate.

The internet bridges this gap entirely. Suddenly, everyone everywhere can have instant access to all the metal they could want. Tape trading is replaced with peer-to-peer sharing. I had instant access to every bit of music I could find—in my years listening to metal, there might have been a dozen tapes that I couldn’t find across Soulseek, YouTube, or even just Spotify.

We’re in an era of total access. Insidiously, this has killed any need for a scene. You don’t need to know a guy who knows a guy to hear the best French black metal. You don’t need to write a letter to hunt down a Polish grindcore tape. You don’t need to go to local shows to get your fix. Most of these are just on Spotify—at worst, you have to spend three minutes figuring out how peer-to-peer downloads work.

Now, there’s no natural barrier to entry Passing fans can dabble in the medium without really joining it. And, in due time, those passing fans become a majority. Inevitably, the people with a slight interest will outnumber the core. And what happens to a community when a majority of its members have only a passing interest?

Around the same time that my metal obsession began, I developed an interest in tabletop roleplaying games, though I faced the incredibly common problem of lacking a group. When I couldn’t find my fix in real life, I went to the internet. There, I found the same sorts of communities as I would in metal: devoted fans, many of them pissed off about swaths of half-interested onlookers demanding that everything be dumbed down for them. “Nogames” browsers—the passersby only there for the memes—were the scum of the earth as far as these posters were concerned. They had no substantial investment in the hobby.

Somehow, it took me a while to realize that I was the nogames lowlife they were all mad at. I was the one who thought roleplaying games were cool but had no real investment in them. Just like any other bored noob, I was the one ruining their community. People like me might join with genuine curiosity, but we contributed nothing other than dull memes, repeated takes, and senseless advice.3

Most often, this vitriolic gatekeeping is counterproductive and annoying. It’s hard for newcomers to break through this exterior shell. But this shell is the only thing that gives these communities form. What happens to the roleplaying community when most of their fans have no investment in the actual games? What remains?

In brief, memes. There’s nothing left but jokes and references. Plenty of online communities have devolved into that, and we should expect plenty more convergent devolution.

The scene isn’t gone altogether, though it’s slowly receding as the local blends into the amorphous mass of the global. Local music scenes certainly haven’t died off, but record stores are nearly a novelty and plenty of venues are struggling to stay afloat. (Naturally, this was accelerated by COVID.) We’re not encouraged to invest ourselves deeply in any one place. We’re perpetual dilettantes moving from interest to interest, always putting in the bare minimum to slake our shallow thirst.

In an era of digital nomadism, gatekeeping is an attempt to establish something lasting in a perpetually shifting landscape. I don’t believe it will work—the bonds it creates are far weaker than the forces pulling these communities apart—but should we blame people for wanting that anachronistic sense of relationship and devotion?

If you enjoy anachronism, you could do something incredibly anachronistic: pay me for writing. If you’re a man of the age, maybe subscribe for free instead.

Subscribe now

Share

When I was 18, I went to the first and only opera I’ve seen in my life: a modern rendition of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, costumed and staged with a noir aesthetic and apparently intended to evoke some sort of sentiment related to the then-emerging #MeToo movement. It was a good production to my untrained ear, though I was annoyed by their decision to replace Don Giovanni’s descent to hell with a quick and unceremonious death on stage and frustratingly cut the final song of the opera—likely because that final song was written as a moralizing coda to show that sin never pays. The director wanted to show that in our world, sin can and does flourish.

I didn’t hate that production. Even now, I don’t hate it. I understand the impulse to modernize classic works, especially in a medium like opera that doesn’t offer nearly as much space for new original productions. Yet there is one thing that remains striking about that presentation to me: for all its promises of contemporaneity and revitalization, it didn’t seem to add much of anything.

We have seen these “modernized” productions flourish everywhere for decades now, taking the dated words of Shakespeare or the old music of Puccini and livening it up for a new audience. Sometimes, it’s simply meant to engage with new problems of our age: my local opera company staged a rendition of Madama Butterfly replacing Cio-Cio-San with an AI girlfriend abandoned by Pinkerton, which I don’t interpret as a rebellious attack on Puccini so much as an attempt to handle contemporary problems. Sometimes, these modernizations are meant to problematize the plays themselves: there are too many feminist renditions of The Taming of the Shrew to count.

But despite these attempts to modernize, the theater still continues to lose ground. Timothee Chalamet earned a decent bit of controversy recently when he said, “I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.’” More than an insult, I think this remark was so cutting because everyone in theater is afraid it’s true. (And I’d like to note that Chalamet didn’t seem to be insulting these forms so much as expressing his anxiety that movie theaters are at risk of fading away in the same way.)

At a simple cultural and economic level, the theater is stagnant. I won’t say dying, because I think we’re still a full-blown social collapse away from plays and operas disappearing altogether. But plays, operas, and ballet have their niche and struggle to reach anyone beyond it. Modern renditions are a poor attempt to do such outreach.

Now, a logical takeaway from this set-up is that I’m here to complain about the death of the traditional arts and the rise of valueless and immoral modern theater. That’s not my goal. I don’t feel angry or upset seeing these productions—they often pique my curiosity in concept. But there’s one feeling I have seeing almost all of these productions: at a certain point, they’re just painfully boring.

If you’re sick of artistic stagnation, subscribe to me to see a whole new type of stagnation!

Subscribe now

A while back,1 I saw a Twitter post going semi-viral mocking a National Theatre presentation of a “new version” of Euripides’ The Bacchae. (It is, to my understanding, a new play retelling the same story.) It advertised itself with that painful millennial speak: “This ain’t no classic play,” it says at the top. It presents Dionysus’s followers, the Bacchae, in modern girlboss style as women who “aren’t standing on the sidelines whilst the men have all the fun.”

The trailer features a series of women (presumably the Bacchae) depicted only from the clavicle to the nose rapping and smearing red lip gloss across their faces while occasionally sucking what appears to be a lollipop shaped like a big toe. The conclusion of the rap declares, “Now I’m the new boss of Greek mythology.”

And, in the fashion of millennial pseudo-rebellion, it self-censors with an asterisk as it describes Dionysus’s “f*cked-up family Olympics.” The self-censoring reads to me as the producers desperately trying to pretend like they’re too controversial, inventing some overbearing traditionalist who demands that they respect tradition—but they, of course, are too independent and cutting edge to obey The Man.

All of this begins to unravel when you realize one thing: the Man doesn’t exist. There’s nobody who’s censoring this, and there’s not that many people who really care. If it’s trying to bring a modern edge to a timeless work, it’s not really breaking any boundaries. If it’s trying to inspire enraged critics, its only hope is a time machine.

Who is “the old boss of Greek mythology” whom the Bacchae replace? I’m genuinely not sure. If it’s the classics departments, good news for them: the classics departments are dying off pretty quickly. If it’s the specter of traditionalism, good news, because nobody is enforcing a traditional study of the classics. There’s nothing left to rebel against. Why do we insist on sticking to the charade of rebellion?

For us as inheritors of the centuries of rebellion and revolution that formed the modern world, rebellion is itself a sort of virtue. It’s good to resist The Man. It’s good to stand up for what you believe in. Our heroes are those who stood brave in the face of unjust authority. We all wish we could be the heroic rebels.

But, as it turns out, many of us missed the boat for rebellion. 50 or 60 years ago, there might’ve been something genuinely shocking about an irreverent presentation of a canonical work. Gender-swapped Shakespeare and recontextualized Mozart might have inspired scandal. Perhaps they’re still scandalous to people without any serious intention of watching Shakespeare or Mozart—like, the only people who could get mad about this are those who haven’t been to a non-school play since the Nixon administration. But to people with some familiarity with the world of theater, it’s all very much trodden ground.

In just a few short decades, the rebels won. And, in just a few short decades, the rebels lost any semblance of excitement and interest. I’m not asking for a value judgment on modernized productions. I’m just asking you this: do you feel a particularly strong desire to go see them? Does anyone who genuine shock at this whole shtick anymore?

Our old guard of theater has expelled all the stodgy traditionalist. The deans, professors, and board members were all themselves part of the experimental generation that did away with many of the conventions of classical theater. Just about every theater professor in the country wants formal experimentation and irreverent writing.

All of this modern cultural rebellion is made in a context where there’s not serious internal opposition. Did the producers feel a genuine boldness in writing “f*cked-up family Olympics”? It’s safe, sanitary rebellion. It’s the kind of rebellion an NPR listener could enjoy. Whether you’re a fan of the pop-theater contemporizing or a traditionalist championing “the new counterculture,” I ask you this: do you genuinely believe that there is any risk in this? Jarry inspired riots; Georgi Markov was assassinated; and what sort of danger is left for us?

Really, this rhetoric seems most at risk of disarming itself. What will people think if you preface every production with, “Look, we know that this is boring and dated. But we can still have some fun with it, right?” In an era where the theater was a central pillar of the arts, this ruthless self-criticism might have been necessary. Now, as it increasingly recedes from our minds and culture, much of this rebellious experimentation comes off less as a belligerent fight for control of the theater and more as a timid pitch to the effect of, “Hey, I promise we’re still here!”

My point isn’t to advocate for some naive traditionalism. The literary culture arguing that nothing of value has been written for decades is just as lifeless as the culture rebelling against an imagined Man that hasn’t existed since the start of color TV. I am fully in favor of supporting the study of the classics and of reusing classical methods once more, but art is not a static practice that exists in a vacuum. It is a continuing conversation about value, meaning, and beauty in the surrounding social context. Traditional artforms didn’t disappear for the hell of it. They belonged to a social and technological context, and these conditions changed. Why would we expect art to remain the same throughout this?

A new interest in tradition, at its liveliest, is not merely recreating old forms. To the contrary, it’s often here that the greatest experimentation takes place: think of the Renaissance, when a new engagement with classical texts led to the radical formal experimentation of vernacular literature, the sonnet, linear perspective in painting, and new styles of architecture. Reengaging with tradition ought to be an opportunity to reconsider and reevaluate our position, not merely entrench ourselves in whatever ditches remain unfilled. I fear that the common call for tradition is closer to that isolation than a serious attempt at reentering conversation. Quite often, it ignores that the works and styles it admires were themselves a product of radical divergence from tradition.

Art that uses tradition only as a means of repudiating it—or, more cynically, as a means of drawing interest from the few of us who still have an interest in theater—struggles to enter this revitalizing conversation. At worst, its allusions to tradition serve as nothing more than window dressing for a straightforward polemic. Often, it makes the tradition seem like nothing more but an unfortunate burden: “Well, I guess we have no choice but to watch Shakespeare, but let’s make the most of it, right?” And, again, it’s hard to blame the actors and directors for embracing this: many of them want something entirely new but find no space for it.

More than anything, I think these attempts at “revitalization” are ignoring a vitality that’s still present in these works. We try to bring these stories to the modern world because we still sense life in them. But if we still sense life, why not let the audience discover it themselves?

The director of that #MeToo version of Don Giovanni I saw long ago mentioned once in an interview “how contemporary a piece it is.” But why is this surprising contemporaneity an invitation to modernization? To the contrary, this shows that it doesn’t need modernizing. Much of the beauty of classic art comes in recognizing ourselves within something that is so uncontemporary: it’s absolutely incredible when we realize that characters like Antigone, Dante, Hamlet, and Elizabeth Bennet feel the same things we feel despite the centuries and millennia between us.

Modernization often weakens this. Of course familiar settings have familiar themes. It’s in reckoning with the unfamiliar and forgotten that we realize what is essential and immutable in these experiences. When we’re pleasantly shocked by

Rather than update the tradition, we should fight to rediscover ourselves within it. That does not mean repeating it uncritically—retellings and re-presentations of classic works can be a part of this labor. But there’s no use in imagining a rebellion against some non-existent horde of traditionalists. Maybe it’s satisfying to pretend that we’re in some battle against the stubborn remnants of the past, but imaginary battles can only offer imaginary victories.

This isn’t any sort of concrete recommendation for how to make theater relevant again. Tragically, I just don’t think there’s space for them in our popular culture: most attention is going to go elsewhere. But for those of us who still love and believe in these art forms, there’s an endless supply of vitality that doesn’t need modernization to survive.

If you’re one who wants to rage, rage against the dying of the arts, subscribe to me to commiserate if nothing else.

Subscribe now

Or share with all your miserable friends.

Share

Whereby it is demonstrated that Democracy, the conventional method of selecting books for the reading group, is inferior to a Benevolent Dictatorship ruled by a single selector and administrator; with such an argument demonstrated through the philosophical Dialogue, supremely appropriate to Education and the consideration of diverse and contrary arguments.

THE FIGURES:

I.M. Knecht (K): The brutish former executioner, now seeking to educate himself in virtue

B.A. Boof (B): Advocate of straightforward democracy

Connie Dorset (D): Advocate of nontraditional voting schema

Terry Rhodes (R): Advocate of sheer chance; fate; destiny

Patricius Carolus (P): Advocate of dictatorship

This dialogue was composed to demonstrate to my reading group why voting is pointless and painful among a small group of curious friends. Inside jokes will be explained in footnotes. If it’s not footnoted but seemingly supposed to be funny, then the problem is that you are not sufficiently well read. If you don’t laugh ever, then you are so horrendously read that I’m shocked you are literate.

Enter the group upon the divine home of study—the illustrious Pittsburgh bar, Hemingway’s, on a Saturday morning with pitchers flowing with Iron City Light Mango beer. The fine men of the Mog-tagnard Reading Group have recently completed their book of choice, Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon, after a lengthy three years,1 largely taken up by their revolutionary activities. They now prepare to select their next book, yet remain uncertain as to how they shall make this choice.

P: We have arrived, gentlemen, at the conclusion of our course of study. It is now necessary that we select another book to continue our shared labor.

D: Verily, Patricius.

K: Verily.

B: Verily.

R: Verily.

B: But with the interruptions to our studies wrought by the glorious Revolution which we have recently accomplished—wherein the Epsteinreich was triumphantly toppled, a government of equals installed, and the fine revolutionary club of Hemingway’s spared from the cruelty of landlordism2—it seems that we have lost track of our methods. We have spent quite nearly three years reading this single book—and a mere 250 pages, as well!—and emerge into an altogether different world, now as citizens in the new republic of Virtue.

P: Verily.

B: And we have not merely completed this book, but moreover have reached a higher level of perfection socially. Now, we have no clue how it is that we might have selected a book in the past, nor any indication as to how those men of a virtuous society might govern themselves in such a group! How, then, shall we choose our next book?

K: I am not sure, though I know that I have no strong preferences.

ALL: Verily.

B: Given our doubt, it seems most likely that we ought to build a group that mirrors our traditional form of justice, no? If we are willing to fight and die for a form of government, then it is only right that we ought to apply it in all cases, correct?

ALL: Sensibly.

B: And I therefore propose that we continue our democratic project. In this group of virtuous, trustworthy men, it is plainly best that we all join together equally in choosing, no? As such, it is plain what system is best: a direct democracy, with all voting for their preferred books or otherwise abstaining. A republic shall not be necessary nor viable—for the republic is only a means of bringing democracy to the many mediated by representatives, no? And in a small group such as ours, choosing representatives seems both unnecessary and strange—and thus, we may go triumphantly to the straightforward practice of voting.

K: Nay, Friend & Citizen (henceforth F&C) Boof; I have a challenge.

B: And what might that be?

K: I lack any strong preferences.

B: Well, naturally, we often lack such preferences—and yet in such cases, it will be the choice of the most vocal and strong willed of the group.

P: But is that not vicious?

B: And how so?

P: That we should allow those with the strongest wills to enforce themselves upon those lacking in preference? For such a method does not seem appropriate to equals—it rather mirrors the cruelties whence we have only recently escaped through terror and virtue.

B: Yet there is no enforcement, my friend. For the strongest willed are not forcing the less willed to choose something they hate, but rather are offering them an acceptable choice—and, should the less willed decide that they will not enjoy such a book, they may steel themselves and speak out.

P: And yet, their interests are not guaranteed to win out—they may have a voice, but such a voice will not always win. I fear this formalization encourages a regression to the brutish world of man-against-man whence we have recently emerged; for here, men are drawn to cunning over wisdom, voting not for what they see as best but for what they see as pragmatic. Do not the flaws of such a democracy become exaggerated between friends, wherein they seem to strain the bonds of brotherhood?

B: I suppose, Patricius, that I must concede your point.

P: And so, a direct democracy seems ill advised—for there, we are led to the brutish part of our nature. Yet it is clear that our choice of study is valuable only should it lead us to the fullness of human nature—that is, to virtue—and to a revolutionary sense of brotherhood.

B: Then, what, Patricius, shall we propose? For the principles of brotherhood yet seem to drive us towards democracy.

D: May I, dear friends, propose a solution?

P: Speak, F&C Dorset.

D: What you speak of is a problem of virtue and spirit. Yet our solution may be much simpler and more elegant—for these problems emerge not from a failing of virtue but from a technical shortcoming of direct democracy. These issues may be seen in all forms of voting, yet we see them exaggerated once more here.

P: How so, Dorset?

D: Above all, such a system as F&C Boof’s—noble and well-intentioned though he is—seems to contradict the principle of democracy. For, in democracy, we seek to find the shared interest of each—the choice that best satisfies all. Yet Boof’s system encourages a sort of strategic approach whereby it is not always in one’s interest to vote for one’s favorite. If, for example, you realize that your preferred work is far behind the others in voting, it is in your best interests to vote for one that you do not like. As such, your own preferences and your perception of what is best for all is not the sole nor even dominant principle; it is, rather, a strategic methodology, and even so much as a dual conscience betraying itself.

B: True, Dorset; I see your point.

D: As such, the solution is simple: we are to create a form of voting whereby each man may express his self-interest without contradiction. We shall, through a system of multiple rounds of voting, pick out a truly agreed-upon candidate. We shall begin with a wide ranging set of candidates that shall be whittled down by approval voting, whereby we ask members to vote simply “yes” or “no” on each and remove all but those with the highest agreement—preferably and most likely unanimous—at which point, we shall proceed to a ranked-choice voting round of sort, which will elect a Condorcet winner—that is, a candidate who would beat any other candidate in a head-to-head (or, at least, we shall elect a candidate from a group that only loses to other candidates within the group—these may be the best of the imperfect set we have—such a candidate is called a “Smith winner;” that is, within a group that beats everything outside the group head-to-head and only loses to other choices within the group, these being the best choices though imperfect)—and, through a system of ranked-choice balloting…

B: Pardon me, Dorset.

D: Oh, excuse me, but I wasn’t quite done. We may—

B: But this would be a tremendous pain in the ass, would it not?

D (grunting): Verily.

B: And so, the direct democratic method seems best.

D: But once more, it seems unjust.

B: But we shall, in our small group, accept some degree of imperfection. Among the many, with tremendous stakes, a method such as yours may be essential and necessary—yet among the few such as us, it is acceptable that our choices may not be entirely perfect, so long as they are largely satisfying. I thus encourage us to remain by direct democracy.

K: And yet I still object, my friend.

B: Why is that?

K: For you have said that we are not forced to choose what we hate. And yet I hate this very thing: voting. To make a choice is abominable me—I feel always that I am causing pain to myself or my fellows. For should I choose my preference, I fear that I am leading the others away from theirs; should I find myself with no preference, I feel trapped in a frustrating and pointless vote wherein I cannot recuse myself without seeming uninvested; should I wish for what’s good for the group, I can discern nothing, since all others wish what is good for the group and as such offer no indication of their individual wants.

P: Speak further, F&C Knecht.

K: In this small democracy, we are slaves to an imaginary Goodness that supposedly emerges from our union and yet is apparent in none of us. For we all seek the common profit, and yet the common profit does not seem individually present within ourselves—and, further, seems ill defined. For we ask, “What do others want?” and yet we ignore our own wants—is this not contrary? That this system both demands we value our own interests and yet seems rooted in a common interest?

B: Still, I am uncertain.

K: Then allow me to demonstrate further. Democracy is ill suited to individual interest: it creates compromise, no? It is meant to arrive at a sort of common good by the balancing of our disagreements and the emphasis of our consensus. The common profit is not contained within any one of us, and so we seek what is best for all. But how should such a thing emerge from disagreement? Rather, it is only when the many are willing to sacrifice their own good and prefer what is best for others that a genuine common profit shall emerge.

P: That seems right to me, Knecht.

K: And so, properly, the virtuous among us do not promote their individual interests, but begin to consider the common good: we ask how we may vote for and support the movements that will help others and not merely ourselves. But to do so, we look to the interests of others: we ask what would be for their profit; and, hopefully, we find that our interests align, given all of us have the common goal of virtuous living.

B: I must agree.

K: But what happens when such interests are not revealed? Among a small, virtuous group such as ourselves—one bound by common interest in the good rather than mutual self-interest—we find no indication of what others believe to be best for themselves. We are stuck in an uncomfortable middleground where each wants the common good, and yet the system at present promotes acting in self-interest. Strangely, the common good is identified with self-interest, yet self-interest cannot be identified at all—nor should it be seen as the driver of common good.

B: Still, I agree.

K: And so, we should prefer a system that ignores self-interest and focuses entirely on the common good. But then, why is voting necessary? If we have a shared good in mind, then our disagreements should be resolved through debate and consideration rather than the standoffish act of secret balloting. None of us is properly acting with ourselves in mind—why, then, should any of us vote merely for ourselves?

ALL: Verily, Knecht, now we see your point.

R: May I now speak, seeing that the wise have shared their opinions?

ALL: Verily, Rhodes.

R: Given the invariable injustice in our systems, why ought we have a system at all? It is best that we leave things to mere chance—perhaps guided chance. Take, for example, a sort of lottery: each of us names one or even several books, each then being assigned a number, and we continue with a drawing to select our candidate. As such, there is no means—other than dishonesty and cheating, which should not be a serious concern in a small group built on mutual trust and friendship—by which man may do injustice to his fellow man. It is only the Fates that might do such harm.

B: And is this not regression to superstition?

R: No, F&C Boof, but to mechanism: much as Friend Dorset illustrated, we face a technical problem. To choose a mechanism—whether a lottery, drawing, or perhaps trusting a cat such as this (he lifts a cat from under the table; it is uncertain how long it has been there or when he became aware of it)3—is not to regress to superstition, but simply to search for unpredictability in our world. Further, as Friend Knecht demonstrated, we typically lack a distinct sense of preference among the many choices—certainly, our preferences are rarely strong enough to reach interminable disagreement. Why, then, ought we make a choice at all? Why not simply leave it to pure chance and thereby avoid the painful issue altogether?

B: I do see your point, F&C Rhodes.

P: And yet I am uncertain.

R: Pray, Friend Patricius, speak.

P: We see that, although preferences are weak, still there is a habit towards disagreement. Often, many will propose different books, and not all will be preferred—and, as such, there must be a process of whittling. Moreover, many suggestions may be imperfect—although we do not reach perfect agreement, we tend to come to approximate consensus, and thus to a greater view of what is profitable and worthwhile.

R: I see your point, Patricius.

P: Your system may allow for a final choice, and yet it does not determine the prior choices. It offers no clear mechanism for the choosing of books nor the further filtering; moreover, what shall be done regarding administrative questions, such as meeting times and places, the introduction of new members, or the determination of broad themes and interests for a group? Shall all these be determined by random chance as well?

R: I suppose not.

P: It seems, then, that we need a system in place beforehand. A random choice may be elegant in the event of a final disagreement—once the many have reached a broad though nonspecific consensus—but it does not answer the questions regarding the wider rule and administration of a small group such as ours.

R: Then what, friend Patricius, shall you propose?

P: I return now to those words of Friend Knecht, our young aspirant. He said that to make a choice at all seemed abominable—and I would suspect that many of us feel the same. It is a frustrating process at best, and one that seems cruel and callous at worst. Rarely do we emerge from a vote feeling satisfied.

ALL: Verily, Patricius.

P: I ask, then, whether we might find more profit in removing a choice from the many—and, perhaps, placing this burden upon the one. To this end, I ask whether a group such as ours might be ruled not by the principle of democracy but rather by the dictatorship of an individual.

B: Verily, this is not serious, F&C?

P: Verily, it is, F&C Boof. For in doing so, we remove the pain of the many and offer it to the one—and, moreover, this one is freed of the pain as well. For she is free to choose truly based on the common good, without concern for strategy or for argument. She does not have to present her conclusions or reasoning via rhetoric, nor must she compete with others to be correct; rather, she listens to the many with a spirit of benevolence and, from their voices, crafts a consensus. Thus, she is free to pursue the common good unhindered—as we have already said each of us desires—and without the complicated mechanisms required for an incorruptible democracy, as proposed by F&C Dorset. She will not rule by simple fiat, but will rather listen to the reasoned positions of the many and make a decision that balances them best. So long as we can trust her good will—and, among friends, surely we can—such a system is free from the failures we saw before: no strange self-interest (once more, trusting her good will); no ambiguities in the determination of the personal vs. common good; and no burden of choosing upon the many who would rather be free of it altogether.

B: And yet I see a strange conundrum emerging from this, my friend (and citizen).

P: What would that be?

B: We have said that democracy is a poor means of government, one that creates a contradiction within the man and the society. And yet why do we advocate such a system—a democratically elected republic—in great things while disparaging it in small? Were we to believe that this is the best means of ruling men, then why shouldn’t we believe it belongs in all forms of organization—or, conversely, should we regard it as inferior, then why do we not abandon it as a form of government?

P: Your concern is true, Friend Boof. But I would put this forth: that the rule of a democratic republic acknowledges the imperfections and disagreement of a mass society, yet the rule of a group of friends assumes a common good acknowledged amongst all.

B: Please speak further, Friend Patricius.

P: For the rule of many men is guided by justice; and yet, justice is not the greatest of all laws. It is a means of mediation, but when mediation is no longer necessary—that is, when we have found a shared good among all of us—then justice gives way to the supreme rule of friendship; that is, Charity. Charity is not and may not be formalized—we cannot call charity a system of government at all—but rather must emerge from the trust and mutualism of real friends and friendship.

K: This is sensible to me, Patricius.

P: Among the great masses of men, we have no guarantee of a mutually understood good. Justice emerges as the means of mediation between two differing accounts of the good: it corrects those improper encroachments upon the good and rights of another; it protects individuals from such encroachments; and it seeks an equality that promotes the good for each individual. Yet none of these require force within the charity of friendship: between two friends who earnestly seek the good of the other, any encroachments and abuses emerge only from a failure of knowledge—trivially corrected by reason—or a lack of charity. If we should find friends with perfect charity, then all that is needed to guarantee well-executed goodwill is knowledge. And, thus, within a well-formed group such as ours, what end might be served by democracy? None—for the structured facilitation of self-interest is pointless when we have mutually abandoned self-interest in favor of the interest of one another.

ALL: Verily, this is true.

P: We should hope that one day, the great mass of men we call Humanity reaches a point where it is ruled by charity over justice. Yet though we cannot yet allow the rule of charity to begin among the great mass—for we must accept that there shall be disagreements, compromises, and the risk of corruption among leaders for whom good will is no guarantee—among a small group such as ours, there is no reason why we should remain with the mediation of justice.

ALL: And verily, you have demonstrated your argument perfectly.

P: Thus, I propose a dictatorship, whereby one of our number shall settle these questions—first wisely listening to the opinions of the many, and then making a decision in pursuit of the acknowledged good between us.

ALL: Verily, we are in agreement.

K: And yet, who shall we choose as leader?

B: Given his eloquent advocacy, I nominate F&C Patricius for this small dictatorship.

P: Oh, no.

B: Yet why? Have you not just demonstrated the necessity of this role?

P: Well, I don’t want to pick. I don’t really have a strong preference either way.

QED.

Verily, I have demonstrated my point; it is thus prudent to subscribe for further lessons in virtue.

Subscribe now

And the good is naturally diffusive, properly desiring to share itself with others; and, therefore, one ought to share this article with one’s reading group to argue in favor of reform.

Share

Blood Meridian’s epilogue receives little attention. It’s overshadowed by those perfect few lines that conclude the main story: “He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” McCarthy already ended his story perfectly—anything more is superfluous.

Yet just as significant as its superfluousness is its sheer opacity. It’s nearly incomprehensible on the first pass. To refresh your memory, the epilogue offers a strange description of some traveler of the plains making his way while scourging the earth. Here are the first few lines:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plane behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search…

I don’t recall exactly what I thought of this on my first pass of the book. Some sort of violent gang much like the Glantons, perhaps—engaged in some primitive rite as they go along searching for corpses.

Some time later, I finally heard the explanation I’d been waiting for: these men were laying railroads. The man is laying the way for railroad spikes, putting “his steel” in there step by step, followed by a whole party of surveyors and tracklayers. They are ordering the plane to the logic of human—or, we ought to say, American—reason:

that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there…

And yet McCarthy refuses to dignify this activity with its own language. He will not use the proper names of the tools nor the technical terms of the processes. All that he will offer is a matter-of-fact description of the violence inflicted upon the plains.

Blood Meridian is, at heart, a story about the frontier. It is about the land just beyond the reaches of Civilization, the world that has not yet been put in order according to the colonizing worldview. Savagery is the default: the Glanton Gang, all outlaws and outcasts, come to a world that is itself outlawed yet awaiting legitimization.

But civilization’s building only proceeds from flattened ground. Before the nation can complete its westward journey, every obstacle must be removed. It is the duty of the Glanton Gang to empty the frontier—to rape, to raze, to kill, to render the plains open to the forthcoming march of Civilization. Civilization will hide its complicity in this: the men will be punished for their crimes and largely scorned by history.

Yet without them, civilization would have come no further. The Glanton rampage is the only thing that could make this march possible.

And all this brings us at last to the epilogue. Civilization has completed its violent project of flattening the plains. It is finally available for ordering.

Yet in McCarthy’s brutal description of the march of the railroads, we see that Manifest Destiny has not concluded its violence. It has subsumed it, transformed it, and turned it into what we might call a “productive” force.

It’s a striking feature of McCarthy’s work that he refuses to use quotation marks. In this sense, dialogue becomes description: man is not set apart from the world but made an undistinguished part of it. The two most significant figures of the book—the kid and the judge—are not given proper names. They are part of the natural order of things just the same as the stones, the ground, the plains.

The violent spirit that slaughtered Indians and Mexicans does not disappear—the judge, of course, will never die. The Glanton Gang made low the mountains and exalted the valleys for the railroads; their spirit has made its mark. Much of McCarthy’s work deals with the hidden frontier that remains: Child of God, No Country for Old Men, his Border Trilogy. Through it all, the mere facticity of the violence remains: it is the ground on which we stand.

Subscribe now

Share

did a nice job quickly articulating why it is that confidence feels so slimy. At some level, it’s a replacement for real virtue: where a well-ordered society would expect its citizens to practice courage, honesty, and friendliness—Aristotle even considers “wittiness”(eutrapelia—broadly, good humor and skill in conversation) a necessary virtue—we, in our debased age, are content to leave these under the umbrella of Confidence.

At worst, confidence might be a literal vice. Some translators render Aristotle’s excess of courage1—tharros—as “confidence.” Tharros is the spirit of false courage that leads one to behave recklessly: it ignores real danger and acts without thinking.

This sort of “confidence” doesn’t seem like our concern, though. We’re not thinking of brash idiots diving off bridges to impress their friends. We’re thinking of pick-up artists, pop psychologists, Andrew Tate, hustle culture, and maybe even the deceit that dominates our politics—people who want your trust but don’t want to deal with honesty.

In some sense, this confidence is just tharros: it ignores the dangers and risks of dishonesty because it so badly wants the honor and rewards earned by courage. It’s a peculiar version—not irrational but rather conniving.

Still, a reader could rightly demand a better account of why we ought to regard confidence with skepticism. (This article started as an extended reply to someone demanding just that, actually.) There might be con men (the full term is literally “confidence man”) and schemers, but it’s not bad to be confident, right? We’re not going to say that it’s a vice to be charming and friendly, nor should we criticize the shy and anxious for wanting social competence.

Yet all of the positive traits of confidence are redundant with other common virtues: things like courage, friendliness, honesty, and wittiness. As such, there is no substantial confidence—it’s only a confused representation of these virtues. We shouldn’t pursue confidence as confidence—we should pursue virtue and, in turn, achieve something like confidence.

With that in mind, I’d like to walk through a bullet-pointed argument for what slimy confidence really is, why you should abandon it, and what a virtuous sort of confidence entails.

1. Courage is the right disposition towards fear: it’s not a wholesale dismissal (that would just be recklessness) but it allows one to move past fears when there is genuine good to be gained by doing such.

2. What pains and pleasures are confidence ordered to? Well, it seems to aim for the trust and—of course—confidence of others. Yet this seems redundant at best: honesty, modesty, friendliness, and courage already cover all these goods (both in terms of aiming for the approval of others and resisting the shame/fear that keeps us from conversation). Where does confidence fit alongside these?

3. We could say that confidence is an amalgamation of these virtues—confidence is courage and friendliness (maybe not modesty and truthfulness)—but in its typical presentation, it seems to contradict many virtues. Most advice about confidence comes down to “act like you’re supposed to be here” or something to that effect, which could easily turn into a desire for honors disproportionate to your station and ability.

4. Here’s an actual case: let’s say you’re mistaken for an expert in a field and offered a major task, with plenty of money and honor to boot. What would the courageous and truthful vs. confident person do? The former should say, “This is not my expertise; you should find someone else.” Yet plenty of “confident” people would encourage you to accept and figure it out on the fly.

5. We might see confidence, then, as an abuse of courage: it’s what happens when someone manages to tame fear yet cannot resist boastfulness and immodesty.

6. Staying concrete, the biggest hawkers of “confidence” tend to prove this right: pick-up artists, Hustle Culture guys, pop psychologists, and so on. The heart of all of these is Fake It Till You Make It: try to earn the trust of others through wit and trickery without a concern for truth or goodness.

7. The goods of confidence, then, are trust and honors. Yet confidence must be indifferent to truth and justice: it doesn’t ask whether you deserve these things. It only asks about the fastest route to acquiring them.

8. We may properly desire the respect and trust of others—again, a shy person can rightfully want less social anxiety—but these must be desired because they are rightly deserved, not out of a selfish desire for them. A decent person deserves to participate in conversation and friendship as normal; for them, building “confidence” is about earning goods already deserved.

9. The proper pursuit of confidence is indistinguishable from the pursuit of virtue at large. The pursuit of confidence to the exclusion of other virtues, in contrast, is always the pursuit of vice. As such, there is no possible use in simply “trying to be more confident”—rightly, one must speak of courage, wittiness, friendliness, and so one as part of one wider pursuit of proper social standing.

And sure, you could say to all this, “Well, that’s one interpretation of confidence, but that’s not the only meaning.” And that might be true, and I’m sure that plenty of people encouraging you to “be confident” have nothing but good intentions. But if we break down their meaning to its basic components, we’re not going to find anything that is uniquely identifiable as “confidence”—we’re left with a list of virtues.

Slimy confidence is a vice. Good confidence is a confused version of virtue. Let’s cut through the nonsense: don’t let anyone hide their duplicity behind veneers of self-help and success.

You read this far. Have the courage to subscribe for free, or maybe pledge some money if you want to help me grow into a virtuous philosopher.

Subscribe now

And make sure to share this with your slimiest, most vicious friends.

Share

Imagine a perfect society. No war, no greed, no scarcity, and millions of happy people living in harmony. There is just one cost: for whatever reason, a single innocent person must be tortured to maintain this existence.

Such is the premise of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This perfect city is possible only because one small child sits suffering in a small prison cell, wasting away in perpetuity—why this is necessary, Le Guin doesn’t explain. (Maybe the narrator doesn’t want to understand.) Everyone in the city knows this must be so; this is not a society of ignorant bliss surviving on a noble lie. Yet they all know that were the child ever freed, the paradise they’ve created would collapse in a moment. For many, this is an acceptable sacrifice: one person lives in misery for the sake of millions. Not all can accept this, however. There are a small few who choose to walk away from Omelas, unable to bear the cruelty.

Traditionally, the story is interpreted as an ethical challenge for utilitarianism. In exchange for perfect joy for millions, you must impose terrible suffering on one entirely innocent person. Any rational calculus has a clear answer: this is a worthwhile sacrifice. Still, many of us would proudly say that we could not endure this. We must walk away from Omelas no matter the cost.

Yet for as much as we armchair philosophers tend to pride ourselves on our superiority to utilitarians, I fear that many of us are unwittingly approving of a different philosophical argument for Omelas. I’m referring, of course, to Aristotle.

How could this be? Aristotle does not provide for any sort of utilitarian calculus: just about every interpretation of virtue ethics would demand that you stick to a set of principles rather than sacrifice them for the sake of “The Greater Good.” As many interpreters have shown, there is no such thing as a “greater good.” The practice of virtue itself is the common good to which man must dedicate himself.

Ultimately, the community—here, we may use the polis, the city, that Aristotle centrally refers to—only succeeds when all its members flourish. The suffering of one child would mean that this polis is necessarily incomplete. And, of course, the viciousness needed to continue her suffering would harm the rest of the city as well: one cannot achieve flourishing while still stuck practicing such cruelty towards one of the polis’s own citizens.

Yet a closer reading of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics reveals that, far from impermissible, this sort of suffering is necessary for Aristotle’s vision of the good life. He cannot conceive of a well-ordered city without this sacrifice.

Thus is born Aristotle’s account of slavery, the heart of his flourishing polis.

Aristotelian Slavery

At the heart of Aristotle’s polis are the citizens: the men of good character who can achieve true flourishing (eudaimonia) through the practice of virtue. Women are more ambiguous—it does not seem Aristotle really believed they could achieve complete flourishing, though they are nevertheless a part of the good of the city—and children are still not capable of genuine participation in the good life, though they must of course be educated and cared for.

These are the first three parts of the Aristotelian household: men, women, and children. Each is a member of the polis, differing based on their capacities. Yet there is a fourth member, another human with no part in the polis: the slave.

Aristotle’s slaves are “a kind of animate tool” for the household. (Politics 1.3 1253b33-1254a1) They are superior to animals for their limited reasoning, yet still have no real capacity for fulfillment or happiness. The best they can hope for is the rule of a wise owner—which means occasional beatings and frequent chastisement.

Why can we inflict such pain on these slaves? Well, it’s simple: they aren’t really capable of happiness. Aristotle argues that their defective reasoning keeps them from real flourishing: they cannot possibly participate in the life guided by prohairesis, Aristotle’s term for moral reasoning. This applies only to “natural slaves”—Aristotle acknowledges that some people may be made slaves by no fault of their own. For them, there is no hope for reasoning, happiness, or freedom.

Yet while they cannot participate in moral reasoning, they can understand it. What exactly this means is confusing: are they unable to perceive the good? Are they unable to reason about how to achieve good ends?

Aristotle’s account of natural slavery is easy to criticize. It is convoluted, contradictory, and obviously proceeds from Aristotle’s assumption that slavery is necessary—reason is only a justification for what he already believed. Repeatedly, when he runs against his own arguments, he simply reminds the reader that slaves are not capable of morality, happiness, or belonging: once, he remarks that if a certain account of the city were true, then “slaves and nonhuman animals would be members of the city, whereas they are not, since they do not participate in happiness or in a life guided by decision.” (Politics 3.9 1280a32-34) This is, in his mind, a sufficient argument for him to dismiss that account.

Yet for as trivial as it is to dismiss Aristotle’s arguments in favor of natural slavery (it’s a fun game to poke new holes in it), it is much less trivial to explain an alternative. Because, illogical and unacceptable though they may be, Aristotle’s slaves are absolutely necessary to defend his vision of a flourishing life.

Aristotle, like many philosophers, came to the conclusion that the best life of all is doing philosophy. (They put their theory in practice, at least.) As he contends, the highest good of human life is to become more godlike and less mortal—we are made better by elevating ourselves to these heights.

What is the most godlike way to spend a life? Contemplation, he says. Study is the most godlike thing a man can do: to rest with the pureness of knowledge over the impurity of mortality.

The opposite of study is production: to labor is the most mortal thing a human can do. As such, it brings us down from our lofty, divine heights into the weakness and fallibility of mortality. And yet, the polis cannot function without production. Who will tend the farms? Who will build our homes? The great heights of humanity are only possible once the petty foundations are complete. Who could possibly manage those foundations?

Well, we’ve already found our answer: the slaves. They are not capable of taking pleasure in contemplation or decision anyways—they can only parrot the philosophers’ reasoning without any real understanding of its significance. If they must waste their days in base labor, who cares? Not them and certainly not the citizens.

Removing slavery from the Aristotelian system is not simply a matter of saying, “Never mind! We know better now.” It demands that we rethink his vision of flourishing altogether: we cannot repeat his underlying logic without adhering to its ultimate conclusions.

This is a dilemma for which I lack a clear answer. There are many possible routes out, each with its own potential pitfalls. Yet I do not want to dismiss the seriousness of this problem: Aristotle demands that we remain in Omelas, and we must ask whether we could walk away.

Like what I write? This essay was largely adapted from my writing sample for the University of Oxford, where I’m hoping to go for grad school this fall. If you want to help me afford that, you should pledge (or even just subscribe for free).

Subscribe now

Or maybe just share.

Share

I want to convince you that we should get rid of intellectual property altogether. I want to convince you that “piracy”—or, as I’m going to call it, the right to copy—should be the norm. Actually, I don’t think I need to convince you of any of this: all I plan to do is demonstrate how based on what you already believe, piracy should be a perfectly normal extension of ownership.

Consider these basic principles:

1. If you buy something, you should own it, full stop.

2. If you own something, it’s yours to use as you please.

I don’t feel the need to cite John Locke or whoever to prove this. To me, these are both truisms of personal property. They’re the same founding principles behind the right-to-repair movement and the opposition to subscription-laden “Smart” products.

And if you hold strictly to these principles, here’s a straightforward conclusion: “piracy” is a right. Or, to use a different term, ownership ought to entail a right-to-copy law. At its most basic, piracy is nothing more than copying something you already own—whether it’s a book, a video game, or a song—and sharing it with someone else. If you own a PDF, why shouldn’t you be allowed to email it to a friend? If you own a game—really own it—why can’t you copy the files already on your computer and offer them to someone?

Now, we obviously place restrictions on #2. You can’t use your property to do something if you didn’t have the right to do it before: the fact that you can’t use a gun to shoot people at random doesn’t lessen your ownership. Your property rights only extend so far as your natural rights. Natural rights, of course, are predicated on the idea that you can’t violate anyone else’s.

So, does piracy violate anyone else’s natural rights? Well, it might violate the same right to property I cited above—intellectual property, that is. But intellectual property law is less intuitive than other sorts of ownership: how can you lay claim to an idea? “Hey, that’s my idea, get your own!” doesn’t seem to have much in common with, “Hey, that’s my bike—give it back!”

You have the right to read my essays, though I’d hope you credit me if you cite them. You can exercise it by subscribing.

Subscribe now

And these get especially messy when we start talking about selling your ideas to others. What rights do you have over your idea after you’ve sold a commodified version of it to someone else? Once I buy your novel, to what extent do I own the words within? “Natural” ownership—the possession of tangible things—hinges on scarcity: if someone takes your property, you don’t have it anymore. There’s nothing comparable with ideas—I still have full possession of this essay’s ideas even if you’ve plagiarized it.

Intellectual property is, at least, unusual in the world of ownership rights. And I would contend it only exists because we don’t know how to build an economy without scarcity. How could artists receive anything for their work if you don’t pay them for the privilege of a copy?1 Without it, who pays writers, musicians, and illustrators?

Well, that answer is obvious enough: nobody pays them, the same as always.

I do think you could argue that intellectual property failed in its original goal. It’s come to protect large corporations far more than independent artists and thinkers. Whatever we have now has had some pretty unfortunate shortcomings.

And if it’s not working, then why not get rid of it? I believe that something better will come for artists in a post-IP world, even though we might not understand it yet.

Here’s my basic argument:

Premise #1: yes, the art and entertainment industry as we know it couldn’t survive a right-to-copy law. Book publishers, music labels, video game developers, and so on would never, ever endure a world where people just freely copy their products for nothing.2 At the very least, they would have to transform their business model entirely.

Premise #2: do you think people would suddenly lose all desire for new books, music, and video games in this world? That we’d all just comb through the old stuff without wanting anything new? No, obviously not. And I don’t think people working in their free time could meet the demand—people would have to dedicate themselves to art. But what could support them?

I’m going to say a few things that aren’t entirely thought through. Give me a moment to be an idealist—I'm cynical enough most of the time.

Here it goes: I think it’s simply ridiculous to imagine that art would just die out without IP. You think people wouldn’t find ways to support artists or fund new entertainment? Those huge sums we spend on entertainment every year would instead go towards nothing?

I think there are real models for alternatives: democratized patronage, philanthropy-driven support, artists crowdfunding the money needed to support themselves through the creation process. All of these have worked to different extents already. Each, I would argue, goes back to the same principle: we should pay people for the actual value of their work instead of creating an arbitrarily scarce commodity to mediate the payment.

Plagiarism would certainly be a problem, but this is already largely handled by peer-to-peer trust rather than legal restrictions. If you don’t cite your sources, you’ll quickly get shunned from communities with a legitimate interest in truth and beauty. Again, I think these principles will emerge naturally—we don’t need copyright law to tell us to cooperate.

But to some extent, we should be willing to say that we don’t know what will come next. If we believe there’s a genuine hunger for art and beauty that must be satiated, then we should believe that it can survive without the arbitrary restrictions of intellectual property. Certainly, such things existed well before any notion of copyright began—it’s not as though Milton needed it to complete Paradise Lost—and for those with a real belief in art, I think it’s easy to imagine that it will exist afterwards as well.

Though I'm still unconvinced that video games are art, I do think they’re the best evidence that this is possible. My evidence: Dwarf Fortress. It’s an incredibly elaborate game simulating a civilization of dwarves building fortresses, mining, crafting, drinking, and so on. It’s so incredibly detailed that every character in the world—and there can be thousands and thousands—has preferences, wounds simulated down to the individual muscle fiber, a history, and so on. The game is the project of two brothers who’ve been working on it since 2002, adding unbelievable detail over time.3

And Dwarf Fortress is free. It’s been free the whole time. There’s a paid version with upgraded graphics (the free game is entirely ASCII symbols—see below), but you can play as much as you want without spending a cent.

People want to play Dwarf Fortress. They want it to be updated. They want to reward two hard-working guys for their insane efforts over the past two decades. It just works.

I’m convinced that the same culture could develop around writing, music, and all sorts of other artforms. We just need to let it. Once we abandon our absurd beliefs about ownership and “intellectual property,” I genuinely believe things will change. And a little bit of optimism doesn’t kill you, right?

Want to help me organically build a career offering you art and essays? Subscribe for free or offer a pledge:

Subscribe now

Or just share with someone who needs a quick dose of idealism.

Share

Sir, it’s happened again: someone has posted about how Pascal’s Wager actually means that we should all be Muslims.

If you’ve spent enough time floating around social media, you have probably seen someone present an interpretation of the Wager to this effect: if your main reason for belief is the benefits of heaven or risk of hell, then Christianity seems like a bad choice. Its vision of hell is ambiguous and many theologians argue that non-Christians can be saved—so why should any rational bettor choose Christ?

For the devoutly Christian Pascal, shouldn’t this be the end? Pack it up—either the argument doesn’t work or it tells you to abandon your beliefs. How did he miss this?

And every time I see a post to this effect—whether it’s this argument about the multiplicity of religions, Christians arguing that it undermines Christianity, or iffy Pascal readers claiming it was a joke—I begin banging my head off the wall and yelling that this is not how to interpret the Wager. It’s not some argument about your best shot at infinite pleasure. It’s a nuanced picture of the many sides of human reason and a means of escaping the doubting calculus of reason. The original Wager illuminates the nature of human belief—these alternatives flatten and deform it.

I do not believe I can stop people from running amok with their bad interpretations of the Wager. But if I can just get one person to see the Wager for what it is, I count that as a success.1

There is a small—but non-zero!—chance that by subscribing, you will gain an eternity in heaven. The cost is zero (unless you want to pledge some support); the upside is infinite. As such, the only rational choice is to subscribe.

Subscribe now

A Brief Exposition

As typically stated, the argument is something like this: you should believe in God because that’s the most useful option. You don’t know that God is real, but think about it rationally for a second. If God doesn’t exist, then belief carries a small penalty—obeying religious laws, avoiding a few earthly pleasures, and so on—and might even bring some joy regardless.2 In this world where God doesn’t exist, disbelief carries some limited benefits: earthly pleasures, unrestricted choices, etc. etc.

But if God exists, the calculus is overwhelmingly obvious. Belief in God carries an infinite benefit—eternal joy in heaven—and disbelief leads to infinite suffering in hell. If God’s reality has any nonzero probability—and, given the impossibility of a disproof, there must always be a chance—then a rational actor needs to believe in God. Anything else would be ridiculously irrational.

Such is the cold, mercenary logic driving Pascal. Believe in God because it’s useful. Truth and morality are secondary concerns.

This is not a popular argument. Not among philosophers, not among theologians, and not among us third-estate readers. The objections are many: reason cannot grasp God in full. A life of faith is a quiet, personal sacrifice made in pursuit of goodness. Pascal reduces all of this to the simple logic of investments and returns: God is positive EV! God is a good bet!

And a Christian might argue that this sort of belief in God is actually a sin. You can’t just enter into contract negotiations with the Creator of the Universe—to do such is prideful, immoral, and a path to perdition. So even if the basic logic of the Wager were rational, you would be a fool to follow it—you’re undoing all the benefits you might have otherwise earned.

Two questions for the reader: first, to set up my second question, you probably have a take on Pascal’s Wager. What is it?

Second and more importantly: have you actually read any Pascal? Whether the Pensees (the unfinished collection of notes and essays, including the Wager, that he intended to form a complete work of apologetics) or any of his other philosophical writings? Half credit if you know his work in math or physics.

Because I’d wager most people with a take on the Wager haven’t read a lick of Pascal—which I get, because the Pensees are a slog to get through and the Wager is fertile ground for quick takes and fun arguments—and thus haven’t thought about how weird it is that Pascal supposedly believes this. Because Pascal, far from a cold rationalist, has basically zero faith in human reason’s power to choose the good.

Pascal was an adherent of Jansenism, a Catholic movement that claimed to be absolute followers of St. Augustine’s teachings—nothing more, nothing less. What resulted was a controversial theological position that critics argued denies free will any role in salvation. As these critics presented it, Jansenists contend that God’s grace must be entirely irresistible and necessary for salvation, such that the only way to be saved is for God to choose you and such that anyone not chosen is guaranteed damnation—pretty similar, you’ll notice, to Calvinist predestination. This position was condemned as heresy.

Pascal, like many defenders of the movement, denied that Cornelius Jansen (the thinker who had started the movement with his book Augustinus) ever argued for this. Still, he certainly agreed that man’s will is too weak to find its way to God through reason: “Anything founded on sound reason is very ill-founded,” Pascal wrote.3 As a matter of fact, “Men are wholly occupied in pursuing their good…[but] they have nothing but human fancy and no strength to make its possession secure.”4

Pascal believed that humanity is defined by a paradox: our potential for absolute greatness and our practical depravity. We can be elevated to the greatest of heights, yet we are typically pathetic, sinful, and weak. On our own, we are nothing—yet with God, we can be everything.

And time and time again, Pascal emphasizes that we as Christians need evidence. “I should not be a Christian but for the Miracles, says St. Augustine,” notes Pascal.5 Pascal speaks of this need for miracles many times in the course of the Pensees: we are not going to believe just because of reason.

If you know one thing about Pascal, it’s probably the Wager. If you know a second thing about Pascal, it’s probably his conversion story. Pascal was not much of a Christian in his younger years, briefly identifying with the Jansenists in his 20s but mostly ignoring religion. This changed at about half past ten on November 23rd, 1654 —we know this so precisely because of a note Pascal sewed into his jacket to keep with him forever. That evening, Pascal was overcome by an inexplicable mystical experience—a “night of fire” as it’s commonly described—and wrote passionately that he would never again forget God. This was the inspiration for the Pensees—and, as such, for the Wager.

Yet Pascal’s conversion was clearly absolutely nothing like the rational calculus proposed by the Wager. His life and philosophy contradict this notion of mercenary faith that’s since defined his legacy. How can we reconcile the two?

I think I’ve done enough to demonstrate why it’s implausible that Pascal intended this interpretation. Now, I’d like to show you a better one.

The Heart of the Wager

Before I’d actually read the Pensees, I was exposed to a new view of the wager by the late, great American pragmatist Nicholas Rescher, whom I will describe as a mentor since my reading group emailed with him a bit. His obscure book (Rescher wrote over a hundred books—the vast majority are obscure) Pascal’s Wager: A Study of Practical Reasoning in Philosophical Theology offers, in my view, a far better reading of the Wager.

Rescher’s goal is not solely to defend Pascal or correct erroneous interpretations, though he does so regardless. Critics’ “charges of moral insensitivity and other such high-minded complaints…are based on a total misunderstanding of its aim and import.”6 A typical reading, Rescher contends, ignores its actual content in favor of the digestible, easily criticized version we receive.

Pascal, Rescher contends, is not making this argument in a vacuum. Rather, he stands apart from the Cartesians and Thomists of his time who focused on theoretical proofs for God. Their concern was demonstrating God’s existence through argument.

Yet for Pascal, who saw human reason as insignificant beside God, such argument is useless. “Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separate us…Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.”7 Our concern cannot be with truth, because the truth of God is beyond us. We must think about actions—and, as such, we must move away from theoretical reasoning to practical reasoning. We have to ask what to do, not what the world is really like. As Rescher presents it, the question is now, “Should we accept that [God] exists—is it appropriate to endorse this position?”8

Mere uncertainty is not acceptable—in practical reasoning, “to suspend judgment is…to resolve the issue in the negative.”9 Not making a choice means choosing disbelief. You must decide. So if reason can’t prove God to us, where do we turn?

Well, we wager. Reason demands certainty and calculus. It demands definite returns and sensibility. Yet religion seems nonsensical: here’s an uncertain proposition that I cannot prove and that demands a meaningful sacrifice on my part—Rescher contends that Pascal was targeting the intelligent libertines of his day, the wealthy, learned men who neglected religion. Reason tells them that Christianity is a nonsensical way to live. Why sacrifice all that for an uncertainty?

The conclusion of the Wager is not, “Therefore, God exists,” or even, “Therefore, I (as someone who has followed and accepted this argument) believe in God.” It is instead, “Therefore, belief in God is prudent.” As self-interested beings, believing in God makes sense. This, Pascal contends, does not reduce us to mercenaries of faith. You have to make a choice—either believe or don’t—so the fact that you have thought about self-interest and chosen belief is no more selfish than to do the same and choose disbelief.

And once we have completed this work—demonstrating that belief in God is warranted by reason—we can finally escape the insufficiencies of reason. The Wager came to meet humanity in our vain, calculating ways. Now, we emerge into the real domain of faith: the heart.

“The heart,” Pascal writes, “has its reasons of which reason knows nothing…It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.”10 It is this intangible, irrational sort of passion that is meant to contend with God—not merely our reason. “Neither Mind [i.e., reason] nor Heart can force the other’s hand,” Rescher contends.11 But while the heart is inclined to believe,12 the mind’s natural path is skepticism and calculus.

Yet through the Wager, heart offers mind “an appeal made in its own terms” that shows why it should follow along in belief.13 The hesitant Christian encounters God in inexplicable moments—in a beautiful work of art, in the powerful sound of the organ, in a poignant verse of scripture—that cannot command the mind to think God exists but can lead the heart to feel that God exists. The content and nature of this feeling is ineffable—just like Pascal’s night of fire—but following such an experience, the heart cannot help but believe this.

We think of the Wager as the mind taking the heart hostage: reason says to belief, “You had better follow along if you don’t want to burn in hell forever!” Pascal’s approach is the exact opposite: it’s the heart saying to the mind, “We can never be certain of God’s existence. But I still believe, and you know that it benefits both of us.” Pascal’s Wager does not leverage reason except to disarm it. It demonstrates that we have no need to wait for a definitive proof of God to live as reasonable religious men.

And I’d like to note one final argument from Rescher: the many-religions objection is irrelevant. It misinterprets Pascal’s audience and target:

[T]he person who is realistically worried about all these myriad possible jealous gods is indeed going to find Pascal’s Wager unconvincing. But the fact remains the argument is simply not addressed to this person (if such there be). It is addressed to those nominal Christians, whose name is legion, who do indeed espouse the god-conception on which the argument is premised.14

Pascal isn’t trying to tell random atheists to be Christians. He’s trying to ask uncertain and indifferent Christians whether their choices make any sense. Clearly, it contradicts the heart, since they believe in God yet ignore the practice. Clearly, it contradicts reason, since a cunning Christian would be vying for heaven. Your actions are nonsense—if you hold these beliefs, you’re making a bet that will always lose!

I lack the power to stop the endless tide of Wager misinterpretations. But I hope that you now understand Pascal’s actual meaning: not that we ought to live as mercenaries in service of God, but that our heart and mind demand two very different things. The Wager calms the mind so that the heart may contend with God as it must.

Your mind may revolt against subscribing. Yet clearly your heart is inclined towards it seeing as you read this far. Appeal to your selfish reason and subscribe for a chance at infinite utility (a free subscription offers a countable infinity; paid offers an uncountable infinity):

Subscribe now

For smaller, earthly benefits, you may consider sharing.

Share