E. B. White said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

A war has widened overnight. A scandal breaks and instantly becomes a verdict. Markets rise on bad news and fall on good. A video of suffering appears between an ad for skin cream and a clip of someone dancing in an airport.

The weather is ominous. Technology astonishes. Politics is deranged. The day has barely begun.

Then someone sends a joke.

I laugh, then wonder whether I should have. Grief and absurdity share the same screen. Hope and despair appear side by side. As Alice said in Wonderland, “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change.”

Events overlap, interrupt, contradict, and refuse to resolve before the next arrives. “Organized incoherence” sounds like an accusation but describes the condition well. What has changed is how fast these contradictions reach us.

Satire is the new sincerity.

A concert by Phish, the celebrated improvisational rock band, offers a benign version. A song begins, wanders into improvisation, and seems to lose track of where it came from. The through line disappears. Not ideal for readers who insist that 2 + 2 = 4.

Yet the musicians listen. Beneath the wandering lies attention. A phrase returns altered. A rhythm gathers. What sounded like disintegration becomes exploration.

Incoherence rhymes.

The jazz great Thelonious Monk is often credited with saying that a wrong note depends on what comes after it. A mistake does not end the performance. The next note exposes the error or folds it into a pattern no one intended.

Current politics offers a harsher version. The same act becomes tyranny when the other side commits it and necessity when one’s own side does. Incoherence is not a mistake in the performance. It is often the performance.

Technology promises to remove friction, but much of that friction comes from other people, with their delays, awkwardness, needs, and unpredictability. Screens and algorithms spare us this organized incoherence, then weaken some of the capacities it forms: reading a face, tolerating uncertainty, finding our way, and making judgments no device can make for us.

Convenience, n. The removal of every difficulty except those it creates.

Yet incoherence does not always lead to collapse. Conflict can give a system staying power as opposing forces check and sustain one another. A suspension bridge stands because its tensions are held in balance; remove them, and the structure fails.

And so with a household. The differences that cause friction may also distribute burdens no one person could carry alone. Fragmentation and integration occur together. The pressures that divide people may also bind them into new forms of dependence.

Thucydides, the great historian of war and power, saw that even justice arrives entangled in incoherence. The strong call domination necessity. The weak assume righteousness guarantees rescue. Both mistake fear and pride, self-interest and desire, for clear judgment.

Justice remains real, but its claims are never free of interest. We are quickest to demand justice when it requires someone else to yield.

Coherence is a discipline of thought, not the discovery of a perfectly ordered world. Experience need not fit together neatly for contradiction to remain contradiction rather than depth.

Incoherence blurs the lines between serious and trivial, public and personal, tragedy and comedy. It entangles justice with interest and principle with self-deception. Everything must be judged at once, and then the day goes on.

The result is numbness or frenzy. Despair sometimes passes for lucidity because exhaustion has begun to feel like insight. Declaring the world meaningless reduces its mystery to our disappointment.

Meaning changes as our relation to the world changes. The desire for permanent resolution can become a refusal to deal with what is still taking shape. When familiar meanings fade, the emptiness they leave can become an opening.

Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life gathers human incoherence into a single image. Lovers, a mother and child, an old woman, and a crowd of bodies form a bright mosaic of attachment and vulnerability. Death waits at the edge, grinning beneath a cloak patterned with crosses and graves.

I have never seen death as the last word in the painting. Each birth brings someone into the world who has never appeared before, capable of interrupting what seemed inevitable and beginning what no pattern could predict. Mortality sets a limit but does not exhaust the meaning of a life. People fail and recover, break and mend, and die while life continues in beginnings they will never see.

Ruin does not have the last word. Cruelty can destroy, but even cruelty depends on powers it did not create: intelligence, freedom, desire, and life.

Coherence never existed in the form nostalgia assigns it. It is the story the past tells after editing out confusion. Things were not better then, simply farther away.

Life is closer to improvisation, with ideas introduced and abandoned, mistakes repeated, old patterns returning in new forms. I am not who I was. What matters is attention within the confusion: knowing noise from warning, spectacle from suffering, novelty from change, despair from honesty, hope from denial.

The next note will not redeem the last, but it can change what comes next—not a clean ending, but a new beginning.

Notes and reading

Alice in Wonderland—The line is spoken by Alice in Walt Disney’s animated film Alice in Wonderland (1951), rather than in Lewis Carroll’s original books.

Phish—An American rock band known for treating songs as open forms. Concerts vary from night to night, with long improvisations in which repetition, detour, and return become the structure rather than departures from it.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original—Robin D. G. Kelley (2010). Kelley’s biography presents Monk as a rigorous composer whose silences, dissonances, and angular rhythms reflect a highly deliberate musical intelligence.

Thucydides—“Thucydides the Perspicacious,” Aeon (August 3, 2026). The great historian’s realism lies in exposing self-deception. Far from believing that might makes right, Thucydides shows how the strong call force wisdom and the weak call justice rescue. Both mistake desire for judgment.

Mary Catherine Bateson—Composing a Life (1989). The cultural anthropologist sees identity as an improvisational achievement. People become who they are by making creative use of discontinuity and change.

August 5, 2026—On the eve of the Hiroshima anniversary, Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” published seventy-six years ago in 1950, reaches the date on which it ends. An automated house continues serving a family reduced to silhouettes on an outside wall. A falling branch starts a fire, and its intricate order collapses into “maniac confusion, yet unity.” Even a settled ending can be unsettled:

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice repeated: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . .”

A lighter note

Company in Confusion—After receiving a brilliant student’s paper, a prominent professor said, “I can’t grade this. It’s too difficult, too obscure.” He gave it to a colleague of comparable renown. “Well,” the colleague said, “it’s either an F or an A+.” The New Yorker (August 3, 2026), 57.

The Singularity, Apparently

Careless Responsibility

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

With an endnote by Jonathan Green, my son and a manager on Roku’s Platform team.

“The meteor has hit, and the dinosaurs don’t know it yet,” a movie producer was overheard saying of AI. Perhaps. Epochal claims flatter those who make them.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared that AI has reached the Singularity. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” he said, calling the prospect “incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”

Others argue that the essential condition of a singularity—AI capable of continuously improving itself without human direction—has not yet been met.

Until recently, the idea belonged largely to science fiction. The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) imagines machines ruling humanity, while Singularity (2017) depicts a supercomputer designed to end war that decides human beings are the true threat and attempts to destroy them.

Such scenarios can make present concerns seem minor, but they are substantial. Massive data centers are proliferating nationwide, consuming vast quantities of electricity and water. Educators, workers, writers, and the public are asking what AI may mean for learning, employment, privacy, creativity, and human judgment.

AI-detection systems embody the paradox. Companies have developed one form of AI to identify the products of another. These systems answer demand among schools, publishers, and employers seeking to distinguish human work from machine-generated material. Yet an algorithmic probability can quickly become an accusation.

Substack’s adoption of the AI detector Pangram has exposed the danger. Pangram claims greater accuracy and fewer false positives. No detector can determine who conceived an argument, selected its sources, revised its language, corrected its errors, or accepted responsibility for publishing it. Nor can it reliably distinguish among AI used as ghostwriter, research assistant, translator, editor, or proofreader.

Romaric Jannel, a philosopher and AI ethicist who uses AI to improve his writing, is less troubled by detection itself than by the culture of distrust surrounding it. His writing habits may cause some of his work to be classified as AI-generated, but his deeper concern is the impulse to police other people’s prose—and Substack’s decision to encourage it.

The detector supplies a statistical estimate. Readers supply the verdict. Once suspicion becomes the premise, denial is a lie. Vigilance becomes a search for confirmation, and ambiguous evidence begins to look conclusive. A tool intended to strengthen trust may instead institutionalize distrust and corrode the confidence it was meant to protect.

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological,” wrote Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher and major critic of technology. Technology, he argued, is not merely the devices we use. It also shapes how the world—and we ourselves—appear to us.

In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Heidegger sought neither blind acceptance nor helpless rebellion, but a “free relationship” to technology. Its deepest danger lies not in machines themselves but in a way of seeing that makes nature, knowledge, and human beings appear chiefly as resources to be measured, organized, and used.

Rebellion alone is insufficient. An effort to master or defeat technology can repeat the very logic of control under criticism.

In his 1955 “Memorial Address,” Heidegger called this freer relationship “releasement toward things”: using technological devices without allowing them to dominate our inner lives. It means saying both yes and no—recognizing what technology makes possible while remembering that efficiency, calculation, and control are not the only ways of understanding the world. Integrity lies in using what surrounds us without becoming subject to its demands.

“Releasement” can feel like a rhetorical wand waved over the forces that hold us. AI systems can be extraordinarily persuasive, capture attention, and encourage dependency. Autonomous agents also raise legitimate fears that work, decision-making, and judgment may be displaced by automation.

This tension offers little comfort to either side of the AI debate. Enthusiasm can become credulity, while alarm can become its own form of captivity. A low fence separates the two: both can allow technology to dictate the terms on which it is judged, though they do not possess equal power to shape its development.

There is no return to a world without AI. Even its fiercest critics use computers amid algorithms embedded in news, finance, transportation, medicine, and commerce. AI agents are also generating more browser activity, further blurring the distinction between human and automated action.

As it is, we are already half bots. The problem with the internet is not so much that it distorts life as that it reflects it: banal, ugly, beautiful. If only the slop could be filtered out. We may flee the algorithm, yet never so far as to leave its shadow behind.

Collaboration is not capitulation. To work with AI is not to suspend judgment about its uses, costs, or consequences.

The answer is neither condemnation nor surrender, but awareness, restraint, democratic oversight, and limits proportionate to the dangers involved. Regulation can produce unintended consequences, and sweeping prohibitions may drive harmful practices beyond effective oversight. That possibility argues for carefully designed rules, not regulatory hesitation.

Despite its record to date, the AI industry has a clear interest in accepting responsible public standards, including limits on the exploitation of land, water, energy, creative work, and personal data. Regulation should address demonstrated harms, credible risks, and reasonable precaution—not speculative panic. Unchecked development serves no one. Neither does unchecked alarmism.

We are all implicated in what is easiest to deplore. As Heidegger wrote, “We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us.”

Endnote

Jonathan Green, my son, is a manager on Roku’s Platform team. Roku operates a television-streaming platform through which viewers access services such as Netflix and Hulu.

“I have had a hard time wrapping my head around AI lately, even though my work lies squarely within technology and entertainment. As an idea, and still more as a promise, it feels at best awe-inspiring and at worst existentially unsettling. Only those of us old enough to remember the arrival of the internet have lived through a comparable shift, and human beings are notoriously poor at grasping the scale of such moments while still inside them.

“I do not know whether artificial general intelligence or the Singularity will ever arrive. But even in its present form, AI gives anyone with a keyboard or microphone powers once reserved for specialists. Consider computer programming. Its walled garden is already disappearing. The laundromat on the corner can now build its own app without taking a computer science course or opening a coding book. The barrier to that once-esoteric world is no longer training or credentials. It is having an idea.”

Notes and reading

Heidegger’s “Releasement”—his Gelassenheit — draws on Meister Eckhart and the German mystical tradition, where it meant relinquishing self-will and possessiveness to become receptive to God. Heidegger secularized the idea but retained its discipline of non-possession. Religious practices such as prayer, Sabbath, fasting, meditation, and almsgiving can still cultivate the critical balance Gelassenheit (releasement) requires: neither rejecting technology or anything else outright nor surrendering ourselves to it.

“Pangram and Substack’s Collaboration Is Worse Than Video Surveillance”—Romaric Jannel, Philosophy and Beyond (July 27, 2026). A philosopher and AI ethicist at Paris’s Collège International de Philosophie, Jannel concludes: “Let’s be careful about ruining lives.”

Privileging Suspicion—“Why is critique so frequently feted as the most serious and scrupulous form of thought? What imaginative alternatives does it obscure or overrule?”—Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015). Felski questions the prestige accorded to suspicion as an intellectual reflex and asks what other forms of attention it may crowd out.

Octavia Butler and Change. In Parable of the Sower, the visionary American science-fiction writer presents adaptation not as submission but as meeting change consciously, building communities able to survive it, and helping shape what follows.

A Lighter Note

“The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI”—Erik German, New York–Intelligencer (May 20, 2026). Cars and televisions may remain prohibited, but some Amish communities have adopted uses of ChatGPT for business and personal correspondence. One Amish husband asked it to write his wife a birthday card.

“Daniel, that’s beautiful. It doesn’t sound like you.”

Careless Responsibility

Liberalism and Odysseus

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

The last posts considered death and “immortality projects,” then Odysseus as a conservative hero of restoration. This one turns to the Prodigal Son—and to the claims of morality.

We’ve lost all sense of right and wrong in a culture without God.

So goes the complaint.

Liberals get blamed for moral drift. Conservatives get called self-righteous. Once God enters the argument, everyone agrees that God opposes bad people. Jesus turns the other cheek but stays on our side against those we dislike.

The truth helps no one. Every culture has been corrupt, even when it produced good. Greek writers complained that the young lacked discipline. Plato described rulers devoted to wealth and ease.

Faith can give this habit divine force. Each age mistakes its anxieties for God’s judgment. Religion gives us a God who shares our enemies.

Jesus’ parables refuse to cooperate. They place God on the wrong side of our moral accounts. Few do so more than the story of the Prodigal Son.

The story is familiar. A younger son takes his inheritance, leaves home, and wastes it. When hunger drives him back, his father runs to meet him and orders a feast. The older son, who stayed and worked, refuses to join the celebration.

But this is not merely a touching story about a wayward son who comes to his senses. It is a scandal about grace.

The usual lesson is true, but it lets us off too soon. We identify with the son who needs forgiveness and ignore the son with a claim. We admire the father without asking whether he is fair. Reconciliation becomes a feeling instead of a change in how people live together.

The parable is more demanding than that.

The father hears the younger son’s confession but will not let repentance become a bargain. He restores him in public and orders a feast that may draw the village. The older son sees this. He obeyed while his brother wasted what he had been given. Now the household celebrates the one who harmed it.

The father sees the pain of the son who returned. The brother sees the damage he caused. Each sees something true, but neither sees enough. The father takes responsibility for a family neither son can repair.

That responsibility looks careless because it ignores what people deserve. The father risks shame by running. He forgives before change has been proved. He celebrates before the damage has been faced. Yet he is careless only about the accounting that has made life together impossible.

The younger son says he is no longer worthy to be called a son. The older says, “All these years I have been working like a slave for you.” One leaves through rebellion. The other leaves through obedience hardened into entitlement. Both think belonging must be earned.

The father will not let either earn or lose his place. He restores the younger son and tells the older, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” He denies neither failure nor faithfulness, but he lets neither have the last word.

The parable leaves the conflict unresolved.

The younger son enters the feast. The older stays outside, armed with virtue and wounded by mercy. The father goes to each, but he forces neither across the door. Reconciliation can look like irresponsibility. The line between the deserving and the undeserving may have to break before healing can begin.

That is not moral indifference. Celebration is not acquittal. The embrace does not erase the past. It keeps the past from owning the future.

Perhaps this is the carelessness of God: not carelessness toward injury, but refusal to treat any division as final. God does not wait for the guilty to become lovable or the resentful to become gracious. God does not wait for agreement on where everyone should sit.

The father tells the older son that he belongs. He rejoices because the younger has come home. God refuses the sides the brothers have drawn.

Jesus leaves us at the door with the older brother. Can we accept mercy for someone else before our own grievance has been settled?

The older brother thinks the scandal is that the undeserving have been welcomed. The greater scandal is that he must enter with them. Grace offends him because it includes those he would exclude.

The door stays open. The joke, if we can bear it, is that the one outside is home already.

It is easier to assign guilt or admit it because guilt can be managed. Responsibility remains after everyone has made a case for innocence.

Conservatives fail when they mistake punishment for seriousness and exclusion for faithfulness. Liberals fail when they treat compassion as enough and assume that understanding an injury repairs it. Each sees what the other avoids.

The father enjoys no such innocence. He goes out to both sons and bears the cost of keeping the family open. The God in this parable is harder to use. God will not stay on our side of the door. The father stands outside, pleading with the son who believes himself right. Inside, the feast has begun.

Reconciliation is offered whether we want it or not. Some have said, if that is heaven, give me hell. Anger offers an exit. Despair does too. The task is to enter a joy we did not authorize with people we did not choose.

Notes and reading

Parable—Luke 15:11–32. Some Christian interpreters allegorized the two sons as Gentiles and Jews, an identification that could reduce the elder brother to a supersessionist, anti-Jewish type. More careful readings preserve the sharper point: both sons are estranged, one by rebellion and the other by obedience hardened into entitlement.

Morality in the flesh. The father does not answer the family’s crisis with a principle. He runs, embraces, clothes, feeds, and goes out again to plead with the elder son. The moral meaning of the parable resides in these acts: responsibility becomes bodily presence, and reconciliation becomes a table at which estranged people must learn to live together. Grace is not an exception to morality but morality restored to its human purpose.

The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd: Finding Christ on the Buddha’s Path—Addison Hodges Hart, 2013. Hart brings the Zen ox-herding tradition into conversation with Christ the Good Shepherd. Both, he argues, portray spiritual life as a recovery of the self from estrangement, an inward transformation that issues in a more natural and loving life. Read beside the Prodigal Son, this illuminates “coming to himself” as the beginning of return rather than regret alone.

The Uni-Context: One World, One Moral Room—Agnes Callard. “The world is flat,” McDonaldization, homogenization, and unipolarity describe economic, cultural, or political convergence. Callard’s more radical claim concerns norms: once-distinct contexts—home, church, friendship, public life—collapse into one moral arena governed by standards meant to apply everywhere.

The elder brother already inhabits the uni-context. He turns the household into a ledger: obedience merits reward, betrayal its cost. The father does not deny the difference. He refuses to let a universal ranking determine his responsibility to either son. His response resembles Aristotelian phronesis: the fitting good discerned within a particular relationship. Callard’s novelty lies less in the remedy than in naming the conditions now eroding it.

Callard develops the idea in “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird,” her July 14, 2026, conversation with Derek Thompson on Plain English. A philosopher of ancient thought and ethics, she is the author of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.

• Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own. More on that distinction in my next post, “The Singularity, Apparently,” coming shortly.

Liberalism and Odysseus

Death-Cleaning

About 2 + 2 = 5

The last post considered death and “immortality projects.” Today follows that idea into politics, where Odysseus has become an icon of conservative restoration—and a challenge to liberalism. Next Wednesday turns to the Prodigal Son and the moral judgments it overturns.

Conservatives have had John Wayne and Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, Norman Rockwell and Thanksgiving dinner, Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Charlton Heston and Ben-Hur, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. Columns and symmetry; pastels and neon; cowboy hats, country music, the American flag.

Liberals have had Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Alan Alda and Hawkeye Pierce, Sidney Poitier and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jane Fonda and Coming Home. James Baldwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol. Glass and steel, asymmetry; earth tones and rainbow stripes; folk songs, protest marches, the peace sign.

These are caricatures, and many figures refuse their assigned camps. Still, conservatives have been better at turning politics into stories of belonging—a recognizable world that can be lost and reclaimed.

Now, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, they have Odysseus.

The backlash against Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy shows how much symbolic territory is at stake. Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, and others see a Black Helen not as an artistic choice but as another surrender to “woke” decline. For part of the right, Odysseus has become an icon of civilizational restoration, returning to reclaim the household from a godless culture run amok.

Nolan’s film hands the right a monumental hero, while conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey frames Homer’s epic as an American story: a nation divided between restless wandering and the desire for home.

In the more reactionary version of that reading, the emphasis falls on return. Odysseus finds usurpers draining his estate, flouting custom, courting his queen, and mocking his heir. He tests loyalties, strings the unbendable bow, and restores order by force. Homer’s hero does not just come home. He reclaims his country.

Politics becomes repossession: a lost country restored to those who believe it was theirs all along.

Conservatism has refined this story of dispossession—institutions captured, inheritances squandered, old loyalties mocked. The diagnosis calls less for policy than for a man on horseback to take back the country. Those who revolt against an effete elite often surrender to a coarser one.

Deneen’s reading is richer than that. The wanderer discovers that freedom detached from home becomes exile. Yet even this account can lend Homer to reactionary restoration. Ithaca is reclaimed; the old order returns.

But the romance of restored household order can obscure who must leave the room when “the power in this household” is reclaimed. Women are silenced while sexual coercion and the treatment of women as property remain embedded in the heroic world.

Liberals have causes, programs, and policy papers. They defend equal citizenship and the rule of law. But none arrives carrying a hero’s bow. None walks into the mess and makes the world recognizable again.

This is an aesthetic crisis. At a Harvard forum, Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, Cass Sunstein, and James Wood debated whether liberalism can offer a vision of the good life or only the freedom to choose one.

Its newer emblems are less heroic: Sweetgreen, HR jargon, Equinox classes, Parks and Recreation, and glass apartments above retail. They suggest a smooth, well-managed society offering choices but little worth returning to.

Sunstein’s defense captures liberalism’s moral strength and imaginative weakness: government should not dictate which life is beautiful, only protect citizens’ right to decide. That restraint matters. Imposed visions of the good have a dark history.

Yet liberty is not self-explanatory. An order allowing many ways of life must still explain why it deserves attachment. Choice opens the door but gives no one a reason to stay.

What liberalism lacks is not another strongman promising to drive out the intruders but a story of return it can claim. Home cannot be reduced to ancestral property guarded against outsiders or treated as a place with no lasting claim on us.

A liberal Ithaca would be enlarged by the journey, worth recovering because it had learned whom it once excluded. Belonging would no longer depend on who arrived first.

But Homer’s Odysseus does not recover home through triumph. He returns disguised as a beggar. He lies, tests, and waits. Recognition comes through his dog and nurse, then Telemachus, and finally Penelope. Homecoming depends not only on his return but on others recognizing who he is.

Nor does the climax offer a simple resolution. Odysseus has the doors secured and turns his home into a slaughterhouse. The maids are hanged; Melanthius is mutilated. When the suitors’ families gather for revenge, the epic ends near civil war. Odysseus cannot secure peace by force alone; Athena must halt the vengeance.

Homer leaves a warning inside the homecoming. Restoration hardens into purity. Injury becomes a license for cruelty. Reclaiming a nation turns into hunting intruders and punishing betrayal until anything unsettling the old household looks disposable.

Liberalism has been wary of “home.” But politics without attachment leaves the field to those who define belonging through blood and obedience. The question is whether a country can feel like home without needing enemies to make it whole.

“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”

A liberal Odysseus would return to defend what deserves preservation and repair what has been broken. He would know that no household is innocent and no peace is secured by vengeance. Homecoming would not mean fortifying the walls.

That tension runs through our politics. Conservatives face the difference between repair and revenge, between loving a nation and purifying it of those who question its past.

Liberals face another difficulty: whether resistance is enough, whether institutions can command loyalty without offering belonging, and whether patriotism can be spoken without embarrassment.

Amid polarization and disorder, two consoling fantasies are collapsing: that order will return when the enemy is defeated, or that justice will follow when the rules are restored.

A country cannot be saved by expulsion, and a world cannot survive on rules no one will enforce.

A democracy becomes a home only when defeat does not become exile.

Notes and reading

“I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.”
—Homer, Odyssey 5.219–220, trans. A. T. Murray.

“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”
—Homer, Odyssey 6.207–208, trans. A. T. Murray.

Christopher Nolan’s achievement as writer-director, the film’s IMAX scale, and its extraordinary reception deserve recognition. The questions raised here concern not its cinematic accomplishment but the political and cultural meanings gathered around it.

“Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World?” Harvard University, March 23, 2026. Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, and Cass Sunstein, moderated by James Wood, considered whether liberalism can offer a rich vision of life or only protect freedom of choice. The event’s own description invoked salad chains, consultant-speak, and Parks and Recreation as emblems of liberalism’s perceived aesthetic thinness.

Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls (2026). As mentioned in my last post, Deneen reads the Odyssey as an American story of restless wandering and desired homecoming. His postliberal conservatism gives the reading much of its richness, though his larger defense of rootedness and local community may romanticize “home” and understate its exclusions.

“Aesthetic Politics and Political Aesthetics: A Crucial Distinction”—Katya Mandoki, August 8, 2023. Mandoki, a philosopher, author, and experimental artist, distinguishes the political use of aesthetics to legitimize, persuade, or intimidate from the use of political power to impose a preferred aesthetic order. The distinction helps explain how cultural symbols can become instruments of belonging, exclusion, and rule.

Death-Cleaning

The Fire, This Time

About 2 + 2 = 5

I’m old—or, as I prefer to say, older—but I keep forgetting that I’m going to die. Seriously. Yet not seriously enough to act on it. I would rather just write about it.

Not to worry, say advocates of “longevity escape velocity”—the point at which medical advances extend life expectancy faster than time passes. Mortality, apparently, may yet be outrun.

Memento mori means “Remember that you must die.”

Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” The Stoics returned to mortality because remembering life’s limit might free them to live more deliberately. Mortality shapes life.

History is crowded with thinkers contemplating skulls. Caravaggio had something less orderly in mind in the painting above. He knew violence firsthand: brawls, arrests, flight, a death sentence, and the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni. His biography reads more like baroque true crime than an artist’s life.

Yet here he paints Saint Francis collapsing into an angel’s arms after receiving the stigmata. The saint looks less transported than overcome: wounded, exhausted, almost relieved. In Caravaggio, ecstasy arrives as surrender after turmoil.

His chiaroscuro does more than set light against darkness; each discloses the other. His life joined beauty and brutality, privilege and disgrace, devotion and rascality. Wealthy patrons prized his paintings while he outran the law. Moralists should proceed with caution.

Tolstoy approaches mortality mercilessly in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan has accumulated the furnishings of a successful life only to discover, as death approaches, that he may have mistaken arrangement for meaning.

His house is in order. His life is not.

That is mortality in its grander form. The mundane version begins with a closet.

Feng shui, the Chinese practice of arranging surroundings for harmony, recommends discarding what is broken. The Swedish practice of döstädning, or death-cleaning, goes further: clear away what others must sort after you die.

Unlike Marie Kondo—the Clutter Queen—who asks whether an object “sparks joy,” Margareta Magnusson asks whether you use it, need it, or would buy it again. In a country seized by decluttering while storage space remains at a premium, the question is less aesthetic than moral. Leave memories, not a mess.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker joins mortality’s depths to death-cleaning’s mundanity. Clutter—more seriously, hoarding—can be read through his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death.

Possessions accumulate not only because they are useful or cherished but because they offer continuity to a self that knows it will disappear.

Becker raises the stakes beyond crowded closets. Careers, nations, causes, ideals, and religious convictions can become “immortality projects,” ways of attaching ourselves to what will outlast us.

The danger begins when we forget they are human constructions and demand that others live or die inside them.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has made the homeward journey a national spectacle. The story raises a question beyond the film itself: whether home and family, among America’s most cherished ideals, can become immortality projects—places where continuity seems assured and innocence preserved.

Nostalgia edits ruthlessly, smoothing what was painful or unresolved into belonging. The danger lies not in loving home, but in asking it to provide a permanence no home—or family—can bear.

That our ideals contain illusion does not make them false, any more than self-interest makes a good act worthless. Knowing this may save us from mistaking our need for an ideal as proof of its claims on others.

Becker’s grimmer point is that death cannot be sanitized by giving it a higher purpose. When ideal promises escape from mortality, devotion can harden into perfectionism and coercion.

Religion is not exempt. Christians can speak of the Crucifixion as though Easter made Good Friday less terrible—as though Christ did not fully die because he rose again.

“No cross, no crown” may name costly hope, but it can also turn agony into spiritual achievement and suffering into proof of election. Death, denied at the door, returns wearing a halo.

The cross resists that evasion. Resurrection does not cancel death but passes through it. “All things work together for good” locates the good not in suffering itself but in what God may yet bring out of it. Redemption does not justify suffering but refuses to abandon what suffering has broken.

What does any of this ask of an ordinary Tuesday? Refuse to demand permanence from things that cannot provide it. Clear the closet and spare someone else the burden of sorting what you refused to relinquish.

Letting go does not lessen the meaning of what we had. What we cannot keep is not necessarily lost.

Loosen, too, the grip of causes, possessions, grievances, and self-images through which we try to outlast ourselves—and the versions we impose on others.

Remembering death does not make every choice profound or turn tidiness into wisdom. It may expose the difference between what helps us avoid life’s limits and what sustains us.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa advised carrying two sayings, one in each pocket: “For my sake was the world created” and “I am but dust and ashes.” Mortality requires both truths: one guards against despair, the other against self-importance.

We do not merely live by illusions. We resist the full truth of life and resent the ambiguity of being human.

Accepting that ambiguity may mean judging others with less certainty. Criticism remains necessary, but every life contains something hidden from us, perhaps even from the person living it.

To live with that knowledge is to stop demanding that life become something it never promised to be—and to remember, as a poet put it, that “Nobody’s lantern can be held entirely responsible for sight.”

Notes and reading

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Darwin explains the development of life through natural selection, and Nietzsche interprets human striving through the will to power. Becker gives the denial of death a similarly far-reaching place in human behavior and culture. Even worthy convictions, he argues, can serve our desire to outlast death. Recognizing that motive need not diminish conviction but may help us hold it with less self-righteousness.

The Desire to Be—Maximus the Confessor offers a counterpoint to Becker: every creature possesses a “natural will,” an innate desire “to be and to live” and attain its proper fulfillment. The longing to continue may become illusion, but it may also express life’s elemental appetite for more life.

Can Anything Become Nothing?—Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism (1972; English translation, 2016). In its foundational essay, “Returning to Parmenides,” Severino argues that Western thought becomes nihilistic when it treats beings as emerging from and returning to nothing. Nothing that is, he maintains, can finally become nothing; appearing and disappearing are not the same as entering and leaving existence. The claim is powerful, though it comes at a price: if everything is eternal, genuine becoming, loss, freedom, and renewal become difficult to account for.

Disillusion, the Last Illusion—In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens writes of “disillusion as the last illusion.” Recognizing our “immortality projects” may not free us from illusion but only give it a more sophisticated name. Illusion can become endlessly recursive; where one ends and another begins, no one quite knows.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning—Margareta Magnusson (2017; English edition, 2018). Practical, unsentimental, and funny, Magnusson treats decluttering not as a cult of tidiness but as consideration for those who survive us—and as a way of deciding what has truly belonged to a life.

The Trouble with Home—Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls (2026). Deneen reads Homer’s violent, intricate epic through concerns familiar from his broader critique of liberalism, finding in it the American tension between restless movement and attachment to home. His interpretation is richer than a simple opposition between mobility and rooted order, but it can still press Homer’s ambiguities toward an ideal of civic recovery centered on homecoming. That emphasis risks romanticizing “home” and softening the brutality and hierarchy of the world Odysseus reclaims. The book gives Deneen’s political thought a more mythic form, while leaving open questions about the exclusions of localism and the plural forces that shaped the American republic.

The Value of the Irretrievable—In “The Immortal,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic.… Everything has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.” Death may inspire fantasies of permanence, but it also gives weight to what happens only once. Rainer Maria Rilke makes a related claim in the Ninth Duino Elegy (1923): “But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”

The Value of What Does Not Last—John Carney’s Once (2007; 86 minutes) gives the idea human form. A brief encounter between two musicians becomes a relationship the audience longs to see endure, yet permanence is not its measure. What they create together remains meaningful without becoming theirs to keep. A heartbreaker. Its stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, later became a couple; after their romance ended, they remained friends and musical collaborators.

Rabbinic Saying—joins Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5—“For my sake the world was created”—to Abraham’s confession in Genesis 18:27: “I am but dust and ashes.” Retold by Martin Buber, Later Masters.

“Nobody’s lantern is entirely responsible for sight.”—Alina Stefanescu, “Self-Portrait with Shadows and Turgenev,” Cable Street, forthcoming.

The Fire, This Time

Backing Forward

About 2 + 2 = 5

For most of history, fire was a mainstay of daily life, providing warmth, food, and protection. Industrial societies changed this, hiding combustion inside engines, furnaces, and power plants. Fire became less visible even as we depended on it more completely, trading the open flame for controlled progress.

This confidence shaped land management. For decades, governments aggressively suppressed fires across forests and grasslands. They interrupted natural cycles, allowing undergrowth to accumulate in ecosystems long adapted to burning. Fire did not disappear; the fuel gathered.

It is returning, intensified by heat and drought. Thousands of wildfires cross Canada, sending plumes of smoke into the jet stream. The damage extends far beyond the fire line. Fine particulate matter clogs lungs, worsens respiratory illness, and spikes heart risks.

When a forest burns in one country, people in another are warned to stay indoors. Climate change arrives no longer as a statistical projection, but as a visceral reality borne out in an apocalyptic sky and the sharp smell of smoke. Many treat air quality warnings as background noise until breathing makes it personal.

No single cause explains a wildfire. Lightning and human sparks matter, but so do drought, land use, and a century of total fire suppression. Climate change parches vegetation and extends fire seasons, increasing the odds that a single spark will morph into a regional disaster.

George Saunders, the American novelist and short-story writer, brings this crisis into devastating focus. His fiction combines grotesque comedy with tenderness, refusing the easy choice between judging people and recognizing their humanity. Art is always about more than itself.

His new novel Vigil places K. J. Boone, a fictional oil executive dying of cancer, under the care of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit assigned to comfort him. Boone helped suppress climate science and defend an industry whose benefits he invokes to justify its damage. Victims, animals, former associates, and other spirits gather around his bed, demanding something closer to judgment.

The novel turns combustion into moral consequence. Heat, drought, smoke, and burning landscapes appear as the accumulated result of decisions made in offices, laboratories, legislatures, markets, and ordinary lives. Fire becomes the visible afterlife of choices once kept distant and abstract.

Saunders does not make accusation simple. The executive is culpable, but not a cardboard monster; he genuinely believed society demanded the comforts fossil fuels provided. Vigil asks whether compassion can face grim truths without surrendering judgment or mercy, even when repentance never comes.

However, a single villain risks letting the reader off the hook. A clear villain clarifies guilt but can conceal how widely the blame is shared. Some profited from deception; others merely benefited from the system or felt powerless.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, once wrote that the fire is not on the roofs of houses, but in the minds of men. Today, our predicament cannot be so easily divided. The fire is simultaneously in the forests, our lungs, our policies, and our habits. The task is to name responsibility without letting complexity become an alibi—or failure seem inevitable.

Fatalism claims the future is fixed. Pessimism expects decline but leaves room for action. The philosopher Mara van der Lugt describes “hopeful pessimism” as a refusal to believe progress is a given. It asks us to act without assurance of success, to lessen the worst because the worst is not yet set in stone.

Van der Lugt focuses on climate activists, and she considers the pessimist who approaches her activism with this attitude: “Our efforts are likely to fail—and we will do what we can nonetheless.” You act, not because you think you can keep the rising temperature of global warming to one and a half degrees, but because anything you do to mitigate the worst, which is not inevitable, has value.

Many are withdrawing from public life—abandoning fractured institutions, hyper-partisan cities, and conventional careers. Exhausted by an overheated culture and planet, they look for an escape hatch, a migration captured by the film Nomadland and the ethos of what the intellectual media platform Big Think calls “The Opt-Out Nation.”

But we cannot opt out of breathing.

When the smoke clears, and we breathe easily again, the very conditions that fed the fire are still accepted as normal. Hope begins by refusing both evasion and surrender. We can’t live together, or live at all, as nomads fleeing under a burning sky.

Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, playwright, and later president, called hope not a “prognostication,” but “an orientation of the spirit,” an internal force that allows you “to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Hopeful pessimists can lessen the worst, and make room to breathe.

Notes and reading

[*] Nero and the Fire—Hubert Robert’s The Fire of Rome, July 18, 64 AD (1785) imagines the catastrophe through the grand architecture and theatrical light of eighteenth-century history painting. Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned—the fiddle did not yet exist—and he was probably outside Rome when the fire began. Ancient sources disagree about his conduct and possible responsibility, though the story proved too useful to disappear.

Art and morality—A brief link to my last post on Ursula K. Le Guin. Much in the spirit of George Saunders, she wrote: “I do not feel a real difference in kind—or even of importance—between the ethical and the aesthetic inquiry. But to pursue that statement further would require some understanding of philosophy, and I have none.”

Stephen J. Pyne, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (2021). Pyne places today’s fires within humanity’s long, uneasy history of burning. By consuming fossil fuels on a planetary scale, he argues, we have not merely warmed the climate but remade Earth into a fire age of our own making.

Luke T. Kelly and others, “Fire and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene,” Science (2020). Why fire is not simply destructive and why healthy landscapes require better fire management rather than universal suppression.

Mara van der Lugt, Hopeful Pessimism (2025). Van der Lugt rejects the demand for optimism in a world coming apart. Pessimism, she argues, need not mean despair or surrender. Refusing to assume that progress is inevitable can make hope more honest and moral action less dependent on the promise of success.

Climate Fiction, timely now—Notable examples include David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, linking environmental destruction to exploitation across generations; Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, set amid fire, displacement, and social collapse; Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, about a drought-ravaged California; Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, imagining a flooded but still unequal city; and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, exploring the bond between human and arboreal life. Together, they address ecological breakdown, inequality, survival, adaptation, and renewal.

Backing Forward

The Human Still Coming

About 2 + 2 = 5

Not long ago, I reached for my phone during a few unoccupied minutes. I expected no news, message, or amusement. Silence had appeared, and almost before noticing it, I moved to fill it.

How much of life is spent avoiding the pause that makes our assumptions visible? We inherit loyalties, fears, ambitions, and ways of seeing. Then distraction saves us the trouble of asking whether they are true. Besides, distraction now has a gig economy behind it—digital fakery just a click away—something else to get upset about.

Unexpected help came from Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Harold Bloom credited, more than Tolkien, with raising fantasy into high literature. Her speculative fiction did not so much predict the future as estrange the present. She invented unfamiliar worlds to expose assumptions too familiar to see.

Nietzsche approached the problem differently. He called the passive, comfort-seeking person who abandoned meaning “the last man.” The danger was surrender without drama: the loss of curiosity, judgment, risk, and inward independence.

When inherited meanings weaken, freedom does not necessarily follow. Responsibility shifts to leaders, movements, institutions, nations, or the crowd. Distraction replaces attention. Summaries replace books. Artificial intelligence can produce the evidence of thought while allowing thought itself to go missing. Productivity displaces reflection.

Freedom shrinks to choosing among ready-made options rather than questioning the values behind them.

The culture wars persist because certitude keeps them going. The quarrel is not over belief or unbelief—God, reason, science, religion, right and wrong. It begins when we mistake our understanding for reality, our convictions for truth itself, and the limits of our vision for the limits of what is true.

Soon civility is cowardice, compromise is treason, and everyone is a knight of righteousness riding out to destroy somebody else’s heresy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw hope in what certitude resists. In “Circles” (1841), he wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Emerson was not praising confusion. A settled mind can become closed. New thought begins when conviction admits surprise, correction, and unseen possibilities. Unsettlement reminds us that neither world nor self is finished.

An old Greek image placed the past before us and the future approaching from behind. We backed into what came next with memory, not foresight.

Memory is not nostalgia. Nostalgia reshapes the past to meet present needs; memory recovers possibilities the present has forgotten. Yet history gives no map, only warnings, and memory can become blindness when we recognize only familiar dangers.

Meeting what comes next requires imagination: seeing forms of life and truth our inherited categories conceal.

Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness makes that work of imagination more than science fiction. Published in 1969 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, the novel sends a human envoy into an unfamiliar world—and makes his assumptions the strangest things there.

The novel follows Genly Ai, a human from Terra sent to Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a confederation of worlds. Believing himself open-minded, he invites Gethen into a larger human community. Yet he carries assumptions he cannot see.

The people of Gethen are neither permanently male nor female. Their societies developed without the fixed gender divisions Genly considers natural. He repeatedly misreads his ally Estraven because Estraven does not fit his ideas of strength, loyalty, honesty, or trust.

Genly thinks he is judging Estraven. Instead, Estraven is exposing the limits of his imagination.

Politics makes that blindness more dangerous. Karhide, the kingdom where he first arrives, is shaped by nationalism, fear of outsiders, and suspicion at court. Neighboring Orgoreyn is bureaucratic and totalitarian, presenting itself as rational and efficient while concealing surveillance, coercion, and repression. The two states differ, yet both narrow loyalty until concern for humanity appears as betrayal.

Estraven sees farther. Condemned as a traitor, Estraven understands that loyalty to one’s country may require refusing to be governed by its fears. Nations matter, but no nation is the whole of humanity. Order that loses sight of truth becomes another kind of blindness.

During their long journey, Genly begins to understand. Stripped of political theater and familiar categories, they must depend upon one another. Trust grows not out of sameness, but out of attention.

Le Guin moves beyond both Nietzsche and Emerson. Freedom is not merely the strength to create values, nor does openness require abandoning conviction. It requires the humility to discover that some of our deepest assumptions may be provincial.

Genly changes because, at last, he can meet another person without forcing that person into familiar categories.

The future still approaches from behind. We will not meet it by repeating inherited answers or congratulating ourselves on independence. We will need memory without nostalgia, conviction without certitude, and loyalties large enough to survive correction.

Perhaps that is why those empty minutes matter. The reflex to fill silence may be more than impatience. It may be reluctance to face what has not yet been decided—including ourselves.

The danger is not only that power may command us to stop thinking. It is that we may mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of reality. The impulse to escape uncertainty becomes, paradoxically, an escape from life itself.

Le Guin gives uncertainty the final word:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Notes and reading

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98). Gauguin conceived the painting as a meditation on human existence. Its figures move through stages of life without resolving the questions named in its title.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was a major American writer of speculative fiction and a longtime student of philosophical Taoism. Its themes of balance, interdependence, restraint, and action without domination shaped much of her work, along with a suspicion of mastery and attentiveness to apparent opposites.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles” (1841). Emerson’s remark that “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” belongs to a larger vision of thought and life as continual expansion. Readers committed to linear, progressive, or Christian apocalyptic accounts of time may resist its recurrent imagery. The quotation is used here not to deny enduring truth, but to defend openness to correction, surprise, and truths not yet fully seen.

Taylor Dotson, The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy (2021). Political polarization grows not only from indifference to truth, but from the conviction that one’s own facts or values should make disagreement unnecessary.

Fact, fiction, and imagination—For Le Guin, fiction is invention but not falsehood. Wishful thinking escapes reality; imagination begins with reality and returns to enlarge it. Through imagination, we may come closer to knowing the minds and hearts of others. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories,” Words Are My Matter (2016).

The Human Still Coming

Against the Arrangement

About 2 + 2 = 5

We are born members of the human species. Whether we are born fully human is another matter. A child arrives unfinished—not only helpless, but still becoming a self through language, memory, love, responsibility, and others.

We did not choose birth, and we could die at any moment. Biology gives us life. It does not settle what life is for.

The latest answer comes from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence will enlarge the mind, genetic engineering correct the body, longevity science perhaps conquer death. Transhumanism says it plainly: the human being is only a draft. Humanity will arrive when nature yields to engineering.

Yet the question returns whenever we ask what kind of person to become, what we owe one another, or why a longer life would be better. Ignoring it—“I’m too busy to be bothered”—leaves human meaning to appetite, circumstance, or whoever has the power to define it.

An older answer may come closer. We are born human, but also born to become human. “Become who you are,” the old command says—but who is that? Is the self something we discover within, create for ourselves, receive as a gift, or become through our relationships with others?

Hannah Arendt began with what she called natality. She wrote:

“It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’” *

Every child enters a world already underway as someone new. To be born is to bring the possibility of beginning.

Humanity is never a done deal. Technology cannot manufacture it, nor can the solitary will achieve it. The human is still coming—not only ahead of us, but among us and in someone whose life reveals what ours may become.

Artificial intelligence makes another old question harder to avoid: What—or who—is truly original? A machine can produce fluency without experience, confession without memory, argument without conviction. Yet we inherit language before choosing our words; we become ourselves through others.

If human dignity rests on more than our abilities, even astonishing simulations of human expression need not threaten it. Our worth lies deeper than capacities technology already reproduces.

Reality is more textured and mysterious than technological fear allows, and more open to meaning than any measure of performance can explain. Science can describe much of what we are without exhausting the meaning of who we are—or closing the question of transcendence.

If none of us creates ourselves, authenticity is not self-creation. Becoming human may depend less upon independence than upon answering for what has been given.

Religion enters here—not because reason has failed, but because religious language names what precedes our choosing and exceeds our making. “Grace” is one such word: life, love, language, belonging—the deepest things are given before they are earned.

What is given must be received, cared for, and shared. Grace does not abolish human agency. It gives agency somewhere to begin.

Christianity makes a further claim: humanity’s meaning is not finally an idea or a better version of ourselves. It appears in a person. That claim is particular, but the question it answers belongs to everyone: What kind of life reveals what humanity is for?

Yet Christians have often understood Jesus too narrowly: as repairing humanity and restoring what Adam lost. The Orthodox theologian John Behr tells the story differently. Humanity, he argues, was not completed at the beginning. Adam was humanity in its infancy.

Christ does more than repair what went wrong. He reveals what humanity was meant to become. Humanity does not lie behind us in lost innocence. It lies ahead.

For Christians, Behr locates fully human life in the crucified and risen Christ. Yet the human meaning of that claim is not confined to believers: humanity reaches fulfillment not through mastery, invulnerability, or escape from death, but through a life freely given in love.

Here Christianity parts company with Silicon Valley’s dream of transcendence. Both imagine transformation. But one looks toward greater power over nature; the other toward love no longer governed by self-preservation.

Medicine heals. Technology enlarges possibility. Longer lives may mean more time to love and repair. Yet immortality would not answer what a limitless life is for. It might only give us more time to remain unfinished.

Grace is neither divine coercion nor escape from the work of becoming. It is the life already given drawing us toward the freedom for which we were made.

Where, when, in whom?

Not beyond the human condition. Not in an ideal realm removed from daily life. Not when biology finally submits to engineering. Not in the isolated self answerable only to itself.

The human is still coming wherever life is received as gift and returned as love. Christians make the more particular claim that this life has already appeared—in one whose humanity was revealed not by holding on to life, but by giving it away.

That claim need not close the circle around believers. Jesus did ask people to believe in him; the Gospels say so. But belief is more than agreement. It is trust in the God he reveals and participation in the life he lives.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, doubters, and those with no religion may answer differently, but the question remains:

What kind of life is worthy of our trust?

“I came,” Jesus said, “that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Not a formula to master, but a way to follow; not an answer that ends every question, but truth embodied; not escape from mortality, but life given and shared.

Matthew’s Gospel ends not with an explanation but a promise:

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Notes and reading

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958). Arendt attributes the words “A child has been born unto us” to the Gospels. The Gospels do, of course, announce the birth of Jesus as good news, but the phrase itself comes more directly from Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Her imprecision may be revealing. Arendt gathers the promise of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel announcement into a single image of natality: every birth introduces someone new into the world and, with that person, the possibility of a new beginning.

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. First published in 1973; 2nd ed., 1997. Bloom argued that originality does not mean freedom from influence. Writers become themselves through inheritance, resistance, and revision. Artificial intelligence makes that old anxiety newly visible: no machine generates without prior language, but neither does any human voice begin alone.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. 1972. Trilling distinguished sincerity—truthfulness in what we present to others—from authenticity, fidelity to a supposedly deeper self. AI complicates both by imitating conviction without experience and reminding us how much human expression depends upon inherited language and borrowed forms.

John Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology. 2025. Behr argues that humanity was not completed at the beginning and merely restored after the Fall. Christ reveals the mature human being toward whom creation has always been moving. The fully human life appears not in mastery or escape from mortality, but in the crucified and risen Christ—a life freely given in love.

Romans 12:6–8. Paul describes grace not as private possession but as gifts made fruitful in service: teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, mercy. What is given becomes fully ours in being offered to others.

Biblical references. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” is John 10:10; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” is John 14:6; and “I am with you always, to the end of the age” is Matthew 28:20. Quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

“No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 is often read as Christianity’s final word of exclusion. Yet it immediately follows Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” The claim is not that a religious label or correct formula saves us, but that the way to God is revealed in the life Jesus embodies: truth lived, love given, mercy practiced. “Through me” need not mean explicit membership in the right religious group.

Nor is this an invitation to “Jesus-olatry”—admiration of Jesus detached from the God he reveals and the life he teaches. Jesus himself says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21).

The Christian claim remains particular: Christ reveals the way to God. But particularity need not become exclusion. The question is not merely who names Jesus correctly, but who is learning to live the life he calls the Way.

Against the Arrangement

The Stubborn Other

About 2 + 2 = 5

I began by looking for women in the Bible beyond the usual names. That search led elsewhere: to the broader neglect of women thinkers in the history of human thought.

Lately I have been writing about belief and belonging, and how both bear on courage and chaos in our own time. But those questions cannot be separated from another: Who has been allowed to think in public, and who has been told that thought itself was not their proper work?

That drew me to Hipparchia of Maroneia, whom I discovered almost by accident. Not because she left a great system. Not because we possess her writings. For nearly the opposite reason: so little remains, and yet the shape of her life still comes through with startling force.

Hipparchia left weaving and made the life prescribed for her look like poor thinking.

Some forgotten thinkers matter because of what they wrote. Hipparchia matters because of what she refused.

The exclusion of women was not only social. It was philosophical. Canonical figures helped give intellectual form to women’s subordination. Aristotle treated women as inferior in reason and authority. Later thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, repeated versions of the same assumption, lending inherited prejudice the appearance of theory.

Prejudice does its best work when it has become respectable.

Such arguments did not merely describe a patriarchal world. They helped defend it. Women’s bodies and minds were treated as unsuited for objective, abstract, or public thought. The result was a closed circle: women were denied education and authority, then their absence from learned life was cited as proof that they did not belong there.

Despite that exclusion, women taught, argued, wrote, advised, and appeared in the margins of traditions that often tried to erase them, though the evidence is frequently fragmentary or contested. The record is not thin because women were absent, but because cultures decide whose minds are worth recording.

Hipparchia interests me because she is not merely one more neglected name. She exposes the arrangement itself.

A woman of her class was expected to marry respectably, guard her reputation, manage the household, and remain largely outside public argument. Hipparchia did not simply ask whether the arrangement was fair. She walked out of it, centuries before the world knew how to call that freedom.

She broke the circle not by writing a treatise, at least none that survives, but by appearing where she was not supposed to appear, thinking where she was not supposed to think, and living as though philosophy belonged to her too.

Her argument had legs, sandals, nerve, and bad manners.

Born in the fourth century BCE in Maroneia, Hipparchia rejected the future laid out for her and chose the austere, public, scandalous life of Cynic philosophy. In a culture where education and public argument were treated largely as men’s work, her decision was not merely unconventional. Her presence itself became an argument.

She married Crates of Thebes, a penniless Cynic philosopher. Crates reportedly warned her that marriage to him meant sharing his poverty, rough clothing, public exposure, and contempt for status. Hipparchia chose that life anyway.

She did not simply marry a philosopher. She became one.

Cynicism did not originally mean sneering disbelief or weary distrust. It was an early enemy of sanctimony: a philosophy that tested virtue against the temptations of wealth, comfort, reputation, and approval. Cynics believed that freedom required self-command and a life stripped of social pretense.

Many philosophers praised courage and contempt for convention. Hipparchia had to live those virtues under conditions that made her very presence in public philosophy an offense.

Ancient accounts remember her not merely as Crates’ wife, but as a philosopher and public disputant. Later tradition also attributes writings to her, though none survive.

The best-known story places her in an argument with Theodorus the Atheist. Hipparchia reasoned that if an act was not wrong when Theodorus did it to himself, the same act could not become wrong merely because she did it to him. Theodorus had no answer. Instead, he tried to pull away her cloak, apparently hoping to shame her.

Hipparchia did not flinch. Public nudity was no threat to her.

When he mocked her for abandoning the loom, she replied: “Do you suppose that I have been ill-advised about myself if, instead of wasting further time upon the loom, I spent it in education?”

She refused the choice society had made for her: domestic obedience or public disgrace. She would be neither silenced nor ashamed.

Her relevance today is not only for women. She also speaks to men. In an age of branding, careerism, ideological display, and anxious self-presentation, Hipparchia asks whether our freedom is real, or merely obedience to a different audience.

Good thinking is the discipline of becoming less governed by fear, vanity, appetite, and applause.

Sometimes its first act is simply to appear where you have been told you do not belong.

Notes and reading

Hipparchia’s “left the loom” comes from an anecdote preserved by Diogenes Laërtius. The phrase is my own, but it follows the point of her reply: Hipparchia’s scandal was not merely that she thought, but that she refused the place assigned to her.—Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, early third century CE, 6.96–98. (Kindle edition, 2026).

• Diogenes Laërtius was part biographer, part compiler of philosophical teachings, and part collector of memorable sayings, disputes, and human oddities. He was not a critical historian in the modern sense, and some of his stories are difficult to verify. Yet his work preserves traditions and fragments that might otherwise have disappeared. Without his appetite for both philosophy and personality, we would know far less about many ancient thinkers, including Hipparchia.

• R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (editors)—The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (edition consulted, 2023).

• Virginia Grigoriadou—“Female Greek Philosophers of Classical Antiquity”—Istraživanja: Journal of Historical Researches 35 (2024), 7–33.

• Sara Brill & Catherine McKeen (editors)—The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy (2024).

The Stubborn Other

A Difficult Glory

About 2 + 2 = 5

I’m tired of politics. It feels like one damned thing after another: spectacle chasing spectacle, the law falling further behind, the next election arriving like another threat. The answer just keeps blowing in the wind.

But that grief only goes so far, because I am also tired of myself. Easy to blame the culprits, harder to admit we are among them. We do not enter politics after becoming ourselves. Politics is part of how we become ourselves.

Each of us is a committee of selves: parent, partner, friend, worker, believer, doubter. We are pulled between duty and desire, work and leisure, autonomy and dependence. Diversity is easier when it’s not our own.

Politics does not begin with parties or governments. It begins in this daily tension of keeping the peace among our different sides, then reappears in families, communities, and states.

Aristotle’s “political animal” was no reduction to statecraft. It belongs to who we are, not merely what we do—our nature, not just our behavior.

We are born from others, sustained by others, formed with others, selves in a world we did not make alone. Politics is what happens when we reckon with this shared life. It is the hard human work of building a world out of differences, heavy memories, open conflict, and stubborn hope.

Hannah Arendt called this natality. Every birth brings a newcomer, but natality becomes political only when the newcomer acts and begins. Politics exists because we are alike enough to share a world, and different enough for something new to happen. It is how we make room for the future.

Arendt heard this truth in the Gospel announcement, “A child has been born unto us,” treating it not as dogma, but as radical faith in the world’s capacity to begin again. For her, we are not born to die, but to start anew—a human defiance of the odds that she called an “infinite improbability which occurs regularly.”

Yet no beginning is innocent. Genesis places the first city east of Eden, founded by Cain, the first murderer. Politics begins with the need to live together after innocence is lost. Every political order inherits the damage.

Scripture gives beginning another form in Abraham. God’s command to leave his country and his father’s house is a summons to begin without knowing where it leads, prizing promise over possession.

It is hard to trust that much. The easier alternative is retreat: into the self, the tribe, or walls that shrink the world until fewer count.

Political thinkers call the work of democracy “agonism”: turning enemies into opponents and conflict into debate. Agonism does not end disagreement. It transforms antagonism and keeps a fight from becoming a war, dissent from being a crime.

Nietzsche understood how moral struggle hardens into resentment, taking its purpose from the power it condemns, turning revenge into virtue. Resentment does not defeat the enemy. It lets the enemy decide who we become.

Soccer and baseball outclass football because players must play both ways: offense and defense. They let the game dictate the clock, not the clock the game—a match cannot be run out by holding the ball to kill time.

Football breeds the one-way specialist—and with that specialization, resentment. Democracy demands citizens who can both score and field, speak and listen. It requires a playing field, not a battlefield—contest, not conquest.

The end of polarization is not always a victory—sometimes it is just an eviction. Whether the hand closing the door belongs to a strongman or a righteous reformer, the result is the same: both are turning the key.

Enemies must be defeated, but opponents preserved—because power does not merely tempt; it transforms. Those who grasp it in God’s name must first secure it, making the god they invoked unrecognizable, a deity who always happens to agree.

Saul began as the Lord’s anointed; he ended consulting a witch. Left unchecked, power turns the highest ideals into a bargain with the devil, stepping over bodies to keep moving.

This delusion of absolute control extends to our private lives. We flatter ourselves that independence is the truth and dependence the illusion. But the self-made person is a myth. No one builds their own roads, purifies their water, or buries themselves. Worshipping self-sufficiency breeds the loneliness it promises to cure.

Reflecting pools turn stagnant, and the monuments we build to our own independence eventually crumble.

The test of a political community is how it treats those not yet members: the stranger, the refugee, the child too young to speak. A community drawing its circle too tightly hides behind safety and calls it justice.

Membership is the first political good, and inclusion means power, not mere permission to participate. At its best, politics gives common life form: our second birth into speech, action, and responsibility.

Yet that second birth can be refused. We can run from our differences as though to return to the womb, where we never shared space. But political life begins only after that illusion breaks.

We don’t just fear the stranger; we fear the neighbor—close enough to matter, different enough to disturb. Good neighbors build boundaries together. A boundary becomes a wall when only one side sets it, just as tolerance becomes a trap when only one side practices it.

D. H. Lawrence saw the danger in Walt Whitman’s totalizing embrace of humanity: it swallows difference rather than meeting it. “The universe, in short, adds up to ONE. ONE. 1. Which is Walt.” That is not communion. It is “an empty Allness. An addled egg.”

Real difference is harder. Other people do not exist to meet my needs; my need is to meet them. They are not here to complete our unity, but to interrupt it—and, sometimes, enlarge it.

That is the invitation: not to agree, not even to like one another, but to stay. To remain in the argument, in a shared, difficult world. To act without certainty, knowing a single deed or word can alter the order; we cannot speak into a void; a world begins when another answers.

Notes and reading

Wendell Berry on Interdependence—“A Native Hill,” in The Long-Legged House (1969), 196. Berry’s reversal of priorities serves as the ethical backbone for moving past political exhaustion. To shift from asking what is good for us to what is good for the world requires abandoning the myth of self-sufficiency. It demands a rigorous, localized attention to the shared environment and the neighbors we did not choose but must live alongside.

Aristotle, Politics, I.2, 1253a1–18.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (1998), Part V, “Action.”

The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence—Tilo Schabert (2015). Writing in the philosophical tradition of Eric Voegelin, Schabert builds a political anthropology around the concept of human beginnings and cosmic order.

The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel—Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes (2017). The authors analyze sovereign power through the stories of Saul, David, Uriah, Tamar, and Absalom.

D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman—Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Chapter XII, “Whitman.” Lawrence critiques Whitman’s democratic expansionism as the ego consuming the other under the guise of loving them. For Lawrence, true communion demands radical separateness; it is possible only when both sides remain stubbornly themselves, maintaining “the powerful resistance and cohesiveness of our individuality.” (Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine).

A Difficult Glory

The Politics of Jesus

About 2 + 2 = 5

“I, too, sing America.” — Langston Hughes, 1901–1967

Poet, novelist, playwright, and chronicler of Black life in America, Hughes held America to its promise. Who has been allowed to inherit that promise, and who has been left outside it?

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
That great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart.
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land.
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed,
And all the songs we’ve sung,
And all the hopes we’ve held,
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be.

The land that’s mine—
The poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

O, yes,
I say it plain:
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin,
The graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain—
And make America again.

• “Deep River” — Paul Robeson (1898–1976), from the original recording (2:17).

Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, and political dissenter—sang from the gap between America’s praise of freedom and its denial of it. The spiritual expresses the longing for a promised land.

Notes

Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” Esquire, July 1936; later collected in A New Song (1938). Excerpted and abridged here.

Paul Robeson recorded “Deep River” in 1927. See Wayne D. Shirley, “The Coming of ‘Deep River,’” American Music 15, no. 4 (Winter 1997).

On the American Founding, see Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Ellis stresses the moral contradiction at the heart of the Founding, while Wood stresses the genuinely radical release of egalitarian and democratic energies. Read together, they suggest that 1776 was a beginning that opened democratic possibilities and left grave injustices unresolved.

The Politics of Jesus

Shrewdly Honest

About 2 + 2 = 5

The politics of Jesus begins by proclaiming the kingdom of God. No other kingdom, nation, market, empire, or institution is ultimate. Such power is real. Sometimes it prevents worse things from happening. But it is not sacred. The gospel is distorted when it gives moral cover to power.

The kingdom of God is personal but not private. It judges every order that runs on fear and exclusion. Jesus announced a world in which the poor are blessed, enemies are forgiven, and the last are received without anyone pretending to do them a favor. When he said he came “not to bring peace, but a sword,” he was not blessing violence. He was naming the division that comes when truth disturbs a false peace.

Conscience is easy until it has something to lose. It is harder when truth costs safety, status, or belonging. Doing good is not always nice. Jesus overthrew the tables because some peace is only fraud with good manners.

The cross shows what worldly power does when mercy becomes dangerous. The resurrection says that such power does not have the last word. Christian politics, at its deepest, is not about using the state to secure religious ends. It is loyalty to a kingdom no state can contain, and the refusal to call anything just when it survives by making the weak pay.

Jesus’ politics confronts power without worshiping power. It builds a community that lives from a kingdom already here and still on the way. It turns the other cheek and goes the extra mile because refusing to imitate power is not the same as surrendering to it.

His kingdom, he said, was not of this world. He did not say God’s kingdom was not for this earth. By “the world,” he meant the world as presently arranged. He also taught his followers to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That prayer is a promise. So Augustine could say, “Alleluia is our name.”

Jesus did not say he was the answer, but the way. Not the way to succeed, but how to be faithful. Not paradise tomorrow, but the presence of his Spirit, come what may. He did not make his life a doctrine about status, but a disclosure of God’s own life: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” We are called not just to believe in Jesus, but to live from the courage of his faith.

If Jesus were only a teacher of heavenly truths, however memorably told, the cross makes little sense. Crucifixion was public degradation, meant to expose and terrorize. Jerusalem elites, collaborating with Roman power, saw Jesus as a threat to the religious, economic, and political arrangements that sustained them.

Flannery O’Connor once heard Mary McCarthy praise the Eucharist, the Christian meal of bread and wine, as a fine symbol. O’Connor’s reply was blunt: if it was only a symbol, “to hell with it.” The point applies here too. Jesus was not merely a great example. An example can show the way. It cannot break the power of what holds us.

What made Jesus different was the life he disclosed as God’s own: mercy without calculation, authority without domination, faithfulness without self-protection, and a kingdom whose king was enthroned on a cross.

There was no Easter without Good Friday. There is no Christianity without resurrection. Unless Jesus was raised from the dead, Paul says, Christian preaching and faith are empty.

As a believer myself, I have no idea how to explain “resurrection,” especially since the claim does not stop with Jesus. Even if I saw the empty tomb, I would not understand. Calling resurrection a metaphor is a modern way out, a fine symbol with the scandal removed.

All I know for sure is that something happened, and that it changed the course of history.

Hannah Arendt, the great Jewish philosopher, did not try to explain Easter, but she understood the force of beginning again. Human beings, she wrote in The Human Condition, are “not born in order to die but in order to begin.” That is as close as philosophy may get to the edge of resurrection: not an explanation, but a refusal to let death have the last word.

The truth is not a policy. Resurrection is not a program. It is a way of life. The school of faith is still in session, and we are a long way from graduation.

We live in a Good Friday world. Death and destruction abound. But to make that the measure of our attention is to praise what we deplore. Refusing happiness does not honor the suffering. It only makes suffering the one thing we agree to honor. Joy is not denial. It is defiance.

An anonymous prayer could speak for us all, whether we say God or prefer honesty:

“From the cowardice that dares not face new truth
From the laziness that is contented with half-truth
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me.”

Notes and reading

The politics of Jesus cannot be understood chiefly in terms of resistance to Rome. Jesus was not to the left or right of Caesar. His refusal of violence was not passivity, and his kingdom was not another sovereignty competing on Caesar’s field. It was the judgment of every sovereignty that lives by violence, possession, and death, and the promise of a world where mercy, abundance, and life have the final word. Christian faith means living true to the promise of what shall be.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is easy to overuse, but hard to avoid when religious power protects itself from Christ. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), especially “The Grand Inquisitor.” Christ returns, says almost nothing, and religious power finds him unbearable.

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948). Dostoevsky shows power enthroned in religion. Jackson shows it dispersed through ordinary people. No tyrant appears. No monster arrives. The crowd can do the work all by itself: communal, orderly, traditional. That is the terror of the story: how easily a people can call cruelty custom and call themselves innocent because everyone joined in.

Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life (2019). Malick rarely interprets his films in public, but this one asks with unusual clarity what faithfulness to Christ costs when the state, the village, and even religious caution call compromise responsibility. Franz Jägerstätter’s refusal is not useful, successful, or admired. It is simply true.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940). Greene’s novel is gloomy only if holiness requires clean hands and steady nerves. Its “whisky priest” is weak, frightened, compromised, and still somehow a bearer of grace. Mercy is not a reward for worthiness. It can move through people who are not even respectable.

Shrewdly Honest

Freedom as Argument

About 2 + 2 = 5

A friend once told me he had stopped asking whether an institution was honest. He asked what good could be done through it.

The people who helped most were the ones who knew which door was closing, which rule could bend, which budget line could be moved, and when waiting would be harmful.

The end does not justify the means, except when we start hoping it does. That hope has many names: peace through strength, law and order, national security, temporary emergency powers, necessary force. Soon getting something done matters more than asking what we are doing.

Much committee life and much of politics work this way. A seat at the table becomes the point of the meeting. Winning office becomes the purpose of politics.

Innocence becomes hard to place. Sometimes it feels like integrity. Other times it looks naive, even like a luxury someone else can afford. Graham Greene put the harsher verdict sharply in The Quiet American: innocence can mean no harm and still deserve “a leper’s bell.”

Shrewdness becomes hard to place too. Is it wisdom under pressure, moral concession, or what survival looks like in a crooked world?

Then comes Jesus’ puzzling parable of the Shrewd Manager, often called the Unjust Manager. A rich man discovers his manager has been wasting his property and fires him. Facing ruin, the manager calls in his master’s debtors and slashes their bills so that when he loses his job, they will owe him favors.

The scandal is sharper still. The master praises the dishonest manager for his shrewdness, and Jesus seems to hold him up as an example. The man is not generous or repentant. He is trying to survive. He cuts the debts not because his heart has changed, but because his circumstances have.

The books will not save him. His title will not save him. Respectability is poor protection when the accounts are opened. So he uses the little power he has left to make sure someone will open the door when he has nowhere else to go.

Jesus is not blessing fraud, which already has its excuses. He is exposing the lethargy of the well-meaning. “The children of this age,” he says, know how to act with urgency. The “children of light” often do not. They can be so determined to stay innocent that they become useless, harmless in their own minds while harm goes unanswered.

The Shrewd Manager is stripped of respectable illusions. He knows time is short. He knows the system is compromised. He knows accounts fail, positions vanish, and official security can disappear overnight. So he uses what he cannot keep to create what he will soon need.

That does not make him admirable. It makes him instructive.

Prudence may be the virtue, but shrewdness is often what it looks like under pressure.

The parable asks whether we are using our temporary resources — money, time, attention, access, influence — to preserve our standing inside failing systems, or to spend them on mercy, loyalty, friendship, and courage that might survive them.

Shrewdness is dangerous, but so is innocence that means no harm while leaving harm untouched.

Nor is this simply the lesser of two evils, as though the choices are already clear. Shrewdness begins when responsibility requires acting before circumstances fully disclose themselves.

A dangerous thing about innocence is its refusal to acknowledge dependence. Separatists on the Right and Left denounce capitalism and consumer culture while living off the supply chains, platforms, markets, and protections they criticize.

There is a kind of guilt that serves as a bid for relevance. Unable to change a broken world, people trade powerlessness for blame. Being an accomplice can feel less humiliating than being a bystander, because if you are guilty, at least you matter.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s “monarchy of fear” gets at the deeper condition: fear makes us desperate to feel morally central, even when we are not politically powerful.

Luther’s “sin boldly” was a warning against false purity: act, repent, trust mercy, and do not confuse a clean self-image with faithfulness. The point is to become responsible enough to act, instead of mistaking disgust for action or innocence for integrity.

Goodness itself, armed with respectable methods and high ideals, can do terrible harm in the name of goodness. The paperwork may be impeccable.

It is precisely this obsession with respectable goodness that Jesus disrupts. The parable refuses a polite account of grace. Mercy enters through unlikely people and compromised systems, using even “unrighteous mammon” to open doors. If dishonest wealth can become an instrument of mercy, imagine what that means for the rest of us.

And here the parable goes deeper. The manager may be more than an example. He may point, however strangely, toward Christ, who forgives debts, welcomes the indebted, and offends those who think the books should balance.

Thank God we do not have to deal with a just steward.

Jesus’ parable leaves us with a harder question: why are the “children of this age” often more shrewd than the “children of light”? Elsewhere, Jesus tells his followers to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Not clever instead of good. Not pure instead of practical.

Both.

The hope is not to avoid trouble or be spared conflict, but to move through a compromised world with open eyes, open hands, and courage toughened by a broken heart.

Notes and reading

The parables. Jesus’ parables are not improved Aesop’s fables or sayings fit for church signs. They do not make morality neater. They make evasion harder. The Shrewd Manager presses directly on ordinary life: money, reputation, power, dependence, and mercy inside compromised systems.

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Luke 16:1–13. The scandal is that Jesus uses a morally compromised figure to expose the spiritual paralysis of the respectable.

Shrewd. In Luke 16, “shrewd” means practical wisdom under pressure, not mere cleverness or deceit. It is urgent realism once the accounts are opened: seeing what is at stake and acting before the door closes. Modern English makes the word sound colder and more calculating. Jesus is not praising dishonesty. He is praising clear-eyed action in a crisis.

Other biblical references. “Children of this age” and “children of light” come from Luke 16:8, where Jesus contrasts those who know how to act when crisis comes with those whose goodness has gone passive. “Unrighteous mammon” comes from Luke 16:9: money and profit are not inherently wrong, but they are never innocent. Matthew 10:16 joins the qualities the essay holds together: “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Without innocence, wisdom becomes manipulative. Without wisdom, innocence becomes naive.

Dependence. None of us stands outside the networks we criticize: supply chains, platforms, markets, laws, protections, institutions, and other people’s labor. Innocence becomes evasive when it denies what sustains it.

Martha Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018). One of the world’s most celebrated moral philosophers, Nussbaum argues that fear, especially when joined to powerlessness, feeds anger, disgust, blame, scapegoating, and the longing for simple answers and strong leaders, thereby weakening democratic trust.

Martin Luther, “sin boldly.” Luther’s phrase comes from a 1521 letter to Philip Melanchthon. It is often quoted with a straight face, then carefully defended because it sounds reckless. The point is to attack false purity: act in a broken world, repent honestly, trust mercy, and do not confuse a clean self-image with faithfulness.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Jean Valjean begins as a criminal and a fugitive. His moral life is transformed not by respectability, but by a scandalous act of mercy. Bishop Myriel returns the silver Valjean stole, then saves him by calling the theft a gift. Across Les Misérables, law, property, guilt, debt, mercy, and survival collide. Grace enters through acts that look improper. Mercy sometimes breaks expected reckoning.

Freedom as Argument

The Post-Human Parish

About 2 + 2 = 5

On the night the dictator fell, citizens of Caracas poured into the streets, singing the old city songs. For a few hours, the city reclaimed its history as la cuna del Libertador—the birthplace of Simón Bolívar, who helped lead much of South America to independence from Spain.

That was Venezuela on January 23, 1958, when my family lived there. Marcos Pérez Jiménez had fled. By Independence Day, fireworks rose from the barrios.

Tyranny had given way to democracy, and security to freedom, but also to disorder once fear no longer kept the peace. In place of the old right-wing order came elections, parties, rivalries, and the fragile work of self-government.

Bolívar’s old dilemma returned. Liberation was real, but unity had to be won again. Bolívar eventually dissolved the legislature to take dictatorial powers—a desperate attempt to force unity from the top down.

Nearly two centuries after Bolívar, a new breed of populist arose to master a different kind of chaos, breaking the economy while claiming to speak for the poor. The ruin of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro ended in January 2026, when U.S. forces removed Maduro, only to leave Venezuela in the hands of a loyalist of the same system.

The American founding generation feared this very thing. King George was no Pérez Jiménez, but to the colonists, he was close enough. Yet Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and their generation knew monarchy was not liberty’s only enemy. A republic could just as easily be ruined from within by the chaos of faction, demagoguery, corruption, cowardice, and the lust for power. They had overthrown a king; they had not abolished tyranny.

History is a nation’s memory: the stories it argues over, revises, and passes on. David Bentley Hart has playfully called baseball America’s most redemptive form of memory—a civic ritual where childhood, moral reckoning, and national story meet. The playfulness carries a serious point: nations need a shared remembrance that does more than flatter, one that makes room for individual excellence inside a common game.

Time reveals which victories contained defeat, which disasters carried possibility, and which small turns changed nations. People who forget this become easier to flatter, frighten, and rule. They also become quicker to reduce American history to a single master key, whether slavery alone, as in The 1619 Project, or patriotic innocence, as in The 1776 Report.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, a republic bound more by shared ideals than ethnicity struggles to tell a common story. Older stories minimized slavery and conquest; later scholarship corrected those omissions but fractured the story into separate histories of race, class, and identity.

The harder task is to hold universal claims and particular histories together. We must affirm common ideals without erasing difference, and honor difference without retreating into rival camps. A common story that leaves people out becomes propaganda. Separate stories that lose sight of one another become tribalism.

1776 is an unfinished struggle over power, empire, slavery, and self-government. The Revolution became an argument over who counts as “the people.” It carried forward dispossession, racial nationalism, and damage that cannot be talked away. But the same Revolution that compromised with slavery gave later generations the language to condemn it: inalienable rights, higher law, and the right to resist power.

Democracy provokes reaction because it means living with big differences, uncertainty, and change. For those who want order without conflict, this can feel less like liberty than futility. Authoritarianism is a reflex democracy itself can trigger. When freedom feels like disorder, people start looking for someone strong enough to end the argument.

Civility cannot be reduced to manners. It is not deference, or the pretense that disagreement can be solved by being agreeable. Opponents do not have to like each other, but they must keep the conversation going.

We are stuck in the same boat with people we may distrust, dislike, or despise. Listening is not always an act of goodwill; it has long been a tool of the powerless—a way of “listening up” to anticipate the powerful.

Still, as Teresa Bejan argues, democracy depends on keeping argument alive so that disagreement does not harden into separation, persecution, or violence. The answer to hate speech is more speech. Sometimes democracy simply means saying, “Maybe we can talk about this later,” and leaving without slamming the door.

Conversely, tolerance becomes cowardice when it mistakes avoiding trouble for keeping peace. Politeness makes matters worse when it drains argument of substance and treats conflict itself as failure. Real civility is to politeness what moral courage is to etiquette.

A sound account of 1776 holds together violence and vision, exclusion and ideal, the republic built and the democracy still unfinished. Unfinished hopes do not nullify hard-won progress—they make argument necessary.

Argument hurts. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson felt that as much as anyone. Their bitter, personal rivalry proved that fierce opposition need not end in permanent estrangement.

Adams argued for a strong, independent executive: one person with enough energy to execute laws and check legislative power. Jefferson feared the tyranny that can wear the mask of consent, warning that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

Jefferson and Adams never stopped contending; even their eventual friendship did not settle the argument.

That, too, is part of the legacy of 1776: freedom as an argument fierce enough to divide a country, and durable enough to keep one.

Notes and reading

Jacob Lawrence—artist, Struggle, Panel 1; the first African American artist to have his work acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. “I do not look upon the story of the Blacks in America as a separate experience to the American culture but as a part of the American heritage and experience as a whole.” —MoMA

Venezuela—“Modern History of Venezuela 1900–2025,” Medium, January 8, 2026.

Baseball—Venezuela’s national pastime, too, and a small mercy in this essay. David Bentley Hart calls baseball “America’s most redemptive form of memory,” but Venezuela has its own deep claim on the game, from Caracas sandlots to Luis Aparicio, the Hall of Fame shortstop whose name still crowns the annual award for Venezuela’s best major-league player. See Hart, “Running in Circles: There is only one truly redemptive form of memory: baseball,” Plough, June 17, 2026. After all the revolutions, perhaps hope still knows how to come home.

[Note: On March 17, 2026, Venezuela became the first South American team to win the World Baseball Classic, defeating the host United States 3–2 in Miami, a moment of national joy amid continuing political and economic turmoil.]

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—Gordon S. Wood, 2017. Jefferson and Adams differed sharply: Jefferson, the aristocratic Southern slaveholder and democratic optimist; Adams, the striving New Englander wary of popular rule. Their friendship, rupture, and reconciliation expose the argument at the heart of the American founding.

The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the Revolution Never Ended—Thomas Richards Jr., 2026. Politics emerged from the Revolution as an evolving contest between legal order and popular protest, not the easy consensus and settled authority later evoked by talk of a “founding.”

Nothing Can Separate Us: Healing for Souls and Nations—Howard Thurman, September 22, 2026, preorder. Thurman’s message is rooted in his belief that true spirituality can transcend individualism and alleviate injustice and suffering. As spiritual adviser to civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, Thurman eloquently expressed the bond between faith and action.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America—Heather Cox Richardson, 2023. The current democratic crisis in historical perspective, with special attention to false history, weaponized language, and public grievance as tools of power consolidation.

Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration—Teresa M. Bejan, 2017. Bejan’s “mere civility” does not require warmth, admiration, or agreement, but the harder democratic discipline of keeping argument possible. Her Washington Post essay, “You don’t have to be nice to political opponents. But you do have to talk to them,” March 8, 2017, distills the argument for the present moment.

The Post-Human Parish

Just Beauty

About 2 + 2 = 5

To readers: This reflection is longer than usual. It comes from a collision I see around us and within us. It involves automated technology, personal integrity, changing faith, and dreams of power moving through politics from the American Bible Belt to Putin’s Russia and back to my childhood roots in Caracas. I would be grateful to know what you are seeing in your own corners of the world.

Human nature doesn’t change. We are what we are, and so we shall be. Wiser, still foolish. Moving forward, falling back. Reaching for the stars, stuck here on earth.

Artificial intelligence dazzles with promise beyond belief. Behind the glare of the screen, the creature staring back remains unchanged. We manufacture delusion driven by the same hunger, vanity, and fragile hope our ancestors knew. Everything we call culture and civilization, we built with the same body and brain.

Except.

That’s wrong. Geneticists studying historical DNA discovered something counterintuitive: civilization doesn’t stop human evolution; it accelerates it. We aren’t finished evolving. Culture and technology shape biology, including the ways we come to believe what we do. This isn’t destiny, but it isn’t dormant.

For decades, a fierce taboo policed this territory. After the horrors of Nazi racial science, caution hardened into dogma. By the 1990s, when political scientist Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve spilled out of lecture halls into the streets, the debate was defined by campus shutdowns, protests, and physical violence. I recall campus police surrounding the podium and dragging away protesters. The argument itself had become dangerous.

To maintain social peace, it was acceptable to admit genetic variation in the body—but not in the brain. Better to pretend the brain lived outside biology than to let intelligence become an excuse for discrimination.

Skin, metabolism, disease risk, immune response—yes. Temperament, cognition, behavior, the brain itself—no. That fiction has failed. Ancestry is not a racial prison, but neither is it biologically meaningless. It is a porous inheritance, shaped by history, environment, and chance. The brain is an organ, and organs evolve.

The true modern peril, however, is not the survival of old biological categories, but the engineering of entirely new ones. We are barreling toward a world where genetic editing, brain implants, and artificial selection may dictate what it means to be human—and, perhaps, what it means to live forever.

Nietzsche’s vision of the “will to power” and the super-human “Overman” puts modern “transhumanism” to shame, making Silicon Valley look small. What arrives is not the Overman, but the automation of Nietzsche’s “Last Man”: higher consciousness traded for optimized comfort, the machine turned into a more efficient cage.

Biological disparity will no longer be an accident of inheritance but a consequence of economic access. A high-tech caste system will give old prejudices new form.

Tired of every version of this cold material reality, global religion is breaking apart and on the move. The noisy headlines of Western Christian nationalism are a sideshow. The center of global faith has left the West behind, shedding dry political anxieties and gathering new energy across the Global South and Asia.

Not a rejection of tradition, but a recovery of its neglected depth: the holiness of life, the sanctity of creation, and the intensity of personal experience.

In places as different as Mississippi and Moscow, old religious establishments are cracking open. Top-down decrees matter less than local fervor. In the high-altitude barrios of Lima, the ancient machinery of Catholicism is being bypassed as millions embrace the ecstatic worship of Pentecostalism.

Across America’s Bible Belt, a world that has deeply shaped my own family, traditional denominational loyalty is collapsing as believers abandon historic mainlines for hyper-charismatic online networks outside clerical oversight.

I see this mutation in Venezuela, where I grew up. Old concrete plazas built for patron saints are drowned out by amplified late-night tent revivals of evangélicos rewriting the spiritual map of the hillsides. Some rage against immorality while accommodating, or even blessing, a corrupt regime, making American religious politics look almost restrained by comparison. Performative piety cloaks an anger keen to erupt.

Meanwhile, Eastern Orthodoxy stands apart, drawing believers toward ancient rites, mystical depth, and worship that feels received rather than manufactured. Its appeal is easy to understand beside much of Western Protestantism, where transcendent mystery has too often yielded to political therapy and committee meetings.

Yet, however sincere its devotion, this global retreat into the soul becomes, in its mass expression, a counterfeit rebellion. It disdains modern freedom while sheltering a rigid conformity that depends entirely on the state and chokes anyone who thinks differently. Everyone can sound as radical as they like so long as they stay put. On the other side, fundamentalism is not always a battle cry.

Autocrats understand the opportunity: as organic social bonds dissolve, a fractured and anxious populace comes to beg the state for order. This is the strongman’s trap, captured by Alexander Dugin, often called “Putin’s brain”: “The higher up and more authoritarian the ruler, the closer he is to the masses and the more stable his rule.”

This is the ultimate triumph of tyranny: to give the masses a chance to express themselves instead of a chance to claim their rights. People are free to rave and worship because that fervor never touches the actual distribution of power.

The promise of the technological frontier becomes an illusion: deeper imprisonment in material vanities under the guise of escape. Yet the persistent turn toward the emotional and mystical reveals the hard limits of a purely material world. Humanity cannot be engineered out of its longing for the transcendent.

The true peril is that new tools may be used to build a more efficient tyranny, mistaking a supreme artificial intelligence for a god.

Humanity’s origins were never merely material, and its destination was never something a machine could build.

The problem is not the vanity of human ambition, but the depth of human desire. Humanity is not meant merely to aspire to the infinite. It is made to participate in it—mixtures of dust and deity.

Notes and reading

• Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life—Ferris Jabr (2024). An excellent journalistic overview of the idea that Earth is not simply an inanimate planet on which life evolved, but a living system continuously shaped by the organisms inhabiting it. Microbes, plants, and animals do not merely adapt to their environment; they alter it. (Shape it, not make it, leaving the broader question of consciousness open.)

• Cultural Transmission and Evolution—Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman (1981). A foundational work in gene-culture theory by Cavalli-Sforza, a founder of modern human population genetics, and Feldman, a leading theorist of gene-culture coevolution.

• “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?”—On behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker (September 6, 2021).

• Art and literature. Philip Rieff remains “the preeminent prophet of our psychological age,” foreseeing how modernity would trade salvation for therapy. See The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and the earlier modern classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

• Friedrich Nietzsche—For the “Overman” (Übermensch) and the “Last Man,” see the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Silicon Valley’s transhumanist project seeks to escape biological limits through technology, but risks engineering Nietzsche’s nightmare: the “Last Man,” a herd-like creature content with safety, predictability, and optimized comfort.

• The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future—John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (2016), Part I/2. Milbank and Pabst argue for a postliberal alternative that joins economic egalitarianism to a renewed social conservatism, while rejecting prejudice against women, minorities, and the complications of actual human life. For how this upends contemporary left-right divides and market logic, see this discussion of Christian social vision at 53:00. One need not accept the whole argument to recognize how well it is made.

• Eastern Orthodoxy—Many converts are drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy’s liturgical depth and the lifelong, mystical process of partaking in the divine nature, in contrast to more rationalized Western approaches to faith. See “Eastern Orthodoxy Gains New Followers in America,” Francis X. Rocca, The Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2023).

• Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female—Bryce E. Rich (2023). Modern reactionary movements draw on Eastern Orthodox theology to build an idealized, highly gendered fortress against Western modernity. I’m new to this work. Critics may argue that Rich is too bound up with contemporary academic idiom, including queer theory. He earned his PhD in Theology at the University of Chicago and has participated in international conferences on Orthodoxy and sexuality. Cf. George Demacopoulos, “The ‘Orthodoxy as Masculinity’ Narrative,” Public Orthodoxy, November 22, 2025.

Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin—Michael Millerman (2022). Demonizing Putin makes him easier to hate and harder to understand. The East is rising, the West is faltering, and even Putin’s clearest weaknesses—a strained war economy and a fraying claim to competent domestic control—do not make him less dangerous.

Western elites long treated Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian civilizational project as fringe. Ukraine’s security services judged otherwise. In August 2022, a car bomb outside Moscow destroyed Dugin’s vehicle and killed his daughter, Darya—a brutal sign that his ideas were not merely academic. Millerman provides the definitive English-language treatment of Dugin’s philosophy, a project that triggered institutional backlash during his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and helped lock him out of traditional academia for attempting a serious, fair treatment of Dugin’s Heideggerian framework.

• Michael Millerman: Who is Alexander Dugin? (18:15). A sharp breakdown of Dugin’s core philosophy and mysticism.

• Interview with Alexander Dugin (1:39:04). An essential discussion of civilizational studies, delivered in Dugin’s remarkably clear English.

Just Beauty

Babel in Barcelona

About 2 + 2 = 5

Several readers of my last post, just yesterday on the Sagrada Família and Antoni Gaudí, raised the old, necessary bugaboo of “priorities.” Next to war, massive poverty, the tragic buffoonery of our president, and escalating bloodshed in conflicts we help fund, surely this is no time to be carrying on about “beauty” and, of all things, cathedrals.

Religion is at the heart of much of the world’s terror, and has been for centuries. When all is said and done, including ongoing maintenance, the basilica in Barcelona will have cost close to a billion dollars.

The more commonsensical among us, knowing the false equivalence but unable to dismiss the question, still wonder: What does beauty have to do with justice? What is “just” about beauty? And if religion is supposed to be about morality, what about the poor? Especially when most of us are rich by comparison with much of the world.

Jesus is often put in trouble for having said, “The poor will always be with you,” as though poverty were not the issue, especially next to the lavish beauty of the perfume poured out in his honor.

Except that Jesus did not say that as an excuse for indifference. And the first to raise the “priorities” objection was Judas, who, in John’s Gospel, asks why the perfume was not sold and the money given to the poor.

What Jesus clearly meant was not that poverty is permanent and therefore tolerable, but that love of the poor is a standing obligation, while this moment of costly tenderness toward him would not come again. Judas had the arithmetic right and the heart wrong. He saw waste where Mary saw devotion. He invoked justice to rebuke beauty, and Jesus refused the terms.

The poor are not helped by a world in which beauty is forbidden; they are harmed by a world in which beauty belongs only to the rich.

There is a deep irony here. Antoni Gaudí, the artist responsible for the Sagrada Família, lived the question in his own flesh. Successful and well paid in his younger years, he gradually gave himself over to Catholic devotion and to the basilica until little remained for himself. He left fashionable rooms for a spartan workshop, gave away much of what he earned, fasted severely, dressed poorly, and increasingly appeared less like a celebrated architect than a beggar. Beauty, for him, was not an escape from poverty. It required a poverty of its own.

That poverty followed him to the end. On June 7, 1926, while walking to confession, Gaudí was struck by a streetcar. Because he was poorly dressed, unshaven, and carried no identification, he was mistaken for a homeless man and taken to the Hospital de la Santa Creu, a hospital for the poor. By the time his identity was known, it was too late. He died three days later and was buried in the crypt of the basilica to which he had given his life.

This week, exactly one hundred years after Gaudí’s death, Pope Leo XIV will be in Barcelona to offer blessings at two Catholic churches that couldn’t be more different. First, he’ll meet with Catholic charity and welfare organizations at Sant Agustí, a humble church sometimes called “the Cathedral of the Poor,” in a densely packed, largely immigrant neighborhood. Then he’ll celebrate Mass at the spectacular Sagrada Família.

The contrast is almost too neat: poverty in the late afternoon, beauty in the evening. But perhaps that is the point. The church is most false when it chooses one at the expense of the other.

Imagine, then, a cynical bystander challenging him: “You proclaim respect for the poor. Given the Vatican’s wealth, what are you doing about poverty?”

No more than Gaudí would Pope Leo be offended by the question. He might simply answer, “Not enough. Never enough. But we honor the poor by refusing to make beauty a privilege of the comfortable. Feed people. House them. Give them justice. But do not pretend that ugliness is more moral. The poor need bread, shelter, dignity, and the beauty otherwise denied them.”

Religion has done terrible harm. But no tradition is understood by its worst expressions alone. To judge Christianity only by its worst disciples is to distort the truth.

The poor are patronized by the wealthy, unable to see their complicity in what they claim to deplore. It is easier to give untold sums to alleviate poverty than to ask what made such deprivation profitable.

Jesus was not sentimental about this. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Not where your opinions or sympathies are. Not even where your politics are. Where your treasure is.

Gaudí answered that challenge with his life. He did not romanticize poverty. He simply gave his labor to a beauty no private owner could possess.

Notes and reading

Gaudi: A Biography – The Icon of Artistic Integrity Whose Controversial Catalan Masterpieces Defined Modern Architecture. Gijs Van Hensbergen (2003). Van Hensbergen is an art historian and Hispanist, also author of The Sagrada Familia: The Astonishing Story of Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece (2018).

“History of the Basilica”—sagradafamilia.org.

“Not Too Little, Too Late. . .”—Gabriela Saldivia, NPR, June 9, 2026. Saldivia is a digital editor and an Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist.

Babel in Barcelona

Hyperpolitics

About 2 + 2 = 5

After finishing this reflection, I discovered that Gaudí is suddenly everywhere: the centennial of his death, Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the Sagrada Família, and a new surge of attention to the basilica’s long-delayed completion. So much for writing quietly about a spectacle.

Barcelona’s Basilica of the Sagrada Família is nearing completion, the magnum opus of the Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudí, who died 100 years ago. According to one biographer, Gaudí’s ambition was to write the Bible in stone.

Full completion is targeted for 2034 at an estimated cost of $400 million. The project is funded entirely by donations and visitor admissions. About 1,600 people work at the temple and its two stone-processing workshops.

The structure weighs nearly 220,500 U.S. tons and uses fifty types of stone, from red granite porphyry and black basalt to grey granite and yellowish sedimentary sandstone. It also includes stainless steel, high-strength concrete, and enameled white ceramic cladding. All are shaped with digital design tools and 3D printers Gaudí could never have imagined.

Its central Tower of Jesus Christ, the tallest spire, reached its full height of 172.5 meters, or 566 feet, on February 20, 2026, making it the tallest church in the world.

Still, its achievement is not height. Babel already tried that. Gaudí’s harder wager was scale without domination: immensity that returns us to attention.

The Sagrada Família is a cosmic inversion of the Tower of Babel: not humanity storming heaven, but stone, light, creature, craft, and prayer rising into praise. Not confusion multiplied, but multiplicity gathered.

Today, the church is Spain’s most visited tourist attraction. Locals have protested the crowds by squirting tourists with water guns. One recent visitor described a scene almost as surreal as Gaudí’s carvings: jazz from a brass band, giant bubbles, and clowns selling balloon animals outside the basilica.

The protesters with water guns are not merely being cranky. They are registering a loss: silence, which religious architecture was meant to offer. A place where the world recedes enough for something else to be heard.

Gaudí wanted to carve the Christian story into stone: every creature, every mystery, every hope. In some sense, he succeeded. The building is theological, a sermon in geometry. But you cannot receive that sermon with a jazz band and clowns selling balloon animals nearby.

That the most visited site in Spain is a church seems, on reflection, less a triumph for Christianity than a confirmation of its domestication. The sacred has become spectacle, backdrop, and content.

Many visitors do not come to pray. They come to consume an experience of the sacred, to feel transcendence is real while staying insulated from any demand it might make.

This is what late capitalism does to religion. It does not abolish the sacred. It embalms, repackages, and sells it for $29 a ticket.

The brass band, the balloon animals, the bubble-maker: these are not simply corruptions of Gaudí’s vision from outside. They are the truth of what his vision becomes when Babel reclaims the plaza.

And yet.

My wife stood outside as construction blocked the entrance. She went quiet in a way unrelated to the noise around her. The light did something to the stone she had no word for.

The Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov wrote that the Divine Spirit “is totally and thoroughly transparent to itself.” Something like that seemed present here, not as doctrine she could master, but as light passing through matter until matter itself appeared almost inward.

The facade rose like a forest that decided to become a cathedral, or a cathedral that had always secretly been a forest.

The space it implied held something she recognized without naming: the feeling that existence is not an accident, that the world carries more meaning than we can bear, and that beauty at this scale is argument, not decoration.

She thought of Marilynne Robinson, who wrote that reverence comes before belief, that awe is its own way of knowing. Standing there, she understood this not as an idea but as something the building did to her, whether she agreed or not.

Gaudí spent his life reaching for that. She stood before what he had reached for. The building did not argue. It expanded. Reverence is belief before it learns to defend itself.

The Sagrada Família produces exactly that: not certainty, but openness. Not answers, but the right kind of silence, the kind in which questions can breathe.

Gaudí built it for God. What it offers anyone willing to go quiet before it is not an argument for belief but an encounter with the world as more than material. It does not prove God. It makes disbelief less easy.

Before that forest of stone, with light moving through it like something alive, you do not need to know what you believe to feel that something is asked of you.

That recognition, wordless and unearned, arriving before any creed can claim it, is what Gaudí was building toward. Babel scattered speech. Gaudí tried to let stone speak again.

The stone is almost all in place. The rest is up to whoever comes near enough to see.

To be moved beyond words speaks of God, too. Gaudí said little. He kept building. His ambition was to write the Bible in stone. The words came later. Perhaps they still do.

Notes and reading

Are you sufficiently enchanted? Science says the key is absorption, “reliably associated with a constellation of psychological, cognitive, and behavioral traits.” Thus neuroscience arrives, breathless and peer-reviewed, at Gaudí’s old suspicion: reality was there all along. — Popular Mechanics, “Some People Can ‘Absorb’ a Richer Version of Reality,” June 2026.

• The Sagrada Familia: Gaudí’s Heaven on Earth — Gijs Van Hensbergen (2017). Van Hensbergen is an art historian and Hispanist, featured on “God’s Architect,” a CBS profile of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia for 60 Minutes (March 20, 2013). His previous books include Antoni Gaudí: A Biography and Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon.

• Marilynne Robinson, “Credo,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Spring 2008. Reverence before belief.

• Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (2008). Bulgakov (1871–1944) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s leading Orthodox theologians. This first volume in his On Divine-Humanity trilogy explores Christ and our share in divine-human life. The world is not an exile from God, but the raw material of Divine glory.

Hyperpolitics

Houyhnhnms vs. Yahoos

About 2 + 2 = 5

I remember when apathy was a concern. The evening news could wrap up with a happy story. The challenge was to make people care about elections, policy, and foreign affairs. Today, politics is everywhere. We are angrier and more divided than ever.

What many call “hyperpolitics” is the politicization of ordinary life. It reaches into family dinners, sports leagues, streaming services, the Academy Awards, the voting booth, and pronoun etiquette. It involves mobilizations, internet activism, and talk about God: not only He, not quite He or She, what about They, if you care about the Trinity. The result is anxious exhaustion or irony growing tired.

Politics matters most when it is not everything. A nation is more than institutions, laws, and divisions. It is also memory, mutual dependence, local loyalties, and places where people still have to deal with one another. When those weaken, politics expands to fill the space.

Politics reflects the morals and manners of a culture. The old remedy was to strengthen what decent politics requires: law, memory, restraint, local loyalty, tradition, judgment, and trade-offs.

Jefferson and Adams were enemies who later resumed one of the great correspondences in American life. They kept disagreeing. They refused to let politics become the whole of friendship, memory, and judgment.

Biblical stories understand both the necessity and threat of rule. The people had judges but insisted on kings. God relented, warning that kings might save them from disorder, but not domination: “And ye shall be his servants.” The older word is almost polite. Another translation says slaves.

It is tempting to think democracy needs fixing from above: in Washington, in the courts, through sweeping reform, or through a sudden return of national common sense. Some of that would help. Some of that is happening. But politics has become too large and complicated for ordinary citizens to follow closely.

Nobody with a job, family, mortgage, church committee, children’s schedules, and an aging parent can track every bill, agency, rule, and interest group. Most people struggle to remember which password includes the exclamation point.

People tune out. The loudest voices, best-funded groups, and most shameless operators fill the gap. Public attention is hijacked by spectacle, continually upstaging itself. In come the new sophisticates, explaining that democracy must become less democratic to survive. Besides, too many conflicting views are bad for the soul.

People care most when the question is close to home: the school board, the town budget, the county election. They seldom make the news unless something goes wrong. Yet this is where democracy becomes real or remains a slogan.

Hyperpolitics thrives on grand responsibility while neglecting what is right at hand.

It makes ordinary ties harder. It is hard to have coffee with a neighbor when the coffee must answer for its supply chain, or to say “nice day” when the weather gets promoted to apocalypse.

People may simply learn what not to say.

Another free-speech argument will not help much. What matters is citizens paying attention together: showing up, taking notes, asking who benefits, noticing who is afraid to speak, and making local decisions harder to hide or rig.

Democracy is a habit. It is learning to argue better: answering the strongest opposing view, not the weakest. It rejects indignation, gives neighbors the benefit of ordinary decency, and remembers who needs a ride, a call, or a visit. It begins by protecting the places where we live.

That may seem small amid so much disorder. Perhaps a new meme would help: “Repair rarely begins at the scale of the disaster.” It begins where people still have names, obligations, memories, and a chance of being held accountable. Not with rescue from above or the next election, fingers crossed, but with ordinary people refusing to surrender the places where they live.

The work is not glamorous. That may be the point. Hyperpolitics feeds on spectacle. Democracy depends on habits too local, too patient, and too human to go viral.

We confuse visibility with importance. Daily life is shaped in plain rooms, on dull agendas, before small audiences. Neglect the dull places, and the dramatic ones begin to crack.

Aristotle called human beings political animals not because everything should become politics, but because we are made to reason together about justice and the good. Hyperpolitics turns that gift into noise.

Democracy begins again when ordinary people recover its habits, close to home, where life is shared. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

Notes and reading

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”—Yeats’s “The Second Coming” was written in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Its apocalyptic language has become almost too available in times of political crisis, but it names more than disorder: the loss of a shared center of judgment, trust, and restraint.

“Civic Mobilization to Defend Electoral Integrity in Hungary”—Hanna Folsz, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 28, 2026. Folsz describes a grassroots effort that helped defend Hungary’s recent elections and shaped the outcome. Though national in consequence, its lesson is local in method: citizens organizing, watching, recording, and refusing to let public life be managed out of view. Folsz, of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, shows democratic repair as organized civic competence under pressure. Her work inspired this reflection.

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences—Anton Jäger, February 10, 2026. Jäger describes a restless public life where private passions enter politics without building durable power. He is a political historian at Oxford.

Beyond Empathy and Inclusion—Molly Scudder (2021). The democratic force of listening. The moral equality of voice. Scudder is a professor of political science at Purdue and co-author of Two Cheers for Politics.

“And ye shall be his servants.”—1 Samuel 8:10–18, especially v. 17 (KJV). See Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, which Robert Alter calls “of singular insight relevant to the political constellations of our own era.” Alter’s own translation gives the warning its starker force: “And you shall become his slaves.”

Houyhnhnms vs. Yahoos

Excellence, Discounted

About 2 + 2 = 5

In this age of bullshit, even irony is growing banal, and clever is wearing out. People are tired of being tired. It’s a good time for the truth.

Three hundred years after its publication, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels remains one of the masterpieces of satire in world literature. Written as a travel journal and often treated as an adventurous children’s story, it is comic enough to disarm, severe enough to wound.

Each section follows a different voyage of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship’s surgeon who stumbles into bizarre, isolated societies: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms. Every destination offers a sharp critique of human nature, politics, and reason. Swift changes the scale so greatness no longer depends on size, power, conquest, or empire.

Gulliver’s last journey is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, horselike creatures with great intelligence, restraint, courtesy, and devotion to reason. Dreadful humanlike creatures called Yahoos instill in Gulliver a loathing of the human form. But the Houyhnhnms’ calm rationality masks horror. They whip and degrade the Yahoos, debate their destruction, and create the degraded conditions that make Yahoo inferiority obvious. Gulliver, awed by their order, loses his moral bearings so completely that he leaves in a boat partly made from Yahoo skin. Something has gone badly wrong.

By mistaking the Houyhnhnms for perfect creatures, Gulliver makes ordinary human life intolerable. He cannot bear the sight of his own family and feels at home only in the stables. Swift’s social criticism is not abstract misanthropy but a humane indictment of systems that make domination look reasonable.

After many years, I found relief from the news and read Swift’s classic again. No partisan of left or right, liberal or conservative, Swift despised the self-flattering party of progress: the Whigs. When Gulliver holds up perfect rationality as the human ideal and finds no one who meets it, he collapses into disgust. He sees humanity as little better than the ugly Yahoos. His faith in progress and reason turns into misanthropy.

Swift, an Anglican cleric who loved his people, stung readers into seeing the imitative habits of reason and the dangers of rationality without humility.

Today’s Houyhnhnms might be the AI gurus of Silicon Valley, apostles of would-be rationality. The public has grown used to warnings about artificial intelligence, children’s digital dependence, and students outsourcing work to machines. Whether we welcome, fear, or ignore AI, we face the fact: the vast growth of data centers and their demands on land, water, energy, and public life.

Within a few years, at a cost measured in power plants, water rights, transmission lines, tax breaks, and land once meant for other uses, AI may do more than assist intelligence. It may come close to defining it. In the process, it risks turning the rest of us into Yahoos—a role once reserved for “the deplorables” and MAGA enthusiasts.

It is easy to demonize AI and its luminaries as if the rest of us are not complicit. The dream of improving humanity can become the management of humanity. The prison need not arrive with chains. It may come as efficiency, comfort, moral certainty, and the promise that everything is arranged for our own good. We are told to adapt, optimize, move on, and keep up, as if grief meant clinging to what used to be or failing to let bygones be bygones.

“I want change, but not if it’s different.” Funny enough, until life changes. Rejecting false consolation can become its own kind of refusal, turning irony into an alibi, until “that sweet smoke dissolves in air.”

“Surely some revelation is at hand.” Those familiar lines from W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming” capture the feeling of a world where “things fall apart.” The poem ends with a question that leaves the age itself a riddle:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

The beast is not AI. We need not flee the machine or, like Gulliver, worship the horse. We can use tools without bowing to them. We can seek knowledge without giving up judgment, mourn without turning grief into weakness, and resist the passion that wants every person made useful, every loss made obsolete, every question turned into output.

Who are the Yahoos? Swift knew that princes do not need crowns. They need servants, flatterers, systems, and a public willing to trade judgment for ease. Gulliver’s final ruin shows what happens when false rationality and repeated misperception hollow out human feeling. He can flee humanity, worship the horse, and recoil from his family, but he still belongs to the world he despises. He cannot finally escape the Yahoos because he is one.

Service counts for little when a prince wants consent. The test comes when conscience refuses to gratify power.

Such refusal may carry little weight at court. It may be the only weight that matters. Even Gulliver had to go home.

Notes and reading

Caption: “I saw coming towards the house a kind of vehicle drawn like a sledge by four Yahoos.” - Part IV, Chapter II.

“that sweet smoke dissolves in air”—from a poem by A.N. Wilson, an English novelist, biographer, literary journalist, and cultural critic. The poem appears on his Substack on May 22, 2026.

Gulliver’s Travels: The Cambridge Anniversary Edition (May 14, 2026). “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” - Alexander Pope.

The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (2023), especially the chapter “Politics.” W.B. Yeats revered Swift’s “savage” moral force and returned repeatedly to his work. He saw Swift as a kind of mask or anti-self: “Swift haunts me; he is always just round the next corner.”

Swift as Priest and Satirist — edited by Todd C. Parker (2009), a volume examining how Swift’s priestly vocation shaped his satirical severity.

“Is AI Pushing Us Toward a Faceless Parasocial World in 2026?”—Akhilesh Kulkarni, Medium (December 25, 2025). Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” its 2025 Word of the Year. The term has surged as people form one-sided bonds with influencers, celebrities, podcasters, fictional characters, and now AI chatbots.

Excellence, Discounted

The Hive Within

About 2 + 2 = 5

This post is the last in a short series on what holds us together: memory, faith, belonging, and excellence. Today’s post asks how to honor distinction without slighting equality.

Once, excellence was a virtue. Now we have learned to say, “It depends.”

Taken to extremes, the “excellent” individual becomes a prisoner of their own gifts. Success becomes the sole proof of worth; failure is exiled to the margins. Achievement hardens into captivity rather than freedom, until excellence itself is defined by the eradication of failure. It is hard to find a shadow in a showroom.

A Jewish midrash warns, “If you grasp too much, you grasp nothing.”

That warning gets at something Aristotle knew—and something I keep returning to. True excellence—what he called aretē—was never a mere measure of performance. It was character, formed by habit, judgment, and shared life. But we have cut excellence loose from its moral anchor and handed it over to institutions, rankings, résumés, and managers. I’m not sure we noticed when it happened.

Once we accepted that talent is universal but opportunity is not, excellence could no longer be seen as a neutral virtue. We had to say “it depends,” because unexamined excellence can easily become a rigid meritocracy, and meritocracy can make privilege look like achievement. Achievement then justifies a new elite. Excellence without equality becomes aristocracy; equality without excellence becomes evasion.

Giving everyone the same starting line does not matter if some runners have shoes and others are barefoot. Equity at its best provides different tools to help people reach their potential. At its worst, it becomes bureaucracy, turning difference into injury and standards into threats.

The trouble is not excellence itself, but when it becomes a protection against failure. Flaws look like exposure, mistakes like evidence, rough edges like defects. We inflate the definition of “excellence” until ordinary people can no longer be normal. When life is treated like a product on display, we can’t be unfinished.

That is why our culture veers between indulgence and severity. Everyone gets a gold star, then discipline returns with a vengeance. Colleges move toward pass/fail grading, then standards reappear, sharper than before. We confuse mercy with indulgence and standards with punishment. We haven’t resolved this. I’m not sure we can.

The fear of failure is learned socially. Excellence has become a performance review. Grammarly, AI editors, predictive text, and style checkers promise to remove risk before a sentence reaches the page.

Meanwhile, tutorials explain how to hide the signs of AI use: drop the em dashes, avoid colons, and bury the now-suspicious “It’s not X; it’s Y” formula. AI even claims to detect itself and advises writers to “become more human” by using personal pronouns and making the occasional mistake. We have reached a strange moment when “excellence” sounds less like a human being than software.

I notice the irony of writing this in a Substack post that my editor—a human one—will probably say is too long.

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a line I keep coming back to: “The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.” What it does not lack is leverage. The more seamlessly AI integrates into working life, the clearer the question becomes: whose excellence is being optimized?

Plato thought the problem began with writing—expressed, of course, in writing. In the Phaedrus, he warned that written words offer only a “semblance of wisdom.” By polishing away our flaws, we fall into exactly that trap: mistaking correctness for thought, accuracy for wisdom, and polish for perfection.

After all, a language is shaped by the common, clever ways its speakers bend the rules. We follow the rules to be understood; we bend them to be known.

Another midrash cuts to the heart of it: “The Torah was not given to the ministering angels.” True excellence was never meant for flawless beings. It belongs entirely to the messy, unfinished, unedited reality of being human.

A similar truth unfolds in Exodus. The shortest route to the Promised Land was a straight, eleven-day march along the coast. Yet God did not lead the people that way. If they faced war too soon, they would panic and return to Egypt. Instead, they were sent into the desert. The long way was not punishment but necessary. Recently freed captives could not simply walk into a new homeland and sustain it.

By avoiding the shortcut—what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the celestial railroad”—they gained time to shed a slave mentality. The desert formed and tested a people, making them capable of freedom.

So it is with excellence. When it hardens into a program to remove risk, mistakes, embarrassment, and delay, what remains is counterfeit excellence: competence without struggle, polish without depth, achievement without inward growth.

Those of us who think for a living want to be more profound. (I ought to know.)

George Orwell was profound. He said: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

The excellent life does not mistake smoothness for arrival. Maybe Aristotle was right: excellence is not a measure of success but a habit of character, no matter what life holds. I find that more comforting than I probably should.

Notes and Reading

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1100b–1101a. Aristotle grounds excellence (aretē) in stable character (hexis) rather than outward fortune—the truly excellent person bears fate with grace through a “great and calm soul.” As a naturalist, he would have recognized the human brain itself as aretē in action: a living capacity shaped by experience and grown through practice. We keep measuring ourselves against machines. The more honest question is why we stopped marveling at what we already are.

On the bureaucratization of virtue. Turn a deep, human trait into a checklist for managers, and excellence stops being about character; it becomes about playing it safe. As both the Greek and Jewish traditions remind us, real growth requires friction and a trip through a wilderness. True excellence cannot survive in a sterile showroom designed to hide our mistakes. — See “Culture as Formation,” in John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue (2016).

Another AI. “Steve Wozniak Discusses Apple, AI and Pranks as Compelling Perspectives Speaker,” Lehigh University News, January 30, 2026. Wozniak was applauded before an audience of students famous for walking out on other AI luminaries. He criticized the formulaic quality of artificial output and its inability to replicate biological consciousness, while emphasizing a necessary alternative: the escalating capacity of another AI—the actual intelligence of the human mind—to direct and elevate the machine.

The Wisdom of Elwood P. Dowd. From Jimmy Stewart’s famous monologue in Harvey (1950): “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be,’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”

The Hive Within

The Purple Goddess

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