Just two weeks ago I wrote some fifteen hundred words on the cruelty and indifference of nature. That was on a Friday. Then, that Monday, a wave of tornadic storms swept through Northern Illinois, bringing with it fierce wind gusts that topped out around seventy miles per hour. (I love the Upper Midwest, but I could do without the violent weather. After dodging the 2013 Moore tornado by one day, I’ve had enough of extreme meteorological events for one lifetime.^[1]) Finally, around 5pm, the last squall line passed, and the winds and rain abated.

Walking through the door from work, I go to the back window to check up on the discharge of our new sump pump. There in the sandbox where we keep our fire pit, I spot a tiny, pink, naked thing like a length of uncooked hotdog lying face down in the rain-pocked grime. I quickly infer that the pink thing is a neonate squirrel kit—so small its eyes haven’t yet opened—blown from its nest by the afternoon’s gale-force winds.

The kit, it seems, is dead: no motion, no sign of life, not even a twitch or wiggle when a fly alights on its left haunch. Just what I need, I think. Another minor tragedy. I can’t bring myself to go outside and take a closer look. Surely, it died in the fall or drowned in the deluge. I harden my feelings and go about my evening.

Maybe thirty minutes later I point out the squirrel to Kay from our upstairs window. As we look, the rain starts again. No sooner do the first heavy drops land than the kit begins to squirm: it’s alive after all. Utterly helpless, it rolls back and forth, its tiny paws seeking purchase on the empty air.

My heart sinks. What do we do now? What can we do? My instinct tells me, Probably not much, if anything. It’s too fragile, too young; without the mother, it will almost certainly die in a matter of hours.

But I can’t do nothing. My conscience commands me to act. Ever cautious, I consult Google for instructions.

Google offers some hope: First, build a nest of rags in a shoebox. (Avoid terrycloth, as the loopy nap can cause the kit to become dangerously entangled.) Then, fill a sock with uncooked rice, warm the sock in the microwave, and place it under the nest. Next, gently (ever so gently!) place the kit in the nest, and place the nest near the tree from which the kit fell. Finally, to summon the mother, place your phone near the tree and play a recording of a crying kit on loop. After that, all you can do is wait as other interventions, including feeding and watering, can injure the kit, or even kill it.

We follow these instructions to the letter, using an umbrella to shield the kit from the slackening rain. Our researches also turn up contact information for a squirrel rescue that, coincidentally and most welcomely, is only five minutes from our house. I call the rescue’s director in the hope that she can help.

The rescue, however, has troubles of its own: the storms have swept dozens of squirrels from their nests, overwhelming the rescue and pushing its resources to the brink. If the mother doesn’t return, keep the kit on a heating pad in the garage overnight and text us in the morning. We do just that, giving the kit (now named Geoffrey) a warm, safe place to sleep (and also, should things go wrong, a place to die in peace).

By some miracle, Geoffrey survives the night. (Organisms are astonishing not only in their fragility, but also in their durability. Funny, isn’t it, that a man can survive a gunshot wound to the head only to die of a peanut allergy?) The next morning, the rescue operator, perhaps as wracked by unwarranted guilt as I am, instructs me to bring Geoffrey over around 10am. I’m happy and relieved to oblige.

Happy to oblige. But why? Why do I feel this solicitousness for a small animal that many people regard as nothing more than an interloper or pest? (“Rats with bushy tails,” they call them. Where I grew up in Southeast Georgia, our neighbors—many of them descended from long lines of homestead gardeners and cotton farmers, and as such are wary of the depredations of all manner of pests—would surely puzzle at my compassion. To people like our elderly neighbor who made a daily practice of sniping squirrels hiding in the tops of his pecan trees, rodents are a nuisance to be shut out or exterminated.) Why—given my demonstrated willingness to kill other animals, including my fellow human beings—do I go out of my way for an animal that, for various reasons, has only a twenty-five-percent chance of surviving its first year, regardless of whatever accidents, good or bad, befall it? Is my compassion instinctive, some trick of evolution (animals take care of young of other species all the time), or merely a result of cultural conditioning?

As always, my effort to trace my feelings to their source leads me into a blind alley. I don’t know why I care, I just do; I don’t know why Geoffrette’s^[2] life matters, it just does—or, at least, I feel like it does.^[3] Whatever its source, my compassion is as much a part of nature as the cruelty and indifference I see at work all around me, in both the agentive and nonagentive elements of the natural world. I take some comfort in this fact.^[4]

It seems that, as much as I deny it, I can’t shake the feeling that the animal world is somehow purer than the human world, and therefore more deserving of our allowances and special protections. (Of course, this is a delusion: my feelings are lying to me. But I can’t deny or resist the power of the lie. Apparently, neither can the people who devote their lives—or, at least, large portions of their time, energy, and resources—to rescuing and rehabilitating lost and injured animals. What does it say about our species that some people choose to so dedicate themselves?) When comparing species, my first instinct is to condemn humanity for abusing the power granted to it by its superior agency. As the ultimate facultative animal, we have exceptional latitude in matters of individual choice and are therefore more blamable when our behavior—particularly our volitional behavior—bears poisonous fruit. Unlike the lower animals, we can choose how we wish to live. (Or can we? I can’t make up my mind on this matter.) Furthermore, humans, by virtue of our unique power of invention, can helps animals in ways they can’t help themselves. Therefore, we should do so, both for their sake and for ours.^[5]

So much for my thoughts and feelings on the matter. As for Geoffrette, her fate is unknown. I texted the rescue operator for an update seventy-two hours after the handoff but received no reply. Is she alive or dead? We’ll probably never know. (It could be that the rescue doesn’t know, either. Geoffrette was placed in an incubator with ten or twelve other “pinkies,” and it’s not clear to me that the staff can tell them apart at this stage of development. Either way, I don’t want to pester the rescue or distract its caretakers from their already crushing and ever-expanding duties.) Whatever the result, I’m happy that we were able to step in and make a difference, however infinitesimal or inconsequential that difference might seem. For there’s always the chance that I’m wrong—perhaps seriously wrong—and that our actions in this little drama do matter after all.

^[1] In certain contexts, anyway. I’ve been fascinated by tornadoes since boyhood and absolutely must see one before I die. To that end, I plan to participate in a guided storm tour and will certainly write about it when I do.

^[2] The kit, the rescue informed us, is female. We renamed Geoffrey “Geoffrette” on the spot.

^[3] It is my opinion that there is no God and no telos. Therefore, all significance is subjective and contingent, a matter of individual or societal opinion. Meaning is a human invention, not fixed, and certainly not something received from a supernatural source.

^[4] Compassion has its downside: namely, the pain one feels when the object of his compassion meets with misfortune or comes to a bad end. In the middle of this incident, I asked myself whether it would have been better not to have found Geoffrette and for nature to have taken its course while I went about my business in ignorance. I answer Yes, it’s better to have found Geoffrette, that her continued existence is more important than my desire to spare myself from emotional pain. At the very least, no matter what happens, we will have eased her in her last hours (though perhaps her consciousness is so unformed as to make her unaware of her situation at any level. This too might be something of a mercy).

^[5] We should take care of animals not just for the warm-fuzzies that come with doing good, but also because animals are a critical part of the biosphere that supports us all. Animal welfare is inseparable from human welfare.

“I do not think we could bear a clear vision of the animal world.”

—J. A. Baker, The Hill of Summer

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”

—Erich Fromm

***

Atop our backyard floodlight sits a bird’s nest. Over the last year, several species have called this stringy tangle home. In May, much to our happiness, the nest became home to a clutch of house sparrows.

For several weeks we watched as the chicks hatched and grew. Some mornings, while taking coffee, we sat in hushed delight as the parents, working by turns, brought their helpless but still clamant hatchlings beakfuls of premasticated larvae. What a joy and a privilege it would be to see the young sparrows fledge and, one day, take flight!

That day never came. Late last month, amid a vicious heatwave that swept from North America to Western Europe, the sparrows—the chicks as well as the adults—vanished. For a whole week, the nest sat vacant.

One day, after the heat wave passed and temperatures moderated, the adults returned. Chirping and chattering, they took turns peering into and sitting on the nest in what by my human reckoning I can only interpret as confused dismay. Where are the chicks?

Wherever they were, they were certainly dead. What began as an object lesson in the miracle and wonder of being had ended as a minor tragedy.

As suddenly as they’d returned, the parents disappeared again. We don’t know where they went and haven’t seen them since. Today the nest sits empty, awaiting its new owners and whatever fortunes, good or bad, might find them.

***

Now it’s high summer. Fireflies flash in the twilight swelter while invisible cicadas buzz from the treetops. Walking the neighborhood at dusk, we spot a fledgling Cooper’s hawk perched on the roof of our neighbor’s silver Mercedes. He’s left the nest for the first time and must learn to shift for himself.

Frowsy, popeyed, and awkward, the fledging stares at us in puzzlement, seemingly marshaling every fiber of his inchoate intellect in an effort to divine our intent. What are we, and what do we want with him? He’s as surprised at our appearance as we are at his, strangers in each other’s alien worlds. We pause and return his stare, happy to play some part, however vital or trivial, in his early education.

It’s a comical scene. But the humor of the moment is tempered by the diligent gaze of the young hawk’s mother who, sentry-like, has stationed herself on the height of the neighbor’s chimney, ready to intervene should something go amiss. I’m tempted to step closer, but prudence restrains me.

We stay another long moment, still and silent, until something in the evening darkness away down the street—perhaps invisible to our inferior human sight—captures the fledgling’s attention. Of interest no longer, we move on, concluding our roles as bit players in this brief and recurrent episode of the grand comedy.

***

Disillusioned with art and theory, I turn towards positive knowledge. Perhaps the natural world can tell me more about the human situation than the wisest theologian or philosopher ever can.

Naturally, I begin by reading: Ornithology, The Beak of the Finch, and Playing Possum are my starting points. Next, I focus my own observations, bringing binoculars with me on forest walks and noting the behavior of the animals that live in our yard and visit our bird feeder. Bored with the world outside my window and craving exoticism, I join several nature groups on Facebook and tune in to Planet Earth.

Where I hoped to find wonders, I find a horror show. Planet Earth, as astonishing a piece of documentary filmmaking as it is, plays like an anthology film of interspecies terror. (Truly. I don’t think I can bear to see one more tern chick or whale calf lost, maimed, or killed. At its cheeriest, Planet Earth is a gloomy reminder that this planet is terribly hard on all the beings that inhabit it—an exacting tyrant, not a bountiful mother.) The Facebook groups too degenerate into an exhibition of nature’s underbelly, with group members posting image after grisly image of window-struck birds and bloody, tooth-rent remains in various stages of decay. (Window-struck birds, as some members are quick to point out, seldom survive. Even if they shake themselves off and fly away, they’re still likely to die later from internal injuries. So much for my last bit of optimism.) Looking for high drama, I instead discover unending chronicles of peril and loss.

My journey reaches its climax with the discovery of a single picture: a candid portrait of a barred owl dismembering a duckling. It’s a startling and almost surreal image: the owl’s daintiness belies the violence of the encounter, as does the serenity in the duckling’s eyes. (So unlikely is the duckling’s appearance that I at first suspected the photographer of digital fakery. But no—this is an authentic and unaltered image.) Even more startling is the reminder that, in the animal world, there’s nothing remarkable about any of this. Everywhere in the wild—from the remotest glade to our suburban back yard—this sort of bloodthirstiness goes on all the time. It’s just business as usual.

This is not the view of nature I sought. But having found it, I can’t, without deceiving myself, look away.

***

I’ve stopped killing spiders. There was a time when I’d crush any spider, big or small, that came in my way. Now, I let them be. Tiny spiders are free to stay in their webby nooks while their larger cousins get swept outdoors. (I would, of course, make an exception for black widows and brown recluses. But I never see any on our property.) Occasionally, in performing my daily chores, I’ll vacuum up a spider, web and all, but this is by accident, not design. When this happens, I suffer brief pangs of guilt, but I no sooner reproach than forgive myself. (Most of the time, anyway.)

Since being discharged from the Army seven years ago, I generally avoid killing things. However, my pacifism is not born from any philosophical commitment or squishy sense of karma. (I’m a voracious carnivore, and even if I stopped now, I couldn’t possibly hope to ever work off the soul-debt I’ve surely accumulated over the last thirty-six years. So hamburgers it is.) In fact, my motives here are entirely self-serving, perhaps even malevolent: I let spiders live so that they can do my killing for me. This is the one-sided, unspoken bargain I’ve worked out with them.

And kill they do. Beneath every cobweb in every corner of the house is a pile of desiccated insect husks, little open-air ossuaries that stand as testaments to the murderous efficiency of these web-bound ambush predators. So tiny is the spiders’ prey that I can’t begin to identify them. Are they gnats? No, nothing even that large. Perhaps they are some kind of mite. Whatever they are, they are pests to me, something we’re certainly well rid of.

But thank God for the phenomenon of proportion! It’s strange, this knowledge that down in the lonely corners of the fireplace are transpiring scenes of bloodletting fit to make even the organizers of Grand Guignol blush. Of course, I don’t really think of the spiders’ depredations in human terms, but if I could and did, it would be impossible not to view these acts as anything but the height of brutality. My humanness—my size and utter lack of affinity with the many-eyed, many-legged, blood-sucking world of Anthropoda—shields me from any real sense of complicity in this viciousness.

But my complicity remains, whether I acknowledge it or not. (Knowledge and feelings—distinct species indeed.) Every time I swat or vacuum up a fat bluebottle I directly participate in the casual cruelty of everyday life. (I imagine that suffocating inside of a vacuum bag is a terrible way to die, no matter one’s mode of life or level of consciousness. Still, I routinely and gladly consign houseflies to this fate.) Surely, to the other animals, there can be no worse monster than a man.

I console myself by saying that there is no moral system governing interspecies relations except the one that exists in my mind, that what I do in this area of life doesn’t matter. If I don’t kill the fly, something else will, or, being short-lived, the fly will die of natural causes in a matter of weeks anyway. Ultimately, in a way, interference and noninterference amount to the same thing. Whatever the case may be, I’m just like every other animal, doing the things my fellow beings do every day, without guilt or scruple.

Still, at times, I recoil from myself. In those rare moments of self-disgust, try as I might, I can’t wipe off the taint of blame.

“Instinct and reason, signs of two natures.”

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.”

—T. H. Huxley

***

Everywhere in theological argumentation I see claims that we are made special, and that the Earth and the seemingly boundless universe in which it careens are made especially for us. I can’t disprove these claims, but I don’t believe them.

The same people who make so much of our specialness often speak of our supposedly unique faculties and characteristics: language, culture, artmaking, theory of mind, political organization, the manufacture and use of tools, and so forth, reserving special emphasis for consciousness, godlike creativity, and our unshakeable suspicion that there exists a godhead. (Whether the godhead is immanent or remote is a matter of endless debate. But the religious instinct, some claim, is proof enough of the existence of some god, somewhere.) These things, they say, are evidence of our specialness, our semidivinity; these things, they say, set us above and apart from the lower animals, whose stewardship God has entrusted to us.

It’s easy to see how religious thinkers arrived at these conclusions, as man’s exceptionalism seems everywhere in evidence. Even the second-most intelligent animal on the planet, whatever that might be—a dolphin, an ape—cannot match us in any domain, and that by a wide margin.

The religionists’ message is clear: We are distinct. More than that, we are distinct in kind, not degree. In proclaiming us distinct they draw a line between the semidivine human world and the decidedly undivine animal world. They denominate things to one side of this line unnatural, and things to the other natural.

Some secularists seem to think in much the same way, going the extra step of assigning a positive moral valence to the world of plants and animals and a negative one to that of humanity. Humanity, they say, has through its own corruptive enterprises become denatured. Citing some Edenic state of nature—imagined, always—they plea for a return to our prelapsarian condition, where we can all live in harmony and balance not only with each other but also with the nonhuman world. To do this, we must abandon or revolutionize our industries.

But I say that there is only one human nature. Furthermore, I say that whatever is, is natural—everything, from crude oil to its many synthetic derivatives. All of our modes of living, all of our industries, everything we manufacture, whatever we do for whatever reason, are instantiations of our nature, a tyrant whose diktats we cannot ignore or escape.

Still, the differences between the human and nonhuman worlds are apparent. That I grant. But I assert in accordance with Darwin that these differences are of degree and not kind: humans manifest more radical expressions of faculties and habits possessed by many other animals. (But of course not all). In the neverending competition between species, Homo sapiens has won the evolutionary lottery; an outsized share of cognitive benefits has accrued to this one species, along with everything that superior cognition implies.

Art^[1] and religion, as far as I can tell, are the only uniquely human phenomena going. Every other facet of our nature emerges elsewhere in the animal kingdom: We build towns, but so do ants; we use tools, but so do many animals, from crows and Egyptian vultures to primates and fish; we make war, but so do chimpanzees; we reason, but so do elephants and dolphins; we possess theory of mind, but so might some parrots; we manipulate resources through chemical means and elsewise, but so do bees in the making of honey and wax. Thus, it can’t be said with justification that any of these activities and processes makes us special. Our specialness arises from our exceptional facility in these and all other endeavors. We need not attempt to look beyond the observable world to see that this is so.

All that is to say: We are extraordinary animals, but animals still.

^[1] It seems some animals have an appreciation for aesthetics—shiny baubles, etc.—but this is hardly the same thing as artmaking. Religion seems the exclusive preserve of human beings. (I suppose it’s possible that my cat has a religion, or has consciously made an art of catnapping, but I have no way of knowing that, since I can’t pose the question to him.)

As a kid, I loved Scrooge McDuck comic books. One of my favorite recurring gags from the old Carl Barks comics is the list of titles stenciled on Scrooge’s office door: Scrooge McDuck: Billionaire, Tycoon, Investor in Sure Things. The exact titles changed from story to story, but the gist stayed the same.

This gag is funny for three reasons. First, as anyone who’s read the comics knows, all of Scrooge’s moneymaking schemes are not sure things, but dizzyingly speculative ventures. (Remember the story where Scrooge drops a trillion dollars at auction for a ball of Bombastium, a super-rare element that might, despite its extreme scarcity, prove completely useless?) Second is that in the world of business, there are no sure things. Every investment—from bullion to tulips to stocks to good old cash money—is in some degree speculative. Unless you’re a Gordon Gekko—a mercenary profiteer armed with up-to-the-minute insider information and the resources and shrewdness to act on it—you’re just like the rest of us mortals, doomed to a life of speculation and risk. For the big risk-takers, getting ahead is always a matter of luck.

The third reason is that, despite the odds—despite all the speculation, risk, and wild reversals of fortune—Scrooge almost always comes up a winner. For the so-called Investor in Sure Things, no gamble is too big. And why not? Precedent indicates that Scrooge can’t lose; therefore, he’d be foolish not to bet.

In the real world, Scrooge’s style of speculation would be no way to run a railroad. And yet, film executives are doing precisely this.^[1] Over the last two decades, studio heads have proved themselves to be so many Scrooge McDucks, high-stakes speculators dazzled by the golden gleam of incalculable lucre, willing to go to any length—however embarrassing or potentially ruinous—to seize it. To all us rabble way back in the cheap seats, it might seem bad business sense to roll out the umptillionth (to pilfer a Barksian idiom) Marvel or Star Wars film for fear of finally and at long last exhausting our last collective ounce of attention. (Not to mention our willingness to once again dig into our back pockets for the ever-higher price of admission.) But then again, given the untold profits reaped by previous entries, it would seem an even greater folly not to. (I dare say that nobody’s principles run that deep. For 5x profits, I would commit any and all crimes against artistic integrity, too. Kevin, if you’re reading this, call me!)

But so dazzling are these golden daybeams that they strike the beholder blind—or purblind, at any rate. In the pursuit of yet another box office record, the executives have lost sight of that foundational aspiration, forever enshrined in MGM’s logo but now forgotten, or remembered only as an artifact of Golden Age naivete: Ars gratia artis.^[2] Will this guiding light be rekindled and burn brightly once more? Maybe, but after the twenty years’ onslaught of sequels, prequels, remakes, soft reboots, and other grotesque revenants, there’s scant reason for hope.

Of course, this observation—that the studios have sold out their last shred of creative integrity for ever-more-staggering financial rewards—is not new. Anthony Lane, in his review of the first Star Wars prequel, foretold this development as early as 1999:

The Phantom Menace raises the spectre of an industry where the parasitic arts of buildup and spinoff will outgrow and choke the product itself.

This prophecy has been fulfilled, and then some. In fact, an entire cottage industry dedicated to documenting and analyzing the breakdown of the Hollywood machine has cropped up on YouTube and elsewhere. But nobody, Lane included, could have predicted that things would reach such a pitch. Nobody could have foreseen just how thorny and dense the bloom-choking thicket would grow. Barring an industrywide shakeup, there’s no hacking down this jungle now.

Today, even low-budget studio pictures, TV shows, and arthouse films suffer from this same malady. Originality is but a husk, sucked dry of its imaginative juices. Rehash, ripoff, and pastiche carry the day. (Case in point: do we really need a Crystal Lake television series? Weren’t twelve—twelve—Friday the 13^th films enough? After Jason in space, there’s no more loot to plunder from this overmined, hollowed-out, caved-in property. To put this shocking lack of imagination into perspective, Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)—filmed under the pseudonym Repetition—came out forty-one years ago. For all our sakes, can someone chuck a sabot into the Hollywood millworks already?)

How on earth, in this moment where the Internet and social media have democratized creative enterprises to an historically unprecedented degree, did we get here? How, in a wide-open world where new ideas should mingle freely, did the film industry become so incestuous and closed off? Four possible explanations spring to mind.

First, in tentpole franchises, spectacle has eclipsed story and characterization as film’s raison d’être. Sure, groundbreaking special effects have always been part of cinema’s appeal. But as George Lucas famously (and ironically) remarked, “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” His own films—along with the Avatar franchise, another zombie product stitched together from the regurgitated parts of still other cliched hackwork—are sufficient proof of this dictum’s soundness. (To make matters worse, CGI lost its power to wow almost twenty years ago with the release of the first Avatar picture. In 2026, digital wonderlands are old hat. Give me practical effects any day.)

Second has to do with the Matthew effect—that is, the universal phenomenon whereby an outsized portion of rewards tends to accrue to a privileged minority. (This phenomenon is observable across many domains, from the world of venture capital to the trees that grow to dominate jungle canopies.) Studios figured out decades ago that a mere handful of their properties account for the bulk of their profits and adjusted their production strategies accordingly. Consequentially, smaller properties and independent filmmakers have been left out in the cold. Once seen as a stable of cheap potential winners, independent films are now written off as so many also-rans before the gate even drops, if the gate drops at all.

Third is our new crop of filmmakers. Judging by their output, our young writers and directors are a gaggle of overeducated, self-conscious fanboys laboring in the shadow of the franchises they loved growing up. Having come of age in the epoch of the megafranchises, they naturally aspire to carry on the legacy of their childhood favorites. Clearly, the studios are more than happy to pay them to do so, however mediocre the results.

These new artists, however, live in constant tension. On the one hand, they pay homage to their beloved legacy properties with every sequel, prequel, and remake they churn out. On the other hand, they suffer from an acute anxiety of influence, wishing with every new film to surpass the works of the old masters. Failing that, they push homage aside, opting instead for subversion and parody. The result is a spate of thematically and tonally confused patchwork films that stand in awe of their influences while at the same time holding them in deepest contempt. Unsurprisingly, even our more fanatical moviegoers—that special subset of weirdos attuned to every reference and detail, no matter how obscure or minute—don’t know what to make of these ill-conceived monstrosities. And how could they, since the people making them don’t know either?

Fourth and worst of all is the meta turn of recent decades. More than anything else, the meta phenomenon—that is, the art world’s obsession with ironic self-referentiality—has killed not only creativity, but also the possibility of creativity.

Here in the Internet Age, we’ve reached our saturation point of pop culture awareness. Novelty is dead. We’ve seen it all, heard it all, read it all. Social media, meme culture, and various digital databases have put us all on uncomfortably intimate terms with every media trope and cliché.^[3] The result is a collective ennui that presupposes no end of insincerity. In our boredom, we don’t bother asking for anything new. Given enough time, this ennui hardens into cynicism.

This cynicism has infected both our young filmmakers and the people who pay to watch their films. Self-conscious to a fault, writers and directors are quick to point to their own clichés, thereby preempting any critique that the audience, equally well-versed in the language of trope and insider reference, might advance: Yes, we know this sucks, so we’ll save you the trouble of saying it out loud. At what point did filmmakers decide that the audience can’t be trusted to suspend disbelief for two hours at a go? At what point did we lose faith in the public’s ability to take anything at least somewhat seriously? It’s all rather cowardly and depressing, and not a little insulting.

The Scream franchise—the self-proclaimed king of po-mo hipness—marks the acme of the meta turn. This thirty-year-old warhorse—which dropped its seventh installment earlier this year just weeks before announcing its eighth—has become a handy bellwether for gauging the slow and steady decline of Hollywood’s creativity and risk-taking.

Each Scream film follows the same basic premise: someone (or someones) close to the heroine slash their way through her friend group in retribution for a perceived injustice or past wrong. Along the way, our characters—every bit as savvy to the rules of the slasher genre as the people in the audience—comment more or less directly on the action as it unfolds. (This isn’t a movie, declares our heroine in the first film. Sure it is, her boyfriend replies. It’s all one great big movie. Thirty years on, other, less memorable characters—the bastard children of six too many cycles of generation loss—continue to parrot these stale sentiments.) By following the rules of horror cinema, the heroine defeats the killer (or killers), living to endure yet another cycle of slayings the next year.

This premise was (mostly) a novelty in 1996.^[4] Three decades later, however, the franchise, despite all its blood and gore, is terminally anemic. Its satirical bite has vanished, a victim of the same genre-wide brain death the first film worked so hard to skewer. Despite all the cynicism—the ironic self-reference, the knowing asides, the movie within the movie that’s about the previous movie but also the current movie—every Scream picture comes down to the same old thing we’ve all seen a thousand times before: a guy in a ghost mask stabbing people to death. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13^th (1980)—Scream is more of the same, just painted over with several coatings of millennial glitz. But after seven trips to the well, the veneer has long since washed off, revealing a broad underlayer of rust and rot.

And so it is with every other high-dollar IP. As of my writing, we have twelve Star Wars films, fourteen Star Trek films, twenty-five James Bond films, thirty-seven Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and the list goes on. Minions, The Hunger Games, Top Gun, and many other franchises have sequels on the near horizon as well. Commercially, there’s plenty of juice to be squeezed from these husks, as record after smashed record has shown. But creatively, these properties are far beyond bankruptcy, deep in the red, yielding nothing but negative returns. I despair to think of the many dreary nonsurprises that surely await us in the years ahead.

Rather than give in to cynicism, perhaps the smart move is to try to appreciate the imbecilic genius at work in the Hollywood system. For Hollywood has, through gross overuse, reduced its favorite narrative trick—smug self-referentiality—into the single worst cliché of our age. In a world hung over from a yearslong bender of irony, this is the ultimate irony.

In this way, life has come to imitate art, but in the absurdest way imaginable. And what, Hollywood, could be more meta than that?

^[1] It’s debatable whether these business decisions can truly be described as speculative. So strong has the commercial response to the MCU, etc., been that it hardly seems reasonable to think that this trend won’t continue in future. Still, box office bombs—along with the vicissitudes of consumer sentiment—can and will take studios unawares. There is never a 0% chance of failure. There are likely things, but no sure things. Even a 90% chance of success entails a 10% chance of failure. Therefore, all ventures are inherently speculative.

^[2] Of course, movies are and always have been commercial ventures first and foremost. Still, I would argue that the best movies are those that expertly meld true artistry with mass commercial appeal: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Star Wars (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), to name just a few obvious examples. I don’t fault the studios for trying to make a buck, but I do fault them for aborting creativity in their dogged pursuit of profit.

^[3] There is some pleasure to be had in tracing the genealogies of these tropes, but this exercise can quickly lead one into cynicism.

^[4] Although it’s gotten worse in recent decades, the meta phenomenon is nothing new. Filmmakers have been providing sly commentary on the show business hellscape for at least seventy-five years.

“Art consists in going the full length.” ~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

***

1. Introduction

What makes the artist? What qualities or characteristics set the true artist apart from the copyist or dilettante? What constitutes a masterwork?

These are age-old questions, and ones that have perplexed and bedeviled scholars and critics for millennia. Of course, no one will ever answer them definitively; still, we must attempt to answer them, for the sake of diversion if for no other reason. (How else are we to while away the lengthening days if not by undertaking questions such as these?)

In my view, the true artist possesses at least three key qualities: technical excellence, originality, and perceptivity.^[1] The greater the degree of technical excellence, etc., the better the artist; thus, a masterwork is a work in which all three qualities work in concert to achieve a spectacular emotional or aesthetic effect. (Or both, or something else entirely, such as an intellectual proposition. Beyond all that, an artwork should be judged chiefly on the loftiness of its creator’s aims, and on how well or how poorly it meets those aims.) This is, to borrow Henry Miller’s phrase, “going the full length.”

Below, we’ll review each of these qualities in detail. Afterwards, in the second half of the essay, we’ll use case studies to illustrate how the artist makes these qualities work together to create a masterpiece. (Note: The following analysis pertains only to representational art. Excepting a book here or an article there, I’m untutored in the methods and theories of nonrepresentational art, and so cannot comment on them with any degree of confidence or authority. In the House of Art are many mansions, and no single theory can unlock the doors of all.)

2. Technical Excellence

Right away, we encounter a thorny question: What is technical excellence, and how do we know it when we see it? Starting with the second half of this question, I answer that there are least two ways of identifying technical excellence.

First is intuition. Whenever we encounter a masterwork in any medium—the David, Olympia, the Tannhäuser overture, etc.^[2]—something deep in our souls recognizes and responds to the manifest virtuosity of their creators. The artwork might be to our taste or within the boundaries of our experience, or it might not. Still, intuition tells us that the thing before us, though perhaps objectionable in other ways, is masterfully wrought, that every element is working in concert to virtuosic effect.^[3] This instinctive response is universal: the novice delights in mastery just as much as the adept, even if he doesn’t yet possess the vocabulary necessary to articulate his aesthetic judgments.

Second is experience. Broad experience of the arts trains the eye and sharpens the critical faculties. Through repeated viewings, even the casual museumgoer comes to learn the fine gradations in quality and technique that separate the truly excellent from the very good. Formal study, should he take the time for it, deepens his understanding and helps him name and describe those special qualities.

These qualities are manifold: Color, perspective, proportion, geometry—all the painterly virtues that Vasari is always banging on about. A good artwork is deficient in none of these qualities; a great artwork possesses them all in spades, and in the highest degree of refinement. (These virtues are relative, of course. For example, what we call a masterful deployment of color is different across palettes and styles. Comparing Impressionist masterworks to Classical Realist masterworks, etc., is extremely difficult, at least where technique is concerned. Thematic and descriptive qualities are another matter entirely.) With just a little bit of education, we can formulate sound artistic judgments and argue them with our fellow aesthetes.

Now we know some of the criteria for technical mastery. Still, another urgent question persists: If great art is nothing more than a rare technical feat, as some cranks allege, then what makes the work of a master superior to the work of a copyist? We take up this question in the next section.

3. Originality and Perceptivity

Originality and perceptivity set the true artist over and above the copyist.

These qualities, I think, are inborn. Unlike technical mastery, they can’t be taught. Thus, without them, one can never be more than an accomplished draftsman.

Here again, however, are prickly questions: In a world where all of our ideas are received from external sources, and where all of our fancies are cobbled together from these received impressions, what is originality? Can genius be expressed absent influence? Is originality in any domain possible?

I cede that perfect originality is unachievable. The necessity of influence precludes absolute novelty. However, despite this gloomy fact, let us be reassured that within the generously broad parameters set by our received ideas, originality^[4] is still possible.

So what, then, is originality? In my view, originality is not absolute novelty, but an imaginative twist on an existing concept or form. (Or, even rarer, a new form altogether. ^[5]) I think we can safely say that this is a common and widely accepted definition of the term, and one that is sufficient to our purposes. However, whether originality makes for a good artwork or artist is another matter, as originality alone can’t account for degrees of quality.

Perceptivity is the keenness of the artist’s eye, particularly his ability to detect, understand, and record the many and varied shades of emotion human beings express in various ways. Like originality, perceptivity can’t be taught. One is either born with this special sensitivity or he isn’t. Thus, the rarity of great art, it seems to me, speaks to the extreme rarity of this faculty.

Perceptivity helps the artist achieve simultaneity of effect. (I considered listing simultaneity of effect as a fourth criterion. Instead, I decided to list it as an adjunct of perceptivity, as I’m not convinced that the one is possible without the other.) By simultaneity of effect I mean a form of artistic economy—that is, how many different effects—ideas, sensations, emotions, etc.—an artist can elicit from his public in a single work of art. Generally, the larger the number of effects, the greater the work of art.

Apologies if this is all a bit puzzling. (The more I dwell on questions of originality, imagination, quality, etc., the more puzzled I become, too. What is quality? I can’t always say exactly, but I know it when I see it!) Perhaps some examples are in order.

4. Case Study #1: Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes

This subject—the climax of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, in which the eponymous heroine assassinates the wicked Assyrian general Holofernes in his drunken torpor—was a popular subject in Renaissance art. (Just look to the Wikipedia page to find dozens of renditions of this subject in various media.) Caravaggio, through a masterful marriage of technical skill, originality, and perceptivity, gives us not only the best Judith, but also the best of all possible versions of this grand (albeit grisly) subject.

I admit that this is a strong claim.^[6] Naturally, one might then ask: Why, in a field of strong competitors, does Caravaggio’s Judith emerge triumphant? Certainly, we can’t give the painting’s technical excellence sole credit for sweeping the field. While Caravaggio’s geometry, palette, and lighting are all surely excellent, they are no more excellent than the arrangements and color effects found in other depictions of this subject.^[7] Thus, the picture’s essential quality—the thing that makes it truly great—must lie elsewhere.

This Judith’s greatness lies in its figures. More than any other element, Caravaggio’s figures give this picture the overwhelming dramatic force that sets it apart from others of its kind. To get a better idea of what I mean, let’s examine the figure of Judith in detail.

As the painting’s sole active subject, Judith provides this picture with much of its action and drama. (The dying Holofernes provides the other, lesser part of its drama, but that’s not relevant here; neither is Judith’s tight-mouthed elderly maidservant.) Her fleshy and muscular body bespeaks tremendous determination and corporal might. With chest upraised, shoulders straight, and forearms flexed, Judith doesn’t sever Holofernes’ head from his neck with her scimitar so much as rip it away with main force. Her blade is almost incidental to the bloody action unfolding before us.

Even more striking than Judith’s body language is her general demeanor. Head drawn back, chin tucked, lips taught, brow furrowed, and eyes asquint, Judith recoils from her victim in revulsion and contempt as blood geysers from his open throat. She appears not to relish her murderous deed; however, at the same time, not one fiber of her being shrinks from it, either. This is, I think, how anyone in her position would act, and react.

But there’s still something more. Looking closely at Judith’s cheeks we detect faint triangular shadows below each eye, barely perceptible blackish downspouts that, the longer I look at them, become suggestive of tears. (Judith’s narrowed eyes and slightly parted lips also contribute to this impression, this sense of lachrymosity.) Yes, her face registers disgust, but in her eyes is also something else, something rather like pity. This is an evil man, certainly, but in this moment, a defenseless and pitiable one as well.

Judith’s deed has aroused her pity; her pity, in turn, arouses the viewer’s ambivalence. In depicting her this way, Caravaggio has upended our expectations. Are we meant to dwell on Judith’s heroism, or on the horror inherent in the killing of another person? Caravaggio leaves us alone to wrestle with this question.

Caravaggio’s decision to depict Judith as an ambivalent actor is strange indeed—shocking, almost, given the triumphalist nature of many of his painting’s predecessors and counterparts. But in breaking with precedent—in showing Judith not as an ideal but as a flesh-and-blood person,^[8] replete with warring impulses and passions—Caravaggio gives us a work of astonishing emotional sophistication. Obviously, like every biblical subject, this scene is pure fancy, a work born in the imagination. But Caravaggio’s matchless perceptivity—his eye for the infinite nuances of human feeling and behavior—enables his imagination to imbue this mythical subject with the deepest humanity. In this way, Caravaggio’s Judith, for all its sensationalism, is a work of highest realism, and the best of its kind.

How Caravaggio pulled off this feat is a mystery to me. Whether he relied on models^[9] for this painting, pulled his figures from a collection of studies and masterworks, or simply dreamed his figures up, I can’t say. (Perhaps he used a combination of all three.) Whatever the case may be, his methods are of secondary importance to his perceptivity and the force of his imagination, faculties without which he would not have been able, regardless of his great technical skill, to bring this scene—this exact moment, not a second before, not a second after, but this one perfectly realized snapshot of action and emotion—into being. This is the wizardry that even the most technically competent copyists lack, and cannot, despite all their efforts, gain.

5. Case Study #2: Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian and Goya’s The Third of May 1808

It’s no secret that Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian draws inspiration from Goya’s masterwork The Third of May 1808. Indeed, some might go so far as to argue that Manet’s work pushes homage to the point of plagiarism. If this is the case, Manet’s paining must be disqualified from the title of Great Picture on grounds of unoriginality. But like every great artist, Manet knows exactly what he’s doing here—technically, thematically, and otherwise.

At first glance, the two paintings are strikingly similar. Both depict the same general subject (execution by firing squad), and both follow the same visual schema (soldiers to the right side with their backs turned towards the viewer and victims to the left at three-quarter view.) To the casual museumgoer, the Manet might seem like little more than a bland riff on the Goya.

However, closer inspection reveals noteworthy differences between the two paintings. The Goya is romantic, intimate, and emotionally supercharged; the Manet, conversely, gives off an air of aloofness, banality, and routine. In short, Goya’s picture invites the viewer into its drama while Manet’s pushes her away.

Manet achieves this distance in at least two ways. First is his drab palette. The flat navy blue of the soldiers’ rough woolen garb set against the cool French grey of the stone wall muffles the viewer’s emotions from the moment he confronts the canvas to the moment he moves on down the gallery to the next painting. (Contrast this with the Goya, where the warm ochres and rich earth tones create a sense of drama, even urgency. The viewer’s emotions only heighten the longer he gazes at this picture.) The Goya is a lucid nightmare of the predawn, whereas the Manet depicts the soldiers’ ordinary work of midday—just another afternoon at the barracks.

Second is the construction of Manet’s figures. (Like in the Judith discussed above, the figures give these two similar-but-different paintings their power.) Everyone depicted here—from the victims to the soldiers and the half-bored onlookers peeking over the compound wall at center—appears perfectly impassive. (Contrast this with the victims’ taut grimaces in the Goya.) The soldier fidgeting with his musket’s lock—a commonplace annoyance in the life of an infantryman—is a particularly nice touch. Presumably, the Republican troops in this scene are doing this sort of thing all the time and have come to take little interest in their work, however world-shaking or consequential it might be. Paradoxically, the inaction of the Goya—the instant between fusillades—places the viewer in suspense, whereas the action in the Manet—the smoky discharge of the muskets—contributes to the picture’s sense of mundanity. It’s as though Manet is saying This is all there is to dying—nothing more.^[10] In Manet’s vision, death is nothing extraordinary; certainly, it is not heroic.^[11] Given the mass of melodramatic art of centuries past, Manet’s decision to banalize death—even the death of a royal personage—is a risky one indeed.

So which is the better picture, the Goya or the Manet? That depends largely on what one believes art is meant to accomplish. (Clearly, when judging between great works of art, there is a strong element of subjectivity for which we cannot fully account.) The Goya invites awe and moral outrage, whereas the Manet invites reflection; the Goya is dazzling, the Manet sobering. Both artists draw upon high degrees of technical excellence, originality, and perceptivity to achieve opposite emotional effects, and both capture the action at just the right moment.

All that is to say, both pictures are great. I think anyone would agree with me on this point. But in the final analysis, the Manet is cold and alienating, whereas the Goya is a triumph of composition, contrast, action, color, imagination, and humanity—in a word, the better painting.^[12] I welcome all rebuttals.

6. Conclusion

As I wrote in a footnote at the beginning of this essay, the arguments I make here are not meant to be final or exhaustive. Instead, I intend for this essay—as with all my other essays—to set down a prolegomenon for a longer (perhaps endless) inquiry into quality, and what, precisely, we mean when we toss around words like excellence and best. I thank you for your bearing with my sermons and hope you’ll stay with me as I continue this lifelong investigation.

For this promises to be my life’s work. In writing this one essay—a mere 4% of all the words I’ve published on this platform in the last twelve months—I have raised far more questions than I have answered. (Some of these are included in the footnotes; others are recorded elsewhere for future use.) In doing so, I have discovered not only the vast scope of the task before me but also the obligation of my chosen profession—that is, that if I’m ever to be truly worthy of the title of “critic,” that I too must go the full length. Nothing less will do.

^[1] There are others, to be certain. However, for our present purposes, these three qualities are sufficient.

^[2] I chose these three artworks—a High Renaissance sculpture, a realist painting, and a Romantic opera—to suggest that excellence manifests in different ways in different styles and media. Generally, when evaluating artistic mastery, we must compare like to like. Comparing genres and media is difficult, and in some cases, impossible. (How does one compare a Rothko to a Mozart concerto, except to point out obvious differences of medium and form? Perhaps a keener observer than I could pull off such a feat, but I’m quite at a loss to make such an intelligent judgment.)

^[3] In our current sociopolitical climate, many people evaluate art according to its political content, or to the political value they assign to it. Some people go as far as to say that all art is political. This is foolish and, as a matter of historicity, false. Art can serve myriad purposes, the political being just one among them.

Certainly, like all human enterprises, artworks contain greater or lesser traces of the political commitments of the people who commissioned or created them. Furthermore, no work of art can ever be fully understood without some knowledge of the political culture in which it sprang up. But there is nothing inherently political in every work of art or in the creation of art.

I must note that almost all political art—whatever its degree of technical excellence—is bad. It might be of interest to the historian or sociologist, but probably not so much to the aesthete. For the aesthete’s purposes, political art and propaganda are too circumscribed—thematically, emotionally, and otherwise—to ever attain greatness. The true aesthete is primarily concerned with great art—that is, those artworks that are in every aspect inexhaustible, the Things That Will Always Be True.

^[4] Once again, I’ve run up against the limitations of language. I use “originality” advisedly, acknowledging that it doesn’t quite capture my exact meaning—that is, The newest idea possible that still bows to the impossibility of perfect newness. However, this is too awkward and clumsy to write over and over again, so I will stick with the simpler (if regrettably reductive) term, Originality.

^[5] I wonder what new artforms remain to be invented. Video games are debatably a new form, though one might argue that they are not so much a new form as an offshoot or evolved state of an existing form (video). Furthermore, critics and enthusiasts disagree whether video games qualify as art. This argument brings us back to the age-old and intractable question, What is art?

^[6] To argue convincingly in superlatives is no mean feat! I’ve spent at least twenty hours here trying to do exactly that, yet I’m still unsure of the result.

^[7] Caravaggio is widely credited with the invention of tenebrism—that is, the specific chiaroscuro effect seen in this painting. However, other artists’ use of this effect is every bit as masterful as his own. In the art world, it’s not uncommon for a master innovator to be equaled or surpassed by an acolyte. Aside: if a student or copyist can never match or surpass a master at least for technical competence, then questions of attribution would never arise.

^[8] Caravaggio’s Judith is not an ideal, but she is certainly idealized. As I point out, she’s quite the physical specimen: muscular, lusty, and well-proportioned—rather masculine, like many other female figures in High Renaissance art. (My favorite such figure is Michelangelo’s Delphic Sybil.) However, despite her masculinity, Judith is still quite feminine: blonde, buxom, ruby-lipped, and provocatively turned out. (This makes sense, thematically: she must be beautiful enough to seduce Holofernes, but powerful enough to slaughter him, too.) All these elements combine to make Caravaggio’s Judith a sexy androgyne—yet another inspired twist on this fascinating and challenging subject.

^[9] If Caravaggio employed models, I assume he would have cued them in much the same way that a film director cues his actors to elicit the desired emotion. The ability to give just the right cues requires a highly refined perceptivity indeed.

^[10] Manet’s chosen subject—the death of Emperor Maximilian I, an exalted figured compared to the nameless peasant rebels in the Goya—drives this point home.

^[11] Or tragic, or pathetic. Death just is, as routine as the cycles of history that drive the deaths of all people, the small and the powerful alike.

^[12] My bias is that art is and should be more an emotional experience than an intellective one. (It can certainly be both. I simply assign higher value to the one quality than the other.) Here, I have passed judgment accordingly.

Age

You come into the world giving and receiving pain. Possibly, in being born, you will cause your mother to die; certainly, you will cause her grievous hurt—immediately, postpartum, and in the years beyond. (She and others will do likewise to you.) This is the first exchange in the blow / counterblow of living. Of all the phenomena and sensations to join your acquaintanceship, none will prove as weighty or as consequential as pain.

To be young is to be fearful and anxious. Abandonment dogs you. Where is Mother? But no sooner have you found her than you wish to be left alone again. Companionship on my terms: This basic contradiction never goes away.

To be young is to be dangerously sensitive. Barbs lodge too easily in the flesh. (Most fall to the ground, harmless; others worm their way to the bone.) Friends today, strangers tomorrow: I never really liked him, anyway. Youth is an ongoing contest of rejection. In this game, every player wins and loses by turns. Pain distracts you from your hypocrisy.

To be young is to be great, invincible—potential personified. This is the only season of real happiness.

Irrepressible, you persist in the unshakeable knowledge of your superiority. Failure reflects exterior conditions only, the still-conquerable unfairness of the world. But slowly or suddenly, experience disabuses you of the Ego’s lies. You will be judged one against another, and Comparison will cut you down to the level.

You will not go so far as you had hoped. Every possibility forecloses another. Limitations compound year to year. Other people see to this. One day, you awake in the depth of a gorge. Here you stay with the pains you have accrued in the preceding phase.

Age yields novel advantages, but they are less desirable than the advantages of youth. To enjoy the advantages of youth with the resources of age—this impossibility is a bottomless wellspring of bitterness.

Emotions harden as the body weakens. Slowly, physical pain becomes the governing force. Irrecoverable losses mount year to year.

Others

Social life is the realest life. Without society, you cannot be fully human.

Thus, the sharpest pain is social pain. It is best to place yourself forever in a position of advantage. But advantage is relative and becomes feeble with time.

You want two things only: to be desired by all and to be superior to all. This is a torturous contradiction and one we would resolve. But these desires are inseparable consorts.

In the social sphere the power to reject is the greatest privilege of all. (It is the greatest pleasure, too: to reject is to assert superiority in plainest terms.) But this privilege will be exercised against you as you exercise it against others. There is no one arena. Everyone of us at some point feels the sting of assortment.

You cannot rid yourself of the need for others, nor can you rid yourself of their opinions. This is a source of tremendous fear.

Falsity haunts you. What’s real? You want to know but you can’t. The heart is unknown even to itself. (The heart of another, then, is an even greater enigma.) Insight is an illusion. Unknowability is an occasion for pain, as are the many stories we invent to dispel the unknown. Am I loved? You clench Doubt by the throat, but still It speaks.

Truth and lies: comparable evils. Fictions, at least, are palliative.

Social worth is forever conditional. There is no final prize; proving oneself is an iterative game. Your will weakens over time, but the exigencies of the game persist.

Everyone loses in the end.

Self

Happiness—something for other people. It’s not in my nature to be happy. Like everything else, happiness is a matter of chance.

You are enough, say the liars. Why should I believe this? On what evidence?

Why should I accept myself as I am? I know that I can be more than what I am; therefore, I am duty bound to make the attempt. Conscience will not allow me to do otherwise.

Change is pain, but so is stasis. If I must suffer, then I choose to suffer in the pursuit of excellence.

Here again is anxiety: what is excellence? You insist upon being judged excellent relative to your own potential, but excellence is only ever relative to others. Effort goes only so far: I cannot will myself to be taller, nor can I will myself to be better. Some constraints are unbreakable. Many strengthen with time.

Talent is forever at the mercy of circumstances and resources. Private genius—was there ever anything so frivolous? Unrewarded ability is a tired story indeed.

Self-love and self-hate: two paths to the same terminus. Wisdom consists in following the middle course.

This too will be painful.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”

—Nietzsche

“...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

***
Two weeks ago, after almost a year of searching, I got a new job. For the first time since June, I can breathe easy again. Gone is financial anxiety. Gone are doubts about my employability and self-worth. But gone too are my writerly powers. When they’ll come back, I’ve no idea.

I’m surprised and troubled by this development. Just a couple months ago, I dashed off several of my favorite essays in short order. Taken by a sudden afflatus, I spent hours every day in “The Zone,” churning out paragraph after polished paragraph with unprecedented ease. Just as one essay was wrapping up, ideas for the next one sprouted in my mind. Here, I wrongly assumed, was a new, ever more fruitful era of creativity; From here, I told myself, I can only go up.

Then I got busy and promptly hit a wall. In the last few weeks, I’ve enjoyed several flashes of inspiration, writing a paragraph here and half a draft there as the inspiration comes, penning tidbits every bit as good as anything I’ve written in the last year. But anytime I sit down to develop and build upon my ideas, the little bit of inspiration I briefly enjoyed dries up, leaving me with half-baked concepts at best. I find myself struggling with trivialities, sweating every sentence construction and adverb placement. Every word I write is another folly in a string of inanities. Try as I might, I can’t finish a goddam thing. (Even this brief sally into the writer’s age-old standby—writing about how difficult it is to write—is harder than it should be.) Why won’t the Muse cut me a break and pipe up?

So what happened? Several things, I think. For one thing, I’ve been distracted by my new job, and by the second-order effects that come with it. (For example: now that I’m commuting, we need a second car. For ten days or so, car shopping cut into ordinary writing time.) For another, my cognitive energy—a resource more precious to me than time—has been consumed by professional obligations, domestic responsibilities, and the general excitement that comes with a new career. (Speaking of domestic responsibilities, now that I’m a confirmed suburbanite, I’ve become fixated on the state of our flower beds and lawn, giving more thought and attention to fertilizer treatments than the world of ideas. Next thing you know, I’ll be chairman of the HOA.) All of these are good things, but they’ve come at a steep cost to my creativity.

Strangest and most surprising of all is that happiness, more than anything else, has killed my literary verve. Trouble and despair, it turns out, bring clarity and authorial purpose. As Nietzsche writes in this essay’s epigraph, chaos is a precondition for artistic greatness. I haven’t attained such heights yet, but I suspect that absent spiritual torment, I’ll never reach them.

This is a paradox: I don’t relish anxiety and depression (who does?), but it seems they are the fuel that keeps the fire of my creativity burning. As an author, I’m at my best in the depths of turmoil, but I wouldn’t wish myself unwell for the sake of anything—not even my art. I would not wish for my old saturninity to supplant my present fizziness. What, then, should I do? What can I do?

Nothing, I suppose, except to soldier on, to put fingers to keyboard every day even if nothing worthwhile comes out on paper. More than that, though, I should refocus my mind, dispense with Nietzsche’s proclamation, and harken instead to the enduring wisdom of Flaubert: “Talent is a long trial of patience.” Perhaps in time, as I plod along unaided, the Muse will take pity, return, and smile on me once again.

Two months ago, I introduced the world (well, more like seventy-odd people) to Halfie, a friendly fox squirrel who routinely visited our kitchen window during the frigid winter months to beg for food. Today, I’m sad to report that Halfie is dead.

At least, I suspect that Halfie is dead.^[1] On 21 February, I posted a Substack note documenting his latest visit to the window; a few days later, I noticed several tufts of auburn fur strewn on the grass near our bird feeder, undulating ominously in the late winter breeze. Halfie, that adorable little rogue, hasn’t been seen since.^[2]

I’m sad that Halfie’s gone—sadder than I should be, I suppose, given the briefness of our acquaintance, and given the fact that he’s just a squirrel. (In the wild, adult fox squirrels live upwards of three years on average. This is more than double the average life expectancy of their cousins, the grey squirrels. Such being the case, our friendship, if you can call it that, was probably destined to be short-lived.)

Just a squirrel. I’m surprised and a little horrified at my flippancy. My brain knows that Halfie was “just a squirrel,” a common animal who was in most ways indistinguishable from millions of his fellow squirrels. However, at the same time, my cold rationality belies my emotions.

My emotions tell me something very different. They tell me that Halfie was more than just a squirrel, that he was an adventurer, an outlier. They tell me, contrary to my suspicions of parasitism, that he had an interest in us that went beyond base appetite, that we shared a mutual affinity. They tell me that he was, despite the gulf that separates species, a friend.

It’s because of this sense of affinity that I feel responsible for Halfie’s death—guilty, even. By setting up a bird feeder, did we inadvertently create the ideal ambush site for hawks and owls? By cultivating Halfie’s trust, did we accidentally attenuate his native caginess and cause him to drop his guard? Perhaps so. But then again, our neighborhood is basically one giant masting area—a veritable trove of acorns, ornamental fruits, edible shrubs, and seasonal vegetables—and therefore a prime hunting ground for predators of all kinds. That being the case, Kay and I are neither more nor less guilty of creating dangerous enticements than anyone else on our block, so maybe we shouldn’t feel too bad. (I still do, though.)

Halfie’s disappearance has provided me with ample opportunity for reflection: Was Halfie clever and resourceful—the smartest squirrel on the block—or maladaptive? Was his trusting nature a winning survival strategy, a liability, or a little of both, depending upon chance circumstances? Was Halfie too trusting or careless with other species, or just with us? Do animals—particularly wild animals—feel any affinity with human beings, and if so, is what they feel towards us anything like what we feel towards them?

Can animals and human beings truly be friends, as we conceive of friendship? Or is there a type of friendship that transcends human terms and conventions? How can we possibly know?

To these last questions, my intellect says No. My emotions, on the other hand, say Yes. Here again we find the irreconcilable disjunction between what we know to be true and what we feel to be true. Which voice I listen to—the voice of reason or the voice or sentiment—varies moment to moment. Therefore, what I believe varies just as often, too. As always, I find myself wavering between two radically different possibilities.

All philosophical ramblings aside, we miss Halfie very much. Maybe he was just a squirrel, or maybe he was really something more than that. Maybe, in a belated Easter miracle, he’ll show up again one of these days, scratching at our kitchen window once again for a palmful of blueberries or fat slice of pear. Ever devoted, we’ll continue to leave out these treats, both as general offerings of friendship and tokens of our hopefulness.

Our hopes, however, are thin. Halfie is gone, and likely not coming back. All we can do is wait and see.

As we wait, we’ll continue to ponder the mystery of it all. In future, I hope that we’ll make new wild friends, and in these new friendships find again some of the magic Halfie brought into our lives, if only for a short time.

^[1] Maybe Halfie has moved on to greener pastures. Apparently, fox squirrels command large territories for being such small animals. However, I think the likelier thing is that he’s passed on.

^[2] We’ll probably never know for sure what happened to Halfie, but I suspect a hawk got him. I’ve seen hawks attack squirrels at our feeder twice: once successfully, and once with no luck. I’m sure the neighborhood hawks watch our feeder for unsuspecting prey like…well, like hawks.

“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“What is divinity if it can come/ Only in silent shadows and in dreams?”

—Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

“Beauty is the sensitive man’s access to the spirit.”

—Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”

—Willa Cather, The Professor’s House

In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—Amen!

—Emily Dickinson

***

Six years ago, about the same time that I was falling away from my lifelong faith, I completed my master’s thesis, thereby taking my first step towards a lifetime of independent scholarship. (A shaky profession, I know, but at this point I’m afraid that I would die of old age before completing a PhD in literature or a related field. And even if I lived long enough to enjoy conferral of the degree, I’d be entering a punishingly tight labor market with virtually zero prospect of tenure. So independent scholarship it is.) In my thesis, I begin by making the case that In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s masterwork of the closely (painfully closely!) examined life, is best understood as the record of a protracted religious experience, the narrator’s sacred quest to reclaim purpose and meaning after a lifetime of disillusionment and disappointment. However, by the paper’s end, I end up asking a more general question, one that had grown in urgency as my own belief weakened and broke: Where does one find transcendence, purpose, and meaning after ceasing to believe in God? Six years later, after considerable reflection and hundreds of hours of conversation with friends and family, I’ve yet to come up with a satisfactory answer to this question.

My literary idols produced answers little better than my own. Proust, for his part, locates divinity primarily in art.^[1] (Indeed, in Proust studies, the observation that Proust substituted art for religion is commonplace to the point of universal acceptance.) As Joshua Landy and others have pointed out, Proust not only reveled in the transportive quality of art but also saw art as a unifying force every bit as potent as that of any mother church. By studying art, one gains access—however limited that access might be—to the artist’s point of view. Art enables the viewer to see the world through someone else’s eyes, even if one’s view is always partially clouded by a darksome glass. This commonality of vision, this empathic practice, when exercised at scale, points to the possibility of a secular ecumenism, an earthly New Jerusalem held together by the creation and appreciation of art. In the absence of God, man, the lower creator, can save himself through aesthetic expression.

Oh, that we lived in such a world! Alas, most people just don’t care that deeply about art and the splendid multiplicity of artistic visions one encounters across various media. (What’s more, much as one might wish to, one can’t spend one’s entire life looking at art. The soul requires nourishment beyond that provided by aesthetic pleasure.) Surely Proust was aware of this general indifference, though I doubt he cared much about the public’s tastes and interests in anything, least of all art. From what I know, he seldom concerned himself with the world outside the rarified sphere of the Champs-Élysées where an active interest in art—genuine or feigned, it hardly seemed to matter—was a prerequisite for admission into le beau monde. Whatever the case may be, at least in our current era of unprecedented access, fine art certainly doesn’t enjoy the same reach as religion and politics, and so can never wield the same power to unify or to sunder. So where else in a godless world should one look for transcendence?

Sensual pleasure seems an obvious place to resume the search for transcendence, with sex in particular presenting itself as a top contender for the bearer of highest meaning. (I would think that for most people, sexual intercourse is when they feel most alive, most fulfilled, most connected, most human. Paradoxically, sex carries with it the possibility of one’s simultaneously achieving complete selfness and complete selflessness, of losing oneself in another person while at the same time achieving total self-actualization. If this isn’t a religious experience of sorts, then what is?) But as with every spiritual experience explored here, so much depends upon subjectivity, upon the individual’s concept of divine encounter. What’s sacred to me is banal to you—perhaps even profane or unclean. Sex has the dubious distinction of being considered both the loftiest and basest human act, depending upon cultural attitudes or one’s point of view, with practitioners of sex magic and Kama Sutra to one side and hardshell Protestant sects to the other.) Sex, a physical act, has the double benefit of encompassing aesthetic appreciation. After all, what is sexual desire if not (at least in part) a response to human beauty, the aestheticization of the flesh? (Proust knew this very well. His hapless lover, Charles Swann, becomes infatuated with Odette, a vulgar-minded courtesan, in large part because of her startling resemblance to a figure in a favorite Botticelli fresco. By possessing Odette, Swann possesses this beloved artwork, and vice versa.) In this way, sex fuses both flesh and intellect, in the process becoming something akin to a religious rite, a sacred performance that requires both bodily action and the acceptance of and submission to an idea or doctrine of beauty.^[2]

The problem, however, is that sensual pleasures tend to fade over time. Sex is generally the province of the young and vigorous, though it could be argued that the pleasures of the flesh only grow in attractiveness as one ages, leading to more frequent indulgence, not less. (This seems especially true when it comes to the pleasures of gustation. Better to add an inch to the waistline than deny oneself a second martini or slice of cake.) At some point before death, I fear, many of us will find the doors to the realm of the senses shut and barred. At that point, the voluptuary must seek transcendence elsewhere.

Maybe this all is a bit too egocentric, a bit too modern. (The modern attitude seems to take as granted that the human mind is the measure of all things and, as a corollary, that God’s laws and the nature of the divine are subject to man’s opinions. It seems to me that if there is a spirit world or godhead—indeed, any power higher than man—then this judgment is exactly backwards. If God exists, then He and His laws are as far above human judgment as human consciousness is that of a worm—farther, even.) Maybe the thing is to look outside oneself—beyond one’s own tastes and preferences—and see what the external world has to offer in the way divinity.

In turning away from the self, we can’t do otherwise than first turn towards the splendors of nature and all their hidden and manifest power. (Some of you are probably wondering why it took us so long to get here, why this wasn’t the first step in our investigation. It easily could have been, I suppose, but I wanted to explore experiences of the divine in one’s interior life before looking for them in the exterior world.) The natural world is a theater of ongoing miracles, and therefore entirely deserving of our awe and veneration, if anything is.

There’s much to be said for nature-worship.^[3] Religions of the book are for the most part the worship of ideas, concepts, words. Nature, for all its blemishes, at least is material. It yields to the senses. You can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it. Ideas, ultimately, deaden and stultify; nature—the giver of food, water, sunlight, and air—nurtures and sustains us. As matter, the natural world can be manipulated through technological means and made to increase in fecundity and abundance. By harnessing nature’s power, human beings, themselves children of the Earth, become cocreators with nature; in this way, human beings become something like demigods. But because we can never master nature, we can never fully become God. We must be content to forever dwell at the foot of the holy mountain.

Yes, nature abounds in beguilements. (Proust, who seems to locate divinity at the juncture of art and sex, was certainly not immune to the charms of the natural world. His infatuation with flowers—particularly apple and hawthorn blossoms—attests to this.) The danger here, however, is to think of the natural world as wholly good—benevolent even, if we allow ourselves to give in to the temptation to anthropomorphize our environment and our many fellow animals.

As I’ve written elsewhere, this is a grave error. Nature is bountiful, yes, but also dangerous, horrific, depraved.^[4] Once your initial impressions of awe and sublimity subside, once you scratch just a little bit under the surface, the natural world drops its disguise, revealing itself as an ongoing horror show of death and destruction, of parasitism and devourment, the neverending process of reducing all its creatures into a vast heap of fertilizer, as Ernest Becker so effectively puts it. A truly sophisticated view of nature is one that takes into account the natural world’s various aspects, even the ones our values-obsessed brains can’t help judging good and bad, and, acknowledging the imperfectability of being, submits to both the good and evil principles of existence. Thus, a mature, thoroughgoing worship of nature excludes human desires and preferences. It deemphasizes or rejects entirely the possibility of salvation and accepts instead this hard, inescapable truth: the Earth gives all, but in the end, it takes all away. Mantis-like, our Mother Earth births us; then, one day, She devours us. There’s no avoiding this fate.

So much for the consolations of the spiritual life. It seems that everywhere we look, wherever we seek transcendence—art, sex, nature, etc.—there’s more disconsolation than comfort to be found. What’re we to do?

The answer, Proust might say, is to look to time. Time is a unifying force, a sacred power that gives life meaning by sorting all things into their proper moments and seasons. It’s the glue that holds human experience together, the organizing principle that helps us make good subjective^[5] sense of our otherwise fractured and disjointed lives. We don’t need an epiphany to comprehend this principle; we need only to stop for a moment and reflect.^[6]

By considering ourselves as beings acting in time, moving from birth and infancy to senescence and death, it begins to dawn on me that there isn’t any one wellspring of sacrality, that after the disappearance of God, there’s no single, enduring source of transcendence that sustains us through our lifetimes. Rather than any one thing, there are many things, sometimes in cycles, and sometimes in succession, or a succession of cycles, like the feasts and holy days of the church year. When considered this way, the matter of everyday life becomes something not unlike High-Church liturgy. Leonardo Boff, a former Catholic priest and a famous proponent of liberation theology, puts it this way:

The past now shows up, not as a soothing succession of happenings, but rather as a coherent, logical chain of events. A mysterious connection links the facts and events together. There surfaces a patent meaning that once lay submerged in the river of life. A plan was slowly unfolding, as one might unfold a map of some geographical territory. In the tangle of data we now discern cities, rivers, and the roads connecting major points. The territory is no longer terra incognita. Now mapped, it has meaning for the traveler, who can move forward without going astray because the route is visible.^[7]

How does time give life meaning? Simple: by circumscribing the boundaries of individual existence. When we reject the possibility of eternal life and embrace a finite existence we place a premium on every minute and hour of our lives and on the things that fill those minutes and hours. When we accept that life, be it twenty years or a hundred, is finite and tragically brief, we can’t help but endeavor to spend our time as best we can, to seek out and name the meaning inherent in every moment. And if we can’t find meaning, then it suffices to invent it. In the absence of a grand narrative, we can, after the fashion of Don Quixote, make one up for ourselves.^[8]

Proust, Boff, and others offer up some ideas for how one might imbue the matter of everyday life with sacred meaning. The practice, basically, is to go into the day with your eyes wide open, to inquire into the hidden significance bound up in every little thing you do, seeking and making connections between things—the big and the small, the mysterious and the ordinary—at every opportunity. In this way, for Proust, kissing one’s lover becomes a ritual approximating the Eucharist, a rite that brings the communicant into contact with a higher reality—namely love, particularly progenerative, erotic love. The trappings of nature, like Proust’s hawthorns and apple blossoms (or spring flowers and autumn leaves) become the paraments of daily, resacralized life. For Boff, a simple tin cup becomes a holy chalice, a tool that carries vital physical and spiritual nourishment to the mouth of its user. (Then, when people drink together, be it water or coffee or wine, a cup becomes an instrument of community, a sacred vessel that brings people together in merrymaking and fellowship.) As the old poem so wisely tells us, when we seek or assign special meaning to everything that comes in our way, even drudgery—those unpleasant, repetitive tasks of domestic and professional life—takes on a divine character. With daily practice, this seeking quickly becomes a reflexive habit of mind. In this way, we can reinject sacrality and enchantment into a world sucked dry of higher meaning.

Of course, I realize that I’m cheating here. I’m borrowing religious concepts, taking a Christian framework and superimposing secular, materialist values onto it, weaving disparate threads into an ersatz religion of my own peculiar pattern.^[9] Perhaps this is intellectual laziness, or perhaps it’s the human inability to completely shake off religious thinking and practices, particularly the religious practices that color one’s culture or upbringing. (For example, I have fond boyhood memories of High-Church liturgical services in the Episcopal Church. So now that God is long gone, it’s only natural that I seek analogues of those trappings and ceremonies in other areas of my life.) After all, the idea that time and being are saturated with the divine is not exclusive to Christianity. Indeed, many and perhaps even most religions throughout history teach precisely that, that the days and seasons are sacred and must be treated as such. Acknowledging that the days and seasons are short and few only makes them holier.

For me, this is where the real power is, then: not in looking to eternity, but to the moment. Mysteriously, paradoxically, wonderfully, by giving up the search for the eternal and focusing instead on the matter of everyday life, I have begun once again, after years of loss and sorrow, to see the divinity inherent in all things.

^[1] I must say here that I know more about Proust’s work than I do his personal life. This is a recurrent failure of mine: to study the work, not its creator. Therefore, I tend to confuse the views advanced by the writer’s characters with the writer’s own views. This is an error, and one that must be corrected if I’m ever to produce quality scholarship.

^[2] Some scholars have argued that prior to the rise and spread of the Abrahamic faiths, religion was for most people a matter of right practice, not right belief. (For example: in the classical world, it didn’t so much matter whether you believed in Zeus’s omnipotence so long as you made proper sacrifices to him. Nobody cares what you think or feel; just go through the motions.) This claim requires further investigation.

^[3] Human beings can’t help but see things in human terms. To do otherwise is quite impossible. This is surely why nature-worshipers throughout history have anthropomorphized nature and natural processes, everywhere imagining and creating representations of fertility goddesses and the like. But this seems unnecessary: nature being omnipresent and omnipotent, why isn’t it perfectly sufficient to worship a sunflower or a plum? Must we humanize everything?

^[4] “Depraved” implies a moral system that I don’t believe exists in the natural world. I’m simply using this term for rhetorical effect.

^[5] It’s tempting to think of our lives as the unfolding of a divinely ordained plan. Naturally, I think this is a mistake.

^[6] Here I part ways with Proust. In In Search of Lost Time, episodes of involuntary memory—epiphanies that help the narrator make sense of the course of his life—are precipitated by fortuitous encounters with external stimuli (most famously, a bit of madeleine dipped in tisane). I on the other hand believe we can achieve a similar effect through contemplation.

^[7] Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life: Life of the Sacraments, 1975.

^[8] I submit that everyone does this anyway, religionists and nonbelievers alike.

^[9] I don’t think I know anyone who’s truly, strictly doctrinaire. In my experience, most people pick and choose the parts of religion and scripture that suit their purposes and chuck the rest.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

—Immanuel Kant

“If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas.”

—John Gray, The Silence of Animals

“Morality has many charms. What could be more captivating than a vision of everlasting justice? Yet visions of justice are as immutable as styles in shoes. What morality demands shifts across the generations and may change more than once within a single human lifetime. Not so long ago morality required spreading civilization by extending imperial power. Today, morality condemns empire in all its forms. These judgements are irreconcilably opposed. But they provide the same satisfaction to those who pronounce them—a gratifying sense of virtue.”

—John Gray, Feline Philosophy

***

Today, at the forest preserve where I volunteer once a week, I found a painted rock. On its whitewashed face is written a question: How Will History Judge You? (As you can see, “You” is painted in red for maximum rhetorical effect.)

Smiling to myself, I picked up the rock, plopped it in my jacket pocket, and went about my business of battling the various noxious weeds that infest the preserve’s wetlands. As I wheeled my barrowload of tools to the worksite, I marveled at my good fortune: here was just the anecdote (and therefore just the right excuse) I needed to kick off yet another one of my longwinded philosophical harangues. (Oh Reader, how I envy you this rare treat!)

As I hacked and snipped away at the thorny undergrowth, I imagined the rock artist at work, trying with whatever empathic powers I possess to get inside his head. What was the artist’s intent? What does his question mean? Who is his target audience, and what did he hope to achieve by leaving the rock at the trailhead? Of course, I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I have a pretty good guess.

It’s possible that the artist has no particular agenda. (I say possible, but it’s unlikely, considering he went out of his way to paint the dumb thing and leave it in public view—a minor chore, yes, but still a chore. But let’s entertain this possibility for now.) Perhaps he wishes to inspire introspection in the rock’s beholder, or perhaps the rock’s message is an open-ended invitation to the viewer to let his moral imagination lead him whither it lists. Whatever his intent, the artist obviously wants his viewers to think.

Yes, the artist wants you to think. However, I suspect that he’s not so much inviting spontaneous introspection as leading the witness. Clearly, in echoing all the tired discourse of recent years around the right and wrong sides of history, the artist is making a slightly oblique moral argument about current events. In this way, the artist’s question is not really a prelude to a discourse, but to a lecture. He wants you to think, sure, but to think along specific lines to a predetermined conclusion.

That conclusion, of course, is that your politics is Wrong, and that History will forever condemn you for your wrongthink and resultant moral failures. So unless you want imaginary people with imaginary morals in an imaginary future to speak ill of you long after you’re dead, you better straighten up and fly right. Ever elephantine, history doesn’t forget. So say progressives and utopians of all stripes.

This is a faulty way of looking at history. In fact, every way of looking at history is faulty, because there’s really no such thing as history to begin with. History has no reality. It’s an abstraction, a mere intellective device. As such, it can’t think, let alone remember or forget anything. Stripped of all its meretricious moral garb, history is nothing more nor less than a vast catalogue of meaningless and supposedly objective facts, an inventory of dates and names and events that is only as reliable as the people who write it. (Ancient written histories are notoriously unreliable; oral histories are even less reliable still. I remember getting my first inkling of the historian’s fallibility when, as a boy, I read a heavily abridged edition of Froissart’s Chronicles, in which every battle of the Hundred Years’ War is described as having been fought between improbably large armies.) Such being the case, history “forgets” many things, either through omission, destruction, obscurantism, or falsification.^[1]

Furthermore, as a catalogue of more or less reliable facts, history has no moral valence. The so-called lessons of history are moral fables that people invent and attach to facts. History can tell us that Rome rose and fell, but whether this dramatic trajectory was a Good Thing,^[2] who’s to say?

To stick for a moment with the descriptor “elephantine,” history is indeed in some ways like an elephant—that is, the longsuffering elephant palpated by the blind men in the old parable. Like the elephant in the story, history’s essence is concealed, off limits to human inspectors. Whatever objective reality it has—if it has any at all, like a Platonic form floating around somewhere out there in the æther, real, but forever out of reach—is inaccessible, resistant to even the most penetrating methods of investigation. We only ever see (or, as the parable suggests, feel) a part of the whole. Even if we agree on the nature of the parts, we will likely disagree on the weight of their implications or their profundity.^[3] Such being the case, the reading of history can only result in disparate subjective interpretations. And in interpreting the facts of history, we can’t help but assign moral weight to our interpretations.

Of course, ideologues reject all of these critiques. (To be an ideologue is to be immune to criticism and blind to grey tones. This could be a working definition of the term.) In their view, a universal moral system does exist: namely, theirs. Their system holds dominion over the ages. It’s the rule by which all events are measured, past and present. Woe to those who are found wanting.^[4]

The truth of that matter, however, is that our moral judgments and attitudes are contingencies of our world-historical moment. And because history is always in flux, the world-historical moment never stays still. Perhaps, then, it’s more correct to say that there is no one world-historical moment, but rather a series of moments that follow each other in a rapid, imperceptible succession, like individual frames in a strip of celluloid film. In this way, history is like evolution, a faceless, purposeless agency—a sort of invisible hand—that gives rise to myriad similar^[5] but distinct species, the exact form of which defies prediction. At times, these species, these blind itinerants, diverge; at others, they reconverge before inevitably splitting again. The route they take can only ever be mapped in retrospect, and even then without exactitude. Moral opinions wander across time, rarely arriving in the same place twice. If they do converge, then their convergence is likely as attributable to accident as to anything else.

History—if I may be allowed to invoke the name History after so harshly criticizing the concept—bears this out. Yesterday’s norms are today’s atrocities: conquest, slavery, child brides, eugenics, human and animal sacrifice, disenfranchisement, and the list goes on. (Bad as these things are by the standards of contemporary liberalism, they’re still not quite rock bottom, morally speaking.) This is true of all societies, from the greatest to the least, from the most venerable to the most contemptible. Travel back in time two thousand years to the Roman Republic—an advanced society that for its myriad faults is admirable in many ways—and witness extreme cruelties, from gladiatorial games to institutionalized slavery and public executions, including the crucifixion of over six thousand rebel slaves in the Third Servile War. Yes, Rome’s citizens and subjects enjoyed considerable rights and protections, privileges not necessarily granted by other nation-states to their people. However, at the same time, Roman subjects were met with unspeakable cruelty if they dared challenge or disobey imperial power.

This moral balance might seem strange to us today, but it shouldn’t, for only yesterday were we guilty of similar moral crimes: slavery, lynchings, public executions, race massacres—the catalogue of horribles has no end.^[6] Everyone deprecates these atrocities (in public, anyway), yet somehow they never cease. I can only conclude, then, that moral depravity is an integral and ineradicable feature of the human animal, part of the grain of the crooked timber Kant writes about. No amount of religious or moral instruction, no number of policy prescriptions or years of political reeducation, can ever plane down and straighten out the warped material of our being. If history has anything to teach us, then a sobering lesson about the immutability of human nature is it.

There is some comfort to be had here, thin though that comfort is. Although these horribles are constants of the human condition, they wax and wane over time in just the same way that the prevalence of moral practice fluctuates. (As I wrote just recently, I’m not convinced there are new moral ideas, just variations in the level of moral praxis. However, these fluctuations are difficult to measure. Tracking public behavior is hard enough as it is, but gauging private behavior is almost impossible. Therefore, we never answer the question: Just how well-behaved is our society?) At present, mirabile dictu, many people in the contemporary world enjoy unprecedented levels of peace and security. As optimists frequently tell us, this is the best time in history in which to be alive. Many are the naysayers, but data around things like infant mortality, relative wealth, and life expectancies attest to the prosperity of the present moment. One would hope that any society that is able to reliably and consistently furnish its people with these public goods would be judged as standing firmly on the right side of history.

At the same time, we face stiff headwinds. Across the globe, liberalism is in retreat. Humanist values are in decline. People and institutions once charged with protecting and extending human rights and privileges are now calling for their curtailment. Yesterday’s virtues are today’s sins, and vice versa. What tomorrow’s moral vogue will be, nobody can say.

What we can say with certainty is that there will be another moral vogue, and another after that, and so on until we finally die out some centuries from now. Moral vogues are as inevitable as the turn of the seasons. And just as predictably, when that vogue comes, its proponents, whatever their prior beliefs, will once again anoint themselves and, shielded by the aegis of unshakeable moral certainty, take up their place at what they with every passing minute tell themselves is the vanguard of progress.

^[1] It’s more correct to say that humans, through ignorance, forgetfulness, falsification, etc., damage the historical record. In many cases, it’s just as difficult to determine what happened as why, let alone figure out the so what. For example, after more than one hundred years of scholarship and debate, nobody can agree what caused World War I, or what resulted from it.

^[2] For a good satire of the historian’s moralistic habits, read 1066 and All That. It’s a hoot.

^[3] The relative weight we assign facts and phenomena seems to drive social and political disagreements across the board. For example, almost everyone agrees that racism is a blight on American society, but people disagree about the scope and magnitude of the problem.

^[4] By contemporary morals, all past peoples are wanting, except perhaps for history’s Noble Savages. But they never existed to begin with, so we need not worry about them.

^[5] And by similar, I mean alike to the point of being indiscernible to the naked eye, literally and figuratively.

^[6] Of course, all of these evils were protested in certain quarters of the populace at the times and places in which they were practiced. Seldom is any practice or custom universally condoned, no matter how commonplace it might be.

“There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.”

—Montaigne

“Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions.”

“The flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory.”

“Contemporary culture rejects the idea of nature for the same reason it rejects the idea of God. Both set limits on the human will.”

—John Gray, Feline Philosophy

“Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world’s religions.”

—John Gray, Straw Dogs

“To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”

—John Gray, The Silence of Animals

***

1. Introduction

Something happened to me a few weeks ago that took me quite by surprise. For the first time in my life, I was accused of nihilism.

Of course, the person making this accusation knows nothing about me whatsoever—such is the nature of almost all online discourse, wherein strawman arguments and ad hominem attacks are as routine as please and thank you. Such being the case, I shrugged my shoulders and moved on.

Or so I thought. The accusation itself doesn’t bother me, but it has got me thinking: What do I believe, and why? Now that I’ve dispensed with God, what idol have I raised in His place? What is the basis, the firm ground, on which everything—my morals, my belief system, my personal epistemology—rests? If there is no objective, universal morality, then what’s the next best thing?

These are hard questions, perhaps the hardest of all. The ocean of ink spilled in answering them bears witness to their urgency, as does the ocean of blood that’s been spilled in defending their various answers. Still, a thinking person can’t shy away from answering them. One must attempt to answer, despite all hazards.

What do I believe, and why?

2. Does the Charge of Nihilism Stick?

Am I a Nihilist? In considering this question, I’m reminded of a scene near the end of The Big Lebowski (1998). Apologies if you haven’t seen it, but I won’t bother trying to explain the film’s plot. (I don’t think I could if I tried. Suffice to say, it’s a two-hour shaggy-dog story.) It’s best if you just watch the clip for yourself:

Basically, the nihilists have taken advantage of a runaway bride situation to stage a bogus kidnapping and demand a ransom. When they aren’t compensated for their troubles, they lament the unfairness of their fate, as you just saw. And, as you just saw, their lament is met with Walter’s (John Goodman) just derision (which, incidentally, is also the funniest line in the movie):

‘Fair??’ Who’s the fuckin’ nihilists around here, you bunch of fuckin’ crybabies?

Donny (Steve Buscemi) isn’t convinced they’re just crybabies, though:

Are these guys gonna hurt us, Walter?

No Donny, Walter reassures him. These men are cowards.

These lines slyly and humorously raise two key critiques of the nihilist position. The first critique concerns hypocrisy: even the self-proclaimed nihilists—thugs who earlier chant We believe in nothing!, as though they must constantly remind themselves of this fact, lest they forget—can’t bring themselves to truly not care about anything, especially when their million-dollar payday is at stake. Given that they’re willing to commit a second serious crime (murder) to compensate for their first (extortion), it would seem that they actually care quite a lot. Their hypocrisy reveals them for the phonies they are.

The second critique lies in Walter’s accusation of cowardice. This is an apt accusation: nihilism, if realizable, which I doubt it is, could only be classified as a species of cowardice. What is total disbelief if not a refusal to commit oneself, to acknowledge a higher purpose, whatever that might be, and submit to it? The closer you look at it, the more nihilism seems a dodge, a lazy way out of putting anything on the line or taking ownership for anything, even something as trivial as an opinion. Simply put, nihilism is the last refuge of the gutless.

Taken together, Walter’s critiques are a strong argument against the tenability of the nihilist’s position. Despite our protestations, despite our self-diagnosed postmodern ennui and smug, ironic remarks about the pointlessness of it all, each and every one of us cares about something. We can’t help but care. We’re hardwired by nature to direct ourselves towards certain ends, even if those ends are slightly different for everyone, or even if that end is mere continued existence.^[1]

No—we might call ourselves nihilists, but we sure don’t act like nihilists. I submit that even the people we often term nihilistic—suicide bombers, school shooters, suicides, etc.—are anything but. Each of these actions—suicide bombing, mass shooting, the killing of the self—implies acknowledgement of meaning and purpose.

Suicide bombers almost always kill themselves in the service of a sacred cause. In a perverted way that is impossible for a moderate like me to understand, their sacrifice is the highest acknowledgment of meaning, the ultimate realization of purpose. (Suicide bombing must appear nihilistic to a Western ultraliberal whose most precious conceit is the Self. The hyperindividualist’s zealotry is the reverse of the suicide bomber’s. Such an individualist might take as his motto the words of Grace Slick, paraphrasing Joyce: I’d rather have my country die for me.^[2]) For suicide bombers, the moment of death is the moment of total self-actualization.

School shooters serve a cause as well, though their cause is of their own invention. In slaughtering their classmates, they take for themselves the justice they believe they’ve been denied by society. This corrective is an attempt to restore the meaning that’s been stolen from them by various abusers: bullies, parents, teachers, God—whoever. Furthermore, shooting innocent people satisfies their hunger for status and notoriety, if only temporarily. (For many school shooters, but not all, the shocking climax to their evil deed is suicide. Their notoriety is assured, but they don’t live to relish it. Some shooters seem to think this paradox through, while others don’t.) In brief, school shootings are almost always bloody hail-Mary bids to restore sense to lives that have been sucked dry of meaning and purpose.

Unlike school shootings, suicide is not the climax of purpose (or, perhaps more appropriately, antipurpose), but the final stage in a gradual loss of meaning. Suicidal people had meaning once, so they know it’s out there. Their problem is that they’ve somehow lost or been cheated out of it and despair of finding it again. When they can’t reclaim meaning, they start looking for another way out. (This was true for me, at any rate. Having been depressed and presuicidal in the recent past, I can now with clarity point to loss of meaning and purpose as the source of my self-destructive ideation. I can also attest to the difficulty of reclaiming meaning once it’s been lost, as there was a point in my depression where I became convinced that meaning was gone and never coming back. I assume the same is true for many of my fellow sufferers.)

So, keeping these critiques in mind, where does this leave me? I’m not quite sure yet, but I can positively assert that wherever it leaves me, it’s somewhere far short of nihilism.

First, even though I profess that there’s no higher purpose in the universe, I certainly don’t act like there’s no higher purpose in my life, or in the life of the collective. (Some people might call this disavowal of universal purpose a kind of nihilism, but this seems to me a taxonomical error, or a problem of definitions, though much philosophical discourse, especially at the undergraduate level, is nothing more than quibbling over definitions. I don’t see the problem with saying my life has meaning or that your life has meaning, even if I don’t believe in any ultimate meaning. The objective truth, if it’s even accessible or knowable, has no bearing on our subjective truth. When people tell me there’s no point to existence, I simply reply Yes. And…?) But this doesn’t make me exceptional, as I maintain that there are no actual nihilists. Nihilism is nothing more than one of the linguistic fictions John Gray mentions in one of this essay’s prefatory quotations. It simply isn’t part of our or any animal’s programming, nor is it software that can be installed.

Secondly, whatever I am, I’m not a coward in any sense: relationally, intellectually, morally, or physically. For one thing, out of principle, I volunteered for a combat job in the Army and served in Afghanistan where I participated in more than one hundred combat patrols. That alone disqualifies me as a moral or physical coward. For another thing, I have firm relationships with people and ideas that disqualify me from all the other charges. As much as anyone I know, I put my money where my mouth is.

So clearly the charge of nihilism doesn’t stick. (I mean, my God, if it did, I wouldn’t bother writing this Substack!) However, I’ve admitted that I don’t believe in God, timeless, objective morality, or any ultimate purpose. So where does that leave me?

To reiterate: What do I believe, and why?

3. First Principles

I’ll try to be as succinct as possible in explaining the origins and nature of my first principles.

Basically, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, down-the-middle liberal with right-wing or conservative sympathies.^[3] I believe that America’s founding principles, namely its positive and negative rights (freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, freedom of the press, freedom from illegal search and seizure, popular enfranchisement, etc.) are historical rarities, hard-won luxuries that we surrender^[3] at our peril. So strong is my belief that I’m willing to kill and die for these principles, if necessary.

As for my right-wing sympathies, they mostly have to do with my reverence for tradition and my hawkish outlook on global affairs. (This reverence is not particularly important and won’t be discussed here—maybe someday soon in a new essay.) As an offensive realist, I believe that nation-states compete with each other to maximize their power. Because I see no way out of this competition, I want my nation-state to be the most powerful. Consequently, I see advocates of degrowth and disarmament as deluded outliers from the mass of humanity, people who can’t or won’t see the global situation for what it is. (That the American government doesn’t treat these outliers as a dangerous fifth column is to me proof of just how exceptionally tolerant America really is, and just how precious our ideals truly are—further reasons to guard and preserve the free world and its founding principles at almost any cost.) Given the realistic alternatives, I prefer an America-aligned world to any other.

Also, it must be said that I see myself as a true believer in pluralism and republicanism. What I mean by this is that I value diverse perspectives.^[5] I don’t want everyone to think the way that I do. I do not and would not wish a political or intellectual monoculture into being. Though I skew conservative,^[6] I want to live in a society where conservatives are checked and counterbalanced by progressives, and vice versa.^[6] This social and political friction, while uncomfortable, frustrating, and at times seemingly anti-progress, drives compromise, which in turn drives steady, reasoned growth in every area of life. To put it simply, sometimes conservative solutions are best, while other times progressive solutions are the way forward; often a blended approach is needed. Nobody has the complete picture or the final word. Everything is contingent.

Lastly, I believe that a properly organized society is one that strikes a balance between individualism and collectivism. Tip the scale too much in either direction, and you’re in trouble. For any society, this is a fine line to walk, as both individualism and collectivism have unique benefits and allurements.

Two questions naturally arise here: What is the source of these freedoms and values? Why do I believe in them? I’ll answer these questions—or attempt to answer them—in turn.

First, as stated above, I don’t believe in God or an agentive creator of any kind. Therefore, contra the Declaration of Independence, I don’t see humans as endowed with rights by their creator, because there is no creator to endow them with anything at all, least of all a fanciful notion like rights. The only rights we have are the ones we invent and claim for ourselves. Furthermore, rights are sacrosanct because we declare them sacrosanct and (generally^[8]) behave accordingly. (Thus, I also reject the Declaration’s argument that these truths are self-evident. Nothing in life is self-evident, except individual desires.) Rights, like so many other intangible or imaginary things (money, borders, laws, etc.), are reified and made valuable through action. We don’t need God in order to be moral—or for anything else.^[9]

Secondly, I believe in these rights for two reasons. First, I believe in them because they form the intellectual and moral bedrock of the culture in which I was raised and in which I still live. In sum, I’ve been acculturated to them.^[10] (Also, there seems to be some evidence that our politics are biologically encoded. I haven’t investigated this very deeply, but it seems plausible. From an evolutionary perspective, it appears desirable for social beings to strike a rough balance between members who are more open to outsiders and novel experience and members who are more closed off: That strange tribe over the next hill might give us the medicine our people need, or they might be here to exterminate us. But that’s all speculation—perhaps even impossible to prove.) Secondly, I believe in them because they seem pragmatically useful: these rights, in practice, lead to a good life for everyone. (Of course, everyone across time has held competing conceptions of the good life, and many of those conceptions make no room for human rights. But that’s a matter for another day.) My assumption is that most people want an open, stable society surrounded by secure borders inside of which they are free to pursue whatever ends they choose, without interference, harassment, or molestation. Nobody with options wishes for tyranny and oppression—not for himself, anyway.^[11]

I’ll stop here. This is not an exhaustive list of my first principles. But for our purposes, I think it’s sufficient.

4. Problems and Critiques

Of course, as much as I cherish my moral and political commitments, I recognize their flaws and limitations. More than that, I recognize their contingency, their fragility.

Let’s start with their flaws and limitations. In my view, liberalism’s great flaw is its tendency towards hyperindividualism. I believe in the sovereignty of the individual, but like anything, it can go too far.

In our case, it has gone too far. The God of Western Civilization, as far as I can tell, is the Self. Much of our culture—our entertainment industry, our economy, our consumer decisions, our professional ambitions, our social behavior (which grows increasingly antisocial, often in hyperindividualistic ways)—panders to our insatiable hunger for recognition, status, and self-worship. We are increasingly concerned with what’s good for Me and not with what’s good for Us.^{[12 ]} What to do about this, I’m not sure.^[13] I hope it doesn’t take another war to return us to solidarity, but I fear it might. Only time will tell.

Liberalism’s other great flaw is its tendency, in one of its extreme forms, to promote political values over and above the state.^[14] Basically, over time, some liberals become more loyal to the idea of human rights than they do their country, seemingly forgetting that the hard power of the state is what secures their rights in the first place. Without the Big Stick of government, there are and can be no rights.^[15] As Eugene Sledge puts it, “With privilege goes responsibility.”

Now let’s talk about contingency and fragility. In a word, I consider progress an illusion.^[16] What we call progress is largely the whims of contingency in operation. I reject the idea that world history has been building, slowly but inexorably, towards greater—even complete—individual freedom. Furthermore, I take all this End of History stuff as so much tosh. (Who would have thought that after more than fifty years of cold war, we’d find ourselves in another, potentially more dangerous cold war? Cynics and realists, that’s who.) If anything is self-evidently true, it’s the dominion and persistence of contingency, as the world-shaking events of just the last few years have shown. Yes, things can get better. The many advances and achievements of modernity show that progress, if only limited progress, is possible. Just as easily though, things can get worse, or even collapse entirely.

Another problem is the ultraliberal’s tendency to see his values as universal and objectively correct.^[17] Unlimited freedom, he thinks, is self-evidently the most desirable condition of all. (Unlimited positive freedom, anyway. Part of the appeal of totalitarianism lies in its many negative freedoms. After all, ideological conformity frees one from the drudgery of exercising independent thought. Even as someone who considers himself a free thinker,^[18] in my moments of intellectual exhaustion, I see tremendous appeal in this kind of capitulation, this sort of servile order-taking.) For the ultraliberal, any policy or social order that doesn’t maximize human freedom is suspect at best, utterly evil at worst.

As John Gray writes in one of this essay’s prefatory remarks, “To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.” The problem, as Gray indirectly points out, is that the ultraliberal—just one species in a family of what he refers to as “self-admiring world-improvers”—does view almost all of history as a mistake, and one that urgently needs to be corrected. He sees himself as the inheritor and embodiment of man’s greatest moral destiny. And like every child of destiny, he is an evangelist—sometimes even a murderous evangelist.^[19]

For the ultraliberal,^[20] anything less than the boundless freedom of the human will is morally dubious and, ultimately, unacceptable. In this view, the nonliberals of the world must be saved from themselves. They must be made to think the way that we think. Ironically, this political philosophy lends itself to the creation of new moral evils, as the global march of democratic idealism has shown. If we truly believed in unlimited freedom, then it seems that we would respect one’s right to delimit his own freedoms and responsibilities, one’s right to renounce or restrict his rights. But as conflicts from Somalia to Afghanistan prove, we distrust other people to set acceptable parameters for themselves. Consequently, we take it upon ourselves to impose these parameters, to spread our evangel with the guided bomb and automatic rifle, often with disastrous results. Looking at the historical record, it appears that one cannot export his values peacefully, salutary though those values might be.^[21]

As in most things, I reject this and every other form of sociopolitical evangelicalism in favor of a middle course. Sometimes, sudden, radical action is necessary. But I don’t think radical action is necessary as often as progressives seem to believe. In their world, change should’ve happened yesterday. In my world, in most cases, change can happen tomorrow, if it needs to happen at all.^[22]

All of this is to say that I don’t see my values and opinions as the best way, but as a better way that makes room for incremental improvement. You won’t be surprised, then, that I agree with Thomas Sowell when he says that there are no perfect systems, only better and worse ones; no solutions, only trade-offs. (This is why I reject utopianism—indeed, all grand narratives, from ethnonationalism on the right to communism on the left—as dangerous and stupid.) Under this framework, the key to progress is to make the most intelligent trade-offs, the winningest bargains possible.

Yes, I believe that things can get better. No matter the endeavor, there’s always room for improvement. But that doesn’t mean I think they will get better. Neither a meliorist nor a utopian, I believe progress is contingent, and that things can go backwards just as easily as they can go forward—perhaps more easily. Social and moral progress are possible, but ever elusive, always fragile. But no amount of progress, no sterling record of moral victories, however long, can separate us from the base elements of our nature.^[23]

5. Conclusion

I don’t exempt myself from any of the above critiques. I hope you trust me when I say that I interrogate my own values and beliefs just as harshly as I do those of others. Recognizing that many people are quick to point to the contingency of every belief system except their own, I try my best to do contrariwise, accepting that my set of beliefs is just as much a product of historical drift as any other. I believe what I believe in large part due to the confluence of unpredictable circumstances. Still, when compared against historical precedent, I think there’s much to recommend my value system. But then again, who doesn’t think this?

For me, a pragmatist, the proof is always in the pudding. Ideas can only be judged by their results—everything else is mere theoretical play, more of John Gray’s linguistic fictions.

Still, linguistic fictions are necessary. Indeed, we can’t get by without them, or without any of the things we’ve “just made up.” The world is too complicated to do otherwise than try to comprehend it with the aid of a theory, however crude and reductive that theory might be. (If you don’t believe me about the world’s infinite complexity, just try this exercise: take a mundane object—a chair, say—and start writing a list of facts associated with that particular chair—it’s height, weight, materials, etc.—and with the category Chair. You’ll quickly see how infinitely complex even the most everyday things truly are. Now, let’s talk about theoretical physics.) No intellect is capacious enough to encompass and make sense of the whole world, or even the systems we create. (Just ask our leading economists, modern-day Victor Frankensteins who daily fail to understand, let alone control, a monster of their own making.) Thus, we need tools to help us rapidly and efficiently index the world. But to critique our pet theories once again, there’s always a sharper tool, a more accurate caliper near to hand, if only we allow ourselves its use. Hence the need for endless education, dialogue, and reform—the “friction” of liberal political discourse I mention above.

Lastly, we must always keep in mind that all of these things—laws, rights, values—exist at the mercy of our baser urges and fundamental needs. Our political structures, properly maintained, keep these base needs in check. But remove these structures and prepare to witness an outpouring of barbarity the magnitude of which defies comprehension. Societal backsliding and collapse have occurred many times throughout history, from the best-educated country to the most foolish, from the poorest to the richest. Under the right conditions, it can happen again. I pray that societal failure doesn’t happen in my lifetime, or in anyone’s lifetime, here or anywhere. Against these evils, let us all remain vigilant.

Appetite, desire, and need—these are the things that truly drive human behavior. Try as we might, we’ll never be rid of them. Our best hope, then, is to put in place systems that harness the base elements of our nature and direct them towards noble ends.

^[1] The act of eating—a deliberate act that is as fundamental as the passive act of breathing—implies care.

^[2] I doubt suicide bombers and other extremists listen to Jefferson Airplane, and if they did, it would probably only confirm to them our society’s decadence.

^[3] I was dragged kicking and screaming into my belief in liberal democracy as the best form of social and political organization. By nature, I have aristocratic sympathies. In this day and age, it’s probably best that I keep this admission to myself. But then again, this is a manifesto.

^[4] I say “surrender” because I don’t see these rights being taken from us, at least not by any foreign power. (That terrorists would somehow deprive us of our rights and freedoms was one of the animating myths of the Global War on Terror, a canard I rejected with derision even on the day I volunteered to help fight that war.) The likelier thing is that we will give up our rights, for one ill-advised reason or another.

^[5] This is not mere lip service. I don’t care where ideas come from, so long as they’re sound. Of course, they are certain ideas and ideologies I deem ridiculous, outmoded, or discredited, and therefore unworthy of serious consideration.

^[6] I think it’s worth remarking here that I’m unaffiliated and don’t vote. Even though I volunteered for seven years of active military service, I’m deeply uncomfortable with labels and acts of affiliation. I apply labels to myself here because I must, not because I take any special delight in titles and firm descriptors.

^[7] Here, I deliberately shun the term “liberal.” I’m a liberal, but not in the popular sense of “left.” For more on this, see Alexandre Lefebvre’s excellent Liberalism as a Way of Life.

^[8] I could qualify every statement here quite to death. However, for the sake of brevity and clarity, I won’t. (Except where needed. Please excuse this double qualification.)

^[9] I don’t see the problem with proclaiming as sacred things we simply make up. From the individual all the way up to the largest collective, our species breeds its own sacred cows all the time. For me, the source of our values matters far less than their benefits. As far as I can tell, God isn’t a necessary condition of anything. (Logically, there must be an origin point for everything, the so-called “unmoved mover.” But I don’t spend much time worrying about what the mover might be, or where it might be.) I think this is why my value system survived the collapse of my Christian faith. My values were severed from what I then believed was their source, yet they remained. Therefore, the source didn’t much matter.

^[10] My personal history attests to the importance of political and moral education. Where I grew up, racism was the norm. However, my parents taught me from the beginning the illiberality and moral repugnance of racism. The moral education I received at home overrode the normative attitudes and behaviors I encountered daily outside of the domestic sphere. Such was the power of my parents’ moral instruction.

^[11] I add the qualification “with options” because some people born into totalitarian regimes don’t necessarily have a concept of other, better ways of living. For example, based on what I’ve read, the North Korean peasantry is aware of its impoverishment—an empty stomach will make your wretchedness known to you if nothing else does. However, rather than blame their plight on the wrongheaded social and economic policies of their own government, they blame America and the machinations of its South Korean stooges.

^[12] This might be a strange thing to say given the ever-worsening division of our society into various “Uses”—that is, warring political camps. However, as far as I can tell, the prime tactic of the leaders in both camps is to buy favor by appealing to the individual’s craving for special recognition. (Or, even more cynically, cash payment.)

Also, this statement points to another problem: As I’ve contended elsewhere, Us is the sum of Me. By making this argument, I’m outing myself as an individualist, which I suppose I am. The right thing, then, is to try to be a well-adjusted, dutiful Me who contributes to the wellbeing of Us. What we need is less self-service and more selfless service.

^[13] Diagnosing the problem is always easier than curing it, isn’t it? I have some ideas for curatives, but I’ll hold off for the sake of not coming off like more of a pedant and moralistic scold than I’m sure I already have. Maybe one day, when I’m in a particularly didactic mood, I’ll publish my list of prescriptions. But not today, and not here, as I fear I’ve already overstayed my welcome in your otherwise happy morning coffee break.

^[14] Many ultraliberals seem allergic to all references to patriotism or the state. For them, nationalism in any form is soft fascism, if not fascism outright.

^[15] As an antiutopian, I believe that anarchic paradises are unworkable, mere fantasies that don’t warrant a moment’s serious consideration. (I also reject the myth of the Noble Savage. I know enough about “primitive” societies, ancient and current, to know that stupidity, laziness, greed, and hostility are human universals, everywhere pernicious, but admittedly made worse through the sheer scale of modern civilization. Other animal societies suffer from social parasitism and murder, so why shouldn’t ours? Obviously, we want to limit these tragedies, but we can never get rid of them completely.) No matter how ideal the society, some people will always attempt to break the social contract or cheat the system. When they do, we need an impartial authority to adjudicate matters and put things right again.

^[16] The staggering, exponential technological progress of the last hundred or so years gives rise to the illusion of moral progress, or at least the delusion that morality can progress as quickly as technology. Hence the oft-encountered lament, I can’t believe that in the year 2026, we still do x! This statement seems to imply that last’s years morality is as outdated as last year’s voguish shoes, and just as unwearable and ridiculous.

I’m not convinced that morality really progresses at all. Maybe it does in terms of how widely it’s practiced, but not in terms of intellectual novelty. (In other words, as far as I know, there are no new moral ideas, just greater or lesser extents of moral practice.) Like many social critics throughout time, I believe that technological progress alone seems to have followed a somewhat linear progression, but that technological progress has nothing to do with moral progress. In fact, in the age of the smartphone, Internet, and hydrogen bomb (equivalents, obviously!), it seems that technological and moral progress exhibit an inverse relationship to each other—but I don’t know enough about that to say for sure.

^[17] In graduate school, I had a casual debate with a classmate about human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs. My interlocutor argued that the Aztecs probably valued human life as much as we do, deeming sacrifice regrettable but necessary. In making this argument, he implied (as ultraliberals often do in their discourse) that all people throughout time go against their liberal instincts despite knowing better. This is a curious way of looking at the world—this belief that everyone else shares your vision, or can be made to share your vision—but I see it time and again in the academic wilds. My hunch is that ultraliberals “liberalize” the historical Other in their minds for fear of painting the Other as morally or politically less-than. This attitude bespeaks a shocking lack of imagination, not to mention a shocking level of moral arrogance, if not outright cultural superiority which is, ironically, anathema to the liberal mind, a mind that, for all its generosity, struggles to entertain alterity in any serious way. (That’s their claim anyway, that they spurn cultural superiority in all its guises. But it sure doesn’t seem that way in practice.) If this isn’t the highest form of egotistical condescension, then I don’t know what is.

I counter that there’s no reason to believe in the existence and dominion of a universal, timeless liberaldom, and that we only think this way because it’s almost impossible to think beyond the boundaries of our liberal assumptions. We can’t jump out of our liberal pond and swim in someone else’s water. Every society, from the Aztecs to the Romans to Nazi Germany and the United States of America, has valued human life differently. (Also, much depends on whose life we’re talking about within a given society. A nobleman’s? A peasant’s? A foreigner’s? A man’s? A woman’s? A child’s? A slave’s? In every society, everyone counts differently.) My classmate’s argument shows the pervasiveness and stubbornness of liberal thought—indeed, of any regnant system of thought in any time or place. But I don’t blame him for thinking this way, as I’m not sure anyone can help thinking in their own particular way.

^[18] Is true freedom of thought possible? I’m not sure. This question is worth exploring in another essay.

^[19] This evangelical impulse manifests itself on the home front all the time as well. In many cases, ultraliberal progressivism is utopianism in disguise. Every day, so-called progressives assail the public with a novel and ridiculous moral proposition, insisting they swallow it unquestioningly lest they be forever tarred with the brush of bigotry. But this isn’t progress, just ideologically motivated blackmail.

^[20] This is a vague, poorly defined term, I know. Many Americans are an odd combination of conservative and ultraliberal or progressive values. (Or neoliberal, or whatever the correct term might be. As you can probably tell, in my moments of laziness, I tire of taxonomies, especially in this sociopolitical moment where political labels reshape themselves as quickly and easily as amoebas.) George W. Bush, neoliberal par excellence, is a sterling example of this new crop of political hybrid.

^[21] As an American patriot, I see the American Revolution as the greatest efflorescence of human rights and freedoms in history. Still, the flowers of ever-greater freedom in the New World were watered with rivers of blood.

^[22] Of course I don’t feel this way about everything. One area for urgent action was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Another is the climate. But even here, we must proceed intelligently, favoring reason to speed, if speed means carelessness. In my opinion, the best and most realistic first steps towards a cleaner planet are to shift as quickly as possible to nuclear energy and EVs. But that’s a whole other issue best discussed elsewhere.

^[23] Factionalism chief among them. We live in the most advanced society in history, but none of our advances has yet rid us of the curse of sectionalist strife.

“It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it, no one thinks to thank God.”

—Emily Dickinson

“Run and find out.”

—Rudyard Kipling, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

Just yesterday I finished one of the best pieces of nonfiction I’ve read in the last ten years: The Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel, an academic, bibliophile, and former Sotheby’s consultant. In writing about remarkable books, de Hamel has blessed the literary world with a book that is itself nothing short of remarkable. I’m certain that his survey of manuscripts and the people who create, collect, and study them will go down as a classic of books about books, if it hasn’t already.

If you’ve met me, or if you’ve gained even a small sense of my personality from my writing, then you know that I in all things tend toward parsimony, dispensing only scant praise, and even that with reluctance. When it comes to my fellow men I’m particularly sparing in my admiration. Ordinarily, I’m far less interested in people than I am in the things they create. But not so with de Hamel: here is an enviable man indeed, a gentleman-scholar of quick wit and deepest humanity. Verily, he is a man set apart, one of the anointed, a giant of scholarship and imagination whose mantle a person of middling powers such as I can dare only touch. In the world of ideas, de Hamel and his ilk are the high priests, hierophants who stand atop the holy mountain, closest to God. We, the unwashed congregation, can do naught but crouch below in the scree, obediently awaiting their decretals.

This priestly lineage is hereditary. Either you’re born into this line, or you’re damned to a life of obscurity; either you come by this inheritance honestly, or you don’t. Birthrights cannot be transferred to lesser sons; pure blood cannot be transfused. Though upstarts and adventurers may try, this Olympian genealogy—a bloodline that runs through the Wrens, the Newtons, the Johnsons, the Goethes, the Ruskins, and the Russells of the world—cannot be faked. This coterie admits only by appointment, not application.

Or so it would seem to all of us outside the circle of the blessed. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. In The Manuscripts Club, de Hamel himself points to his family’s humble origins, remarking that at some point in the past one of his ancestors adopted the affectation “de” in hopes of implying an aristocratic connection somewhere in his lineage. In this democratic age, I’d wager that de Hamel, like most of us, arrived through singleness of vision and dogged hard work.^[1] (Now that I think about it, most of the best-educated people I know hail from the middle classes, that category of people who enjoy relative economic stability but must apply themselves if they wish to crack the upper crust in any industry. I would guess that the scions of our wealthiest families generally pass over academia, especially humanities professorships, in favor of more lucrative professions. But for us commoners, one must fight his way out of the miasmic swamp of error and mediocrity if he wishes to breathe the pure, rarefied air of the empyrean.) Yes, de Hamel knows everything there is to know about manuscripts, but he won this knowledge through decades of focused study in the libraries and auction houses of America and Western Europe. It was by training and persistence—not luck or hereditary privilege—that he acquired the kind of scholarship, writerly flair, and deep erudition that I so admire and envy.

Would that I had this mastery, this expertise, for myself! But alas, it seems that much as I want it, mastery is not for me. I’m doomed by virtue of my nature not to be an expert in anything. Unlike de Hamel—a man who has drunk deeply from the fountains of passion, whose very marrow is suffused with the alluvium of his singular enthusiasm—I’m a topic-hopper, a scholar of things-in-general, a decided nonexpert.

One look at my reading list confirms my promiscuity. In just the last two years, I’ve read books about medieval manuscripts; evolutionary biology; mass shootings; animal consciousness; modern warfare; political theory; witchcraft; mythmaking; color theory; thanatology; and the list goes on. (If I’ve read two books on the same topic, it’s because they were assigned for a class.) Additionally, I’ve read thousands of essays and articles on these topics and many others. True to my Substack’s founding mandate, I have like a good little mongoose run and found out.^[2] But one of the things I’ve found out is that I’m not a specialist, and never will be.

Why this is, I can’t say—I suppose it’s just my nature. The world is so big and wide and colorful and fascinating that I want to see as much of it as I can before I die. I crave experience the way a dipsomaniac craves wine.

By dint of this Faustian mania, I’ve come to know quite a lot about certain topics: ornithology; the Paleolithic phase in North America; intellectual history; film theory and criticism; gothic art and architecture; Victorian literature; the life and works of Marcel Proust; and so on. However, despite my enduring fascination with these subjects, I can’t reasonably claim expert status in any of them. For whatever reason, I just can’t develop a sustained interest in these topics, or in any topic. Instead, I dabble in them for a while until I become bored. At that point, I move on to other subjects before inevitably looping back around to my first interests. (Sometimes, this looping-back might come after a yearslong hiatus in which I forget crucial facts and connections. Therefore, sustained interest and loopbacks, although similar, are not the same thing, as loopbacks preclude steady progress.) Put briefly, about the time I’ve found something out, I’m off and running again.

No, I can’t stay with any one thing for long.^[3] Nor can I make up my mind about anything. I never possess as much information as I’d like on any topic; therefore, definitive interpretations and firm conclusions elude me. Hence the name of my Substack, Miscellaneous Magpie. Just like my blog’s namesake, I fly about here and there, seizing upon and bringing back to the nest sundry baubles of dubious worth. But I never clean house: instead, I occasionally seek to impose order on these baubles by arranging them into elaborate yet refracted patterns. In making my arrangements, I seek mandalalike order, but can only ever achieve random, ever-shifting bricolages, uninterpretable images like those one sees in a kaleidoscope.

These scattershot patterns are my essays. Taken as a whole, my essays form an even larger scattershot pattern that grows in size and complexity with every piece I publish. I suspect that one day this teetering edifice will collapse under its own weight, but let us wait and see. Maybe instead, it will reach to the clouds.

Isaiah Berlin has a name for people like me: Foxes. In his famous and oft-cited essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Berlin describes the fox as a solitary drifter, a ranger of the hills and faraway places. As such, he knows many things—that is, he recognizes and accepts the infinite complexity (and therefore the ultimate unknowability) of the world. The fox embraces mystery, ambiguity, and difference; thus, he shuns systematization. He tries to understand things in isolation, on their own terms, drawing connections only where necessary.

The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a burrower. He knows One Big Thing—that is, he interprets the world according to a ruling ideal. He’s a systematizer, striving day and night to organize disparate knowledge under his unifying principle.^[4] When things don’t fit neatly into his world-picture, the hedgehog bludgeons them into shape and forces them to fit.

Unlike the fox, the hedgehog lives in perpetual frustration. He reigns over an empire of dirt, a vast mudcracked plain that he can never smooth out, try as he might. (We all know someone like this, a religionist or dogmatist of one stripe or another who is forever at pains to make his fractured worldview hang together in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. The problem with totalizing worldviews is their limited explanatory power. Once that runs out, totalizers inevitably fall back on appeals to faith and lazy cliches: The Lord works in mysterious ways!) Still, the hedgehog will never give up his project of totalization.^[5]

This strict taxonomy requires qualification, as taxonomies often do. Everyone, I suspect, is a hybrid animal: part hedgehog, part fox. We might be hedgehogian in certain disciplines or areas of our life (our religion, our politics), and positively foxy in others (our academic studies, our pet interests). Occasionally, we might undergo conversion or reconversion, metamorphosing from a hedgehog into a fox, and vice versa.^[6] To risk a foxy pronouncement, at a certain level, the world and the people in it defy binary categorization.^[7] I know I certainly do.

As of my writing, I see myself as a fox, but a fox with hedgehogian aspirations. Or maybe I’m a mongoose or a magpie, as I’ve always suspected. (Magpies and mongooses are foxy as well, although with key differences. The mongoose is a hybrid, both a ranger and a burrower. The magpie is a collector, whereas a fox might be content with mere spectatorship. Still, different though they are, magpies and mongooses skew foxy.) Whatever I am, I’m both a drifter and a systematizer—or, at least, a wannabe systematizer.

Fox or hedgehog, drifter or burrower. In contrasting the two types, some questions present themselves: Can breadth be a kind of depth? Do many things turn out to be One Big Thing? Mandala-makers, of course, would answer Yes. At the moment, if pressed, I might answer in the affirmative too.

For the more I travel, the more I see patterns emerging in the landscape around me.^[8] The farther I go—the more I read and think and write—the more I suspect that the world is all of a piece, that everything is connected. (Or that all human knowledge is connected, anyway—the natural world is another matter. However, to risk a hippyish pronouncement, it must be pointed out that shocks and disruptions in the biosphere are blunt arguments for the oneness of the planet. But I digress.) If I have a grand hedgehogian project, if there’s a single throughline that connects all my studies and essays, it’s my attempt to understand the human condition and make sense of our place in the world. The longer I dwell on these immense subjects, the more connections, the more patterning I see. By zooming out from the space dust, the particles reveal themselves to be an ordered whole, a vast, dancing nebula. The true world-picture might be a mandala after all.

Or it might not. (Another foxy pronouncement! I just can’t help myself.) After all, nebulae expand, contract, gyrate, and change shape. Patterns can be broken, and their fragments may or may not resolve themselves into new patterns. Contingency, as always, gets a say—perhaps even the final word.^[9]

Sorry if this is all a bit vague, or too rambly and disconnected. It’s just the fox’s way, although, truthfully, it’s a bit vague for me, too. Acknowledging the world’s complexity doesn’t make the world any less inscrutable or daunting.

However, I must keep in mind that it’s still early days for my intellectual project. I hope that in time everything becomes clearer. I also hope that you’ll stick by me as I continue to wander over the hills and far away. For wherever the road leads, whatever twists and turns and pitfalls may come, it promises to be a fascinating trip.

^[1] I doubt that de Hamel would call his vocation “work.” Sufferers of the gentle madness likely don’t perceive their labors as such, especially when paid to perform them.

^[2] I still doubt my—indeed, anyone’s—ability to know anything. I here echo Montaigne’s sentiment: “There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.” But an elusive prey is small reason to abandon the pursuit. The rarer the game, the more thrilling the hunt.

^[3] Even in college and graduate school, I often found myself reading outside of the curriculum. Most of my classmates seemed thrilled to study their pet subjects in class; I, on the other hand, often viewed class as a distraction from my real interests. And I say this as a champion of higher learning.

^[4] It must be noted that the hedgehog might range just as widely as the fox. Indeed, some of the people Berlin categorizes as hedgehogs were some of the best-educated and most widely traveled men of their time, or of any time. The difference between a hedgehog and a fox lies not in how much one knows, but in what one does with his knowledge.

^[5] I mean no disrespect to hedgehogs. If it isn’t clear by now, I envy their expertise. Furthermore, I see strengths and weaknesses in both strategies of sensemaking.

^[6] A conversion might simply prove that one was a fox in hedgehog’s clothing all along, or vice versa. (Perhaps when I was a Christian I thought myself a hedgehog, only to find out that I was an agnostic fox with atheistic sympathies all along. Maybe, as I come closer to death and my horror of mortality increases, I’ll flip again. In this way, our intellectual journeys are similar to the evolution of organisms.) I begin to see why Berlin considered his theory a sort of intellectual parlor game!

^[7] This is a tricky pronouncement, especially given the popular discourse of recent years. The problem of binarism probably deserves its own essay.

^[8] At least, I think I see patterns emerging. I might simply be a victim of a sort of pareidolia of the intellect. See my most recent essay for more about that.

^[9] Here as always, my qualifications, reversals, and contradictions out me as a true fox. I might occasionally adopt erinaceous habits like snuffling around in the dirt or curling myself up into a tight ball (figuratively speaking, of course), but I’ll never be able to flush out my vulpine DNA. (Nor do I wish to.)

1. The Black Panther Party

There’s a legend in South Georgia of an invisible terror that haunts the dismal, moss-choked swamps, a tale of a phantom that stalks the lonely, silent pine barrens and dusk-swathed cotton fields. Old-timers whisper of a wraith that prowls in the dark, a phosphorus-eyed demon that carries off livestock in the night, leaving not so much as a single track in its ghostly path. City folk may laugh and forestry officers may scoff, but wiser heads know better than to be caught in the back pastures after sundown, lest they become the next victims of this bloodthirsty shadow-dweller.

I speak, of course, of the fabled black panther.

My brothers and I first heard tell of the black panther back in grade school. In the school cafeteria or out on the playground, classmates regaled us with stories of their close encounters with these ferocious beasts: a shadow seen at the far end of the firebreak while hunting deer, a dark feline shape streaking for the woods spotted out of the corner of the eye while cleaning out the chicken coop. (Given the black panther’s supposed ubiquity, it’s curious that one has never wandered onto a back patio or been recorded by a Ring camera in the Atlanta suburbs. For whatever reason, black panthers are only ever sighted in out-of-the-way places: rural roads, forest trails, farmer’s fields, etc.) In every encounter, the black panther is no sooner spotted than disappeared, leaving only a single imprint of its powerful forepaws in the loose Georgia sand—if it leaves any trace at all.

Firsthand encounters with the black panther are somewhat rare. In most cases, black panther sightings are secondhand accounts from friends or, more often, family members. It seems that at some point nearly everybody and their third cousin has seen a black panther, yet nobody—not even the most avid sportsman who passes the greater part of his spare time in the backwoods and fields—has ever produced a body or so much as a single high-resolution photograph of one. For the people of Emanuel County and environs, the black panther’s reality is taken on faith.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that this folk faith is general in the eastern half of the country. From Florida to New England and all the way over to eastern Oklahoma, reports of black panthers are common to the point of mundanity. What I took to be a harmless bedtime story or local legend is, in fact, a national phenomenon.

It also wasn’t until much later that I learned that the black panther has become a totem of antiestablishment epistemology. In one of the mustier corners of the internet, the black panther has undergone transmogrification, changing from a mythical big cat into a sacred cow. From Facebook to field and stream chatrooms, outdoorsmen, skeptics, and assorted local yokels bitterly debate the black panther’s existence. But as with all such outlandish claims, neither side can prove or disprove the panther’s reality. All they can do is bicker endlessly, advancing claim after unfalsifiable claim in support of their side while discharging the occasional fusillade of argumentum ad hominem against their enemies. As one would expect, every reasonable counterargument from the naysayers is summarily dismissed by those who believe.

It is at precisely this point that the black panther passes from the stuff of rural legend into the realm of conspiracy theory. In online fora, the common refrain of the pro-panther camp is You think that because that’s what they want you to think!—“they,” of course, being the establishment, broadly defined: your state’s department of natural resources, the faculty of biology down at Directional State University, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the list goes on. (How much these various institutions and agencies actually dialogue and collaborate—let alone align with each other to counter or cover up evidence and allegations of cryptids—who can say?) As in all conspiracy theories, the truth has been actively and maliciously suppressed. The truth about the black panther hasn’t come out because powerful people have a vested interest in keeping it from coming out.

But the longer I think about it, the more I think that the black panther is something more than just a figment of the conspiracist mind. Zooming out and taking a bird’s-eye view of the debate, the black panther reveals itself as a facet of a specific folk epistemology, an entire homegrown system of knowledge that stands in deliberate contradistinction to the received wisdom that emanates from our governmental agencies and academic institutions. Put simply, the black panther symbolizes a certain way of looking at the entire world. Put less simply, the black panther is a shorthand for a sort of antiacademic and anti-intellectual hermeneutics of suspicion that seems to have proliferated in recent years.

This folk epistemology is grounded in subjective perception and direct experience—particularly personal and familial experience.^[1] It privileges the experiences, beliefs, and generational knowledge of friends and relatives over those of the denizens of the ivory tower, that self-satisfied legion of so-called experts with fancy credentials but absolutely zero street smarts. (This is to say nothing of asshole Substack commentators and armchair philosophers who write off popular wisdom and alternative facts as “bullshit.”) Furthermore, in this way of thinking, appeals to ambiguity are often deployed to fill knowledge gaps (“Who knows what crazy things might be running around back in them woods?”). Under this epistemology, home remedies are at least as good if not better than conventional medicine; intuition and spiritual insight are trusted over and above positive knowledge; direct experience trumps theoretical knowledge, book learning, and things known only in the abstract; and hand-me-down knowledge trumps every novel perspective—even one’s own. (In my experience, deference to elders is a defining characteristic of folk epistemologies everywhere.) Under the laws of this epistemology, Grandma never told no lie.

Again, folk epistemology is distinct from conspiracism. However, this kind of thinking seems to be the seedbed from which conspiracy theories sprout and bloom. Belief in the black panther isn’t necessarily a conspiracy theory, but we can see how easily such an otherwise harmless belief shades into conspiracy theory. And as we will see, this nexus between alternative facts and conspiracy theories rears its head over and over again in popular discourse.

2. The Chemtrail Club

Summer 2016. Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. My brother, a Naval aviator, walks into a barbershop. (No, this is not a joke. Or maybe it is—a bad joke, at that—depending how you interpret this incident.) He sits down and asks for the Navy special: a high fade, short on top.

Routine barbershop chat ensues. Once the ice has been sufficiently broken, the stylist sees her opening and goes for it:

“Let me ask you something since you’re a flyer,” she says. “Are you allowed to tell me anything about the chemtrails I see coming out of planes these days?”

My brother explains to her that those funny white streaks in the sky are not chemical trails, but condensation trails—that is, ice clouds that form when hot exhaust from the jet’s engines mixes with cold, low-pressure air at high altitudes. The stylist isn’t convinced.

“Well, I’ve read about it more and more online, and over the last year I’ve seen way more planes with chemtrails than I saw last year. And last year my daddy’s tomato crop was really good and all the tomatoes were healthy, but this year since there’s been more chemtrails in our area his tomatoes look way worse and are way smaller than last year.”

My brother can see which way the wind is blowing. Still, he tries again, this time using a different tack.

He explains that chemicals or jet fuel released at thirty thousand feet would simply atomize and never reach the ground. Furthermore, even if the chemicals didn’t atomize, they wouldn’t reach the ground in the desired concentration. (This is why crop duster pilots make their passes at an altitude of ten to fifteen feet rather than a hundred.) Either way, chemicals released at such an altitude would be ineffective, regardless of intent.

The stylist shakes her head, unmoved. “Well, all I know is that I’ve seen a lot more of them and my daddy always has good tomatoes and now this year they’re not that good.”

The stylist finishes up. My brother gets up, pays, thanks her, and walks out the door. Driving home, he wonders: Why would someone solicit expert opinion simply to reject it in favor of a baseless preconception? Why would someone favor certain correlations but reject others? Why not apply Occam’s razor and pare away convoluted explanations?

Why do people believe so much bullshit??

Here again we see the nexus of folk epistemology and conspiracism at work. The stylist hasn’t made any specific allegations against The System, but her gut tells her that They are up to something, and that whatever They’re up to is clearly not good. (That she asked my brother if he’s “allowed” to discuss chemtrails implies that the government is hiding something from the public, and that my brother might have access to this secret knowledge, whatever it is.) The hermeneutics of suspicion, it seems, has a firm hold on this woman’s mind.

But there’s another phenomenon at work here, too: that is, false causality. In the stylist’s case, false causality arises from correlations she’s observed in her everyday environment. The evidence before her eyes is then corroborated and reinforced by crackpot theories published online. For her, seeing is believing.

But just like in black panther sightings, the question must be asked: Are these people in fact seeing what they think they’re seeing? Certainly, in some cases, hunters and fisherman have seen cats, perhaps even big cats. (Rarely but not unusually, mountain lions wander far outside of their ordinary range.) But in every case, the cat they see is not the cat they allege to have seen. (For example, the image captured by a trail camera in the first section of this essay shows what is obviously a black housecat, not a wildcat of any kind. This problem of accurate reportage has in recent years been exacerbated by artificial intelligence and other modes of digital fakery.) If they have in fact seen a wildcat, it is almost certainly a bobcat, or possibly a mountain lion—whatever it is, it’s not a black panther, as American black panthers simply don’t exist. (And no, there is no evidence that melanistic mountain lions exist, either.) Add optical effects, sensory illusions, and low light into the mix, and eyewitness accounts become even less reliable.^[2]

Similarly, there’s no question that the stylist is seeing high-altitude emissions. Indeed, we all see them every day. (Ironically, vehicle emissions are responsible for serious environmental damage—namely the deleterious effects of climate change—but I wager that the stylist has her doubts about all that as well.) But as my brother explained to her, she’s not seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. She’s a victim of a broken form of empiricism.

For whatever reason, though, my brother’s explanation isn’t good enough for her. Ultimately, the stylist sees what she chooses to see, believes what she chooses to believe. In this, she’s just like the rest of us, irrespective of the soundness of our epistemological and intellectual commitments.

3. The Portable Rock Art Lobby

By now, if you’ve read my prior work, you must know that I’m an artifact collector. For the last twenty-eight years, artifact collecting has been my chief and ruling passion.

What you probably don’t know about, though, is the cult of portable rock art. In brief, members of the rock art subculture believe that common rocks that resemble other things—plants, animals, human beings, etc.—are not common rocks, but effigies made and carried by ancient people: hence, portable rock art. Whereas most effigies were made for ceremonial or funerary purposes, pieces of rock art were, these people claim, personal talismans or ice-age worry stones—or something like that. (It seems that in the house of rock art there are many warring mansions— think of it as a sort of déclassé Wars of the Roses. In this way, the rock art crowd is not dissimilar to other academic and pseudo-academic communities wherein consensus is forever elusive.)

Like the black panther, rock art might at first seem a harmless belief. And yet, the rock art crowd is prepared to die on this hill. Occasionally, proponents of rock art will pop up in online fora to publish their finds and sell their agenda, becoming belligerent when challenged or ridiculed. Other times, rock art advocates go public with their harangues, confronting scholars at university meet-and-greets and artifact identification fairs. So strong are their convictions that some among them have gone as far as to release a ninety-minute documentary on the subject, a video manifesto vindicating their glorious cause while simultaneously exposing the academic establishment for the den of vipers it truly is. What JFK (1991) is to an entire generation of conspiracy theorists, this film is to students of pseudohistory: a formal challenge, a war cry, an ultimatum, a loud and clear message to the men in the high castle that the truth—the Capital-T Truth—belongs not to them, but to the people, the masses. Though their lies may persist for an age, all perfidy will fall, and the truth shall prevail. Such is the creed of the portable rock art community—indeed, of conspiracy theorists the world over.

More than their cousins in the black panther and chemtrail communities, rock art enthusiasts seem to be animated by resentment and anti-institutional bias. The documentary portrays academics as so many pearl-clutchers, gatekeepers of an ossified, hidebound establishment the sole purpose of which is to protect its precious pet theories while excluding all novel propositions out of hand. (Actually, the academy is almost exclusively in the business of producing new knowledge, not guarding musty, outdated information. However, one must make a strong case indeed if he wishes to persuade the academic community or overturn regnant theories. But we’ll put all that to one side for now.) To members of the rock art cult, the academy is not merely intolerant of competing perspectives, but overtly anti-truth, even anti-progress.

The problem, once again, is that there’s no hard evidence to support the portable rock art theory. Yes, Native Americans made effigies and other pieces of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic art. However, archaeologists have a strong understanding of the preferred stylings and methods of manufacture deployed by ancient artisans—stylings and techniques that are noticeably absent on pieces of rock art. What rock art enthusiasts call vestiges of manufacture, archaeologists and artifact appraisers call fossils or erosion.

As with the black panther and chemtrail lobbies, belief in portable rock art is founded on faulty observations. But in this case, there’s a name for these faulty observations: pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving images, representations, meaning, and patterns where none exists. Victims of pareidolia see something, yes, but what they see isn’t real—that is, something altered or contrived by human hands (or alien hands, as believers in Martian life might argue). What they see is mere illusion, a product of neural trickery.

Among the many problems that plague perception-based beliefs, perhaps none is as formidable or pernicious as pareidolia. How, after all, can you persuade someone to doubt the evidence of his eyes? How can you convince someone that he isn’t seeing what he claims to see? At least with a chemtrail, one could, if put to it, capture water vapor and analyze its chemical composition. With a black panther, one could shoot or poison the poor animal, thereby exposing it as the bobcat or housecat it really is. In a word, claims of black panthers and chemtrails can be refuted by verification.

Pareidolia, however, defies all attempts at external verification. The only cure (so to speak) is to acknowledge this phenomenon for what it is: a trick of a primate brain that has evolved to facilitate rapid pattern recognition.^[3] It is a militantly ignorant person, then, who not only fails to see things for what they are, but also fails to recognize the mechanism by which he is deceived.

The irony here is that rock art enthusiasts can, unlike black panther and chemtrail lobbyists, produce the thing in question. Rock art can quite literally be held up to the light of day. It can be examined and disqualified by comparison. Still, scrutiny and comparative analysis aren’t enough to influence a mind barricaded by prejudice. Yes, seeing is believing—but some people simply cannot be made to see.

4. Physician, Heal Thyself

By now you might be wondering why any of this matters. These issues seem harmless enough, so who cares whether anyone believes them?

I too am not convinced that any of these issues is all that important—not in isolation, anyway. What is important, and what the prevalence of these and similar issues seems to point to, is a general erosion of trust in established institutional knowledge. Seemingly harmless beliefs like the ones discussed here tend to cluster around other, potentially dangerous beliefs. They are symptomatic of a larger epistemological crisis, a breakdown of consensus that is both the cause and result of a rancorous politics on both sides of the aisle. Although minor, they are further befoulments in an already polluted information ecosystem. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not calling for a return to a golden age of truth-telling. There never was such an age, and therefore we cannot return to it. However, there is ample data to suggest that more people are daily turning away from institutional knowledge towards conspiracy theories.) Regrettably, as of my writing, I can’t envision any surefire means of narrowing or closing this ever-widening rift.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to close the rift. Indeed, each of us has a responsibility and a role to play in mending the breach. If society is nothing more than the sum of many individuals, then societal drift is nothing more than the sum of individual behaviors and beliefs. If enough individuals reform themselves, then they will have reformed the whole.

One way to start reforming oneself is to adopt intellectual humility. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I’ve taken an unusually haughty tone in these pages, the sort of high-handed way of speaking that causes some people to turn away from institutional wisdom in the first place. In several places, I’ve overstepped the thin boundary that separates raillery from contempt. So suppose we turn the cannons for a moment: Who am I—who is anyone—to make such judgements and prescriptions? Who am I to say that I’m right about anything? How do I know the things I claim to know? How does anyone know anything? Quite unexpectedly, in questioning the bases of unconventional beliefs, I’ve found myself questioning the bases of my own epistemological commitments.

In examining my own beliefs, I realize that I too believe in and have believed in my fair share of fictions, things that other people as uncharitable as I might easily term bullshit. My Christian faith, which once seemed so obviously real and true, now seems like so much superstition;^[4] human rights, which I like all good liberals hold dearly, are mere ideals, liberal shibboleths, Johnny-come-lately political values cut from whole cloth (as John Gray says, “To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake”); state and international borders—things I once swore to protect, to give my life defending, if necessary—are arbitrary lines in the sand; money too is a fiction, which in this day and age exists primarily in cyberspace;^[5] and the list goes on. These dearly held fictions might be made real in some measure by common consent, but they are fictions nevertheless.

In addition to these useful fictions, I also believe in many things that I am incompetent to verify for myself. A key example is climate change. I believe in climate change but, being that I’m not a meteorologist, I’m in no position to collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from my own data. I can’t prove or disprove climate change’s reality any more than a conspiracy theorist can prove the reality of chemtrails.

So why do I believe in climate change? I believe because trusted global institutions have come to the consensus that the planet’s climate is changing due to human activity. I believe because I was raised to trust that these institutions have the public interest at heart, and therefore I should accept their conclusions as valid. Additionally, I believe because I have made a positive decision to believe (this, despite my native skepticism regarding almost everything). I’ve made this positive decision in part because the evidence in favor of climate change—particularly evidence of which I have firsthand experience, such as unusual extreme heat events and unseasonable forest fire smoke—is too compelling to dismiss.

All of this is to say that although I am convinced of the correctness of my beliefs, I recognize and freely admit to the limits of my knowledge. I confess my fallibility. Therefore, I don’t claim to have a monopoly on the truth. I do, however, claim to have the correct disposition: that is, a willingness to trust our institutions until it’s been credibly demonstrated that they can’t be trusted.^[6] After a lifetime of trusting the establishment, I simply don’t know any other way of making sense of the world—nor do I wish to acquire a new one. In this way, I’m as stubborn and biased as the people I so roundly criticize here.

The important thing is that I keep my stubbornness and biases at the front of my mind, just as I do my virtues and strengths. I take it as my duty to carry forward this self-knowledge—both the good and the bad—into all of my intellectual pursuits. Indeed, I see cultivating humility as our collective duty, for individuals and institutions alike.

5. Conclusion

So why do people believe this stuff? Again, I don’t have definitive answers (who does?), but I do have some opinions. I submit that any number of the below factors might work in combination to produce and solidify certain beliefs:

First, our brains are hardwired for sensemaking. Human beings are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity and mystery. In the absence of high-quality information, we cobble together explanations for observed phenomena from the materials at hand, however flimsy those materials might be.

Secondly, as stated above, everyone grows up in a unique epistemological ecosystem. (For example: growing up, my ecosystem—the water I swam in—was colored by a somewhat uneasy combination of charismatic Christianity, conventional institutional wisdom, and mainstream liberal values. In the years since losing faith, my epistemology has survived largely intact. If I’ve lost anything, it’s internal contradictions and inconsistencies, though plenty of those remain.) Put simply, every one of us is raised to believe certain things and to reject or be suspicious of other things. The spectrum of values and beliefs one might hold will be especially broad in a country as ethnically and culturally heterogeneous as the United States.

Thirdly, in my experience, most people are incurious—or, more precisely, they’re curious about only those things that fall within the domain of the strange, occult, and improbable. The everyday simply doesn’t interest them. For such people, it’s somehow easier to accept that unusual and seemingly inexplicable phenomena are the work of a shadowy global cabal or extraterrestrial intelligence than it is to accept a simpler, more rational explanation grounded in demonstrable fact. Why this might be the case, I’m not sure. Perhaps people use this tactic to paper over or compensate for shortfalls in their education or cognitive abilities, shortfalls of which they may or may not be aware and that might be occasions for prickles of embarrassed self-consciousness. In my opinion, most people would rather cling to an invented explanation, however patently false or ridiculous, than admit to their ignorance. But this is dangerous. As Thomas Nagel writes, “to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.” For the mass of people, things we don’t understand or of which we aren’t aware don’t matter and therefore don’t warrant serious consideration. I submit that this flippancy is at the bottom of many of the problems our species faces today.

Fourthly, most of these controversial phenomena—black panthers, chemtrails, portable rock art, etc.—are approximations of the truth. Big cats do exist, and they do occasionally wander outside their normal range; airplanes do expel various substances into the atmosphere, including harmful chemicals; ancient people did create effigies and other kinds of artwork. In light of these facts, these outlandish phenomena don’t seem so outlandish after all. In brief, their proximity to the real thing lends each of these figments an air of plausibility.

Fifthly, some people might lack a sufficiently broad perspective on the matter in question to be able to judge it correctly. For example, when pressed to produce a picture or body of a black panther, many true believers answer that this is impossible because the panther is crafty enough to frustrate all attempts at detection. Such people might not realize that no animal is so elusive as to evade determined and well-equipped naturalists indefinitely. (If we can locate and study marine life at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, then we can certainly locate and study a black panther in the wilds of Tennessee.) In fact, just a few weeks ago, a snow leopard—a secretive, cagey, rarely seen beast of which only a handful remain across a range spanning many thousands of largely inaccessible square miles—mauled a skier in northwest China. The snow leopard’s situation could reasonably be generalized to the black panther. However, in order to make such generalizations, one must first know about these things.

Sixthly, people who think themselves excluded by the system seem to adopt an oppositional attitude towards established knowledge, perhaps even taking spiteful glee in their contrarianism. (For instance: there has in recent years been an unsettling upsurge in belief in a flat Earth. While I’m sure that some people really believe the Earth is flat, I suspect that many flat Earthers are not true believers, but habitual contrarians who delight in their own perversity.) For these people, counterarguments and rebuttals are not invitations to reasonable dialogue, but attacks to be repelled. Challenges simply harden their beliefs. How, then, are we to coax such people back into the fold of conventional wisdom?

Seventhly, I suspect that many proponents of alternative facts have, at some point, been failed or disappointed—perhaps even injured—by the system. Their resentment causes them to seek answers elsewhere. (This seems to be especially true of people who have had negative experiences with the medical world.) Once they step off on their journey into the information netherworld, every new “discovery” leads them one step farther down the rabbit hole of antiestablishment thought until they come at last to the land of arrant conspiracism. For many people, once they’ve arrived, there’s no coming back from this shadowy region.

Eighthly and lastly, a sad fact of being is that every intellectual journey eventually leads to a dead end. Dead ends might be reached sooner, or they might be reached later—it all depends on the resources one has at his disposal, as well as the power of his intellect and imagination. But no matter how rich one’s resources might be, at a certain point the trail goes cold and further evidence becomes off limits. At this point, one must accept things—the existence of the pyramids, the reality of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the Earth’s roundness, our melting ice caps, rapidly increasing mean global temperatures, the origin of the universe, God’s existence, and so on ad infinitum—on faith. But where one chooses to place his faith—well, that’s the real issue, isn’t it?

So where do we go from here? In this age of ever-greater antiestablishment sentiment and ceaseless information warfare, is there any hope for the truth or, at the very least, the most complete version of the truth that’s within our power to attain?

Truthfully, I don’t know. I’d like to think that we’ll all wake up and come to our senses. But as the events of the last ten years suggest, there’s simply no reason to hold out hope for this outcome. (This is to say nothing of the events of the last ten minutes. Given the pace at which absurdities pile up in this sociocultural moment, how can anyone keep up with it all, let alone fight back?) At this point, resignation might be the wiser choice, perhaps even the healthier choice.

Still, I hope every day that we do come to our senses. For I fear that if we don’t, then one day soon, hard contact with reality will force us awake.

^[1] Never mind that empiricism is nothing more than a scientist’s direct experience of his subject. In this populist view, the direct experiences of outsiders—however well-educated or qualified those outsiders might be—don’t count. Dangerous as this insider-outsider binary is, I hypothesize that it is rooted in episodes of real antagonism and bad faith. After all, from predatory coal companies and petrochemical giants to carpetbaggers and William Sherman, outsiders have been giving Southern countryfolk a raw deal for decades. Viewing the matter in this light, one can hardly blame these people for harboring a perennial distrust of The System.

^[2] Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that if you sit alone in the woods long enough, your eyes will start to play tricks on you, especially during the shadowy twilight hours of dawn and dusk. I can’t tell you how many times the “deer” at the far edge of the alfalfa plot turned out to be a clump of dog fennel, or perhaps a pine bough bobbing gently in the evening breeze. Furthermore, in low light, animals with ordinary color patterns appear darker than they are, sometimes even completely black.

^[3] I must add that the problem isn’t really pareidolia: we all experience pareidolia, often multiple times a day. (Look up at the clouds for two minutes and behold all manner of familiar shapes.) The problem is failing to recognize this phenomenon for what it is.

^[4] I still believe that Christianity like all religions contains considerable philosophical truth, but that’s a matter for another essay.

^[5] Money, even before the abolition of the gold standard, is and has always been a fiction. Just like paper currency, gold, gems, and other precious stuffs have no intrinsic value in actuality. They are valuable simply because people across all times and places have declared them valuable. If anything on this planet holds intrinsic value, it’s the nourishment we acquire from food.

^[6] Conspiracy theorists would probably make precisely this argument, that our institutions have been discredited. While it’s true that some institutions have been caught out in lies and errors regarding some things, that doesn’t mean that they lie and are mistaken about everything. But as we’ve seen, there’s a point at which appeals to rationality break down, leaving people on both sides of the issue no choice but to part company.

“Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

—W. G. Sebald

“But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable.”

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

***

Last spring, my wife Kay and I moved out of Chicago’s South Side and into the Western Suburbs. One of the first things we noted about our neighborhood, besides the hush and quiet, was its abundant wildlife. Among our new neighbors were great horned owls, coyotes, opossums, skunks, sharp-shinned hawks, red-tailed hawks, and songbirds of all kinds. (After two years in the city, it does my heart good to again see different species of woodpecker, especially the dapper little downy woodpeckers adorned in their piebald latticework jackets.) Most notable, though, were the squirrels. Squirrels—both grey squirrels and their larger, rust-brown cousins, the fox squirrels—were everywhere.

Of course, by this time, Kay and I were rather used to squirrels. Grey squirrels show up all over the South Side, from city parks to the university’s quadrangle to the thousands of wiry black locust trees that line the neighborhood’s warren of narrow cross streets. As it is in communities of every kind nationwide, so it is there, squirrel and man living in easy symbiosis, the heaps of litter and assorted offage (think pizza crusts, discarded snack foods, and sacks upon sacks of household refuse) keeping the squirrelfolk in fine fettle all the year round. (American superabundance has put a chicken in every pot and, as a corollary, a squirrel in every dumpster.)

But somehow, the suburban squirrelscape was different. The South Side squirrels were individuals, rogues; judging by appearances, Every squirrel for himself was the law of the land. In that rough and ready crowd, no pizza crust ever went uncontested.

Suburban squirrels, on the other hand, are organized, tight-knit, and regimented. For whatever reason, intersquirrel competition seems not to exist here. Indeed, it’s not unusual to see upwards of six fox squirrels happily munching acorns beneath the shade of a single mature burr oak. (It’s also not uncommon to see grey squirrels and fox squirrels quietly tolerating each other. There seems to be neither interspecies nor intraspecies competition here.) In fact, the suburban squirrels often cooperate to procure food. For instance: in their many raids on our bird feeder, one squirrel will ascend the feeder to shake out seeds that the other squirrel, positioned on the ground below, can gather and eat. For the South Side squirrels’ suburban kin, teamwork makes the gluttonous dream work.

One squirrel, however, has broken ranks with his^[1] regimented brethren and gone off on his own program. We call this furry little nonconformist Halfie.

Halfie is a fox squirrel. (In a moment of waggishness—but, admittedly, not of originality—I dubbed him “Halfie” on account of his missing half of his tail. How he lost it, I’m not sure, though I’d wager a hawk was involved. A few months ago, Kay and I watched in horrified fascination as a red-tailed hawk killed and devoured a grey squirrel in our back yard. For more than an hour, the hawk picked at the carcass meticulously with its beak, swallowing chunks of flesh whole and slurping down the poor rodent’s entrails like so much blood-sauced linguine. My hunch is that at some point, Halfie narrowly escaped a similar fate.) In most ways, Halfie is a typical representative of his species: he spends most of his day foraging and building up food caches. Once he’s eaten his fill, he returns to his treetop nest, there to sleep away the rest of the frigid January day.^[2]

What makes Halfie different, though, is his sociability. In contrast with his skittish fellows, he is decidedly unsquirrelly. In fact, happily but quite unexpectedly, Halfie has become our friend.

How did this happen? Quite by accident: one day, while making tea, Kay spotted Halfie hanging out on the windowsill, waiting his turn at the bird feeder. She approached and tapped the windowpane to see how he’d react. Curiously, he didn’t run; instead, he sat back on his haunches, pressed his forepaws against the pane, and returned Kay’s curious gaze, holding this posture for a few moments before retreating to the safety of the nearby A/C unit. From there, he watched as Kay opened the window, left a trail of blueberries along the sill, and shut it again. After a pause, in which woman and squirrel continued to size each other up, Halfie crept once more to the sill, seized the nearest berry, and proceeded to nosh. Having finished one berry, he moved to the next, and so on down the line. Sated at last, he zipped away to the refuge of the giant silver maple that towers over our back fence.

So began Halfie’s regular pilgrimages to the window, and our regular tribute: apples, pears, stale crusts of bread, in-shell peanuts—anything and everything we can spare, Halfie will gladly eat. Our understanding has advanced to the point where, by tapping on the window, I can summon him from his perch on the top of the shed on the other side of the yard. At this rate, I half expect to come downstairs one morning and find the fat little bastard stretched out on the couch, watching our TV.

Of course I make this last comment in jest. We’re pleased to accommodate Halfie and help him—indeed, all of our wild neighbors, including that toothy, rat-tailed opossum that comes by now and again—stay fat and happy through the long Illinois winter. Still, this comment does point to several questions, and ones that must be asked: Is Halfie really our friend? Is any animal truly man’s friend, or are domesticated animals merely helpless dependents or freeloaders? Is friendship the correct way to characterize any of the various modes of exchange between species? I refer to Halfie as our friend, but I do so advisedly.

In this essay’s prefatory quotation, W. G. Sebald famously claims that human beings and animals don’t understand each other, that we can’t understand each other. Radical differences in intelligence, perception, communication, lifeways—indeed, every facet of living and being—make sympathy between species impossible. In Sebald’s model, every species is marooned on its own islet in a sprawling archipelago, communicating with each other through tin-can telephones (if they’re communicating at all).

Of course, experience makes us revolt against Sebald’s description of human-animal relations: How dare he suggest that Fido and I aren’t perfectly simpatico? At least my dog gets me, even if nobody else does! So insist pet owners the world over.^[3] Dogs—and cats, and birds, and rabbits, and guinea pigs, and ferrets, and every other fuzzy domestic companion on the market today—are truly man’s best friend, more trustworthy and reliable than one’s human friends. Phil might stab you in the back, but Fido won’t.^[4]

All of this seems self-evident, especially to anyone who’s ever owned a pet. Closer examination, of course, presents a murkier picture.

We must ask ourselves: What are the necessary characteristics of friendship? What does friendship look like in action? In short, what does it mean to be friends?

Of course, answers to these questions will vary, and depend upon factors of individual temperament (for example, how one esteems animals, and one’s level of sourness or cynicism). What’s more, we don’t have enough time or space here to go too far down this rabbit hole. Suffice to say, friendship, at a minimum, requires some form of exchange or mutual generosity, a form of reciprocity. Put simply, people don’t stay friends if they’re not getting something out of it. (Sad sacks and masochists excepted. You might call this view cynical. I call it honest.) How this generosity manifests will vary from friendship to friendship.

Based on this provisional description, I am willing to go so far as to say that Yes, human beings and animals can be friends—some animals, anyway. Dogs get a lot out of their partnership with human beings—food, shelter, a warm couch or doggie bed on which to veg out—but also provide their owners with plenty of services in return. (Companionship and emotional support being just two among myriad services, from medical services to shepherding and policework. Truly, the range of canine talents is astonishing.) Cats get a heavily lopsided bargain, though they too can provide services beyond snuggles, nose touches, and the sense of quiet dignity they (sometimes) bring to a home. (Once, on a sidewalk in Seattle, I met a sphynx wearing a service animal vest. According to his owner, who suffers from a seizure disorder, this fey little beast can, by dint of some occult premonitory power, sense an oncoming seizure and, by yowling, warn his master of its approach. O, brave new world, that has such cats in ‘t!) Even crows can be our friends: rarely but not unusually, crows will reward their human benefactors with gifts of various kinds. If this kind of interspecific munificence isn’t the mark of true friendship, then I don’t know what is.

So what about Halfie? Is Halfie actually our friend, or is he an exploiter, a parasite? (Parasitism is the most plausible explanation for our unlikely connection. As William H. McNeill argues, parasitism makes the world go round.) Someway, somehow, he’s suckered us into filling his fat little tummy, gratis. Besides the warm-fuzzies that come from our acts of kindness and generosity to bird and beast, we don’t benefit in any way from our dealings with Halfie. What then is this one-sided bargain if not the machination of a cunning^[5]—however supercute—parasite?

Much as I hate to admit it to myself, Halfie is probably a McNeillian villain: a parasite, not a friend. (You have my solemn promise: the day he brings us a trinket in gratitude for all the free peanuts is the day I will revise my statement, and perhaps perform a Herzogian act of penance of my readers’ choosing.) As of my writing, there is simply no evidence of authentic friendship in our dealings with our stub-tailed pal.

None of this is to discount the miraculousness of our connection with Halfie, lopsided though it is. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not being cynical, merely factual. Kay and I consider our connection with Halfie to be nothing less than quite wonderful. We hope every day for him to come to our window in search of a handout, which we will cheerfully give him.

Some might wonder why this connection should seem such a big deal in the first place—after all, as I describe above, human-animal relationships of all kinds are completely commonplace. And as far as human interactions with wild animals go, handouts to fearless, food-grubbing raccoons and squirrels are about as commonplace as such encounters can be.

But this is just my point: in everything in life, the commonplace is the miraculous. As Thomas Carlyle asserts in this essay’s second prefatory quotation, miracles are all around us. Habituation, though, can cause us to forget just how miraculous the world and everything in it truly are. Therefore, one must constantly cultivate his sense of wonder if he is to appreciate the marvels all around him. One must water his roses if he wishes to see them in full blush.

I mostly agree with Carlyle. However, I think most people at some level recognize and respond to the miraculousness of the natural world, particularly the magic of the animal kingdom. This is why, I think, we never cease to marvel at and delight in our nonhuman friends. When we cuddle up on the rug with our corgi, or when our budgie kisses our nose, or when we chuckle as we watch our tabby cut a caper in chasing the red laser dot for the ten-thousandth time, we are marveling—however tacitly, however subconsciously—at the sheer unlikeliness of the phenomenon before us: that is, the meeting of species as friends, as something of equals. As any pet owner will tell you, one can never tire of wondering at this remarkable and improbable fact of being, regardless of how many times it’s been rehearsed. We don’t have to venture far (for example, making best friends with an octopus) to see the miraculous in action. We see it every day, right in our back yards and living rooms.

This sense of miraculousness is what makes our “friendship” with Halfie worth the trouble. It’s why Kay and I are happy to be exploited by the tiny schemer. Every visit Halfie pays to us at our kitchen window is an occasion for wonder, amusement, and delight. Yes, we know that this kind of thing happens all the time in campgrounds and city parks across the world. Still, our connection with Halfie feels special: of the dozens of squirrels that run riot in our yard, he alone had the nerve to approach us.

This act of trust is a marvel in itself: given the near-death experience that resulted in the loss of Halfie’s tail, this connection feels doubly special and doubly mysterious. One would think that of all the squirrels on our street, he’d be the cagiest, the least likely to risk interspecies relations. If anything, you’d think Halfie would take pains to avoid interacting with or accepting anything from us.

But no: Halfie, for whatever reason, made the first move. He built the first caisson and sank the first pier, thereby laying the foundation for the bridge across the gulf that allegedly divides the different species. What to call this behavior, I’m not sure: call it bravery, resourcefulness, intrepidity, or soft parasitism. Whatever you call it, you can’t call it friendship. At least not yet.

For you could reasonably call it trust, and what is trust if not a prelude to friendship?

^[1] We call Halfie “he.” However, I’m unsure of Halfie’s sex, and how to determine it absent an up-close inspection (which, it must be said, is both impossible and undesirable, for many reasons). If Halfie is in fact female, then I would modify the following paragraph to say that Halfie probably spends a not insignificant part of her day caring for her kits.

^[2] By frigid, I mean positively arctic: as I write, it’s -1 outside.

^[3] Or so they declare in the West, anyway. It’s amusing and ironic that we in the West—where human rights have become the popular religion—often treat animals with greater forbearance and humanity than we do our fellow man.

^[4] This is, of course, faulty reasoning, but we’ll put that to one side for now.

^[5] It’s possible and perhaps even likely that Halfie doesn’t have a conniving bone in his body. (Not to libel the little guy, but he’s probably just not that smart. Squirrels, after all, aren’t famous for their brainpower. Hence the term, “squirrelly.”) The likelier thing is that he has, in an unintended but willing partnership with me and Kay, created a Pavlovian system of stimulus and response of which he is the exclusive beneficiary. (I say exclusive. Perhaps Halfie shares his prizes with other squirrels or with kits, but I have no insight into all that.)

You come into the world alone and invisible. Everyone around you is a stranger. Some of these strangers will play bigger or smaller parts in your life but through it all they will remain strangers. It is possible and even likely that they will become more alien to you as time goes on.

You go through the world as you came into it. It does not matter how far you go: you might range widely, but how many people see you? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Still this a fraction of them all. (And nobody really sees you anyway.) This is what thinkers mean when they talk about atoms and monads, or modern anonymity. They are talking about ghostliness.

Occasionally you will collide with another invisible traveler. These collisions are not predetermined—they are accidents. (Kinship is an accidental collision too.) Sometimes after a collision the two invisible travelers will ‘stick,’ their combination giving them some opacity. But more light passes through them than is restricted. For a moment they might become visible, but barely. The strength of the collision is not predictive of anything.

You want desperately for people to know you but they can’t. (This is especially true for those with whom you have collided.) Even if they want to know you you are powerless to help them learn. You can’t help them know you because words are all you have and words are not enough. How can words delineate the invisible? We talk endlessly about the power of words but words can never fully reveal the person. Words might as well be semaphores manufactured on other worlds.

You think that if nobody knows you at least you can know yourself. But this is not true. You do not see yourself just as you do not see others. Perhaps you see yourself even less than others. (Self-invisibility in part drives anonymity. Because you can’t see yourself you also can’t help others to see you.)

Absent objective information you invent stories to help you make sense of yourself. Over time your stories become myths. Occasionally you tell your myths to your fellow travelers but they do not understand them because they are yours. Anyway, they wish only to hear their own myths.

You think that your story is powerful but where you see power other wayfarers see tedium. They do not hear your story any more than you hear theirs. Tragedy at a remove is no tragedy at all.

Central to your myth is your goodness. Goodness is central to your myth because god programmed you to see yourself this way and you need to believe it to live. You will go as far as to abort goodness to prove its reality. This confusion is part of the reason you are and will remain invisible.

You hope that time will ‘shade’ you in: that you will pass from unseen to intermittently delineated to fully delineated, dimensional, and colored. The opposite is likelier. Your lines might grow in but with time they will become faint again. Possibly they will not grow in at all and so cannot fade.

This cycle continues and will continue to an undetermined end. When that end arrives nobody will notice because a ghost can only ever be a ghost, passing from one night to the next.

Much has been written about the ennobling power of literature. Inevitably, at some point, every author must put in his or her two cents concerning this matter: what literature is, what it’s good for, what it does, or what it should do. (The pithier the author’s assessment, the truer it must be!) Here are some notable examples:

“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled ‘This could change your life.’” ~ Helen Exley

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.” ~ Franz Kafka

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.” ~ Garrison Keillor

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” ~ George Orwell

“I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.” ~ J. K. Rowling

“Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.” ~ René Descartes

Time was that I too believed in the reality of this ennobling force. In my youthful simplemindedness, I believed that literature’s edificatory influence would grow from more to more until, one day and as if by magic, I would graduate from the rank of literary novitiate to that of Grand Old Man of Letters. I was going to be the modern Doctor Johnson—or at the very least, Chesterton reborn. All it would take is a lot of reading, and a lot of time.

If you’ve read my recent work, you might guess that I now consider the ennobling power of literature to be so much bosh. And you’d be right. At this point in my life, I question literature’s power to ennoble—or, for that matter, to do much of anything except what the reader wants it to do for him. (More about that below.) For me, these authors’ assessments are so much enthusiasm, little more than the creed of a literary establishment that’s forever high on its own supply.

In recent years, I’ve fallen out of love with literature—or, to be precise, with fiction.^[1] My reading habit demonstrates this: in 2025 I read a total of thirty books, only three of which—a scanty ten percent—were novels. (Recent years show similar patterns.) And of these three, one was Eugene Onegin, which I read every year in December and can, in a pinch, blow through in a day or two. (A sacrilege, I know. Sue me—or, more appropriately, shoot me.) At this point, most fiction, even elevated or literary fiction, feels too phony and contrived to provide me with intellectual stimulation or emotional satisfaction. As I’ve written before, I struggle to get past its artifice, to overcome my suspicion that it’s all just a sham (albeit a beautiful sham).

To illustrate my dissatisfaction: At the moment, in one of my rare flings with popular fiction, I’m reading Neuromancer, William Gibson’s lauded classic of dystopian futurism. Although I admire Gibson’s knack for worldbuilding, I can’t connect with his characters. There’s nothing distinctive, memorable, convincing, or even particularly human about them, which seems a fatal error in a book where the union of flesh with technology should raise urgent questions about what it is to be human in the first place. Gibson’s failure to marry theme to drama is a dreadful missed opportunity indeed.

Contrast this with the other book I’m currently reading, Katherine Newman et al’s Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. In a single chapter, Newman and her research team reveal far more about the complexities and sheer messiness of human relationships and social structures than many of the best novels reveal over many hundreds of pages (or, in some cases, many volumes). With a narrative economy that would surely be the envy of our very greatest novelists, she lays bare the workings of the human soul—its needs, its deepest fears and desires, and its many, many contradictions—in just the first few chapters. When it comes to truthtelling, fiction can’t hold a candle to thorough, keenly observed sociological studies.

The same holds true of other forms of science writing, even textbooks. Curiously, I find that books about animal and especially primate behavior reveal more about the human experience than works of fiction that are ostensibly concerned with questions of the human experience. I argue, then, that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but more compelling and illuminating, too. Hence, I tend these days to read far more nonfiction than fiction.

Still, I can’t fully turn my back on fiction. If I’d sworn off novels entirely, I wouldn’t observe my annual wintertime tradition of reading Eugene Onegin. Yes, I know myself well enough to realize that I’m a sucker for tradition and will sometimes do things for the sake of form even if I’ve come to see those things as devoid of meaning. However, I also know myself well enough to know that I would’ve given up on this self-imposed tradition long ago if I didn’t get something out of it. In other words, fiction still holds some measure of sway over me, even if its power is, for now, radically diminished.

So why can’t I quit it? Besides entertainment and aesthetic delight, what do I get out of fiction? What is literature for? Like the authors I cite above, I too struggle to provide myself with a satisfactory answer to this question.

Some people argue that literature provides its readers with unique cognitive benefits. (I used to be one of those people.) However, it’s hard to sustain this argument in the face of certain objections: What are these unique benefits? How does literature communicate them to the reader? Are these benefits the result of authorial intent, or subjective interpretation? What are the qualitative differences between these benefits and those provided by philosophy, film, nonfiction, and other narrative artforms? (Jon Phelan, one of my instructors during my studies abroad, has provided us with intelligent answers to some of these questions. If you’re truly curious about this topic, you can find his doctoral dissertation HERE.) When confronted with questions such as these, many champions of literature—especially those who take literature’s special status as granted—find themselves at a loss for strong retorts. As of this moment, I too am powerless to provide a satisfactory answer to these questions.

One of these cognitive benefits is the much-touted “meeting of minds” reported by readers of all skill levels. (The “meeting of minds” is the same thing as the “conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries” Descartes mentions in the quotations listed above.) For many litterateurs, this “meeting of minds” is an obvious good.

But is it, though? In my reading career, I’ve met some dangerously warped minds, William Luther Pierce’s chief among them. His novels Hunter and The Turner Diaries are prime examples of narrative’s negative valence, namely the ways in which literature can be twisted, exploited, or coopted for ideological or propagandistic purposes.^[2] And Pierce’s writing is propagandistic indeed: what are these novels if not arguments in favor of genocide and a subsequent global Aryan utopia? What are they if not a codification in narrative form of the National Alliance’s murderous ideology? (In these novels, Pierce does nothing to mask his and his organization’s genocidal ambitions, which include a fantasy about using nuclear weapons to annihilate the peoples of East Asia. Indeed, so strong was Pierce’s misanthropic hatred that it extended to many of his fellow whites. By Pierce’s lights, even though I’m a white man, I’m still a racial enemy: by marrying outside of my race, I have become a race traitor and therefore deserving of summary execution. It takes a lot to shock me, but I confess that the contents of Pierce’s novels sends chills down my spine.) I suppose it could be argued that Pierce’s morally perverted fantasies fail to live up to Descartes’s qualifier of “good.” If that’s the case, then Pierce’s rags are for all intents and purposes beneath our serious consideration (not to mention, our contempt).

However, our dismissal of extremist literature leads us to another question: What does it mean for a book to be “good?” For example, two of my favorite novels are Nabokov’s Lolita and Flaubert’s criminally underrecognized Salammbô. Without thinking too hard about the term, I would tell anyone that these are “good” novels. By “good,” I mean several things: that they’re entertaining, transportive, meticulously constructed, beautifully written, and generally enjoyable. In my mind, they make up an indispensable part of any serious reader’s literary education. They should be read for the beauty of their style, if for no other reason.

“Good” though these books may be, it can be argued that they have serious thematic problems. Lolita, as everyone knows, is about a heinous sex crime against a child that plays out over several years (not to mention, several hundred pages). Salammbô is a tale of extreme violence and cruelty, indifferently if beautifully told. (Just like in Madame Bovary, Flaubert refuses to pass judgment on his characters. He’s just here to report the facts.) Although I reject both labels, one could argue with some strong evidence that the first novel is immoral, and the second is, at best, amoral.

But to argue for an artwork’s moral palatability is simplistic and reductive. In many cases, such arguments miss the point altogether. (“Moral” stories, it could be said, are strictly for children. This side of adolescence, absolute morality is an extremely murky issue.) It could be that Nabokov, ever the sly trickster, is inviting the reader to plumb the depths of personal and societal morality by dressing up a sordid tale of abduction and serial rape in the loveliest garb his pen can weave. It could be that Flaubert is inviting the reader to impose his own moral judgments on Carthage’s bloody drama in the same instant that he refrains from imposing his own. In other words, these novels might simply be intended as mirrors, not paintings.

Other writers and readers have argued along these lines—that is, that the novel is or should be a sort of optical instrument that the reader can use to view and make sense of the human condition. As Stendhal famously put it, “a novel is a mirror carried along a high road.” Or, as Proust’s narrator says near the end of In Search of Lost Time, he hopes his book will be “a sort of magnifying glass… [that will] furnish [my readers] with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.” Put differently, according to this line of thinking, novels should either help readers “zoom in” on certain aspects of life (like a telescope or magnifying glass), or consider various permutations of individual relationships and social orders (like a sort of kaleidoscope), or do both (zoom in and rearrange) at the same time. To fall back on a cliché, literature should help the reader see the world through different eyes.

I think, for me, that this window into a different mind—this borrowed perspective—is the reason that I can’t quit literature. Equipped with a large stock of books I can, without leaving my house, access whole new worlds of experience. I can see things I’ve never seen before and consider ideas I’ve yet to consider. I can encounter another imagination, a phenomenon that occurs less frequently (if at all) when reading nonfiction. I can, if only for a few hours at a time, entertain entirely new subjectivities.^[3]

Of course, these new subjectivities are not the exclusive province of literature. Film, memoir, philosophy—indeed, nearly every other literary genre and form of art—also invite the spectator to consider life from an alien point of view. However, I think literature has distinct advantages over these other artforms—namely, its long form (a novel can run to many hundreds, even thousands of pages, and people will still read it), limitless room for imaginative play (certain phenomena, like mental states, can be captured more convincingly in writing than they can be, say, on film), and many narrative possibilities (a writer can construct and arrange a story however she wishes. Literature possesses a degree of narrative flexibility that other storytelling forms do not—at least, not in the same degree). Additionally, literature benefits from its lack of visuality. Put differently, words invite a level of interpretation that visual artforms don’t. Literature allows for an interplay of imaginations—that is, the magic that occurs when the reader’s sensibility comes into contact with the writer’s, thereby creating unique and unprecedented ways of understanding the world—that’s arguably impossible with other types of media.^[4] Call these things, when taken altogether, literature’s narrative advantage.

Again, I recognize that none of these properties are unique to literature. The narrative advantage is just that: an advantage, not a monopoly. (Conceivably, a director—armed with a mountain of celluloid and the world’s most long-suffering actors—could make a yearlong film. Whether anyone would watch it is, however, another question.) Still, I do argue that literature, by virtue of its creative properties, can do certain things better than other artforms. The written word fires the imagination in ways other media usually don’t, and perhaps can’t.

The narrative advantage is why I’ll almost certainly never give up on literature. It’s why I’ll continue to read Eugene Onegin every December, even if it’s the only novel I read in a given year. (There’s just something about Pushkin’s miraculous ability to capture such a wide swath of the human experience in so short a space—and capturing it in sonnets, no less—that I find deeply valuable, and that keeps me coming back year after year. For whatever reason, Onegin is just the thing for December, that contemplative time of year when one is inclined to look back over the previous year and take it all in—the good and the bad—from something of an elevated vantage.) It’s why I’ll continue to revisit old favorites and occasionally try something new.

I hope, with time, that I’ll rediscover my love of fiction. To paraphrase the writers quoted at the beginning of this essay, I hope that literature will again unlock the secret chambers of my soul, that the meeting of minds will as formerly invigorate my thought life and guide my imagination to heights I thought unachievable. In sum, I hope that literature will, as it did so many times in a happier past, change my life.

^[1] Throughout this essay, for reasons of style, I use the terms “literature” and “fiction” interchangeably. I hope the context in which these terms appear makes my meaning clear.

^[2] It’s been argued that all authors knowingly or unknowingly champion a particular politics in their writing, be it the politics of the status quo or of normative society’s many and various discontents. I tend to shun political interpretations of art and literature, but even I must admit to the validity of this critique: our culturally and historically contingent political values and assumptions inevitably worm their way into every aspect of our thinking and writing, showing up here and there in both subtle and unsubtle modes of expression. (For example, a close reading of my collected essays shows that my thinking is shot through with liberal assumptions, even though I sometimes openly criticize those assumptions. I believe that liberal values and lifeways are desirable, even though they have their problems and tend to cause liberals to think about the world in naïve terms.) There’s no getting around this fact—at least, not without a radical and conscious act of contrarianism on the writer’s part. Put differently, one must be aware of the inevitability of politically inflected thinking and writing if one wishes to resist creating politically inflected thinking and writing.

^[3] I see value in exposing myself to as many of these subjectivities as possible, even if I find them abhorrent, like Pierce’s racist worldview. Yes, I deprecate Pierce’s worldview. Still, I consider myself a wiser person and better thinker for knowing and understanding it. As I’ve written in another essay, I’ve never regretted knowing anything.

^[4] For example, with film, the viewer is anchored to the director’s visual interpretation of the material. Film denies its viewer the luxury of conjuring her own subjective visualizations. Put simply, books allow the reader to paint pictures in her head, but visual media do not.

I like stuff. As I’ve written elsewhere, I have since boyhood been a habitual amasser of things. In my formative years, I collected anything that appealed to my design sense, from wine bottle labels to various articles of tobbaciana. (Perhaps a savvy analyst could help me make sense of my early fixation on the appurtenances and detritus associated with various adult vices. Maybe after a thousand hours stretched supine on the chaise-longue I’ll come to the breakthrough that No, sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.) Now, as an adult, little has changed: I continue to collect items I deem as possessing aesthetic merit, only now I tend to buy rather than find these things. (Let’s be honest: there’s something endearing—if slightly eccentric—about a child’s pulling a band from a soggy cigar butt that he’s just retrieved from the gutter. But an adult’s doing likewise can’t reasonably be judged anything other than a spectacular breach of good breeding and an unforgivable sin against taste—not to mention hygiene.) My current enthusiasms include artworks old and new; sterling silver salt cellars (generally pre-1800); Pre-Columbian statuary; and, as I’ve written about before, stone artifacts, especially projectile points. As it was in my youth, so it is in my adult life: my private room is a modern-day Kunstkammer, a cabinet of artworks, oddities, and assorted tidbits of material culture that are disparate in form but similar in their power to fascinate and delight. Some of these rarities date to the recent past, but many are very, very old.

As you might have guessed, I have over the years spent a fair amount of money to build my collections. This is a regrettable—however inescapable—fact of life as a hobbyist (for my chosen hobbies, anyway. Bottle caps would make for a much cheaper collection). Believe me, I would far prefer to build my collection the old-fashioned way—that is, through finding, not buying. After all, there’s nothing more thrilling (not to mention cost-effective) than pulling an arrowhead or coin from the alluvium that’s encased it for hundreds or thousands of years. But as I’ve gotten older, my ability to run off to the woods and riversides in search of collectibles has diminished in inverse proportion to my ever-growing adult responsibilities. Sadly, at this stage of life, when it comes to collecting, I have to pay to play.

Fortunately for me, my tastes are somewhat modest. For one example, projectile points and other Native American artifacts are, as far as collectibles go, small potatoes: an item at the upper end of the Native American artifact market might sell for $250,000, perhaps a little bit more. This is a far cry from, say, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO or an Andy Warhol, super-rare and more popular desiderata that can easily fetch millions of dollars at auction in New York or London. All things considered, stone arrowheads and axes—even pieces of Pre-Columbian statuary—aren’t expensive.

Expensive, however, is a relative term. For a member of la moyenne bourgeoisie like me, premium and semi-premium art and artifacts don’t come cheap. Lucky though I’ve been in my ability to cobble together an assemblage of quality relics, I’ve generally had to scrimp and save to build my collection. (Rarely, I’ll find an outstanding bargain or pull off a major uptrade. However, I can’t emphasize the word rarely enough.) As in almost everything, money is the first, largest, and most persistent barrier to entering the circle of elite collectors.

Another barrier to building a quality collection (and one that is more germane to the theme of this essay than price and scarcity) is the prevalence of fakery in the collecting world. Even though Native American artifacts are nearer to the bottom of the collecting hierarchy than they are the top, there are still a great many fakes hiding among the ranks of genuine artifacts.^[1] In my experience, well-made fakes worm their way into even the most highly vetted collections with alarming regularity.^[2] To make matters worse, many authentic artifacts have been fixed up on the sly to conceal blemishes, give the piece greater eye appeal, and, of course, drive up the asking price. Taken altogether, these sad facts make for a sorry state of affairs indeed.

Of course, the artifact collecting world is far from unique in its authenticity crisis. By some estimates, forgeries make up to 50% of the collectible art market. If these estimates are correct, and with so much money on the line, one can’t help but wonder why anyone would fool with rare art and artifacts to begin with. Better to collect something nearly impossible to fake (like cars), or something scarcely worth faking (like bottle caps, although people fake them, too), or something you can easily find yourself, thereby taking the question of authenticity out of the equation altogether. Or better yet, someone might argue, don’t collect at all. Simply spend your time and money on a pastime that’s slightly less fraught—like bowling or shuffleboard, for example.

Our imaginary critic might advance further arguments against collecting. He might also argue that fakery is a rich person’s problem of little concern to the common man, or that authenticity is or should be secondary to aesthetic merit. (After all, many fake artifacts and pieces of art are more beautiful and in some cases more finely crafted than genuine ones.) Taking another tack, he might impugn the collector’s knowledge and perspicacity by arguing that given the quality and prevalence of phony artwork, nobody, no matter how well trained, can ever distinguish between fake and genuine pieces with full confidence in the correctness of his judgments. Finally, he might argue that ignorance is bliss: who cares if a piece is real so long as its owner thinks it’s real?^[3]

These are fair criticisms (albeit from someone who clearly doesn’t understand the collector’s mania. To risk a tautology, one must be bitten by the collecting bug to know what it’s like to be bitten). If a collector is motivated exclusively by a work’s aesthetic merits, then yes, an exact copy of a Dalí should be just as good as an original. If near-exact, virtually undetectable forgeries do in fact exist, then yes, most collectors—especially those outside the whirl of the collecting world—can never be sure if their piece is authentic. (This is especially true in the artifact world, where an artifact’s provenance is lost the moment the piece is pulled from the ground. In other words, if you didn’t find the artifact yourself, you can’t be certain it’s real.^[4] For me as for most artifact collectors, I’m at the mercy of my own limited knowledge and the word of accepted experts. To make matters worse, professional archaeologists are not trained in the art of authentication, and so are generally of little help in determining a relic’s authenticity.) Given these arguments, and given the financial stakes, collecting seems a foolhardy endeavor, perhaps even downright madness.

So why do collectors collect? For one thing, as stated just above, we collect for the thrill of it. To touch or to hold (or even better, to own^[5]) an artwork or artifact that was without a doubt turned out by the hand of a great master (known to history or otherwise) is an exhilarating experience indeed. But there are many reasons to collect that go beyond this one. Some people collect to garner social cachet. Others see art and artifacts as investments, while others still collect for historical value or for aesthetic reasons, or from some idiosyncratic reason only they understand. My hunch is that for most collectors, these motives overlap. Speaking for myself, I am possessed of all the above motives in varying degrees.

But I want to come back to the first point in this list, as I consider it to be the most important one: that is, there’s something thrilling about owning the genuine article. It’s the collector’s obsessive desire for the genuine article that compels him to tiptoe into the minefield of the antiquities market in the first place.^[6] No appeal to reason (and, apparently, no amount of squandered treasure) can dispel the thrill that comes with the knowledge that your painting (or baseball card, or spearpoint, etc.) is the real deal.

For readers who have never felt this way and so don’t quite get where I’m coming from, an imaginative exercise might be in order. For this exercise, we’ll stick with the example of the Clovis point. Here goes:

Imagine yourself living thirteen thousand years ago. It’s midspring in northern Colorado. The snows are beginning to melt, and your clan is preparing to go in search of big game. After stepping off on your annual hunt—a perilous adventure that will last months and take you hundreds of miles from your winter encampment—you take a quick detour to Flattop Butte to quarry some glassy peach-colored chalcedony, a beautiful silica-rich stone that, when properly chipped, yields spectacularly sharp and highly lethal dart points. Several months and hundreds of miles later, somewhere in the prairielands of what is now southern Kansas, your cousins drive a woolly mammoth calf through a small draw and past your covert. With expert feet and hands, you spring from cover and plunge your chalcedony spear into the unfortunate animal’s lungs. That night, amidst the revelry and feasting marking your first successful hunt in ten days, you misplace your spearpoint, which has this evening served double duty as a butcher’s knife.

Thirteen thousand years later, while moving his cattle from one pasture to another, a rancher finds your spearpoint lying in a blowout. He wraps it in a paper towel, fits it snugly inside of a tobacco tin, and gives it to his oldest boy when he comes home from school that afternoon. Decades later, the boy, now grown, passes the spearpoint on to his own son.

But the finder’s grandson isn’t interested. He puts the spearpoint away in a drawer where it sits for years until, one day, he takes it out and puts it up for sale on eBay. You buy it, and now the spearpoint—along with its entire history, a saga spanning millennia—is yours, a time capsule in stone that fits in the palm of your hand.

This is a romantic story and cut from whole cloth. What’s more, it took me all of five minutes to dream up this syrupy tale and write it down. And yet, this sort of imaginative exercise—this sort of daydream—is what gives authentic artworks and artifacts their power to enthrall and entice. When we imagine a paleolithic nomad chipping a fresh spearpoint—or when we imagine Monet at his easel, squinting as he daubs a bit of violet paint onto a half-finished canvas of his famous water lilies, or Michelangelo scrutinizing a block of Carrara marble, or whatever your artistic fantasy of choice might be—we feel a personal connection not just with the thing created, but with the creator himself. Put simply, the artifact is a nexus that links the creator to the collector. It’s a bridge between times and places that anyone with just a little bit of imagination can cross.

For many or perhaps even most collectors, this sense of personal connection with the past is sacred. Financial concerns aside, it’s what makes ownership of the genuine article worth all the time and trouble. Fakery, then, is not only a financial crime or a crime against historicity, but also a crime against human culture. It’s a betrayal of our shared heritage. To create and disseminate fakes is to introduce pollutants into the common pool of international treasure, those great (and dare I say, life-changing) artworks and artifacts that, regardless of who owns them, in some sense belong to us all.

^[1] The language I use here to describe the battleground of suspicion and bad faith that is the Native American artifact market might be too soft and generous. “Cesspit” is a more appropriate term. Fakery is rampant in this hobby. In fact, I would go so far as to say that fakes far outnumber authentic pieces, at least at the high end of the price spectrum. For example: on any given day, query “Clovis” or “birdstone” on eBay and behold what I would estimate is at least a 1:10 ratio of genuine to phony pieces.

^[2] Sometimes, the infiltration of fakes into prestigious collections occurs by design, especially when the keepers of prestigious collections are also high-end dealers. In this hobby, there’s no end of stories about once-trustworthy collectors, dealers, and authenticators exploiting their status for profit. (I’m sure this is the case in many other hobbies, as well.) Regrettably, for many dealers and authenticators, it seems that easy money is too strong a temptation for a mere mortal to resist it indefinitely.

^[3] There seems to be some truth to this argument. I’ve known people to spend like sailors on junk pieces, even in the face of overwhelming admonishment from people who know better. (Possibly, these people buy fakes in deliberate spite of the naysayers. Pride is a strange thing, after all.)

^[4] For some radical skeptics, even finding a piece “in the wild” isn’t good enough, as there have been (mercifully few) cases of highly motivated and satanically malicious fakers salting creeks and fields with reproduction relics. Though salting is a real phenomenon, I submit to my readers that doubting the authenticity of field recoveries is the point at which the skeptic has abandoned his healthy skepticism and allowed it to be supplanted by a deep paranoia that verges on conspiracism. I argue that in almost every case, if you find something in the field, then it’s real.

^[5] Ownership is a tricky thing these days. One camp of aficionados maintains that private ownership is theft, and that all artwork should be democratized through public ownership and exhibition. Another camp—my camp—maintains that private ownership is the height of democratization. (After all, outside of the handful of masterworks that attract outsized admiration and attention within any field or discipline, there’s an awful lot of middling art and artifacts to go around—far too many for even the most thorough museumgoer to see in a single lifetime.)

^[6] Other reasons I entered the minefield of the marketplace are scarcity and quality. I’m a lifelong artifact hunter, but the hard truth is that I will almost certainly never find certain types of artifacts or exceptionally fine artifacts on my own. (For example, I will probably never find a Clovis point. Most active collectors—even the ones who live in areas with numerous paleolithic occupation zones—go their whole lives without finding one.) There are many reasons for this: collecting is competitive, time consuming, physically demanding, and, in many states, a legal grey area, if not forbidden outright. If I want certain items, then I have little choice but to buy them.

“What’s your writing habit like?”

So asked a friend a couple of months ago. At the time, I didn’t have a ready answer. (I rarely do when taken off-guard like this. I am not much of an extemporaneous speaker, preferring instead to think through my answer carefully before responding.) In the months since, I’ve given the matter more thought. In giving the matter more thought, I realized that my friend’s question might supply the substance of yet another essay, so here goes: my writing habit in outline, step by step.

1. The Nebula

Naturally, each essay begins with a problem that I’m struggling with or a question that I want to answer. (Or, to be precise, a question to which I want to find a provisional answer. I’m constantly reading, thinking, and growing my knowledge base. As a consequence, my answers to various questions are always changing.) Most of the time, I start by asking myself, What question or problem is at the forefront of my mind right now? Once I’ve answered this question (A recent example: How should we think about nuclear weapons?), I write the question down and begin to think of potential answers.

My list of potential answers is what I call my “snippet dump.” As I brainstorm, I add to the snippet dump, typing rough thoughts and key phrases into a fresh Word document. I sometimes sit on the snippet dump for weeks or months before developing it into a finished essay.

As its name suggests, the snippet dump is jumbled and unorganized. It’s a hazy nebula, a heap of loose jigsaw pieces that I will eventually snap together to form a completed puzzle. When starting an essay, I usually have a general sense of how the pieces will snap together, but not always. Sometimes, the snapping is done on the hoof, or as new ideas present themselves. (To me, writing and thinking are the same thing. To think is to write, and to write is to think. I always start working from my snippet dump but proceed in the knowledge and confidence that new concepts will emerge from the process of drafting.)

There are other arms to this gyrating nebula. One arm is a Word document titled Essay Ideas. This document is the pantry where I store the acorns that, with watering, will one day spring into oaklings (or, sometimes, into weeds. Although I do my very best with each essay, I’m the first to confess that not every idea of mine is particularly worthy or successful). Often, the contents of this document supply not only the central concept but also the snippet dumps of individual essays.

Another arm of the nebula is my commonplace book.^[1] Rather than keep a handwritten commonplace book, I prefer to type up (or, even better, copy and paste) quotations into a Google Document. (The handwritten commonplace book is a lovely and romantic idea. Pragmatically speaking, though, it’s a colossal pain in the ass. For one thing, I never learned to hold a pencil correctly, so writing by hand quickly becomes a painful exercise, not to mention a messy one. I’m left-handed, so my hand drags across the page while I move rightward, smudging the graphite or ink. For another thing, writing by hand is time consuming. A Google Document, however, is fast, easy to maintain, accessible from anywhere, and—perhaps most importantly—searchable. In this case, modern convenience trumps my quaint notions of literary tradition.)

As of my writing this essay, my commonplace book is a hundred-page searchable database that provides handy quotations around almost any topic that I find interesting. These quotations usually appear as prefatory or framing remarks; less frequently, they appear in the body of the essay. Sometimes I use prefatory quotations as a point of departure for my investigation or argument; more often, though, I add them retroactively for no other purpose than thematic emphasis. In other instances, I use these quotations to orient the reader, expand the scope of my investigation, or challenge the reader’s (or my own) prejudices and entering assumptions around the topic or question at hand.

Yet another arm of the nebula is prior work. I sometimes take material from old essays, journal entries, and term papers and recycle it into a new essay. (For example, my very first Substack essay was originally written for a class on War and Peace. I copied and pasted it to my page with just a few minor alterations.) However, I seldom draw upon old material. In fact, I’ve probably drawn upon old material fewer than five times since starting this Substack back in June. Of the approximately sixty thousand words I’ve published in the last six months, almost all of them are entirely new. This is because, as a rule, I generally consider most of my old thinking and writing inferior and therefore unworthy of inclusion here. Not to sound too serious, but I take it as my writerly duty to provide my readers with my freshest and best work; therefore, I shun old work except in places where I deem its inclusion essential. (Usually, “deeming essential” means that I can’t express a point or idea better now than I have at some point in the past.)

The final arm of the nebula is images. I use images to bring my essays to life and to punctuate the flow of the essay. (Among other functions, images allow the reader to stop, breathe, and reflect on what he’s just read.) Additionally, images carry a rhetorical force all their own. Put simply, carefully chosen images give writing extra punch.

2. Outlining

After compiling my materials, I start working to bring the nebula into sharper focus. The first step towards achieving sharper focus is outlining.

I must admit that I’m not much of an outliner. (I don’t do much outlining for shorter pieces, anyway. However, when it comes time to write my first book, I plan to go easy on myself and create a robust outline.) Sometimes, the snippet dump is the outline; most of the time, though, my outline lives in my head. Whenever I start an essay, I simply put my thoughts down onto the page in the sequence in which they exist in my mind. (Or I’ll follow a logical progression natural to the material. For example, this essay is a linear explanation of a fairly linear process. In other words, the subject provides me with a built-in outline.) Oftentimes, my typed outline, if I type one up at all, amounts to little more than a sequence of barebones prompts, like this one:

MAKE KEY POINT (“NUKES ARE A RELATIVE GOOD”) HERE. MODIFY THIS STATEMENT IN NEXT PARAGRAPH.

Really, that’s about all there is to it. Fancy, no?

3. Style

By style, I mean three things: the genus of the piece, its mood, and its rhetorical strategy. (I lump things like vocabulary and syntax into the category Rhetoric. It occurs to me that every point of style could probably be lumped into this category, as well.)

By genus, I mean the kind of essay. Although I write about a large variety of topics (my Substack is a miscellany, after all), all of my essays, regardless of genre, have certain qualities in common.

For the most part, my essays aren’t argumentative or polemical. I might occasionally comment on current affairs, but I don’t wish to fall back on writing opinion pieces for fear of entering the political arena. (I know that political bias can’t be separated from other domains of life—not completely, anyway. Still, I try to make my writing as apolitical as possible. I’d rather focus on offbeat and unpopular subjects than simply rehash the headlines.) Instead, my essays tend to be ruminations on a large variety of subjects, written records of my thought process and struggle to come to terms with the problems of the world. Whatever I write—film review, art criticism, philosophy, memoir, etc.—I tend to be more investigative than combative. Hence, I think of (and sometimes refer to) my essays, regardless of genre, as investigations. (Philosophical investigations might be an even apter term. Although I have serious problems with philosophy, I realize that my larger writing project is, in essence, philosophical. I class myself a “fox,” and as such consider multiple ideas rather than interpret the world according to a single grand idea.)

As I sometimes point out in my writing, the mood of my pieces is generally divisionary. As a follower of the middle path, I almost always see and consider multiple sides of the question or issue at hand. Both a dreamer and a pragmatist, I try to balance realism with idealism. Oftentimes, by essay’s end, I don’t come down firmly on one side or the other of the issue under investigation; instead, I invite the reader to join me in remaining in a state of ambivalence or tension. When I detect a contradiction in my writing, I usually let it be, as the point of my writing is to bring the contradiction to light rather than resolve it. (Besides, an attempt at resolution might just supply the material for a future essay!) In this way, my essays are more like a philosophical dialogue between two sides of myself than a proper modern essay.

My rhetorical strategy varies from piece to piece. However, there are a few tricks I find myself using time and time again.

One trick is to point to the universal by describing the particular. (Prestige publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic champion this strategy.) For example: in my essay The Cutting Edge, Clovis points become a stand-in or shorthand for human ingenuity as a general phenomenon. In discussing the particular (Clovis points), I reveal truths about a universal (humankind’s creativity and resilience). Occasionally, I’ll explore the universal in the particular by writing about my own life and experiences.

Another trick is to use one subject to introduce another. In my essay Symbols of Faith, I start off talking about the American habit of self-advertisement and end up talking about the nature of faith. (Along the way, I also acquaint the reader with the sad history of the ivory-billed woodpecker.) I use this strategy because I like exploring and finding unlikely connections between disparate subjects. (It’s an intellectual game of sorts.) Also, I hope that these thematic twists and turns make for an interesting and surprising read.

As for syntax, I vary the tempo of my sentences and paragraphs to suit my subject. In Tonight, You Die, I generally stick to short declarative sentences as they lend the piece emotional force and a greater sense of immediacy. However, in other essays, I tend to make liberal use of compound sentences—that is, long, elaborate constructions that chart a direct course in some instances, an oblique or zigzagged one in others, but that, irrespective of the nature of the path taken (linear or crooked), invariably loop back around to the subject either to complete it (as by summing up with a predicate nominative or predicate adjective) or to expand upon it (as by introducing a new concept or idea, as I do in the sixth paragraph of my recent essay Prometheus Unbound, where I use a forty-seven word sentence [or forty-nine words; the total number is debatable because it changes if you count the hyphenated terms as one word or two] to draw a contrast between man’s limited generative potential and God’s infinite creative power). I don’t write this way on purpose, however. It just so happens that I think in a discursive, almost Proustian manner, and so I tend to write in one, too.

Finally, I try to keep my vocabulary reasonably simple. I don’t shy away from five-dollar words, but I don’t go out of my way to use them, either. Most of the time, if I use a rarish word, it’s for the sake of precision or economy. For example, using a word like “apotropaic”—which, incidentally, hasn’t appeared in my Substack until now—is far more economical than using its definition (“supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck”). In cases like this, I will always opt for the single word that my reader might not know rather than the eleven words he certainly does know. (Besides, most literate readers will know “apotropaic;” careful ones will look it up.) Generally, when picking and choosing my terms, I take the erudition and sharp intellect of my readership as granted.

4. Editing

Contrary to everything we all learned in freshman comp, I edit my work as I go. Ordinarily, my first draft takes me at least 80% of the way to the final draft.

Much of the time, I don’t struggle with the logic or flow of my essays. Most of my editing consists of reworking words, clauses, and sentences for clarity and effectiveness. If I find myself dissatisfied with a sentence or paragraph, then I’ll copy and paste it, strike through the original, and tinker with the copy until I get it exactly the way that I want it. (This way, I have a record of my original draft as well as a fallback should I change my mind about the revision.) Usually, I’ll perform minor edits while taking a pause from heavy drafting. However, if I’m on a roll, I’ll highlight a word or sentence (or maybe insert a marginal note) reminding me to come back and revise it once I run out of steam.

Sometimes, however, the essay’s logic and flow are a problem. Occasionally, after completing a draft, I find myself dissatisfied with the essay’s structure or sequence. For example, in an essay about war I wrote back in August, I started out talking about the ways that war films influence and reflect popular perceptions and attitudes around the necessity of military interventions. But after reading and rereading the piece, I realized that starting the essay with a discussion about movies is wrong, as such an analysis could easily mislead my audience. (The essay is about war generally, not war movies specifically. Movies help me make my point, but aren’t the point.) Annoyed but unable to ignore this structural flaw, I set about cutting, pasting, and rewriting the essay to fit a new sequence that better supports my argument.

Mercifully, such radical edits are rare. (I say mercifully, because major edits eat up time and cognitive energy. In very rare instances, I have to rewrite the essay in its entirety to get everything to hang together properly.) Still, I don’t avoid major edits when they arise, as I prefer to produce smaller quantities of high-quality work instead of large quantities of middling work. When all’s said and done, I might be able to fool some readers as to the integrity of my writing, but I can never fool myself.^[2] I will always know which pieces of writing represent my best effort, and which don’t.

Once I complete a draft, I read it over several times—both in Word and on Substack—to make any final changes and catch any typos that have managed to fly under my editorial radar. Once these changes have been made, I press “publish.”

5. Publication and Beyond

In my opinion, an essay is always incomplete. By “incomplete,” I mean two things.

First, I mean that an essay can always be better than it is: structurally, stylistically, and rhetorically. Inevitably, in the days and weeks following the publication of a new essay, I’ll spot a word I want to change, a sentence I want to clarify, or an “invisible typo” that needs to be fixed. (An “invisible typo” is my name for an error that goes undetected during multiple read-throughs. Most of the time, an invisible typo is a single word—not a construction—that is just one or two letters off from the word I intended to use. For example, “obvious” and “oblivious,” or “manage” and “mange.” I doubt even AI would pick up these typos, but I wouldn’t know as I don’t use AI in any part of my creative process.) Whenever I discover a trouble spot, I immediately go back into the document and correct it.

Secondly, I mean that an essay never contains absolutely everything I want to say about a given subject. Even though my essays represent my best work at the time of my writing them, I acknowledge that there’s always a way to make them more forceful, interesting, persuasive, etc. The problem is that I can only make my writing as forceful and persuasive as my present writerly powers will allow. Next year’s writing will inevitably be better than this year’s, as my thinking and writing skills continue to grow and improve.

As I mentioned above, I see my essays are part of an ongoing dialogue between two parts of myself (or between me and my readers). As with all good conservations, no one interlocutor ever has the final word. As I continue to read, think, and grow, my views and opinions are bound to change, and so I must be prepared to give voice to these newfound views and opinions by describing them in an original essay all their own. In this way, my intellectual project never ends. With every piece that I publish (and with every one of my essays that I hyperlink within another essay, as I’ve done many times here) my larger philosophical argument grows.

Whether my philosophical project is compelling, I can’t say. But I hope that it is. I hope that each acorn I plant will bring forth a mighty oak, though I acknowledge that it might instead produce a noxious weed—something that must be plucked out by the roots in order to make room for a new tree bearing salutary fruit. Most of all, I hope that you, my reader, find something worthwhile or at least pleasantly diverting here. It’s because of this enduring hope that I write and will continue to write.

^[1] “Which commonplace book? The Da Vinci Code, or The Alchemist?” A different, cheekier friend asked me this question when I first introduced him to the concept of commonplace books. It was a good joke and deserves a nod here.

^[2] This is not to say that I’m always completely happy with my work. For example, my recent essay about nuclear weapons doesn’t flow quite the way that I want it to. After rereading it several times, I’m still not sure that my points hang together or proceed in a logical sequence. Still, the essay is the best I could make it at the time, so I went ahead and published it. There’s one comfort here: because I see my writing as an ongoing dialogue, I can always go back and expand, clarify, or rebut an old essay in a new one.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, in the sixth year of the deadliest and most destructive war mankind has ever known, the world changed forever. An American B-29 Superfortress appeared in the skies over Hiroshima and dropped a single nuclear bomb, the first and one of only two such weapons ever to be used in war. The bomb, delivered from an aircraft soaring nearly six miles above the earth, fell for just over forty-four seconds, a mere speck against the clear bright sky. Upon reaching its detonation altitude of two thousand feet the bomb exploded, unleashing a force previously unknown to man except in his darkest reveries or most hellish visions.

The bomb produced a blast that destroyed nearly everything, living and inorganic, within a mile radius of its hypocenter; the resultant firestorm spread even farther. Tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and soldiers died instantly; many thousands more died later due to injuries, burns, and radiation poisoning. Never in history had so many people died so suddenly or so horribly. Then, just three days later on August 9, all of these horrors were reiterated, this time in Nagasaki.

Japan surrendered six days later. One period of global anxiety was over, but another— the Atomic Age—was just beginning.

Together, these two bombings make up the greatest seminal moment of the modern age. With the creation of the nuclear bomb mankind attained a sort of negative godhood, the power to lay waste with a new Promethean fire that burns hotter than the surface of the sun. But with the detonation of the bomb, man’s hopes for a better future—not to mention all his divine pretensions—went up in flames.

The invention and use of nuclear weapons are the acme of unreason, the terminus in man’s long, descending journey out of Eden and into damnation. With the invention of the bomb, mankind made actual the Serpent’s lie: he had, at long last, become like God.

Like God. The operative word here is Like. In splitting the atom, mankind achieved godlike power, but not godlike wisdom; he attained almost unlimited destructive potential without realizing a countervailing creative potential. Furthermore, his newfound power was only approximately godlike, for the ability to create on land a tiny, short-lived star is trivial in comparison with God’s creation of a single self-sustaining star, let alone the trillions of celestial bodies that ornament the incomprehensibly vast and elegantly orchestrated universe. Man’s ability to harness nuclear power, impressive as it appears to our dull imagination, is nothing more than a perversion of reason, a travesty of the divine principle. In creating the bomb, man didn’t become an omniscient, omnipotent god, but a halfwit demigod.

Or so it would seem. Given the horrific effects of nuclear weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and given the prospect of a future nuclear war and all the fear and anxiety this possibility brings in its train, it’s easy to argue for nuclear power as only a net negative for our species and for the planet. But could it be that nuclear weapons, contrary to popular wisdom and morality, have made the world a better place? Could it be that nuclear weapons represent not the triumph of unreason, but of reason in its purest form? These are disturbing—might I say heretical—propositions. Still, they’re worth investigating.

This is not an easy investigation to conduct, however. For one thing, now that nuclear weapons exist, we can’t accurately envision or describe a world without them. (Predicting future events based on present realities is difficult enough—impossible, really. Even more difficult or futile, then, is describing an imaginary future based on an imaginary present.) We can’t with any degree of reliability say what course the remainder of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century would have taken had the United States or any of its competitors not harnessed nuclear power. To put it flippantly, we can’t unscramble the omelet. All we can do is compare the prenuclear world to the postnuclear world.

As bad as the postnuclear world has been, the prenuclear world was worse. Prior to 1945, highly destructive great power conflicts were depressingly common. To make matters worse, new technology—think the Maxim gun, mustard gas, and accurate long-range heavy artillery—was steadily making such conflicts far deadlier than the wars of even the recent past. Had nuclear weapons not been invented, it’s possible—perhaps even likely—that the cycle of great power conflicts would have continued, with the United States and the USSR embarking upon yet another war following their joint victory over Germany and Japan. Ironically, it’s within the realm of possibility that the only way to mitigate the mass destruction caused by the proliferation of high-tech weaponry was to push high-tech weaponry to its farthest extreme—that is, the nuclear bomb.

That’s not to say that the postnuclear world has been all that rosy. According to John Keegan, about fifty million people around the world died in wars in the second half of the twentieth century.^[1] While this figure pales in comparison to wartime deaths in the first half of the century (World War I and World War II combined saw perhaps as many as one hundred and twenty million deaths in the space of just ten years), it remains a shockingly and tragically high number. The invention of the nuclear bomb might have mitigated war and killing over the last eighty years, but it certainly did nothing to stop these horrors altogether. How many lives were saved because of the counterbalancing effect of nuclear weapons, no one can say. (Ironically, even though nuclear weapons loom large in the popular psyche due to their astonishing destructive potential, they are far from being the deadliest weapons in actuality. Of the fifty million dead mentioned above, most were killed with cheap, mass-produced automatic rifles—weapons Keegan deems a “universal scourge” that mankind would be happily rid of. Of course, a future nuclear war would instantly and irreversibly nullify this fact.)

Still, the point remains: nuclear weapons almost certainly prevented and continue to prevent wars between great powers. Given the precedent set by belligerent global powers prior to 1945, there is little reason to think that there wouldn’t have been at least one great power conflict somewhere in the world in the years following World War II were it not for the invention of nuclear weapons.^[2] Relations between the United States and the USSR were volatile enough with the nuclear deterrent, so it’s conceivable that they would have been even less stable without it. It seems reasonable to assume that, given enough time, at least one of the two superpowers’ many proxy wars would have escalated into a large-scale direct conflict.

Instead of great power conflicts in the second half the century, we got a series of smaller regional conflicts (often fought between American and Soviet proxies), civil wars, genocides, and brushfire wars fought between nonnuclear powers. This is not to discount the tragedy of smaller wars; it’s simply to point out that, tragic and destructive as these wars were, another great power war would have been far worse than any one of them, or maybe even worse than all of them combined. In a world of tradeoffs, the best we can hope for is to cut losses and reduce the frequency and severity of conflicts. No matter what we do, we can’t avoid wars completely.

If we accept the proposition that nuclear weapons were developed primarily as a safeguard against further conflict or as a means of cutting wartime losses, then their creation would seem perfectly reasonable. While I think there is some truth to this proposition, I can’t help but think that it’s an overly optimistic assessment that tells us only part of the story.

Another part of the story is that nuclear weapons are, obviously, a shortcut to gaining an edge in hard power and strategic advantage, or at least of restricting your opponent’s strategic ambitions. Such being the case, the temptation to develop them is irresistible. Even for a militarily weak or technologically inferior country (for example, the DPRK), they are an unbeatable ace in the hole. (Even a strong country can be crippled or destroyed by a weak nuclear power, making a confrontation between nuclear powers a strategic nonstarter. As WarGames (1983) famously preaches to us, when faced with the prospect of nuclear war, “The only winning move is not to play.” In a nuclear war, the relative might or “skill” of the player hardly matters.) For a strong country like the United States, nuclear weapons are the best means of permanently stacking the deck in your favor.

And stack the deck is exactly what the United States did. At the end of World War II, there was no other country that could stand up to us militarily. (The USSR had an enormous and reasonably capable military but was not yet a nuclear power.) Thus, the Axis defeated, the United States quickly set conditions to achieve regional hegemony and gain an unmatched ability to project hard power across the world. Certainly, global stability figured into the calculus of America’s nuclear program, but so too did good old-fashioned military and economic opportunism. Simply put, following the collapse of the Axis and almost all other near-peer competitors, friendly or otherwise, we saw our chance at global ascendancy and took it.

In a way, though, we had to take our chance. As early as 1939, Germany, Russia, and Japan had also launched nuclear programs, the viability of which could not be fully known at the time. By the laws of military necessity, America had no choice but to try and at least keep up in the arms race against these competitors. As luck (if luck I dare call it) would have it, we just so happened to reach the finish line first.

In fact, I would go so far as to argue that given the Axis’s murderously expansionist ambitions, the United States had a moral obligation to participate in and win the nuclear arms race. Then as now, America had many faults, but one cannot reasonably draw a moral equivalency between the United States and the Axis powers. (To draw such an equivalency would be to argue from a worldview alien to the moral and political framework I take as granted here.) For the ultimate welfare of the world, an Allied victory was the only acceptable outcome. In the context of a world war and a global nuclear race, America was justified in creating nuclear weapons.

In context. This, I think, is the key phrase in this entire analysis. Like many things, nuclear weapons can be counted a net good or a net negative only within certain contexts. To analyze anything outside of the context within which it exists is to indulge in fantasy—a pointless exercise, especially when discussing matters as serious as national security and the global balance of power.

In the context of the cutthroat global competition described above, America’s development of nuclear weapons seems a net good, almost a moral necessity. (In a power void—that is, a global situation in which America already enjoyed military preeminence—the development of nuclear weapons could only be deemed a moral atrocity. But that’s not how things unfolded.) In the context of World War II or another war like it, nuclear weapons are a relative good, a perfectly rational response to a deeply irrational global situation.

Still, these assertions don’t account for other questions that inevitably arise at this point in an investigation like this one: Are the fruits of reason always positive and constructive? More specifically, are nuclear weapons an absolute good?

To these questions, I must answer, No. Nuclear weapons—indeed, any weapon—can never be classed an absolute good. Their very existence brings with it a negative potential that can’t be eliminated: that is, of course, their vast destructive power. (Also, some argue that because nuclear weapons exist, they will inevitably be used again in future—a dark prophecy, indeed.) No matter how good or moral any given nuclear power might be, the use of nuclear weapons is in all but the most extreme circumstances almost impossible to justify. Even under extreme circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons carries with it a certain moral stench that no appeal to reason, however carefully constructed or eloquently expressed, can ever fully dissipate.

So, all things considered, do I still think that nuclear weapons have made the world a better place? The more history I read and the more I think about it, I can’t help but believe that Yes, the world is better off with nuclear weapons than without them. I believe that nation-states are at bottom rational actors and as such will usually conduct themselves in a rational manner. I believe that, among other things, their rationality entails avoiding nuclear confrontations except as a final protective measure. (Saber-rattling is another matter.) In sum, I believe that nuclear weapons exert a stabilizing influence on global power dynamics that is beneficial for everyone concerned. However, my intellect acquiesces to these propositions in the same moment that my moral sense is outraged and appalled by my acquiescence.

Here again as in many other instances, my intellect and my feelings come into direct conflict with each other. (This split in my soul is in large part what compels me to write.) In my rare flights of fancy, I too wish that the millennium would arrive and that all the horrors of existence would be miraculously rectified. In these moments I wish that nuclear weapons and every other of mankind’s hellish contrivances never existed. But, despite our meliorist fantasies about how things ought to be, these weapons do exist and will continue to exist, and so must be dealt with.

This is a terrible thing to accept. So too is accepting that the operations and products of reason—no matter how pure they might be in intention and application—have a shadowy underside, that reason and all its fruits carry with them the taint of human fallibility.

Tragically, there’s nothing we can do about any of this. This side of heaven, purity of will and action is unachievable. No matter how hard we try, we can never be God. We can never possess His wisdom or generative power. At best (or at worst, depending how you look at things) we can only ever be like Prometheus—not divine creators, but lowly usurpers of the divine principle.

^[1] So far, at least five million people have died in the wars of the twenty-first century.

^[2] Generally, I don’t like to make predictions based on historical precedents. I loathe slogans such as “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” as simplistic and glib. Still, it seems that certain scenarios (such as the close neighborship of two or more powerful countries) are predictive of certain outcomes, and so must be seriously considered when discussing hypotheticals. No one can know the future anyway, so what else can we do but draw upon historical data when envisioning and debating eventualities?

5. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Plot Summary

In the early days of Operation Overlord, a Ranger squad under the leadership of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) is sent deep into German-occupied territory to locate Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), a young soldier whose three older brothers have been killed in combat. As sole survivor, Ryan has a ticket home, and it’s up to Hanks and his war-weary squad to make sure that he makes it out safely.

Key Scene

Early in the film, during the famous Omaha Beach sequence, Captain Miller and his troops are pinned down by a German machine gun nest. In order to escape the kill zone of the beach and destroy the German defenses on the cliffs above, they must bypass or destroy the gun emplacement. They have no other options.

Thinking fast, Miller orders some of his men to suppress the gun emplacement while others slip by. However, the first two attempts are unsuccessful: each time the Americans shift and lift their suppressive fire, the Germans simply cut down the advancing troops with a hail of bullets. Only a lucky break enables the Americans to knock out the gun emplacement and advance up the draw.

This scene captures in brief the central theme of Saving Private Ryan—that is, the grim calculus of conventional warfare and its effects on the average soldier. In a war between near-peer competitors, every decision from the Pentagon down to the rifle squad is paid for in blood. Whether carrying out a massive operation or a small unit maneuver, the question is not whether men will die, but how many.

The horrifying truth of World War II and other wars like it is that, as a common soldier, the government expected you to die—maybe not you specifically, but you as a faceless military resource, a fungible commodity.^[1] Even the very best leaders can never prevent losses; they can only hope to mitigate them. Every operation assumes casualties, so leaders do everything in their power to select the safest course of action without sacrificing strategic necessity.^[2] More than any other war film I’ve seen, Saving Private Ryan drives this point home with awesome dramatic force.

Why You Should Watch It

In Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg changed the cinematic conversation around World War II in two ways.

First, Spielberg revolutionized the way combat is depicted on screen. In addition to being a dramatic tour de force, Saving Private Ryan is a remarkable feat of technical wizardry.^[3] In every point of production—from the washed-out, earthy palette of the film to the almost period-perfect costumes and chaotic, you-are-there shaky cam cinematography—Spielberg goes to great lengths to make the viewer feel like he’s right there, smack-dab in the middle of battle with the troops. Despite its many inaccuracies, Saving Private Ryan is as convincing a portrayal of force-on-force combat as you’re ever likely to see.

Secondly, Spielberg changed the way most people think about World War II. Even though his film is ultimately patriotic in its message and intent, it turns the myth of the so-called “good war” squarely on its head.

A few false notes of sentimentality notwithstanding,^[4] Saving Private Ryan sucks all of the romance and heroism out of war. Indeed, few other movies bring to life the living nightmare of close infantry combat in the same way that Spielberg does here. Over the film’s three-hour runtime, we see scores of soldiers die—some quickly, others slowly and painfully. We witness acts of bravery but also acts of senseless cruelty. We see American soldiers shoot defenseless Germans and in turn watch as Germans execute wounded Americans. From the stomach-churning amphibious assault on Omaha Beach to the final battle in which nearly all of the lead characters are killed, Spielberg makes his point clear: War is hell.

What else can we conclude from studying a war in which approximately 3% of the global population died, mainly from disease, starvation, and programs of industrialized murder? How can we not resent, at least in some small measure, a political and military establishment that repeatedly sent thousands of soldiers (like the ones depicted in this film) out to slaughter, using them as a bullet sponge to absorb fire long enough for follow-on forces to exploit their precarious foothold? Given these and many other sordid facts, how can we not help but feel bitter over the tragic results of the war, even as we acknowledge the war’s necessity? These are the questions Spielberg invites us to consider as the end credits roll.

4. Warfare (2025)

Plot Summary

During the Battle of Ramadi in 2006, a SEAL platoon takes up an overwatch position in support of an unnamed Marine operation. As the minutes drag past, the SEALs observe insurgents massing for an attack in the surrounding buildings. The attack finally comes, and the team must act fast to make it out of the ambush alive.

Warfare is based on a true story and unfolds in real time.

Key Scene

During their first exfiltration attempt, the team is caught in a massive IED blast. One of their Iraqi interpreters is killed, and several team members are gravely wounded. The team members drag their wounded men back into the building, set up a defensive perimeter, and call for Bradley support to carry them to safety. Their request is denied.

With one SEAL missing a leg, another bleeding profusely, and no help on the way, the situation becomes desperate. With no obvious solution in sight, Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) looks to his lieutenant (Will Poulter) for guidance: “Sir, what do we do?”

The lieutenant pauses for a moment, distracted. He shifts back and forth. “I dunno, I dunno,” he finally blurts out.

I dunno. Not the reaction you’d expect from a SEAL officer—certainly not the reaction you’d expect after years of being conditioned by the movies to think of American soldiers (especially special operations forces) as hypercompetent, always knowing exactly what to do and exactly how to do it, no matter the task.

But what is there to do? The team is pinned down. At best, they’re dazed from the blast; at worst, they’re minutes away from bleeding to death. Higher command has denied the exfiltration request but proposed no alternate plan or timeline for rescue. For Ray Mendoza, cowriter and codirector of Warfare, this moment is a confession: Under certain circumstances, even our best-trained troops don’t always know the right course of action. Sometimes what we call heroism is nothing more than bold improvisation, combined with lots of luck.

Why You Should Watch It

Warfare is all about raw experience. It gives us virtually none of the conventional elements of film: no dramatic context, no soundtrack, no characterization, no plotting, just verisimilitude, as though we’ve been parachuted into the situation as it’s unfolding. (Indeed, we don’t even know the names of half of the SEALs, or why we should care about them—other than the fact that they’re American servicemen, of course.) The movie is not about politics, the national military myth, grand themes of heroism and sacrifice, or American military might—in fact, we never see the SEALs, attack aircraft, or the Bradleys that finally come to get the team kill a single insurgent. Instead, the film is just a recreation of a particular incident that occurred at a particular time and place, an event of little consequence to anyone except the handful of people who were directly involved. This being the case, thematic content must be imposed on the film by the viewer. In this way, Warfare is a bold cinematic experiment, a major departure from other war films that have come before it.

Regrettably, the absence of conventional filmic elements makes Warfare dramatically flat. After all, the audience doesn’t care about the characters on screen unless the filmmakers make them care. But in this case, I suspect that to demand a conventional film is to miss the point of the movie, which is to show us, with the highest degree of realism possible, the true nature of modern counterinsurgency warfare.

The kind of warfare depicted here is a far cry from the fighting shown in Saving Private Ryan. Instead of mass infantry attacks, we get small units shooting at each other from the cover of cinderblock buildings. Instead of daring heroics, we get indecisive leaders who aren’t sure what to do next and who hesitate to send in support for fear of incurring more casualties. (Never mind that the supporting troops are in armored vehicles. But such is the absurdity of the situation.) Instead of nearly invulnerable supermen who shrug off everything but a direct hit, we get actual human beings for whom no amount of physical conditioning, no degree of toughness, can fully prepare them for being shot or blown up. In other words, we get combat as it actually is—or, at least, as close to actual as a team of filmmakers can imagine it. This realism—this rawness—makes Warfare worth seeing.

3. Black Hawk Down (2001)

Plot Summary

It’s 1993. The civil war in Somalia has reached crisis levels. With UN backing, President Clinton orders a military intervention and sends a special operations task force to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid, leader of the Somali National Alliance. What begins as a snatch-and-run mission to capture Aidid’s lieutenants becomes a desperate, eighteen-hour running gunfight after two American helicopters are shot down over Mogadishu. In the end, eighteen American soldiers are killed. Shortly thereafter, the Americans withdraw from Somalia, their mission incomplete.

Key Scene

After the second helicopter is shot down, two Delta operators, SFC Randy Shughart (Johnny Strong) and MSG Gary Gordon (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), request insertion to look for survivors and protect the crash site. At first their request is denied, but after pressing their task force commander, the two are dropped off and take up a defensive position in the downed bird. In the ensuing gunfight, both operators are killed.

This scene captures in brief what Black Hawk Down is all about: that is, the brotherly bond and sense of duty peculiar to the warrior culture. In wars like the one depicted here, the average soldier on the ground fights not for some higher cause, but for his comrades. As one operator puts it to his fellow soldier, “Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that shit just goes right out the window…. It’s about the men next to you, and that’s it.”

Shughart and Gordon’s actions embody these lofty ideals. When requesting insertion, they have no idea about the situation on the ground. They don’t know if anyone inside the destroyed helicopter is still alive. But for them, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that their comrades might still be alive, and by God, they’re going to go and help them if they are. They do this knowing that no one else is coming to rescue them, and that they will almost certainly die protecting their friends.

This is a whole other level of courage, the kind of self-sacrifice that most people probably find impossible to understand.^[5] Certainly, everyone who goes to war goes with the knowledge that he might die. But knowing that you might die is one thing; going through with the task at hand knowing that you will die is another.

Why You Should Watch It

Like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down is a remarkable technical achievement. Its cinematic merits alone make it worth watching.

More than that, Black Hawk Down illustrates the paradox of American interventionism. On the one hand, America, more than any other country on earth, is willing and able to intervene in obscure, faraway conflicts that sometimes have little or no bearing on American interests. On the other hand, America has become deeply risk-averse, almost to a fault. We wish (and sometimes need) to project hard power around the world but are afraid to lose any lives in the process. (Indirectly, Black Hawk Down also shows that you can win all the battles and still lose the war. During the Battle of Mogadishu, a small American assault force killed a disproportionately large number of enemy militiamen. Still, the operation was rated a disaster and resulted in withdrawal.) Black Hawk Down, then, is not only an expertly crafted depiction of modern warfare, but also a depiction of a key turning point in American foreign policy.

2. Generation Kill (2008)

Plot Summary

It’s spring of 2003. A multinational assault force has massed in northern Kuwait, eagerly awaiting the order to launch the invasion of Iraq. As part of General Mattis’s novel experiment in maneuver warfare, the Marine Corp’s 1^st Reconnaissance Battalion prepares to spearhead the invasion, a mission for which the unit isn’t adequately trained or equipped. The Marines of the 1^st Recon are rightfully suspicious of this strategic decision and of the wisdom of invading Iraq a second time.

Unlike the other films in this list, Generation Kill is not a standalone movie, but a seven-part miniseries.

Key Scene

In episode 5, the Marines get caught in an ambush as they approach the town of Al Kut. Thanks to their superior technology and training, the Marines fight off their ambushers with no serious casualties and break out of the kill zone.

The next day, the Marines evaluate the enemy casualties. It turns out that the ambushers are not Iraqi regulars, but foreign jihadists—some of them college students in Western countries who came to Iraq to fight the Americans just three days after the invasion started. The insurgency that will bog down America’s military and political ambitions in the coming years has already begun.

Like Black Hawk Down, Generation Kill speaks to the abiding naivete of American foreign policy—that is, the erroneous assumption that American-style democracy can be successfully exported to the rest of the world. The Marines of the 1^st Recon Battalion seem to understand this, even if their senior leadership (which extends all the way up to the Oval Office) doesn’t. However, cynical as they are, many of the Marines still see themselves as benevolent liberators, showing just how deep the American military myth truly runs.

Why You Should Watch It

Generation Kill, more than any other non-documentary production I’ve seen, brilliantly captures the often absurd reality of American foreign policy and military culture. It’s also one of the most convincing recreations of military life ever committed to film, accurate in every point of detail from the Marine’s incessant crude banter down to the details concerning field hygiene and soldiers’ many strange rituals and superstitions. (Every time I watch Generation Kill, I can almost smell the chemical stench of MRE heater bags and sense the tacky mouthfeel of cranberries, osmotic. For me, a veteran, no other movie or series about military life possesses this transportive power.)

One of the absurdities shown here lies in the uneasy relationship between the enlisted Marines and most of their officers—their company-grade officers, at any rate. While the enlisted Marines are pragmatic, mission-focused, and tactically competent, too many of their leaders are short-sighted, arrogant, and inept. (For example, when calling in artillery support, the Marines’ company commander—disparagingly nicknamed Encino Man, due to his troglodytic appearance and matching IQ—completely misunderstands the situation. For one thing, he wishes to call for fire on an imaginary target. For another, the target is only two hundred meters away—well within the danger zone for friendly forces. Ignoring the warnings of several subordinates, he calls for fire anyway, only to be denied by the supporting artillery unit for submitting the wrong map zone designator. For once, the Marines are saved by their leader’s incompetence.) Very quickly, the viewer finds himself asking: How is it that some of the Marine Corps’ most elite troops are being led by these imbeciles? But just like the Marines on screen, the viewer is denied a direct explanation for this absurd state of affairs. Still, in the absence of an explanation, he can infer an answer: Because the people in charge say so. In a warzone, where every decision carries deadly consequences, this is hardly a satisfactory answer. But as the Marines themselves might say, It is what it is.

Generation Kill also excels at capturing the nuances of military culture and tactics. One of those nuances has to do with the Marines’ ethos.

This ethos, appropriately, centers on violence—after all, the military’s primary function in wartime is to close with and destroy the enemy. The men of the 1^st Recon Battalion can’t wait to cross the line of departure and kill as many bad guys as possible. While they wait, they conduct training maneuvers and practice martial arts. For them, fighting never stops.

Alongside this bloodlust, however, is a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of Iraqi civilians. Yes, the Marines can’t wait to kill people. However, they can’t wait to kill the right people—that is, Iraqi troops and their irregular confederates. Generation Kill does an expert job of showing just how fine a line this is for troops to walk, especially given the ever-present moral ambiguity and foggy strategic situation of counterinsurgency warfare.

1. Restrepo (2010)

Plot Summary

Restrepo follows an infantry company from the 173^rd Airborne Brigade during a fifteen-month deployment to the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. As part of the Brigade’s strategy to push the Taliban out of the valley, the soldiers establish Outpost Restrepo deep inside of enemy-controlled territory.

Restrepo, unlike the other films on this list, is a documentary.

Key Scene

Near the end of the film, Bravo Company commander Captain Dan Kearney pulls in his men for a briefing. He tells them that their sister company in Wanat has just been hit by a large Taliban raiding force in an attack that left nine Americans dead and twenty-seven wounded. In his speech, Kearney speaks not of duty and sacrifice, but of the practical necessity of continuous aggressive patrolling. More than that, he speaks of revenge:

“The fucking only way to bounce back from shit like this is to go out there and make the individuals that did this to us fucking pay. It’s not to sit back here and hide behind the fucking Hescos, it’s not to go back down to our fucking rucks and fucking feel sorry for ourselves and get snuggled up in our woobies. We go out there, we find the motherfuckers that did this and we make them pay. We make them feel how we feel right now.”

Here we see the central theme of Black Hawk Down play out in reality: “It’s about the men next to you, and that’s it.” For the men of Bravo Company (many of whom are just teenagers), the war is not about liberating the people of Afghanistan or spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. For them, it’s all about keeping each other alive and getting home safely.

Why You Should Watch It

Restrepo is the best ground-level view of combat I know. The filmmakers have only one goal: to capture daily life in a warzone as thoroughly and accurately as possible while letting the facts speak for themselves. Unlike many other war documentaries, the filmmakers refuse to moralize or comment.

In the film’s ninety-three-minute runtime, we see it all. We see the soldiers of Bravo Company scratch out the rocky foundations of OP Restrepo while dodging constant enemy fire. We see the boredom of soldierly routine and the terror of close contact with the enemy. In the film’s most moving sequence, we witness the soldiers’ shock and grief as one of their friends is killed in combat. At the end of the film, we watch as the troops send up a single mortar flare in remembrance of their dead. If Restrepo is about anything, it’s about the immediate and enduring pain of loss.

Every soldier depicted here has a different reason for joining the military. Some, like me, joined out of a better or worse informed sense of patriotism. Others joined for pay and benefits, while others joined because they have nowhere else to go. (Once, during a long night of staff duty, I asked a soldier why he joined the Army. His response: “I was tired of living under a bridge.”) But once you’re in, many of those reasons fade to the background, leaving you with only one reason to ruck up and keep going: that is, the soldier in the foxhole next to you.

^[1] Standardized military training sees to it that regular soldiers are, in effect, interchangeable. Once training is complete, one G.I. is little different from another in terms of equipment, training, tactical competence, and, ultimately, combat effectiveness. If one soldier is killed, he can be backfilled by another with relative ease. This principle held true even for the highly trained 2^nd Ranger Battalion on D-Day, when the unit suffered approximately 70% casualties—a catastrophic number, by any measure.

^[2] At some point during the Omaha Beach sequence, most viewers find themselves asking, Why in God’s name did the Allies decide to land here? The answer to this question is that, horrible as the fighting was at places like Omaha and Utah Beach, the alternate landing sites probably would have been much worse (or resulted in a longer, deadlier slog towards Berlin). Again, effective warfighting often hinges on choosing the lesser of two evils, although mass conventional warfare essentially boils down to this: throwing more and more live bodies into the meat grinder until one side or the other surrenders or is destroyed.

^[3] Saving Private Ryan is also extremely violent—far more violent than any other World War II picture that came before it. Even though more gruesome films now exist—Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and Rambo (2008) immediately come to mind—their gruesomeness is made less effective by their soggy sense of drama and general cartoonishness.

The film’s violence isn’t gratuitous, though. Among other things, the gore serves an educative purpose—that is, to inform the viewer of the grim reality of war in general, and of the horrific effects of small arms fire on soft targets like the human body. (In many older war movies, bullets make a tidy little hole and kill instantly, almost sterilely.) In contrast to the anemic war films of yesteryear, Saving Private Ryan pulls back the curtain and shows war for the bloody and soul-killing business it truly is.

^[4] While I admire Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List (1993), I maintain that Spielberg is a far greater fantasist than he is a dramatist.

^[5] I’ve heard it theorized that Delta operators (and other, similar kinds of special warfare soldiers) are members of a very rare breed indeed: that is, a sort of person who has a nearly sociopathic ability to kill other people, combined with an utterly selfless willingness to die for one’s comrades.