I spend time in the woods. A brief walk from my house. Ten acres of oak and maple too hilly to farm surrounded by a sea of corn. The woods is not the wilderness. The woods feels timeless but is not. The oldest trees are 90 years old. Acorns sprouted up through the sun-beat wasteland of a clear cut a hundred years ago. They’re all dying now from a fungal infestation.

I’ve chased purity my whole life. Geographically. Religiously. Intellectually. Denied the body. Became a glutton. Every time is the same. There is nothing pure in this world. This accumulated realization has brought me great relief. It enables me to set roots. Make a home. Wanderlust once consumed me. It vanished when I realized what I yearned for does not exist.

My faith wavers. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. I pretend to have it. For the ones I love. I preach to my eight year old the importance of letting go. There is little in this world that we control. Encourage her to ask for help. Pray. Give God her worries. Praise Him. He is perfect. We are not. Nothing in this world is perfect. Yet it is.

“You’re making a German forest,” my brother in law told me as we walked through the manicured wood lot in early fall. I became obsessed with purity again and I didn’t realize it until I started writing this. For six months I manically cleaned the forest floor of all the dead fall by hand. It was a great battle that broke me more than once. I thought I’d won. Huge piles of branches, stumps and trunks to burn in winter. Trying to create something perfect and pure.

Rain has destroyed my plan for a late night fire. Without rain the sun loses its majesty. It becomes a tyrant. Chasing purity I become a tyrant. Piling the rotting stumps by hand in a ten-acre wood lot.

Nothing is pure in this world. Yet it is. I tell my daughter, “If we were having fun all the time, would that even be fun?” I’m in the woods now. Sitting in my truck writing this as it rains.

My faith wavers. I will not accept an agnostic state of mind. There’s nothing gray about me. I am black or I am white. On the trough of this wave I am a self-loathing atheist. On the crest of this wave is my spiritual experience. I’m hitting the ceiling, or, as William James said,

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result […] The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

I continue to remind myself that as beauty is dependent on an imperfect world. My momentary glimpses of a perfect God are dependent on my doubt and despair and how I react to this world’s chaos. I still pick up branches. More often I allow them to lie where they lie.

Subscribe now

I grew up in a family where the practice of going to confession was actively discouraged. At liturgy with my Greek grandma, the priest suggested during his homily that we should all avail ourselves of the opportunity to see him for confession. My grandma whispered in my ear, “We don’t do that.” I asked her what she meant. “We don’t tell our business to other people,” she said, “because they might gossip about us.”

Gossip is part of the air that Greeks breathe. It’s part and parcel of our cultural legacy. After my religious awakening in college and my decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, I started going to confession regularly. But it wasn’t until I heard Pope Francis call gossip a “diabolical cancer”—“the worst weed” that can grow in a community, because it leads to division and resentment—that I started including the sin of gossip on my list.

Harsh condemnations of gossip date back to the early Church, when some desert fathers recommended putting a stone in one’s mouth in order to learn to keep silent and avoid vain talk about others. St. John Climacus called gossip a leech “draining and wasting the blood of charity.” Even recent Greek Orthodox writers have issued warnings about the evils of gossip. Hieromonk Gregorios said gossip is a form of lying: by spreading negative information about other people, the gossiper implies knowing the full story, including the state of a person’s heart (which only God knows). Saint Paisios insisted that Christians ought to be like the bee who looks for the flowers—only speaking about the good that others do—and avoid being like the fly who wallows in filth, dwelling on others’ worst attributes.

Living in the information age has not exactly made this easy. The expansion of technology—mass and social media, exposure to sensational public spectacles, and constant surveillance—subtly encourages the impulse to play God: to see, know, judge, and disseminate as much information as we can access about others.

But we ought to exercise caution and avoid moralizing—both about gossip and Big Tech—in simplistic ways. The more I’ve reflected on my seemingly endless battle against the sin of gossiping, which is likely fueled by my addiction to my phone and social media, I’ve come to see how much this struggle is not so much a curse from the devil as it is a source of divine grace.

The first time rumors spread about a girl in my eighth-grade class losing her virginity, I greedily consumed to all the information I could get so I could tell everyone, piecing together all the details and using my imagination to embellish them a little more each time I recounted the tale. I even told my mom, who found the story to be so riveting that she gathered everyone in the living room to have me tell it to them. My family didn’t even know who the girl was. What enticed them was not finding out private information about this girl or judging her. It was the sensationalism of the way I told it.

There is a real craft, an artform to gossiping. One need only watch a YouTube compilation of the “hot topics” segment from Wendy Williams’s daytime talk show to see someone who has truly mastered the craft. Her audience doesn’t only crave information about the private lives of the stars—they crave the salacious and witty manner in which Williams presents it. (Williams once took up the challenge to give up gossiping, which lasted a whole ten seconds. Some have dared to conjecture that her current cognitive impairment is divine intervention to stop her from getting—in the words of Mariah Carey—“all up in [people’s] bidness.”)

Some argue that gossip can be a force for good. Gossip in the form of venting can easily spiral into a bashing session, in which you wallow—like the fly—in your resentment toward the person who pissed you off. But it can also open the door to a constructive conversation about how to deal with said person and arrive at some kind of resolution. And some more socially-conscious voices have argued that gossip can be a means for powerless, underprivileged people to warn, protect, and uplift each other in the face of unjust treatment by those in power.

When it comes to my own taste for gossip, it’s a bit more complicated. As time went on, I began feeling like Gretchen Wieners of Mean Girls fame: my head was full of secrets. Somehow, I just happened to know everything about everyone. Perhaps it was because my Aspergers made me pay attention to and remember little random details I observed and heard. Maybe I have an unhealthy appetite for knowing information about others that I’m not entitled to, and am thus guilty of the vain curiosity that drove Adam and Eve to disobey God. Or maybe it’s just because my family groomed me to notice and retain information about other people.

Most of the gossip I grew up around was harmless. Yet I can’t deny that plenty of the gossip I indulge in is malicious. Sometimes I’ve said things that are really mean, and have spread information about people that ended up hurting them afterwards. The more I’ve examined my own conscience, I’ve had to admit that there’s more than just playfulness or curiosity driving my itch to gossip about people. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to compensate for my embarrassingly deep-seated insecurities.

Like most other millennial narcissists, my entitlement complex is fairly massive. I’m embarrassingly insecure and desperate for approval. When people don’t do what I want, I take it as a grave injustice, an affront to my dignity. Rather than accept that I’m not entitled to everything I want—and pull a Matthew 18:15 by confronting people when they actually disrespect me—I allow the resentment to fester internally. The resentment eventually oozes out of me in the form of talking shit about them—usually not in the aforementioned constructive manner, but as a way of punishing them for their affront to me. It numbs my insecurity by letting me pretend that I’m more powerful than them.

But there is also another mode of gossiping—one that’s less impassioned, requires less effort and serves a more mundane function—that risks being even more diabolical. Unlike the aforementioned forms of theatricality or maliciousness—this kind is gossip as mere filler, background noise used to numb boredom, a lack of passion for life and substance in a conversation.

I once asked my grandma why we gossip so much. She said that we weren’t gossiping, we were just making conversation. Gossip was a way to pass the time together. We didn’t give much thought to it; it was second nature. More often than not, it was done for sport. This form of gossip can be incredibly pernicious. When you’re engaging in malicious gossip, you can at least know you’re sinning and feel bad about it at some point. But this blasé kind of gossip requires no engagement of the heart or the mind. It’s most common among those who are accustomed to looking not up at the cosmos or into the eyes of the other, but down at the ground. Gossip of this sort fulfills the same function as other forms of algorithmically-regulated background noise like streaming services, AI, doomscrolling: it’s slop that distracts from the existential dread.

This apathetic, low-labor intensive form of gossip has followed in the direction of celebrity gossip: innovations in technology and media have moved us past the sensationalism of the paparazzi era, when tabloid photographers put their—and celebrities’—lives on the line in order to snap a shot that would get people around the world talking. Gone are the days of the paparazzi harassing Britney and Paris as they stumbled out of the club, and chasing Lady Di down the tunnel to her ultimate demise. The dawn of social media—where celebrities can determine which images of themselves get projected out into the ether—has taken the edge off the sensationalism of celebrity gossip. The sheer overload of information we’re barraged with has made it so that even the most scandalous image or story is quickly forgotten in a matter of days—or hours—as newer, more sensational stories make their way into the news cycle.

When the media that disseminates information about people’s lives assumes god-like proportions of omniscience and omnipotence, the thrill of “playing god” and gossiping loses its edge. Asking your friend if they saw Cardi B’s latest Instagram story performs that same space-filling function as commenting on the weather—indeed, information about the private lives of celebrities has become as pervasively unavoidable—and mundane—as the weather itself. Perhaps the greatest mark of the falling off of a friendship is when the two people cease sharing juicy, impassioned gossip with each other, and when they resort to DMing each other cringe stories of people they follow. (Lately, I’ve been indulging in DMing friends politically-charged posts by our mutuals, deriding them as libtards…and conservatards. My new low has been DMing our mutuals’ thirstraps and bodyshaming them...)

From the artful, to the malicious, to the lazy varieties, I’ve employed various tactics to conquer my pet vice of gossip. I’ve done that thing when you start saying “Did you hear about…wait no, nevermind.” I’ve tried highlighting a person’s most positive attributes after talking shit about them (“He’s such an asshole…but you know, when you think about it he’s actually kinda smart…”)—simultaneously being the fly and the bee. In an attempt to adhere to the Golden Rule, I’ve tried conjuring up memories of how I felt after being told that people were gossiping about me, hoping that would keep me inflicting the same pain upon others. I’ve tried looking at the log in my own eye before talking about someone else’s log, probing my conscience for the ways that I’ve perpetrated the same crime as the person I’m tempted to gossip about. I’ve tried—as much as it goes against my millennial temperament—to get a little more confrontational and tell people how I feel to their face rather than being fake nice venting my emotions behind their back. And I’ve even asked people forgiveness for what I’ve said about them after the fact.

But much like my addiction to doomscrolling, I’ve come around to accepting that gossiping is a vice I’ll never fully kick. Neither denying the sinfulness of my habit nor moralizing about it have been useful. Rather, the most helpful advice I received was from a priest to whom I was (yet again) confessing the sin of gossip, who recommended that I focus my energy not on avoiding the sin, but on looking at God Himself. When tempted to look at people’s faults and talk about them with others, when hurt or scandalized by people’s actions, even when I’m bored and feel the need to fill the empty space—direct my attention toward Him. Even if I’ve already started indulging in the act of gossiping, shift the focus of the conversation back to Him. Offer everything to Him—your resentment, your scandal, your insecurity, your boredom. Trust that he can transform and elevate all of these things. For it is only in this dialogue, in this humble act of offering, that the empty vacuum that gossip tries to fill can be filled with something of true beauty and substance.

Subscribe now

We live in an age of stylized truths and simplified realities, video snippets and short-form fragments of text that each claim to stand in for reality itself. Describing how short-form, aphoristic writing related to the radically “cutup” and abbreviated media landscape of the early twenty-first century, Jean Baudrillard sought to draw some distinctions between these kinds of content. “The aphorism, the video-clip and the advert seem to share an instantaneity, rapidity and ephemerality,” he allowed, but the aphorism represented a different kind of phenomenon:

It’s a fragment, but a fragment that creates a whole symbolic space around it, a gap, a blank. Whereas our techniques and technologies create the instantaneous, but linked by continuity with the whole network. They are networked fragments, if I can put it that way!1

Aphorisms (while they might superficially share the fragment’s brevity) are dense, compacted, and complex statements of truth that are often posed in the form of riddles or paradoxes. They stop readers in their tracks and demand to be unpacked. Their meaning tends to make itself apparent only after a period of meditation. The kinds of media fragments represented by the video-clip and the advertisement, on the other hand, only make sense when viewed as constituent parts of a larger stream. They capture viewers’ attention only momentarily before the next piece of serial content in the queue makes its appearance.

The tensions between the word and the stream have only intensified in the twenty-five years since Baudrillard made his remarks. The most obvious contemporary manifestation of Baudrillard’s “networked fragments” is the algorithmically generated social media timeline or newsfeed. Here, various “shards and fragments of discourse” are placed in relation to each other and the assemblage presented to the end user as a supposedly faithful representation of current social reality itself.2 However, social media has just as profoundly reshaped our understandings of writing itself, rendering it, too, into a series of fragments within a network.

When users join social media, they are given a profile, which both authorizes and assumes responsibility for whatever content is posted under its name. Profiles work via a logic of networked affiliation. On X and Bluesky, for instance, statements and ideologically-coded emojis entered in the free-text biography and display name fields enable users to position themselves in ideological space and to affiliate their profiles with workplaces and institutions, as well as with political movements and moral causes. These are complemented by the “public displays of connections” (lists of following and followed accounts) accessible from users’ profiles, which provide additional evidence of network affinities. Those who encounter these profiles in digital space will (provided that they are familiar with the visual “codes” of affiliation on X and Bluesky) know in advance where their creators stand in ideological and political terms. Users can further indicate that they are members of their communities “in good standing” by editing a profile to keep it “up to date” as new norms of ideological signaling or new “causes” gain currency within particular follower groups.

Ideologically coded profiles signal to the like-minded while simultaneously deterring those from different platform subcultures. They also contribute to a phenomenon I call metadatafication—the way in which status and reputation online is influenced by users’ network affiliations. Metadatafication inheres in the impression given by the other users one chooses to follow, or the ideological flavor of the content one chooses to post or reshare. In a world of linked profiles, whoever one chooses to associate with, link to, or follow back, has become a marker of credibility. Information, too, has become newly coded by the logic of metadatafication, according to who shares or engages with certain “facts” or particular sorts of content, and who rejects or ignores them.

Knowledge has been reduced to its associated topics, relationships, and keywords. Follow circles, filter bubbles, and digital cliques may seem congenial to those within them but will inevitably appear alienating to those from outside. We still lack an agreed-upon language to describe what this sense of being involuntarily exposed to “someone else’s bubble” feels like, beyond a general unease when faced with unfamiliar facts, or an information environment that is not our own. Anxiety is therefore the defining emotion under the regime of metadatafication, particularly with regard to ambiguous or as-yet undescribed material or figures located on the edge of bubbles of acceptability. Is it safe for us to engage or connect with these people or forms of content? What might these engagements say about us? Is to engage necessarily to endorse?

We have been culturally conditioned to accept a certain kind of condensed writing and speaking as an urgent expression of an underlying truth. As the literary critic Ben Grant writes, the aphorism (crystalline and gemlike in its textual economy) tends simply “to declare what it says as true, and to brook no response.”3 Dicta similarly declare what they say to be beyond question. Protest slogans are devised in order to be unerringly and unquestioningly repeated. When chanted in ritual fashion by crowds, they resemble charms or spells, creating the illusion that their demands could be brought into being through the simple act of ardent mass expression. Although the vast majority of social media posts lack the verbal complexity and involuted cleverness of “classic” aphorisms, they have arguably inherited some of the cultural legacy of the aphorism, the slogan, and the dictum.

The assumption that what is condensed and immediate is also somehow true is intensified by the affordances of social media. The profile claims to represent the poster’s “authentic self” at its most unguarded (and therefore “real”) level, granting whatever is posted under its authority the seal of personal truth. The newsfeed and timeline make similar, quasi-aphoristic truth claims. Their constantly self-updating immediacy mimics what Susan Sontag calls the “rapidity” of the aphorism, the sense in which the aphorism’s recipient “gets” the truth “fast.”4 In the same way that early Midjourney fakes like “Balenciaga Pope” hacked into a culturally specific cognitive weakness (the belief that the camera never lies), the baseless online assertion exploits our cultural expectation that speed and concision signal the presence of the plain truth.

During a meeting with X employees in October 2023, Elon Musk claimed that the social media newsfeed was not simply in the process of replacing the news media, but that it was somehow resolving into an unmediated expression of collective psychic reality itself:

There’s really, I think, a profound shift in news. When you really think about information, I sort of approach this as like the collective consciousness, where if you can think of humanity as a superorganism and all the humans are basically the eyes and ears of the collective mind of humanity, you want to have all those eyes and ears feeding information into the collective mind. Not going through the slow and often distorted lens of media but actually just directly.

Instantaneity, combined with human connectedness, fosters the illusion that what appears on the timeline is unmediated and, in Musk’s words, “direct.” It resolves in real time into the thing in itself rather than a belated and “distorted” media representation of it. If there is an ideology of the timeline, it is fundamentally fractal or hologrammatic, representing the logic of the network itself. Every part is supposed to contain (or at least reference) the whole. The most globally circulated fragments of discourse and moving imagery posted to the stream—a stabbing in a train carriage captured by surveillance cameras; a shooting on a Minneapolis street—scale up into absolute truths imbued with an immediate planetary significance. However, what we might call “the algorithmic construction of social media reality” militates against Musk’s naïve (or cynical, or naïve and cynical) suggestion that the newsfeed represents some kind of “human superorganism,” whose every pair of eyes and ears has access to the “full picture” through media participation.

The mass audiences that existed up until the early twenty-first century were temporally synchronized around their consumption of the same programmed media objects (broadcast television; cinema releases) together at the same time. Now, however, programming works differently. Audience members continue to consume media objects en masse and at the same time as one another, but the feed is personalized. The old monoculture (centered on the shared exposure to the same content) has given way to a new monoculture (centered on synchronized behavior on the same digital platforms). Increasingly, what the content-siloed members of the new media audiences have most in common with each other is the fugue state of simultaneous screen fixation. However, rather than leading to a state of total atomization, this divided state of affairs instead intensifies the desire of all parties to represent their own algorithmically constructed social realities as normative and universal.

The need to be seen “communicating what is right” (and one’s own affiliation with that rightness) has led social media users to become skilled in a particular mode of writing—cant. Cant, as Todd Gitlin defines it, is the reduction of speech to sloganeering. It is “the hardening of the aura around a concept.”5 Like the dictum, cant acknowledges no legitimate opposition to its point of view. Each statement stakes a claim to absolute truth. Ideas and political positions are made to seem unimpeachable through the armoring of the language in which they are expressed. Cant simplifies, compresses, and places an enormous stock in the sincerity of the speaker, but, as Gitlin writes, that claim to sincerity “also protects it against scrutiny.” Cant has now become the dominant register in which political and academic arguments are conducted on social media. Anchoring one of her daily anti-immigration posts on X in the coercive moral certainties of the Second World War, the right-wing British journalist Allison Pearson reposted a picture of an exhausted Royal Air Force fighter pilot taken during the Battle of Britain with the text: “Imagine if [Flight Lieutenant] Brian Lane came back and saw what they’d done to the country he fought so valiantly for.” A reply to her post countered this emotive historical simplification with some emotive historical simplifications of its own: “He didn’t fight for a small, fearful England. He fought against the hate that divides us. Brian Lane flew beside Indians, Muslims, Caribbeans, Poles, people from every corner of the world who stood together to defeat fascism.”

Cant inevitably invites its opponents to express their arguments in its own terms. Both sides seek to have the final word, but finality is impossible given the endlessly self-regenerative nature of the social media stream. The discourse thereby devolves into the repetitive sparring of binary moral certainties—fragments purporting to offer the whole picture. Each piece of discourse manifests as a series of capsule “truths” and snippet-sized assertions (“fought so valiantly”; “the hate that divides us”), each packed together like alleles in the pared-down genome of a virus. While they deliver maximum emotive payload for minimal semantic content, each seems capable only of maintaining the balance of the polarity itself. There is no final resolution, only the armored intensification of emotions and moral certainties on either side of the divide.

With the ability it offers users to snippet images and discourse and paste them into new contexts, social media has become the ideal medium for perpetuating the culture war. When Tate Britain organized its “Hogarth and Europe” exhibition in 2021, it generated immediate pushback from visitors, who posted images of the exhibition’s gallery texts on social media (with their own derisive commentary), and then from journalists in the right-wing British press, who turned those initial posts into news stories. However, what was also notable about the exhibition’s wall texts was how they, too, seemed like a series of “networked fragments,” governed by similar social media logics—simplification, the need to immediately grab a reader’s attention, and the anxieties about association typical of metadatafication.

In the exhibition, The Tête à Tête (the second painting in Hogarth’s Marriage-A-la-mode series) was accompanied by a wall text that focused on one tiny detail in the painting—the pamphlet visible in the pocket of the steward, who is exiting the composition with his sheaf of unpaid bills. The caption writer (the University of Pennsylvania’s Chi-ming Yang) noted that the pamphlet’s title:

references a sermon by the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, who preached moral purity in North America and Britain while helping legalise slavery in colonial Georgia in 1751. However indirectly, in this painting the atrocities of Atlantic investments are invoked in relation to the outsized expenditure on Asian luxury goods – overall, a picture of White degeneracy.

Of the chair in Hogarth’s 1757 self-portrait, Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, an accompanying label suggested that its (presumably) imported timber might “stand-in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity.” The aim of these captions was to encourage visitors to think in terms of networks as well as objects, and to be as mindful of what was not on display as they were of what they could see on the wall in front of them. At the same time, however, they excluded the kinds of specific details about the original contexts of these artworks’ creation (and their intended meanings) which might have enabled a viewer to make sense of them as art objects. Potential associations, rather than the art itself, now seem to set the terms for exhibitions and what can (and cannot) be said about the art objects in museum collections. The logic of the feed, metadatafication, and cant trespass on the viewer’s ability to have an un-premeditated aesthetic experience.

As anxious as institutions are to provide them, labels like this can also get between the works and those who simply want to engage with them on their own terms. Years ago, a work colleague described to me some of the frustrations she had felt when she was an English Literature student. Her course readings came to her as a weekly succession of sublime experiences, but in the seminar room she was compelled to discuss them in the much drier terms of applied theory and historical context. There was no opportunity, no space, no language, for talking about the poems in the terms in which she had actually experienced them. Narrowly prescriptive labels risk taking the air out of museum and gallery visitors’ lungs in the same way.

What matters here is not the specific political content of any one label, but the form of explanation that now predominate. In each case, the artwork is treated as a node in a moral network, requiring immediate contextualization. The label becomes a kind of terminal—less an aid to looking than a screen through which contemporary norms are continuously refreshed.

Following its 2022 refurbishment, museum texts at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow now obey similar logic. A sixteenth-century brass dish from Germany depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian now has a label noting that, although St. Sebastian was originally a religious figure, he is now “seen as a gay icon” and that “the arrows fired into his body are like the words that can still prick us as LGBTQI+ individuals.” The label reframes the image through contemporary identity categories and invites visitors to locate themselves personally within its meaning, asking, “Who is your icon?”

Although the new Burrell Collection texts are printed using the same authority-signaling fonts and visual formats as a conventional museum label, they in practice function more like screens or terminals, receiving and displaying (as though in real time) the most up-to-date signals from “the discourse.” What we might call “activistic ways of knowing” are given formal recognition as a kind of “expert knowledge” through their consecration in the form of gallery text, with its aura of expertise and definitiveness. The new Burrell Collection texts are knowingly provocative. They break the fourth wall of professional convention in order to center (as cant does) the curators’ own emotions and ideological commitments. They make a claim to an unassailable emotional truth through subtly coercive normative frames. The controversial 2025–6 “Hear Us” graffiti exhibition inside Canterbury Cathedral operates according to a similar “terminal-style” logic. Exhibition text posted on the cathedral’s website reported that:

The workshops conducted as part of this project not only ignited inquiries but also stirred up poetic expression, leaving participants feeling affirmed, empathised with, and embraced by their peers. These gatherings offered a platform for individuals to share their perspectives, connect with others who resonated with their questions, and delve into profound discussions about their lives, experiences, and aspirations for change.

Combining public relations and therapeutic language with the style and syntax of a ChatGPT-generated student essay, this text takes one of Gitlin’s definitions of cant (“automated thought”) to its logical conclusion. In the subsequent social media furore, the cathedral walls effectively became a screen for the projection of the contemporary culture war, the (as ever unresolved) clash of polar perspectives offering both sides the illusion of total righteousness.

Liberated from the duty of explaining the past in its own terms, and following the logic of short-form content, cultural history has become increasingly judgmental and present-focused. A compulsion to signal one’s responsiveness to contemporary moral concerns by finding fault with history has become pervasive within the institutions. Even very recent cultural artifacts have come to seem retrospectively “problematic” and in need of mediating commentary and “correction.” Streaming and the culture of the rewatch put older movies and TV shows back into current circulation, inviting new audiences to judge them by contemporary moral norms. As a result, culture is becoming flattened and simplified into a decontextualized mulch, reduced to the lists of rules, shortcomings, and topical talking points that can be applied to it.

The role of rules is to ensure accountability; new categories of retrospective judgment function similarly. The new forms of present-focused cultural criticism enable users to redescribe past works, making them accountable to contemporary moral norms. The result is something like a return to the neoclassical literary criticism of the early eighteenth century, in which the role of the critic lay in separating a past work’s putative “faults” from its “beauties.” The rules of neoclassical criticism included the requirement that virtuous characters be rewarded, while the wicked were made to atone for their actions. Contemporary “culture auditing” performs the same function with new ideals. Now, as then, the moralized idea of the “fault” becomes a way of retrospectively dealing with the problem of historical distance, of squaring past practice with current frameworks. Past “content creators” (working in less “aware” eras) cannot be blamed, it seems, for failing to anticipate current sensibilities. Nevertheless, apparently “outdated” material must be identified (and disavowed) before a work’s “beauties” can be fully endorsed for viewing by contemporary audiences.

The new content warning devised for Mad Men’s season 3 episode “My Old Kentucky Home” (aired originally in August 2009) illustrates the mixture of moralism, auditing, and compliance that typifies the new culture. When the episode was made available for streaming for the first time in July 2020, it was prefaced by a sternly moralistic new title-card, which stated that the episode contained “disturbing images” of “one of the characters … in blackface,” but that “the series producers are committed to exposing the injustices and inequities within our society that continue to this day.”

In this case, it did not matter that the image of Roger Sterling bellowing the episode’s title song in blackface at his country-club Kentucky Derby Day party was clearly intended as both an historical and character critique by the makers of the show. Viewers in 2009 were given strong cues for how to interpret the scene from the visible horror on the faces of in-show moral barometers Pete and Trudy Campbell, as well as by Don Draper’s equally disgusted decision to quit the party at this point and look for the bar. For the episode to be streamed uncut only a decade after its first screening, however, it had to be redescribed (with cantish corporate sincerity) as an “exposure” of “injustice” and “inequity,” as though it were a piece of sociology rather than a self-supporting work of art. As such, it illustrates what the French political scientist Olivier Roy calls the characteristic “explicitness” demanded by the new communication norms associated with digitalization, in which content must be “constantly explicated” to remove ambiguities and “only literal meanings matter.”6 A TV episode that was easily comprehensible in 2009 as (among other things) an implied critique of 1960s upper middle-class American racism becomes “problematic” in 2020 because it trusted its original audience to know what they were seeing.

The contemporary dominance of short-form writing and thinking speaks to our contradictory desire for immediacy—to be “told it like it is”—and our need to feel protected from the potential harms of immediacy’s disclosures. The caption, the content warning, the AI summary, the list of followed accounts—all make versions of the aphorism’s promise (the rapid revelation of an absolute truth). In practice, however, they offer us predigested snippets of information in lieu of the things themselves. What the reduction of reality to tags and topics really enables is ease of consumption. In a world dominated by the logic of flows and timelines, information must be flattened and standardized, its meanings redescribed according to their observable relationship with—their relevance to—other fragments in the feed. When imposed as an explicatory overlay across culture, this logic ultimately negates any sense of ambiguity and strangeness in favour of binary moral certainties.

Cultural explanation is increasingly moving away from describing direct encounters with works or objects in favor of broader commentary with a public relations or stakeholder agenda—how can we make this seem relevant to current issues? To put it in metadata terms, the tag or “topic relationship” must be asserted, no matter how reductive and anachronistic this move may seem according to pre-feed understandings of culture and history.

The consumerist logic of the timeline (with its intrinsic bias towards “new content”) is now being applied to cultural zones that have traditionally been cordoned off from this way of thinking by the concept of historical distance. If it was until recently acknowledged that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” this exemption no longer seems to hold. The universalizing imperatives of “communicating what is right” must be extended to history’s territories also. In the process, historical explanation has been exchanged for the more immediate pleasures of instantaneous moral judgment. The graph-like certainties of guilt-by-association reasoning are thereby replacing explanation and analysis.

No matter how attractive the “new topicality” may seem to cultural institutions looking to assert their legitimacy and satisfy funders in a rapidly changing environment, it nevertheless imposes significant costs. Once institutions step onto this path, it can become a never-ending treadmill. When cultural value is transferred from the object itself to the object’s capacity for being deemed relevant to “topics of contemporary interest,” the fashion system’s dance with perpetual obsolescence ensues. Topics, jargons, and “critical approaches” move relentlessly onwards. “Badly needed” new contextual labelling needs to be continually updated if it is not to later appear “unresponsive” and cringeworthily behind the times. Nothing ages more rapidly than something specifically engineered to seem fully up to date.

In promising immediacy and easy access to topicality, short-form truths short-circuit our intellectual understanding and aesthetic responses. The crisis of meaning for the arts and culture industries in the 2010s and early 2020s has been the global generalization of these ways of understanding cultural value. Social media has enabled members of the global intelligentsia to become networked and ideologically synchronized with each other, forming an interlinked “global new class” of symbolic workers. The end result of these synchronizations, however, is that everyone has seemingly started speaking and thinking in the same American-derived, quasi-academic jargons, as though standardizing our disciplines in this way was the only path to “contemporary relevance.” In seeking new routes to legitimacy as therapeutic mediators and commentators on the globally agreed Big Topics, we risk cashing in our old institutional legacies for the timeline’s more ephemeral assurances of perpetual relevance and up-to-date-ness, promises that stay good only so long as we remain compliant and connected to the network.

Subscribe now

I spent much of my teenage years actively seeking out things that might depress me. I’d ask friends for recommendations, tell them my life was too easy and light. Bro… what do you know that will definitely depress me, something that will suck the air out of my mind? They told me to read Camus, Ligotti, Schopenhauer, Buddha, Houellebecq, etc., all outright hedonists as far as I could tell, empty basins waiting for pleasure to pour into them. It didn’t occur to anyone to tell me to read Hegel, possibly because all my friends were between fourteen and sixteen years old. If one or two of them had a vague sense of Hegel’s aura, extracted from Wikipedia or the eager tongue of some deranged relative, they knew him only as a tedious soothsayer of the irreducibly good, a standard-issue utopic-Teutonic conservative, who ate sausages and smiled in stiff benevolence at the cutely swelling bosom of his young, hot, aristocratic wife, who’d kindly agreed to adopt and raise Ludwig—fruit of Hegel’s liaison with his sexually powerful landlordess, Joanna—as her own.

In 2010, everything was still going fairly well in my life. I’d been unable, despite my best efforts, to break out of a general lightness and easiness that followed me around wherever I went, a sense that nothing was particularly true or untrue, nothing was determined, but nothing was not determined either; nothing was necessary, but nothing was not necessary either. Everything, I thought in my light-headed undergraduate egoism, existed on a spectrum, the worst you could do was move one or two inches in a given direction, slightly up or slightly down, slightly left or slightly right, but such adjustments were in the end so smarmily quantitative that overall it was better not to do anything except walk around with your headphones on, a bit of Handel, a bit of Bossa nova, your eyes seventy-two percent open to the extraordinary works of either God or nature, why should it matter which?

But at some point, wandering around various semi-European cities, distributing my time between (a) “looking at attractive people in the distance while listening to various songs composed between 1300 and 2012” and (b), “looking at attractive objects in the distance while listening to various songs composed between 1300 and 2012,” in short enjoying myself. I came across Hegel’s idea of Universal Reason and almost went insane1. A scene in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski demonstrates the mad power of this idea very well. The film’s long-haired protagonist is minding his business when suddenly several nihilists invade his apartment. He’s uncooperative, even courageous; he doesn’t seem to mind very much what they’re doing. Yes, he’s upset when the Asian nihilist cynically micturates on his rug, but he’s not thrown into confusion; he takes everything more or less as it comes, offering by way of resistance only a gently pleading counter-commentary (come on… no, don’t do that… not on the rug, man.)

Something of him, then, is beyond all this, beyond the reach of the nihilists’ insults and cheap threats. This is confirmed when the more Germanic of the two nihilists drags him to the bathroom and jams his head down the toilet. He pulls him up, says where’s the money Lebowski, puts him back, pulls him up again, says where’s the money Lebowski, puts him in, pulls him out, says where’s the [redacted] money, shithead? Perfectly ventriloquizing Universal Reason, “the dude” answers: it’s down there somewhere, let me take another look. Meaning: sure, but bro, why don’t you take another look, the human community from which you’ve pointlessly excluded yourself might be down there somewhere too, how do you know if you don’t look? You look like you’ve already looked everywhere else, if you don’t mind me saying. But if you’re not willing to look for it this time, then hey, I’ll do it, I’m that kind of guy.

Herein the secret of Hegel’s rhetoric and system both: he nutritionalizes your critique. You push his head down the toilet, but it turns out he was just about to look down that particular toilet anyway; actually, it’s pretty difficult to jam your own head down a toilet, the physics are difficult, I was hoping you might come by. Whatever you do, you’re included; exclude yourself, and it will turn out to have been a necessary step—probably the ‘key step’—in your journey towards inclusion. And this is perfectly generalizable; the frantic energy of a rebellious child, interpreted Hegelianly, is merely an advance paid on his inevitable inclusion, the stamp of its authenticity.

Kierkegaard considered this philosophy a joke, the joke being that while the system of inclusion was perfect, the architect had forgotten to include any doors2. But Kierkegaard could only think this because he was already dwelling somewhere else, namely in God (or thereabouts). He was correct to observe that Hegel’s system is doorless. But contemporary subjectivity is homeless—where could the system be built but on the ground where you already are? The absence of doors, which meant for Søren Aabye Kierkegaard that there was no way in, means for you that there is no way out. What for Kierkegaard was an ‘almost funny’ joke is for you an impenetrable tragedy. Moral: to diagnose unbelief, measure how quickly humor turns into pain.

But you have to read Hegel twice, as, after being depressed for some time (2010-2023) for ‘no reason,’ I did; the truth is down there somewhere but you have to take another look. The first time you fail, the second time you fail again, but differently, revealing the necessity of your first failure; from this, you can infer that your second failure was necessary too. It’s not that Hegel himself succeeded and is mocking you from the skies, but that he failed before you, and even more horribly; he’s mocking you from below, punching up, as they say. Hegel’s point, in other words, is not that you are included, but that no one is—not-being-included is the only thing you have in common with anyone. The universal is a blanket you stretch until a small slit, shaped like a mouth, opens up in the middle; out of this the confession of the redeemed particular pours.

Until I looked down this mouth-like gap in the center of thought, I interpreted every attempt at inclusion as a power move of the cruelest kind. As the youngest child of four, perhaps this was natural; to be born last is to be nothing but included; your parents, your brothers, your sisters, they all, by default, know the world better than you, they know, even, of a completely different world, closed to you at the very point of your entrance, and they will take their double epistemological advantage to the grave. The includer, I said to myself, in including the includee, asserts total ontological supremacy; the includer is no less distinct from the includee than the murderer is from the murdered. And at least the murderer has no chance to celebrate his crime, having killed the real witness; the includer, on the other hand, extends his ontological priority as far into the future as possible (oh yeah, feel free to come back any time… don’t forget, there’s always a place for you here). I’d managed to escape the trauma of inclusion by doing exactly that, forgetting about it, but after finding out about Universal Reason this was no longer an option for me. Nothing, Hegel says, is forgotten; forgetting is a preliminary step in a process not of cognition but of revenge. But revenge, luckily, is beautiful.

And realizing this is the first step in becoming a historical subject. Until then, I’d had seen history as an endless series of people, a world-historical expression of the same glutinous logic of inclusion which I hoped to defy or at least ignore in my personal life. Like people, historical events were constantly being added onto each other, for no reason other than to increase their overall gravitational pull. And so to read history, I thought, was only to smear my bad conscience on its surface, which it would of course “welcome”—come back any time, history seemed to say, there’s always room for you here. But reading Hegel for the second time, it instead came back to me; the Spanish Armada, which hadn’t even seemed real enough to be fake, Hiroshima, Christopher Columbus, all of this actually happened, and the reason it happened is that it didn’t entirely happen, it wasn’t able to squeeze the fruit of itself to the last drop. And how else could I ever explain how, when my uncle died at the end of that year, I was able to climb down the ladder of the negative all the way back to the final solitary eyelash of Jesus Christ?

Subscribe now

Imagine, if you will, a civilization lost to time organized entirely by its desire for intimacy with God Most High: intimacy both spiritual and proximal. Within an Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, this civilization could only satisfy its longing by erecting a great tower to join the flat earth to the vault of heaven. Such an undertaking would require the labor of many generations: united through oceans of time by a common purpose. That purpose would be always in view, for to exist, the tower would also have to be a city, one whose every stone witnessed to the telos of its people. This city would have to be self-sufficient: for instance, capturing rain in reservoirs to water its gardens and orchards. The form of every material object and process in the city would be determined by its vertical horizon.

Ted Chiang’s short story “Tower of Babylon” begins when this civilization has finally reached the vault of heaven. Hillalum, the protagonist, is a miner tasked with penetrating the granitic vault. It takes him four months to travel from the base to the city’s upper reaches. When at last the vault is pierced, the “waters above” gush forth, and the tunnel is sealed behind Hillalum to prevent the city from being flooded. He has no choice but to swim upward. When he breaches the surface, expecting to find himself in heaven, he discovers he is swimming in the “waters below” just outside the city. The world, he realizes, was like a seal cylinder that was rolled atop wet clay tablets to imprint an image. The figures that appeared as borders on the tablet were, on the cylinder, side by side. “Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched.” Hillalum marvels at God’s creative wisdom:

It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed.

I was reminded of Chiang’s parable as I listened to Paul Kingsnorth deliver his First Things Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization.” He argues that civilization as such is a consequence of the Fall: “Ever since we were expelled from this garden, it seems, we have been building great towers to the sky, trying, if subconsciously, to return to our true home. But always our towers are brought down, and our tribes are scattered.”

His view is akin to that of René Girard, who held that all archaic culture was birthed in violence because hominization—the process by which our evolutionary precursors became human—itself culminated in the first sacrifice, an event that restored difference to a community on the brink of self-extinction amidst the violent undifferentiation of mimetic crisis. For Girard, civilization was made possible by, and premised upon, the social technology of the scapegoat mechanism. While Girard’s critique of civilization is bleaker and more comprehensive than Kingsnorth’s, it allows for the possibility that a civilization might become genuinely Christian—if only its people would renounce violent reciprocity. It thus offers an illuminating foil to Kingsnorth’s essay, at a time when many minds, especially in America, have fixed on the the raising of towers in the form of the renewal of western civilization. Kingsnorth’s argument is simple: civilization-building is ineluctably idolatrous and antithetical to the Edenic communion God made man to enjoy; therefore, “Christian civilization” is a contradiction in terms. Civilization cannot be baptized. It can only replace Christ with an idol. All towers are Towers of Babel.

Christianity, says Kingsnorth, “is founded upon a set of values inimical to those of our modern, expansionist, acquisitive, growth-obsessed, and apparently ‘masculine’ civilization.” He catalogues some of Christ’s most startling statements, drawn especially from the Sermon on the Mount (for example, Matt. 5:39: “Resist not evil”), and concludes, “Every single one of these teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.”

The teachings of Jesus are radical, in both their rhetoric and politics. Not merely radical—impossible. And so we twist his words, says Kingsnorth. “Oh, yes, I know he said that, we tell ourselves, but he really meant this.” Endless qualifications can be made here, many of them valid. But even a faithfully-nuanced reading of Jesus’s teachings leaves us unsettled, our ears itching for excuses to remarry, to indulge the lust of our eyes, to be more generous to our pleasures than to the poor, to experience our anger always as righteous.

Kingsnorth is right to admonish us. But his criticism applies also to those who take Jesus’s teachings at face value as discrete propositions. An apt example is the way contemporary Anabaptists make the Sermon on the Mount into a “set of values” against which to measure the rest of Scripture. Much more than a set of teachings, the Sermon is a rhetorical performance in which Jesus enacts an authority greater than Moses’s, so great as to be coequal with the Father as Lord of the Day of Judgment. The Sermon is a provocation that both ratifies and upends the Law by revealing its source. Its flourishes of hyperbole (“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away”) underscore the need for expansive contextual reading. The Sermon’s teachings are irreducible to propositions. They are necessarily polysemous, finding their meanings in the whole of Christ’s life, even as it is lived in and through his church.

This is why, despite some implausibly biblicist readings of certain of Christ’s utterances, Kingsnorth’s lecture, in its total impact, is faithful to the spirit of Jesus’s teachings. Jesus was a stumbling block, a “rock of offense” counter-signaling the Jewish and Roman world. His church has a duty to continue his confounding provocation; sometimes, though, she requires her own confounding from within. In my view, Kingsnorth’s essay operates as such a prophetic counter-sign calling the church back to her native intransigence.

We should heed the exhortation. American Christians are entering a period in which much civilization-building is both necessary and achievable. The temptation for activist-minded believers to fall into idolatry is serious, and we must take care to distinguish between faithfully building for the common good and placing our faith in the things we build instead of in Christ. Culture and civilization are worthy of our restorative efforts, but they are unfit for worship.

Kingsnorth’s dismissal of cities and civilization as intrinsically fallen is too extreme. Civilization is simply the scaled sociality of humans made in the image of the Maker; as such, it would still have existed absent the Fall (though in what form we can only speculate). It is true that in Genesis the first city is founded by the first murderer—Cain, who, as Kingsnorth might wish to note, was a grower of crops (there can be no civilization without agriculture). This detail is consonant with René Girard’s contention that archaic cultures coalesced around acts of collective violence. “Because humans imitate one another,” writes Girard, “they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.” The recapitulation of that spontaneous sacrifice in the orchestrated sacrifices of religious ritual forms the basis of culture; all historical civilizations have their genesis in sacred violence. If we have in view only the cities and civilizations of history, Kingsnorth is correct: they are shot through with idolatry.

However, to observe that the material substrate bears the form of the city imperfectly (or even perversely) does not negate the inherent goodness of the form. Because the line of good and evil runs through every human heart, it also runs through every merely human city. In contrast, the Apocalypse of St. John envisions the heavenly city—the perfectly incarnated form of maximally scaled divine-human sociality—descending on a recreated earth. The New Jerusalem contains the Tree of Life, suggesting Eden itself was always destined to become a city.

St. Augustine notes in City of God that the earthly city “is itself mastered by the lust for mastery.” He was writing at a time when western civilization was becoming recognizably western; even earthly cities inhabited and administered by Christians were ruled by the libido dominandi. And yet the form of civilizational self-critique he modeled would itself become a characteristic practice of Christendom.

Even at its worst, western civilization has been substantively different from other civilizations. Britain was far from a just society when it began to colonize the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century; but it did not practice sati (widow burning). Nor was Spain especially virtuous when it conquered Mexico in the early-sixteenth century; but, unlike the Aztecs and Mayans, it did not sacrifice untold thousands of innocents to sustain the cosmos. All civilizations are fallen, violent, and unjust. But only western civilization is premised on the rejection of sacrificial economy. This is solely because it was leavened by the gospel.

In his death, Christ demonstrated that victims of scapegoating are innocent, thereby exposing the mythical lie at the heart of fallen civilization. His resurrection inaugurated the new means of solidarity: his body. A civilization is “Christian” to the extent that its cultural forms and institutions practice that rejection of the victimage mechanism, of the violent sacred, and ground their solidarity in the church. The abolition of sacrifice amounts to practicing what Girard called “political atheism,” the refusal to believe in the state’s divinity.

“The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’s innocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims,” writes Girard. “The process of education away from violent sacrifice thus got underway, but it moved very slowly, making advances that were almost always unconscious.”

Western civilization first became distinctively western—that is, moved decisively in the direction of ontological peace by de-sacrificing—under Constantine Augustus. As Peter Leithart explains, “By eliminating the civic sacrifice that founded Rome and protecting and promoting the Eucharistic civitas, Constantine was, in effect if not intent, acknowledging the church’s superiority as a community of justice and peace. He was acknowledging, whether he recognized it fully or not, that the church was the model that he and all other emperors should strive to imitate.”

Christians in America (and elsewhere) have a duty to build civilization in order to fulfill Christ’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves. We must face that duty with the knowledge that the church is our true polity, our true home, and Christ the true measure of building well. To build a Christian civilization first of all requires the church be the church. It also requires cultivating a sanctified imagination capable of envisioning a world without death—not only the death of victims, but death as the horizon of life.

It is undeniable that the universal goods of Christian faith are mediated through the particular; affection for one’s earthly home—including one’s people, one’s nation—is natural and good. But that affection and the experience of home are conditioned within a fallen world where human death is a reality.

Phenomenologically, death is the stable point of reference that allows a given location to become a specific, meaning-laden “place” within our experience. This is most especially true of the place one calls home. As Coulange demonstrates in The Ancient City, the earliest “homes” were also burial sites. The interred bodies of one’s forebears are the precondition of both the home and the city—and, indeed, of all human culture and civilization. All human language, and thus all human thought, takes the marked grave as its primordial referent, for in the grave signifier and signified are one. Consciousness of death is inextricable from our phenomenology, and thus from our labors in building. As the cities of Ancient Egypt vividly illustrate, the City of Man is a necropolis.

The City of God is deathless. And yet it is the standard toward which the Christian must build if he is to build as a Christian for his neighbor’s good. We find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the inhabitants of Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon,” compelled to pursue a beautiful yet impossible end. The key difference is that we know in advance that the goal cannot be achieved by human means. Girard understood that Christ’s revelation of the mythical lie removed “humanity’s sacrificial crutches,” leaving us either to renounce violence in imitation of Christ or to perish in a conflagration of mimetic crises that can no longer be resolved by sacrifice. We continue to choose the latter. “Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure,” writes Girard. “This prescience is known as the apocalypse.”

It is metaphysically impossible to build the City of Man into the City of God; for beings cannot transform themselves into Being. This is liberating. Just as beings participate in Being, the cities of men can and should be built so as to participate in the beauty and goodness of the City of God. We might think of the artist who builds immense sand sculptures on the beach. The inevitability of the tide does not diminish the sculptures’ beauty but enhances it. We are invited to build civilization with a similar lightness.

In his final book, Girard exhorts us to “battle to the end,” but he doesn’t specify what this entails. Likewise, Kingsnorth offers little in the way of practical guidance—indeed, he revels in the “uselessness” of Christianity. And yet one of his themes is quite germane for developing a faithful disposition toward building. He writes,

The monks built the West, just as surely as the soldiers did, and they built the more enduring part. “Christian civilisation,” wrote the liturgical artist Hilary White recently, “is the secondary fruit of Christian mysticism.” This is the essential point. Prayer is the heart of the matter. Christ is the heart of the matter. Without the heart, there is no body. Trying to work backward—to build a body, as it were, with no heart—is an impossibility.

In the church, some are called to the contemplative life, many others to the active. Neither can exist without the other. The prayers of the hermit waging war in the heavenly realms spiritually nourishes and protects the brothers who tend to the nourishment and protection of his physical body. Something analogous must take place in our civilization building: Christians active in civic life have a duty to ensure the church is free to do its spiritual work. Among other things, this means securing the material conditions necessary for contemplation—above all, sufficient stillness.

Only true contemplation can overcome the ersatz mysticism of the mob, in which the individual loses himself in an ecstasy of violent undifferentiation. True contemplation requires self-giving, the sacrifice of one’s difference for the sake of oneness with God, a finite kenosis that participates in the infinite kenosis of God’s creative act, whereas the undifferentiation experienced by the mob-man is rooted in self-centeredness. After all, it is the self-centered pursuit of desire that creates the mimetic crisis to begin with. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard stresses that the novelist must overcome his own self-centeredness in order to see the currents of mimetic influence that govern the relationship of Self to Other; without such self-overcoming, the novelist will never produce a masterpiece. Writes Girard:

To triumph over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.

Contemplation habituates us to self-giving, preparing us to sacrifice our desires for the sake of defusing negative reciprocity, thereby halting the escalation to extremes. The peace of contemplation opens space for genuine self-knowledge, and thus for genuine creation—from novels to architectural marvels—creation ordered to the City of God. Conversely, the noise, the divertissements that make contemplation difficult or impossible ensure our creations are decadent, ordered to an entirely different city.

Opposing the City of God to the City of Man, absent their full cosmic context, can produce a false binary. In reality, the City of Man is the contested territory in a war between the New Jerusalem and the Infernal City, between the City of Music and Silence and the City of Noise. Hence the elder demon’s paean to cacophony in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters:

Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell. . .no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.

The fall of Babylon the Great in The Apocalypse of St. John is the fall of a city consumed by noise. The entropy of mimetic conflagration is unbearably loud—an undifferentiated lunatic howling—until it’s not. The Apocalypse depicts a Babylon burned to silence. If the cities of men refuse the peaceful silences of heaven, they will suffer the violence of heat death, the silence of judgment.

For all its virtues, western civilization has become a civilization of noise. Almost every feature of daily life is designed to deny us contemplation. Kingsnorth is right to yearn for a new flowering of Christian mysticism. But for that to happen, Christians must build, and build for silence.

Subscribe now

*This essay is from the essay collection, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis and forthcoming from Catholic University of America Press February 2026.

Pre-order here.

Editor’s note: This summer I was invited by the Hope-Western Prison Education Program—which provides a Christian liberal arts education to long-term incarcerated men at the Muskegon Correctional Facility—to attend the convocation for the start of their new academic year.

I learned that over the past three years, my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life has been used in a first-year seminar for incarcerated students. One of those students, Carlos Garcia, became especially passionate about applying René Girard’s mimetic theory to prison reform. He went on to read every work by Girard he could get his hands on, and began sharing the ideas with other inmates who believe that positive mimesis is possible.

Mr. Garcia published an essay he wrote from prison in Contagion, a journal dedicated to Girard’s thought. Special thanks to Michigan State University Press, which publishes Contagion, for allowing us to share an amended version here.

On August 26, 2025, I visited the prison and had lunch with Mr. Garcia and several other students. It was a joy to be with them. I left convinced that Girard’s insights have a real role to play in rehabilitation and reconciliation. I trust this essay offers a glimpse of that possibility.

—Luke Burgis

My name is Carlos Garcia. I am 56 years old and a junior class member of the Hope College-Western Theological Seminary Prison Education Program (HWPEP). I have lived my entire life in the state of Michigan. Unfortunately, more than forty of those years have been spent in juvenile detention centers, county jails, rehabilitation centers, reformatories, and prisons. I have been accused, tried, and convicted legitimately, and wrongfully, for just about every crime less than murder. Needless to say, I know a thing or two about violence. As a result, I have embarked on a journey to understand and make use of those things I have learned, in the field of mimetic desire, to challenge the current system of prison politics. This essay attempts to address and answer the question, “What role does mimetic desire play in the prison environment, and what effect might it have on the violence therein?”

Here, inside the Muskegon Correctional Facility, there is only one television in the day room, and there are 238 inmates in the housing unit, and one remote. Everyone is forced to wear the same kind of clothing, eat the same kind of foods, use the same showers and toilets and the same spaces where they are forced to sleep. Everybody is reaching for the same objects at the same time, caught in a mimetic struggle, and often becoming, at least from this writer’s experience, the very thing I hate: a savage.

It is, I argue, this environment of sameness and the disintegration of differences—not the differences—that ultimately leads to mimetic desire, competition, and rivalry. Winning the rivalry then replaces the initial desire for the material, intellectual, or social object as the desired goal.

Mimesis, mimetic desire, and mimetic theory are rooted in the idea of imitation. Mimesis, in and of itself, is nothing new. It is defined as “imitation or mimicry.” In the context of this essay, however, I address mimetic desire more specifically, as it has been theorized by the French professor of history and literature René Girard. Luke Burgis, the author of Wanting: Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, defines mimesis as “A sophisticated form of imitation that in adults is usually hidden. In mimetic theory, mimesis has a negative connotation because it usually leads to rivalry and conflict.” Mimetic desire is defined as “Desire generated and formed through the imitation of what someone else has already desired.” This means that what we want or desire is what the other—someone we might consider to be a model or mediator—wants, or desires, not necessarily because of the intrinsic value of the object, but because of the value we perceive the other’s desire has placed on it. Mimetic desire is at the center of most conflicts, and the struggle for identity (i.e., autonomy) that I believe makes the prison environment volatile.

We, as a species, struggle to find our place in the world. Each of us is trying to create our own identities: individually, culturally, collectively, even nationally. In very few places is the struggle more real, or its potentially violent consequences more severe, than in the prison environment. The identities of most inmates have been lost or stripped from them. Their names have been replaced with numbers. Their pasts, and who they believed themselves to be, have been erased. What is left are memories, which for some will become like dreams that they never actually lived. The question for this writer is, “Who, or what, will these men and women become?” Better yet, “Who will I become?”

Jenna Geick’s essay “The Stranger, the Crowd, and the Lynching: Using Mimetic Theory to Explore Episodes of Human Violence,” tells us “All humans experience a lack of being: humans feel insufficient, inadequate, and impoverished.” What I am suggesting is that the stripping of one’s being upon incarceration pushes men and women into making every effort possible to regain some sense of it (i.e., identity), no matter how great or small.

This sense of being is seen as held by other individuals or groups at the top of the prison hierarchy. They become models to those who, themselves, lack being. This, I argue, is the same as lacking power. It is the power that now seems desirable. People believe that if they seize power, or at least imitate those with power, it may give them a sense of identity.

For understanding the purpose of power and conflict in a prison setting, Edgar, O’Donnell, and Martin state, “We can distinguish four ways that power can be exercised:”

1. Willpower (i.e., nerve).

2. Political power (yes, there are politics to prison living and surviving, which includes networks and jail wisdom).

3. Economic power (wealth as trader or debtor).

4. Official power (prison jobs, privileges, and the ability to move around the facility with relative freedom).

However, what most people (speaking from a prisoner’s perspective) consider to be the ultimate sign of power is the fear that any one individual or group might instill in the rest of the population. This is the kind of power that many seek to possess, that is most contagious, and often the cause of brutal conflicts. It subsumes within it all four of the examples just provided. Often this kind of power is exercised and hidden behind what many have mistakenly identified with respect, and is associated with one’s identity. One might ask, “Is power truly the object of desire?”

It might be easy to assume that the scarce resources, close quarters, or even the disparities between racial groups fuel the most extreme violent behaviors behind prison walls. Peter Wallensteen has proposed that a complete definition of a conflict, as a social situation, is one “in which a minimum of two actors (parties) strive to acquire at the same moment in time an available set of scarce resources.” But Roberto Farneti argues that “the pull of the object is not critical to the outcome.” Rather, “it is the discord itself that prompts the stakes.”

There are differences between prisoners—cultural, religious, socioeconomic—yet differences are not the reason for prison conflict: they are simply the excuse. Girard argues, “Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions” and “it is the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family, or social group at one another’s throats.”

With all differences removed, members of the inmate population have been turned into mirrored images of one another. They are essentially the same in every way. Those in charge of implementing, and maintaining, a prison environment of sameness may even believe that they have created safer prisons because of it. In fact, they have created ticking time bombs, always teetering on the verge of all-out war.

There was a time when the inmate population was able to purchase and wear clothing from outside vendors. Some literally wore mink coats, alligator-skin shoes, and gold chains that looked like tow chains. As a result, there was a high rate of violent robberies, stabbings, and even murders to possess those things that some could never have purchased on their own. The cure, so it was thought, was to make everyone the same. But this only created a new level of violence and new objects of desire. As argued earlier, it is not our differences that create conflict. It is in the lack, or disintegration, of those differences that the seeds of conflict are sowed. I believe, while also being mindful of the security needs that each prison must concern itself with, that we can maintain and promote those differences in a way that encourages positive behavior, thereby changing the prison culture itself.

What if there were another way? What if we could create prisons that were less violent and actually functioned, while at the same time serving society’s need for justice? It is my belief that if we would change our mindsets from that of correction and punishment toward that of recognition, rehabilitation, and change, we might then be better able to protect those behind prison walls as well as those outside of them. But how might such a thing be possible, and what might that look like?

First, I would propose that the best approach is the same approach that created the need for such institutions to begin with: a mimetic approach. This could be done by creating an environment where fear is no longer the driving force that pushes men and women toward desiring the kind of power that dominates, but rather an environment that propels them forward toward a stronger sense of self without fear, and where there exists an environment with a greater sense of positive mimetic reciprocity with others. While this may seem a monumental task, it is not impossible.

Second, I would suggest a restoration of what was taken from men and women upon entering the penal system: their individual identities. This could be simply done by identifying individuals on their identification cards as Sir, Mr., Ma’am, Mrs., or Miss, rather than Offender Gar*** #185***. It might also be done in the way men and women are verbally addressed by staff. There is a kind of dignity that comes with being called by name or title. In this simple way, restoration and the creation of a new identity, real or imagined, begin to take form. These men and women are suddenly recognized as having a sense of worth and place in their community, beginning in the prison community. These types of things are personal and foster personal responses.

As an example of change, with mimetic implications already visible, I would like to direct your attention to the Hope College–Western Theological Seminary Prison Education Program, which was established as a collaboration of the two institutions, and at the approval of Michigan Department of Corrections Director Heidi Washington and the facility warden and administrators. This is a Bachelor of Arts degree program and is currently in its fourth year of operation at the Muskegon Correctional Facility. The program was created with the hope of changing not just the lives of the men who have taken the initiative to participate in it, but also the very culture of the prison environment. In so doing, what they have done, perhaps without realization, is to create a new mindset within the men involved. They have created a sense of connectedness between them and society beyond the fences to which they once felt no connection at all.

On the first day of class, each of the students was instructed to introduce himself. Some gave only their first names. Others gave their first and last names. At least one, possibly two, gave the names that they were most affiliated with on the prison yard and in the streets. This was not acceptable to the professor. We were asked to reintroduce ourselves. This time, while standing, we gave our first and last names. Many of the men I had not known by their full names.

There was a visible apprehension among the men. I wondered if this was because they had forgotten that they had once been identified by those names, or if they somehow felt that their given names would diminish the identities they had assumed in their street names: names like Sneak, Shooter, G-Money.

The professor, in turn, then addressed the students as Mr., Sir, Gentlemen, Scholar, and Colleague. Initially, these titles seemed odd and made many uncomfortable. However, within a few short weeks, the students began addressing themselves as the same. It was not just a classroom phenomenon; these exchanges continued out onto the prison yard, where one’s image and call sign (i.e., street name and therefore identity) cannot afford to be compromised. These men—most of them with violent histories, and still loosely affiliated with the various street and prison gangs that they had aligned and identified themselves with—now walked across a regularly violent prison yard with book bags slung over their shoulders. With them, they carried the shaping of a new identity. This was something the entire body of inmates began to take notice of. This was also something the students themselves began to notice. Yet they were unaware of the mimetic implications they were introducing into the prison culture.

There existed a new glow to these men. It was the glow of a growing humility. Those still trapped in the pull of mimetic desire struggled to find their identities in the negative other and laughed at the first cohort of students. Others questioned the benefit of their efforts. “What good is a degree going to do for you in prison? You are serving a life sentence, why waste your time?” Some, that is, those with less threatening histories and prison identities, were openly called frauds, puppets of the system, and a few other derogatory names. Others spoke in whispers, worried that if Shooter or G-Money heard them, there might be undesired consequences.

There was, however, another change taking place at the same time. This one did not involve the student body. This one was taking place in the community of onlookers, and it included those who had initially mocked and teased this group of scholars. The mode of questions had begun to change. They became, “What are you guys studying? Do you mind if we sit in with you? How do I become a part of the program? How do I get one of those book bags?” The initial desire was not that of an academic nature, but rather, it was for the book bag. This was a new item on the yard. It became a valued item for each student who had one. And the only way to acquire one was to become a student.

Of course, there were still those who mocked and ridiculed this new breed of prisoner. There were also staff members who seemed bothered by the fact that these men were actually becoming something other than that which they had been before. Yet there were some staff members who also began responding to these men differently as well. The title Mr. began to be spoken out loud by them. They too began to ask about the subjects the students were being taught. Some even engaged them with their own studies. What an amazing thing this was: to be a student of mimetics, and to witness its effects in real time, convinced me that this was the field of study for me.

During Vern Neufeld Redekop’s studies on reconciliation, he noticed: “A mimetic structure of violence is something bigger than any one individual. It can infuse a relational system, putting pressure on those caught up in it to orient themselves towards action meant to harm or disempower the other.”

Redekop proposes that this is the mimetic structure of violence. I am proposing that its mirrored opposition would be the mimetic structure of nonviolence. It, too, is something bigger than one individual. However, as is the case with mimetic violence, it only takes one individual to spark and create a mimetic contagion. It is then the importance that the individual places on the act of violence, or in this case, act of kindness, that determines the level of infusion to which the contagion spreads.

Redekop wondered what it might be that would change or designate another orientation—that is, for an orientation of violence to change to one of nonviolence. His idea was to incorporate “blessings.” Understanding the religious and controversial connotations of this word, he developed an argument supported by the historical origins of the word that would allow him to enter conversations on conflict studies. In fact, he developed a new definition that, in essence, altered the understanding of blessing from its Hebrew origins—that is, from a state of vulnerable receptivity to a place of generous reciprocity. Here, all parties are engaging in reciprocal giving and receiving of joy, confidence, self-esteem, peace, dignity, and respect.

It is within this space, a space of generous reciprocity, that the HWPEP program has stepped. I am a grateful recipient of this, and fully aware of the mimetic implications, changes, and opportunities that education can create in the lives of those who fully engage the program.

Identifying these men as individuals, recognizing, respecting, and nurturing their individual differences, has removed them from a position of sameness that had, for years, trapped them in a state of perpetual conflict within themselves and those around them. Yet this is the condition that was created by the very system tasked with the responsibility of rehabilitating them.

This, Farneti argues, is “the peak of mimetic conflict, when the story of reciprocal imitation has escalated to the point that the very [differences have] been erased and the rivals stand in front of each other matching images of violence.”

The prison environment, by its very nature of sameness, then, stands at the precipice of what could be a mimetic killing field. This is the thing we must avoid if we ever hope to change the shape of our mimetically violent natures. We must create an environment that respects the differences that naturally exist in one another.

Most of the men and women that our society is all too eager to incarcerate as a means of safeguarding our communities will one day be released. The question now is, will they be released into the same societies, welcomed by the same models that led them toward, and down, the path of their own damnation to begin with? Do these communities even know they played a part? Or will our prisons and communities, in failing to recognize the power of mimetics, continue to create systems of sameness that foster rivalry and conflict?

Who will choose from among us those deemed to be most undesirable? Who will be the most expendable? The worthiest of our wrath?

Subscribe now

Philosophy is the art of dying, ars moriendi. It claims that death is the one thing I truly own, that I keep for myself. Death is my “ownmost possibility,” said Heidegger, completely unique to me. No one else can do it for me or with me. It is final and unrepeatable.

But this is obviously false. As those of us who have experienced the death of a child can tell you, my child’s death is more fundamental than my own.

When the Virgin Mary brought Jesus to the temple on the fortieth day after his birth, the prophet Simeon told her, “A sword shall pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:35). Simeon spoke of a death blow, a fatality to which the Mother of God succumbed on Golgotha at the crucifixion.

St Maximus the Confessor, the probable author of a seventh-century Greek biography of the Virgin Mary, writes, “O Mother of Christ, a sword pierced through your soul as Simeon told you. Then the nails that pierced the Lord’s hands pierced your heart. These sufferings overcame you more than [Jesus].”1

Unlike philosophy, Christianity teaches that the death of another can become mine too.

It also teaches life after death, and not simply in the sense of afterlife. Dying with and in her Son, Mary also rose with him on Easter morning. Mary is the paradigmatic example of the Christian art of living after dying.

But what is living after such a death?

St Maximus reports that Mary’s life in Jerusalem as a leader in the emerging Christian church was marked by embodied acts of mercy to strangers and enemies, though he is vague on the specifics. He describes her simply as the “mother of the poor and needy…because for our sake the rich one was made poor in order to enrich us, the downcast and poor.”2

This muted account of the Virgin Mary’s later life offers only a hint of what living after dying means—to live for others in acts of God-like compassion—but it is left to others to paint a fuller picture.

The saint Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Eastern Orthodox nun, poet, theologian, and apostle to the poor, was someone who died halfway through her eventful life —via the death of two of her children. Mother Maria’s luminous life after death is perhaps the most important thing she can teach.

The poet and the revolution

Mother Maria Skobtsova was born Elizaveta (Liza) Pilenko in 1891 into a wealthy and well-connected Russo-Ukrainian family. After the death of her father, her family moved from their estate on the Black Sea to the imperial capital of St Petersburg.

Liza, while still a teenager, attached herself to the esoteric and at times transgressive poets of the “Russian Silver Age,” Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Osip Mandelstam among them. They saw great potential in her, and championed her first volume of poetry, from 1912.

Although she relished the late nights into early mornings spent talking politics, poetry, and mysticism, her sense of idealism prohibited her from throwing herself completely into the world of words. People were suffering, and they were just talking, high in Ivanov’s tower-like apartment!

For her, there was something lethal about such passivity. Blok wrote to her when they first met, “Run, run from us, the dying ones!” After lingering a few years with them, she did.

Liza joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and became the deputy mayor of Anapa, her hometown on the Black Sea, in 1918. Within a year, she faced trial by a hostile White Army military tribunal, who had retaken the town. Although she had no special party loyalty and wished only “for justice and for the relief of suffering,” they saw her as just another Communist.

Convicted, she faced a sentence that could have ranged anywhere from a three-ruble fine to execution by firing squad. However, the sentence she received was minimal, thanks to the intervention of one of the judges, Liza’s former schoolmaster Daniel Skobtsov. He pitied her and her daughter Gaiana (perhaps by a failed marriage, perhaps by another lover). They married just days after the trial.

After the Bolsheviks took power, the Skobtsovs fled the Soviet Union, settling in Paris as stateless refugees. They set up a new life alongside tens of thousands of other Russian refugees, both monarchist Whites and not-left-enough socialists. With Daniel, she had two more children: Anastasia and Yuri.

From Liza Skobtsova to Mother Maria

Liza had been baptized as an infant, and after a period of atheism following the death of her father when she was 14 years old, she took on faith for herself in her last years in Russia. Her 1916 book of poetry, Ruth, reflects her growing attraction to Christ, first as a historical figure, then as living Savior. Here is one short stanza from this long work:

O Lord, do not leave me in the night,
Exhausted, hungry and barefoot,
Sprinkle me with cool dew,
Knock upon my soul like a weary traveler.3

In Paris, she absorbed the writings of the intellectual movement often called “Russian religious thought,” a stream of thinking influenced by Orthodox theology and German philosophy systematized by philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (d. 1900). This movement was carried into Europe by fellow exiles Nicholas Berdyaev and Fr Sergius Bulgakov, two of Liza’s closest friends and mentors in Paris.

Liza and a circle of Orthodox émigré thinkers embarked on a project: to unearth, without fear of ecclesiastical or political censorship, the riches of the Orthodox tradition and to explore the outer reaches of its philosophical and theological possibilities in conversation with European thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Karl Barth.

Liza led the “social” side of this largely intellectual project within the Orthodox Church in exile in Western Europe, giving lectures and writing pamphlets on Orthodox social theology, a topic that still has never been adequately explored. However, as with the poets in St Petersburg, Liza began to believe there were limits to social theology as a merely intellectual exercise. She wanted to take action.

In her travels around Europe lecturing at youth camps and conferences, strangers approached her, lining up to talk to her after lectures, not about the content of her research, but about their own struggles, sorrows, and fears. She wrote,

“A queue would form by the door as if outside a confessional. There would be people wanting to pour out their hearts, to tell of some terrible grief which had burdened them for years, of pangs of conscience which gave them no peace. In such slums it is no use speaking of faith in God, of Christ or of the Church. What is needed here is not religious preaching, but the simplest thing of all: compassion.”4 For Liza, compassion—“co-suffering” and “co-feeling” as she would later articulate it—was a gift given to her by the Spirit of God.

Yet with this newfound discovery of inner fullness, heartbreak came when her infant daughter Anastasia died. In the winter of 1926, the Skobtsov family contracted influenza. All recovered except for the baby. She was admitted to the Pasteur Institute and diagnosed with meningitis. Liza was allowed to stay day and night to care for her, but to no avail.

The death of Anastasia was Liza’s Golgotha. As she would put it later, when her older daughter Gaiana also died, “Now I know what death is.”

The death of a child is a death that penetrates to the center of the soul. It threatens to black it out entirely. Liza wrote a poem after Gaiana’s death:

A solemn, luminescent gift—
You granted me death. To languish in.
The soul, burned in the conflagration,
Slowly sinks forever into the night.
At its bottom, only coal, black and reddish,
It needs to tuck itself away, keep silent.
But in my heart, You burned with eternal fire
The seal of death’s baptism.

Liza discovered after the deaths of Anastasia and Gaiana that her remarkable gift of compassion had a profoundly maternal dimension. She wrote, “I became aware of a new and special, broad, and all-embracing motherhood. I returned from that cemetery a different person. I saw a new road before me and a new meaning in life.”5 She put it similarly in another poem after Gaiana’s death:

You unlocked the heart’s lock through hardships.
Now the road ahead lies like a covering
In all directions. Sometimes to be a mother,
Sometimes placed over the churchyard,
Whatever else You command me to be,—I do not know.

Liza came to see that this newfound, all-embracing motherhood, full of potential, could only be realized by a radical change. With her husband Daniel’s consent and the blessing of the church, she divorced again and accepted monastic tonsure, taking the name Mother Maria. From now on, her life would be defined by the great “Mother Maria,” the “All-compassionate Mother,” as the Virgin Mary is called in Eastern Orthodox liturgical hymnography.

Orthodox Action

Following the example of the Virgin Mary, Mother Maria’s life after dying was to be a life of compassion for others. Mother Maria explored the traditional forms of Orthodox monasticism in secluded compounds dedicated to prayer, but could not reconcile her calling to universal motherhood with the demand for the absolute renunciation of the world.

Rather than being cut off, she wrote, the world had to be pierced with love: “The more we go out into the world, the more we give ourselves to the world, the less we are of the world. For the worldly do not give the world an offering of themselves.”6

Armed with her expansive capacity for compassion, instead of joining a monastery, Mother Maria founded a different kind of collective life, an organization called “Orthodox Action.”

Obtaining a large house in an impoverished section of Paris, she invited in the poor and the neglected, housed, fed, and loved them. The Orthodox Action center included a dining hall, many beds, a roundtable for intellectual discussions, and a chapel. Her motto: “Each person is the very icon of God incarnate.”

Mother Maria and her co-workers met with some resistance, especially from more conservative émigré Russians who knew of her socialist roots. Her own bishop Metropolitan Evlogy Georgievsky, who nevertheless supported and co-signed her efforts, wrote in his diary, “The old party spirit is still very much in evidence in Mother Maria.” Yet this only strengthened her resolve.

The ambitions of Mother Maria and Orthodox Action were large, and they achieved much success in their charitable efforts in terms of the sheer numbers of meals served over the course of just eight-odd years of existence from 1935-1943. Yet what they sought was not charity but to build “life in common,” even when it was difficult.

Once, a frequent guest at the center, a young drug addict, stole 25 francs. Everyone thought they knew who it was but Mother Maria refused to accuse her. Instead, that evening, she announced that the money had not been stolen, only misplaced, and that she had found it. Immediately the girl who stole the money burst into tears.

She wrote in her manifesto for Orthodox Action at its founding in 1935, “We do not want to be executors of charity—we are building our life in common. It is not our fault that this is not the life of a large state or of humanity as a whole. We deal in the small, and we want to be true to the small.”7

For Orthodox Action, a “life in common” was one that somehow integrated the charitable, liturgical, and intellectual work they did. Though their operation expanded, they wanted never to sacrifice their primary concern for the human person, each of whom is beloved by God.

One of their most moving efforts was to hold funerals for impoverished émigrés who died in Parisian hospitals with no one to bury them. Mother Maria stitched their names on a huge tapestry that hung on the wall of the chapel. Life in common included both the living and the dead.

On the imitation of the Mother of God

In addition to scores of poems, Mother Maria also wrote theological essays late at night after cooking and cleaning. Her notebooks, now in archives at Columbia University, still have carrot peels in between the pages.

In one of her most polished essays, “On the Imitation of the Mother of God,” from 1939, Mother Maria articulated in quite inventive theological terms what she saw as the shape of Christian life: to imitate the Virgin Mary, her living after dying on the cross with Christ.

The cross, she wrote, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was a death chosen by the Son of God, his willing and active self-offering. On the other hand, it is the sword that pierced the soul of Mary, an involuntary co-suffering with him. His death was chosen by him, not her; yet she suffered it also, and took it on as her own.

Mary’s co-suffering determined her destiny: in so far as Christ is eternally sacrificed on behalf of the world, her heart is eternally pierced, also on the world’s behalf. She is the compassionate Mother of everyone walking their own path, carrying their own cross. Mother Maria wrote,

“All the countless crosses that mankind takes on its shoulders to follow Christ also become countless swords eternally piercing her maternal heart. She continues to co-participate, co-feel, co-suffer with each human soul, as then on Golgotha.” She continues, “And in this sense she always walks with us on our own way of the cross, she is always there beside us, each of our crosses is a sword for her.”8

In a poem, Mother Maria identifies herself with the Mother of God, co-suffering with others. She walks not to a gloomy and hopeless death, but a “victorious” one:

I will spare nothing,
Desolate, naked.
You, double-edged sword,
Why do you hesitate so, in punishing us?

With no well-ordered systems,
With no subtle philosophies,
My spirit wanders, muddled and mute,
To its victorious Golgotha.

Deserted is the dead sky,
And dead is the deserted earth.
And eternally the Mother gives away
The Son to eternal Golgotha.

For Mother Maria, the “Marian” task of living after dying is to accompany the suffering, to willingly take on maternal compassion, even to the end.

A second death

Mother Maria’s work with Orthodox Action lasted just a few years. After the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940, Orthodox Action dedicated itself to forging baptismal certificates for Jewish people, saving dozens from arrest and exile to concentration camps over the course of a couple of years. However, this work was eventually discovered by the Gestapo, and Orthodox Action members were arrested.

Mother Maria was put on a train to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp. It was there that she died in 1945, reportedly giving her life in another’s stead, taking their place in a gas chamber.

But Mother Maria had already died, long before she was gassed. Her death was not solitary and “ownmost.” It was victorious, and became the cause of rebirth, of joy and of love.

Every moment of life after the death of her children overflowed with grace, which she spilled out for others through her hands, unable to be contained.

My Lord, I embraced life,
I lived with love and fervor.
With love I embrace death.
See, my cup overflows.
At Your feet the cup has fallen.
The life I spilled out before You.9

Subscribe now

The following is an essay by René Girard, originally published in 1990, but even more relevant today. At a time when innovation and imitation are set against one another—with Silicon Valley proffering a God-like conception of innovation in which humans are capable of creating things ex nihilo, or “out of nothing”—this timeless essay by René Girard shows how these ideas are a happy co-existence of opposites: One cannot exist without the other. -

"Innovation," from the Latin innovare, innovatio, should signify renewal, rejuvenation from inside, rather than novelty, which is its modern meaning in both English and French. Judging from the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Littre, the word came into widespread use only in the 16th century and, until the 18th century, its connotations are almost uniformly unfavorable.

In the vulgar tongues, as well as in medieval Latin, the word is used primarily in theology, and it means a departure from what by definition should not change—religious dogma. In many instances, innovation is practically synonymous with heresy.

Orthodoxy is unbroken continuity and, therefore, the absence of in­novation. This is how Bossuet defines the orthodoxy of the great ecumeni­cal councils: "On n'innovait rien à Constantinople," he writes, "mais on n'avait pas plus innové à Nicée." ("Nothing was innovated at Constantinople, but nothing was innovated at Nicea either.")

All uses of the word are patterned on the theological. Good things are stable by definition, and therefore untainted by innovation, which is al­ways presented as dangerous or suspicious. In politics, innovation is almost tantamount to rebellion and revolution. As we might expect, Hobbes loathes innovation. In Government and Society (1651), he writes:

There are many who supposing themselves wiser than others, endeavor to innovate, and divers innovators innovate in various ways.

Besides theology and politics, language and literature seem threatened by unwanted innovation, especially in "classical" France. The 17th-century French grammarians and literary theoreticians are against innovation, of course. Here are two mediocre lines of Menage:

N'innovez nine faites rien
En la langue et vous ferez bien.
Don't innovate or do anything
to the language, and you will do well.

Hostility to innovation is what we expect from conservative thinkers, but we are surprised to find it under the pen of authors whom we regard as innovators. When Calvin denounces "l'appetit et convoitise de tout innover, changer et remuer" ("the appetite and desire to innovate, change and stir up everything"), he sounds just like Bossuet. So does Cromwell in 1658, when he attacks what he calls "Designs... laid to innovate upon the Civil Rights of Nations, and to innovate in matters of religion."

The reformers see the Reformation not as innovation but as a restoration of original Christianity. They profess to return to the authentic imitation of Christ, uncorrupted by Catholic innovation.

Mutatis mutandis—the humanists feel just like the Protestants. They, too, hate innovation. More than ever they look back to the ancient models that the Middle Ages revered. They indict their medieval predecessors not on the grounds that they selected the wrong models, but that they did not imitate the right ones properly. The humanists differ from the Protestants, of course, in that their models are the philosophers, writers and artists of classical antiquity.

Montaigne hates innovation. "Rien ne presse un estat," he writes, "que l'innovation; le changement donne seul forme à l'injustice et à la tyrannie." ("Nothing harries a state except innovation; change alone gives form to injustice and tyranny.") In the Essays, innovation is synonymous with "nouvelleté," a word which the author also uses disparagingly.

A social and political component is present in all this fear of the new, but something else lies behind it, something religious that is more archaic and pagan than Christian. The negative view of innovation reflects what I call external mediation, a world in which the need for and the identity of all cultural models is taken for granted. This is so true that, in the Middle Ages, the concept of innovation is hardly needed. Its use is usually con­fined to technical discussions of heresy in Latin. In the vulgar tongues, the need for the word appears only in the last phase of external mediation, which I roughly identify with the 16th and 17th centuries.

People accuse each other of being bad imitators, unfaithful to the true essence of the models. Not until a little later, with the great Querelle des anciens et des modernes, does the battle shift to the question of which models are best, the traditional ones or their modern rivals? The idea that there must be models still remains common to both camps. The principle of stable imitation is the foundation of the system, and is the last to be questioned.

The world of external mediation genuinely fears the loss of its transcendental models. Society is felt to be inherently fragile. Any tamper­ing with things as they are could unleash the primordial mob and bring about a regression to original chaos. What is feared is a collapse of religion and society as a whole, through a mimetic contagion that would turn the people into a mob.

We have many echoes of this in Shakespeare. In Henry IV, the king speaks of

Poore
Discontents, which gape, and rub the
Elbow at the newes
Of hurly burly Innovation.

"Hurly burly'' means tumult, confusion, storm, violent upheaval. In 1639, Webster mentions "the Hydra-headed multitude that only gape for innovation." On the subject of the English Revolution, Bossuet speaks a similar language and reflects a similar mentality:

Quelque chose de plus violent se remuait dans le fond des coeurs; c'était un dégoût secret de tout ce qui a de l'autorité, et une démangeaison d'innover sans fin dès qu'on en a vu le premier exemple.

Something very violent stirred in the bottom of their hearts; it was a secret disgust of everything having authority, and an urge to innovate incessantly from the moment of seeing a first example of it.

A taste for innovation is supposed to denote a perverse and even a deranged mind. The unfavorable implications of the word were so well established that we still find them under the pen of a thinker as radical as Diderot: "Toute innovation est à craindre dans un gouvernement." ("In a government, every innovation is to be feared.") There is an apocalyptic ring to this old use of innovation that contrasts sharply with the modern flavor of the term.

The Jacobin Terror was enough, apparently, to keep this fear alive, but only the most eloquent traditionalists can play the old tune successfully­—Xavier de Maistre, and, on occasion, Edmund Burke. He calls the French Revolution "a revolt of innovation; and thereby the very elements of society have been confounded and dissipated."

Paradoxically, the Revolution did not reinforce the ancient fear of innovation, but instead greatly contributed to its demise. The guillotine terrified many people, of course, but it was "political" terror in the modern sense, and no longer something mysterious and uncanny. What disap­peared at that time was the feeling that any deliberate tinkering with the social order was not only sacrilegious but intrinsically perilous, likely to trigger an apocalyptic disaster.

Even if the bad connotations of our word occasionally resurfaced in the 18th century, the story of the hour was not the perpetuation of the past, but its overthrow. It was not the core meaning of "innovation" that changed, but its affective "aura."

The reason, of course, was the shift away from theology, and even philosophy, toward science and technology. The word was interpreted in a new context which caused examples of brilliant and useful inventions to spring to the mind. That good impression automatically spilled over into areas and disciplines unrelated to science and technology. This process exactly reversed the earlier one, when the bad connotations rooted in theol­ogy extended to the non-theological uses of the word.

In his Histoire philosophique (1770), Abbé Raynal rehabilitated innova­tion through the contextual change just defined. In typical philosophe style, he discarded the theological background with alacrity. Addressing his reader directly, the abbé writes:

Tu entendras murmurer autour de toi: cela ne se peut, et quand cela se pourrait, ce sont des innovations; des innovations! Soit, mais tant de découvertes dans les sciences et dans les arts n'en ont-elles pas éte?

You will hear murmured all around, that's not possible, and when that would be possible, it's innovations, innovations! Right, but so many dis­coveries in the sciences and in the arts, haven't they been innovations?

All it takes to nip intelligent reforms in the bud is to brandish the old scarecrow, "innovation." The very sound of the word has been so un­pleasant, traditionally, that no further argument is needed. Since inven­tions in the arts and the sciences are also innovations, the bad connotations are unfounded, and should be replaced by good ones.

As Raynal was writing, the change he advocated was occurring. The foul smell of heresy finally dissipated, and was instantly replaced by the inebriating vapors of scientific and technical progress.

From then on, in all walks of life, would-be innovators leaned upon the prestige of science in order to promote their views. This is especially true in the political and social sphere. Social organization was now per­ceived as the creation of mere human beings, and other human beings thus had the right to redesign it in part or even in toto.

As early as the beginning of the 19th century, innovation became the god that we are still worshipping today. In 1817, for instance, Bentham characterizes some idea as "a proposition so daring, so innovational..!" (Someone must have found "innovative" too short a word, and forged the longer "innovational." That someone may have been Bentham himself. Innovation to him is like candy to a child—the bigger the piece, the more slowly and voluptuously it will dissolve in your mouth.)

The new cult meant that a new scourge had descended upon the world—"stagnation." Before the 18th century, "stagnation" was unknown; suddenly it spread its gloom far and wide. The more innovative the capi­tals of the modern spirit became, the more "stagnant" and ''boring'' the surrounding countryside appeared. In La Rabouilleuse, a supposedly con­servative Balzac deplores the retrograde ways of the French provinces: "Hélasl Faire comme faisaient nos pères, ne rien innover, telle est la loi du pays." ("Alas! To do things as our fathers did, to innovate nothing, such is the law of the countryside.")

In an amazingly short time, a systematically positive view of innova­tion replaced the systematically negative one. Everything was reversed and even the least innovative people found themselves celebrating innova­tion.

Innovation and Imitation

As I said before, the negative view of innovation is inseparable from a conception of the spiritual and intellectual life dominated by stable imita­tion. Being the source of eternal truth, of eternal beauty, of eternal good­ness, the models should never change. Only when these transcendental models are toppled, can innovation acquire a positive meaning. External mediation gives way to a world in which, at least in principle, individuals and communities are free to adopt whichever models they prefer and, better still, no model at all.

This seems to go without saying. Our world has always believed that "to be innovative" and "to be imitative" are two incompatible attitudes. This was already true when innovation was feared; now that it is desired, it is more true than ever.

The following sentence is a good example. Michelet deplores the in­fluence of moderate elements on the French Revolution: "Ils la firent réformatrice, l'empêchèrent d'être fondatrice, d'innover et de créer." ("They made it reformatory, prevented it from being a new foundation, from innovating and creating.")

The romantic historian puts innovation on a par with foundation and creation itself, the creation ex nihilo, no doubt, that, up to that time, had been the exclusive monopoly of the biblical God.

During the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, as the passion for innovation intensified, the definition of it became more and more radical, less and less tolerant of tradition, i. e. of imitation. As it spread from painting to music and to literature the radical view of innovation triggered the successive upheavals that we call "modern art." A complete break with the past is viewed as the sole achievement worthy of a "creator."

At least in principle, this innovation mania affects all aspects of human existence. This is true not only of such movements as surrealism but of writers who, at first sight, seem to continue more traditional trends.

Consider, for instance, the implications of the following sentence in Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps: "Tous les amants, même les plus mediocres, s'imaginent qu'ils innovent." If the novelist finds it necessary to say that the innovation of mediocre lovers is imaginary, he must also believe that it can be real, when it proceeds from genuinely talented lovers.

Just as the measure of a painter's talent is now his capacity to innovate in painting, the measure of a lover's love is his or her capacity to innovate in the field of love-making. To be "with it" in the France of 1920, one had to be "innovative" even in the privacy of the boudoir. What a burden on all lovers' shoulders! Far from exorcising the urge to mimic famous lovers in literature and history, compulsory innovation can only inflame it further.

Even philosophy succumbed to the "terrorism" of innovation. When French philosophers began to look for an insurance policy against the greatest possible ill—fidelity to the past, the repetition of dépassé philosophies—one of their inventions was la rupture épistémologique. This miraculous concept made it possible for the communist Althusser to be an old-style aparatchik on the one hand and, on the other, one hundred percent innovative, almost as much so as Marx himself, since Althusser was the first to take the full measure of the prophet's innovative genius.

The psychoanalyst Lacan pulled exactly the same trick with Freud. Very quickly, however, one single rupture épistémologique for all times and for all people seemed paltry. Each thinker had to have his own, and then the really chic thinkers had several in a row. In the end, everybody turned themselves into a continuous and monstrous rupture, not primarily with others, but with their own past.

This is how inconsistency has become the major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde. But the real credit for the tabula rasa school of innovation should go to Nietzsche, who was tired of repeating with everybody else that a great thinker should have no model. He went one better, as always, and refused to be a model—the mark of genius. This is still a sensation that is being piously repeated today. Nietzsche is our supreme model of model­ repudiation, our revered guru of guru- renunciation.

The emphasis on ruptures, fragments and discontinuities is still all the rage in our universities. Michel Foucault has taught us to cut up the history of ideas into separate segments with no communication between them. Even the history of science has developed its own counterpart of Foucault's épistémé. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn tells us more or less that the only scientists worth their salt are those who make themselves completely unintelligible to their colleagues by inventing an entirely new paradigm.

This extreme view of innovation has been dominant for so long that even our dictionaries take it for granted. Innovation is supposed to exclude imitation as completely as imitation excludes it. Examples of how the word should be used are of this type: "It is easier to imitate than to innovate."

This conception is false, I believe, but its falsity is easier to show in some domains than in others. The easiest illustration is to be seen in con­temporary market economies. This is certainly a domain in which innova­tion occurs on a massive, even a frightening scale, at least in the so-called developed countries. It is not difficult to observe the type of behavior that fosters economic innovation. In Economics, innovation has a precise defini­tion; it is sometimes the bringing of a technical invention into widespread practical use, but it can also be improvements in production technique, or in management. It is anything as yet untried that gives a business an edge over its competitors. That is why innovation is often regarded as the prin­cipal, even the sole source of profits.

Business people can speak lyrically about their mystical faith in in­novation and the brave new world it is creating, but the driving force behind their constant innovation is far from utopian. In a vigorous economy, it is a matter of survival, pure and simple. Business firms must innovate in order to remain competitive.

Competition, from two Latin words, cum and petere, means to seek together. What all businessmen seek is profits; they seek them together with their competitors in the paradoxical relationship that we call competi­tive.

When a business loses money, it must innovate very fast, and it cannot do so without forethought. Usually there is neither the money nor the time for this. In this predicament, business people with a strong survival instinct will usually reason as follows:

"If our competitors are more successful than we are, they must be doing something right. We must do it ourselves and the only practical way to go about it is to imitate them as exactly as we can."

Most people will agree that there is a role for imitation in economic recovery, but only in the first phase of the healing process. By imitating its successful competitors, an endangered firm can innovate in relation to itself; it will thus catch up with its rivals but it will invent nothing really new.

This common sense makes less sense than it seems. To begin with, is there such a thing as "absolute innovation"? In the first phase, no doubt, imitation will be rigid and myopic. It will have the ritual quality of external mediation. After a while, however, the element of novelty in the competitor's practice will be mastered and imitation will become bolder. At that moment, it may—or may not—generate some additional improve­ment which will seem insignificant at first, because it is not suggested by the model, but which really is the genuine innovation that will turn things around.

I am not denying the specificity of innovation. I am simply observing that, concretely, in a truly innovative process, it is often so continuous with imitation that its presence can be discovered only after the fact, through a process of abstraction. Not so long ago in Europe, the Americans were portrayed as primarily imitators—good technicians, no doubt, but the real brain power was in Germany or in England. Then, in very few years, the Americans became great innovators.

Public opinion is always surprised when it sees the modest imitators of one generation turn into the daring innovators of the next. The constant recurrence of this phenomenon must have something to teach us.

Until quite recently, the Japanese were dismissed as mere copiers of Western ways, incapable of real invention in any field. They are now the driving force behind innovation in more and more technical fields. When did they acquire that inventive spark which, supposedly, they lacked? At this very moment, imitators of the Japanese—Koreans, Taiwanese­—are repeating the same process. They, too, are fast turning into innovators. Hadn't something similar already occurred in the 19th century, when Ger­many first rivaled and then surpassed England in industrial might? The metamorphosis of imitators into innovators occurs repeatedly, but we al­ways react to it with amazement. Perhaps we do not want to know about the role of imitation in innovation.

"It is easier to imitate than to innovate." This is what the dictionaries tell us, but it is true that the only short-cut to innovation is imitation. And here is another sentence that illustrates the meaning of innovation: "Many people imitate when they think that they innovate." This cannot be denied, but it should be added that many people innovate when they think that they imitate.

Innovation and Competition

In economic life, imitation and innovation are not only compatible but almost inseparable. This conclusion runs counter to the modern ideology of absolute innovation. Does it mean that this precious commodity comes in two varieties, one that relies on imitation and one that does not—a lower type reserved for business and a "higher" type reserved for ''higher" cul­ture?

This is what many intellectuals want to believe. If we agreed with them, we would nullify the one great insight of Marx—that the same com­petitive pattern dominates all aspects of modern culture, being most visible in economic life. On this particular point, Marx is our best guide.

The radical view of innovation is obviously false. But why does our culture so stubbornly cling to it? Why are modern intellectuals and artists so hostile to imitation?

In order to answer this question, we must go back to our example of mimetic inventiveness—business competition. The very fact that those who compete are models and imitators shows two things—imitation sur­vives the collapse of external mediation, and a crucial change occurs in its modus operandi.

In "external mediation," either the models have the advantage of being long-dead or of standing so far above their imitators that they cannot become their rivals. This is not the case in the modern world. Since com­petitors stand next to each other, in the same world, they must compete for the things that they desire in common, with resulting reciprocal imitation. This is the great difference between "external" and "internal" mediation.

All imitators select models whom they regard as superior. In "inter­nal mediation," models and imitators are equal in every respect but one­—the superior achievement of the one, which motivates the imitation by the other. This means, of course, that the models have been successful at their imitators' expense.

Defeat in any kind of competition is disagreeable for reasons that go beyond the material losses that may be incurred. When we imitate success­ful rivals, we acknowledge what we would prefer to deny—their superiority. The urge to imitate is strong, since it opens up possibilities of bettering the competition. But the urge not to imitate is also strong. The only thing that the losers can deny the winners is the homage of their imitation.

Unlike external mediation, the internal variety is a reluctant mimesis that generally goes unrecognized because it hides behind a bewildering diversity of masks. The mimetic urge can never be repressed entirely, but it can tum to counter-imitation. The losers try to demonstrate their inde­pendence by systematically taking the course opposite to that of the win­ners. Thus they may act in a way detrimental to their own self-interest. Their pride turns self destructive. No political or freudian "unconscious" is necessary to account for that.

Even in economic life, where material incentives to imitate are strongest, the urge not to imitate may prove even stronger, especially in international trade which is affected by questions of "national pride." When a nation cannot successfully compete, it is tempted to blame its failure on unfair competition, thus paving the way for protectionist measures that put an end to peaceful competition.

Innovation in the Arts

It is not a deficit but an excess of competitive spirit that makes produc­tive competition impossible. If this occasionally happens in economic life, where the incentive to compete is greatest, what about more subtle but even more intense forms of competition, like in the sciences, the arts, and philosophy, where universally-acknowledged means of evaluation are lacking?

In my opinion, the tendency to define "innovation" in more and more "radical" and anti-mimetic terms, and the mad escalation that I sketched earlier, reflect a surrender of modern intelligence to this mimetic pressure, a collective embrace of self-deception which Marx himself, for all his in­sights, remarkably exemplifies.

Like many 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals, Marx sees competi­tiveness as an unmitigated evil that should be abolished, together with the free market, the only economic system that channels the competitive spirit into constructive efforts instead of exacerbating it to the point of physical violence or discouraging it entirely. Marx's purely historical thinking mis­ses the complex anthropological consequences of democratic equality which Tocqueville perceived. Marx did not detect the change from one modality of imitation to another; he was unable to define the mimetic rivalry unleashed by the abandonment of transcendental models, by the collapse of hierarchical thinking.

In spite of many glorious exceptions, our recent intellectual climate has been determined not by a lucid analysis of these phenomena, but by their repression, which produces what Nietzsche described as ressentiment. Most intellectuals take the path of least resistance vis-a-vis internal media­tion, and their obsessive concern with their own mimetic rivals is always accompanied by a fierce denial of mimetic rivalry, and a determina­tion to crush this abomination through political and cultural revolution.

As a result, most theories fashionable in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries have been the philosophical and aesthetic equivalents of the economic autarkie that preceded World War II, and their consequences have been no less disastrous. Instead of re-examining imitation and dis­ covering its conflictual dimension, the eternal avant-garde has waged a purely defensive and ultimately self-destructive war against it.

When the humility of discipleship is experienced as humiliating, the transmission of the past becomes difficult, even impossible. The so-called counter-culture of the sixties was a climactic moment in this strange rebel­ lion, a revolt not merely against the competitiveness of modern life in all its forms but against the very principle of education. Avant-garde culture has disfigured innovation so badly that we have to look to economic life to see why our world of internal mediation is so innovative.

Economic life is an example of an internal mediation that produces an enormous, even a frightening amount of innovation, since it ritualizes and institutionalizes mimetic rivalry, the rules of which are willingly obeyed. Economic agents openly imitate their successful rivals instead of pretending otherwise.

False as they are, the theories that dominate our cultural life are "true" in that they truly influence the cultural environment. In the arts, the scor­ched-earth policies of the recent past have led to a world in which radical innovation is so free to flourish that there is little difference between having it everywhere and having it nowhere at all.

The dazzling achievements of modern art and modern literature seem to give the lie to what I just said. And it is true, indeed, that, in these domains, spiritual autarkie has a fecundity which has no parallel in science, technology or economic life. Romantic and post-romantic literature thrives for a while on a diet of anti-heroes, and on critical or naive portrayals of individual reactions to the pressures of internal mediation, the retreat of the modern "consciousness" into "itself."

Rousseau was the first great explorer of a territory that already had a large population when he began to write. In no time at all, he became immensely popular and he had countless imitators. He ruled over the underground realm whose most lucid master is probably Dostoevski. The Russian novelist's greatest work is a prodigious satire of self-pity, a luxury that much of the world cannot afford. From Rousseau to Kafka and beyond, the best of modern literature focused on the "fausse conscience" to which intellectuals are more prone than others because of their preoccupa­tion with those purely individual pursuits—books and works of art—that become the yardsticks of their being. The private question of being seems entirely separate from another and supposedly minor one—the question of where these artists and thinkers stand in relation to each other. However, in reality, the two questions are one.

Conclusion

After providing a great deal of genuinely innovative material, and postponing for more than a century the day of reckoning with our solipsis­tic ideologies, the rich vein of failed spiritual autarkie has finally run out, and the future of art and literature is in doubt.

Most people still try to convince themselves that our "arts and humanities" will remain forever "creative" and "innovative," fueled by "individualism," but even the most enthusiastic espousers of recent trends are beginning to wonder. Innovation is still around, they say, but its pace is slackening.

This pessimism, which I share, is a subjective judgment—but in such matters, can there be any other? It seems to me that the still genuinely innovative areas of our culture are those in which innovation is acknow­ledged in modest and prudent terms, whereas those areas where "innova­tion" is absolute and arrogant hide their disarray behind meaningless agitation.

I do not say this because I believe in an intrinsic superiority of the still innovative areas in our culture—science, technology and the economy. But I think that our cultural activities are vulnerable in direct proportion to the spiritual greatness that should be theirs. The old scholastic adage always applies: Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.

The true Romantics believed that if we gave up imitation entirely, deep in our selves, an inexhaustible source of "creativity" would spring up, and we would produce masterpieces without having to learn anything.

Mistaking the end of transcendental models for an end of all imitation, the romantics and their modern successors have turned their "creative process" into a veritable theology of the self, with roots in the distant past, as we have seen. In the old dispensation, innovation was reserved to God, and forbidden to man. When man took upon himself the attributes of God, he became the absolute innovator.

The Latin word innovare implies limited change, rather than total revolution; a combination of continuity and discontinuity. We have seen that from the beginning, in the West, innovation departed from its Latin meaning in favor of the more "radical" view demanded by the extremes of execration and adulation alternately triggered by the idea of change.

The mimetic model of innovation is valid not only for our economic life, but for all cultural activities whose innovative potential depends on the kind of passionate imitation that derives from religious ritual and still partakes of its spirit.

Real change can only take root when it springs from the type of coherence that tradition alone provides. Tradition can only be successfully challenged from the inside. The main prerequisite for real innovation is a minimal respect for the past, and a mastery of its achievements, i. e. mimesis. To expect novelty to cleanse itself of imitation is to expect a plant to grow with its roots up in the air. In the long run, the obligation always to rebel may be more destructive of novelty than the obligation never to rebel.

But isn't all this ancient history? Hasn't the modern theology of the self been fully discredited and discarded along with the rest of "Western Metaphysics"? As the deconstruction of our philosophical tradition proceeds, shall we not be "liberated" at long last, and won't a new culture automatically flourish?

The blurring of all aesthetic and intellectual criteria of judgment un­derlies what is now called "post-modern" aesthetics. This blurring paral­lels the elimination of truth in post-Heideggerian philosophy. Our age tries to overcome the modern obsession with the "new" through an orgy of casual imitation, an indiscriminate adoption of all models. There is no such thing anymore as a mediocre lover in the sense of Radiguet. Pierre Mesnard's perfect copy of Don Quixote is just as great as the novel of Cervantes. Imitation has lost its stigma.

Does this mean that concrete innovation is back? Before we become too hopeful, we must observe that mimesis returns to us in a parodic and derisive mode that is a far cry from the patient, pious and single-minded imitation of the past. The imitation that produced miracles of innovation was still obscurely related to the mimesis of religious ritual.

The real purpose of post-modern thinking may well be to silence once and for all the question that has never ceased to bedevil "creators" in our democratic world—the question of "Who is innovative and who is not?" If such is the case, post-modernism is only the latest modality of our roman­tic "false consciousness," one more twist of the old serpent. There will be more.

Subscribe now

Girard, Rene. "Innovation and Repetition." Substance 19:2/3 (1990), 7-20. © 1990 Johns Hopkins University Press and Substance Journal, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

The personal computer came into existence because, at a time when the idea seemed far-fetched, certain individuals wanted so passionately to have a computer of their own that they just made it happen. Computer power to the people! was their rallying cry.

What was it like, the whole development phase?

Alan: “We were clutching at straws! You’ll do anything when you don’t know what to do.”

Alan Kay was one of the earliest prophets of the personal computer. He believed the computer’s destiny was “to disappear into our lives like all the really important technologies,” things we don’t even think of anymore as technologies, like watches, and paper and pencil, and clothing and books, and all of these things. He told people, “I think the computer’s destiny is to be like one of those.”

This, then, is the story of the personal computer: its birth, its rise to power and influence, and its recent decline. The personal computer still exists, of course, but in an important sense its era—the era of the tinkerer, the explorer, the pirate—is over.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the personal computer started appearing in people’s homes, much like a band of mice invading a small town. At first it was strange to see a mouse inside; then, by the 1990s, it was strange to see a house without one. Computers were used for playing games, for word processing, for basic graphic design—such as making posters you could put up around your neighborhood, announcing a yard sale, or for designing a birthday card—and of course for computation. Before that, only people in the field of computer science owned computers, and before that, computers were so large they could only be stored in an even larger university, where the people who studied computer engineering had to take turns with the machine, feeding punch cards of their programs into the computer in shifts, waiting sometimes twenty-four hours for a simple output, usually telling them there was an error in their code.

The earliest computer programs were designed by mathematicians and scientists who thought the work of communicating with the machine would be straightforward and logical. They found themselves aggravated to discover that writing usable software was much harder than they had hoped. Computers were stubborn: they insisted on doing what the person said, rather than what the person meant. As a result, a new class of artisans took over from the mathematicians: these were the computer scientists—the programmers—who figured out how to talk to the computers in a language the machines could understand, and who had a facility with it, and who found it fun.

“Software is actually an art form,” Alan Kay told a reporter from Scientific American. “It’s a meticulously crafted literature that enables complex conversations between humans and machines. Software is really a kind of literature, written for both computers and people to read.”

In a sense, computer scientists were the writers, the artists, of these new worlds the computers would simulate. Later, the wizard Jaron Lanier would define the three most important new art forms of the twentieth century as “film, jazz, and programming.”

Naturally, anything that is larger than human scale will soon evoke mechanisms akin to religion, and so rather quickly there was a priesthood of programmers. Some ordinary citizens thought computers would take over the world: some citizens wanted them to take over the world, and some citizens feared they would take over the world.

That is not what the computer industry wanted people to be thinking about: you can’t sell a terrifying demon to the common consumer. It’s even hard to sell a God. And so knowledgeable people in different places began saying, “No, this computer thing has the potential of being a partner of humanity, a complementary partner. It can do some things that we can’t, and vice versa.” But how could they demonstrate this? They said to one another, “we should think of some ways of bringing the computer down to human scale, otherwise people will continue to be too scared of it.”

That is where Alan Kay and many others came in. Alan is perhaps a lesser figure in a story that involves more famous names, but because he is everywhere less mythologized, he is easier to see. Alan and his friends came up with the Dynabook. He admitted to Scientific American that the Dynabook was “sort of a figment of the imagination, a Holy Grail that got us going.” It was never a computer, but rather a cardboard model that, as he jokingly put it, “allowed us to avoid having meetings about what we were trying to do.”

Before discussing the model, it is worth saying something about what a computer actually is. The easiest way to think about a computer is mostly as memory. Then, there is a very small amount of logic that carries out a few basic instructions.

Many people who haven’t studied mathematics probably haven’t thought about the notion of an algorithm, but it’s simply a process for producing and moving symbols around. So a computer has a few basic properties: memory, the ability to put symbols into its memory, the ability to take them out again, and the ability to change them. This conceptual framework is enough to simulate any computer that has ever existed, or will ever exist.

Of course, abstract means of storing, retrieving, and manipulating information (symbols) have been in existence since the beginning of humankind: speech is one such method, art and writing another. Even when we are not using tools to manipulate symbols, we’re dealing with the world through intermediaries. After all, we can’t fit the whole world into our brains. Therefore, we are forced to make abstractions. Because the world exists as a model in our minds, we are actually living in a kind of waking hallucination. The reality we exist in is already virtual!

That takes care of the word “computer,” but what about the word “personal”? Personal means something that it is owned by its user, costs no more than a TV, and is portable: the user can easily carry the device around, as they carry other things at the same time. At this point, Alan Kay asked the reporter from Scientific American, “need we add that it be usable in the woods?”

There were three renderings of the personal computer—or Dynabook—that Alan and his friends considered: one resembled a spiral-bound notebook, another was something that went in your pocket and had a head-mounted display and glasses, and finally there was a sensitive wristwatch that, twenty years or so in the future, would ideally be able to connect to a network—in any room that had an outlet in the wall—and would contain an interface that would also move from room to room, as you went. At issue was less which model the Dynabook would resemble, than what these models meant: a computer you could have an intimate, casual, and mundane relationship with. Alan spoke about how “a human should be able to aspire to the heights of humanity” on such a device. “But just as a person with paper and a pen might aspire to the heights of Shakespeare, that doesn’t mean you have to be Shakespeare every time you write something on a piece of paper.”

All the other tinkerers were asking themselves the same question: how to make the computer something intimate, friendly, and accessible? Also, what might people want to do with a computer if they could carry it around? The problem, as Alan put it, was that programmers at the time “lived in this tiny world, full of phrases we learned when we were taking math classes, and it was hermetic, and it was full of people who liked to learn how to do complicated things, and who delighted in it.” One of the hardest things for them to accept was that the common, commercial user was not like that at all. “It became the number one dictum of user interface design: the user is not like us.” They needed a way of shocking themselves into fully accepting this realization, and the way to do this, they decided, was to present the prototype to children.

And so they did—two-hundred and fifty of them, ages six to fifteen. Alan and the other programmers watched how the children approached the computer, which they hoped would expand their ideas of what the computer could be.

Alan recalled about this phase of testing, and the next, “We discovered that whether it was children or adults who first encountered a personal computer, most of them were already involved in pursuits of their own choosing, so the initial impulse was always to exploit the system to assist them in things they were already doing. An office manager might automate paperwork and accounts. A child might work on ways to create pictures and games. People naturally started building personal tools. Although man has been characterized as the toolmaking species, toolmaking has historically been in the hands of specialists. But we began to see that with the computer, toolmaking could become democratic, something anyone could do. Composers might choose to make the computer into a tool that allowed them to hear their compositions as they composed. Businessmen might turn the computer into a briefcase containing a working simulation of their company. Educators might use a computer to engage students in a Socratic dialogue, complete with graphic animations. Homemakers might use it to store and manipulate accounts, budgets, receipts and reminders. Children could turn it into an active learning tool with access to larger stores of knowledge than could be available in any home library.” This was 1967.

“I said, ‘Okay, so twenty years from now we’ll have a notebook-sized computer that will not only do all sorts of wonderful things, but mundane things too.’ And so one of the questions we asked ourselves was, ‘What kind of computer would it have it to be for you to want to do some grand things on it, but also mundane things, like writing a grocery list—and for the computer to be something you’d be willing to carry into a supermarket, and carry out with a couple of bags of groceries?’ Of course, you could write your shopping list on paper. The question was not whether you could replace paper or not. The question was whether you could cover the old medium with the new, and then find all these marvelous extra things to do with the new medium that you couldn’t do with the old.”

Alan liked the analogy of a book, “because with the book you have several stages: you have the invention of writing, which is a huge idea, and the difference between having it and not having it is enormous. And the difference between having computers—even if they’re big mainframes—and not having them, is also enormous. The next stage was the Gutenberg stage, and as McLuhan liked to say, ‘when a new medium comes along, it imitates the old.’ So Gutenberg’s books were the same size as those beautiful illuminated manuscripts that were written by hand by monks. They were big! At the same time, there were so few books in a given library that each actually had its own reading table. You know, you go into the library, you go over to the table that the particular book is at, and they are chained to the tables because they are so valuable—they were priceless! Gutenberg could of course produce numerous books, but he didn’t know what size they should be, and it wasn’t until some decades later that Aldus Manutius, a Venetian publisher, decided that books should be this size—the approximate size they are today. He decided on that size because that was the size of the saddle bags in Venice in the late 1400s. So the key idea Aldus had was that books could now be lost. It was okay. They were cheap! And because books could now be lost, they could also be taken with you. I think, in a very important respect, where we are today with the computer is where the book was before Aldus. Because the notion that a computer can be lost is not one we like yet. You know, we protect our computers. We bolt them to the desk and so forth.” This was the 1970s. “They are quite expensive. They’ll really be valuable once we can lose them. Once we are willing to lose them, then they’ll be everywhere.”

Before Alan got into computers, he was interested in theatre. And theatre influenced his thinking quite a lot. “I mean, theatre is actually kind of an absurd setup,” he said, “because you have a balding person in his forties impersonating a teenager in triumph, holding a plastic skull in front of some wooden scenery, right? It can’t possibly work! But it does—all the time! And the reason it does is because the theatrical experience is a mirror that blasts the audience’s intelligence back at them. It’s like somebody once said, ‘People don’t come to the theatre to forget, they come tingling to remember.’ What theatre is is an evoker. So what we do in the theatre is take something impossibly complex, like human existence or something, and present a person as something more like archetype, which the user’s mind can resynthesize human existence out of.”

“I think it was Picasso who said that art is not the truth, but rather a lie that tells the truth. This is true of the art of theatre,” he continued, “and I realized that in order for the computer to spread through society, this had to become true of the computer, too. Computers couldn’t remain ‘the truth that tells the truth,’ an ugly, heavy box with a black screen and digital, green or amber letters—apparently and in fact a mechanical, code-reading machine which only special people can communicate with in a difficult, formal language. So I began to think, what if the interface between the user and the computer was less literal, and more of a theatrical lie?”

“To speak to each other about this idea, my friends and I invented the term user illusion. I don’t think we ever used the term user interface, at least not in the early days. But the idea was: What can you do theatrically—before the user’s eyes—that will create the precise amount of magic you want the person to experience? Because the question in the theatre is: how do you dress up the stage to set expectations that will allow the story to feel true to the audience? Similarly, giving the user appropriate cues has to be central to the interface design. It’s all about directing the user into particular ways of perceiving.”

“My friend Jerome often spoke about how we have different ways of knowing the world: one of them is kinesthetic, one of them is visual, one of them is symbolic. “That’s why,” Alan said, “we devised the concept of the mouse. We weren’t just thinking of ways of indicating things on a screen. The broader point was, how do we give the user kinesthetic entry into this world—the world of the computer? We have a kinesthetic way of knowing the world through touch. We have a visual way of knowing the world. These ways seemed to be intuitive for people, we realized. The visual deals with analogy, the touch thing makes you feel more at home: you’re not isolated from things when you’re in physical contact with them. You’re grounded. The mouse essentially gave people the tiniest way of putting their hand in through the screen to touch the objects they were working with. Meanwhile, the screen became a theatrical representation that was hiding a truth that is much more complex, something users don’t want to think about: that a computer is a machine executing two million instructions per second.”

Alan and his friends now asked themselves, “What should the theatre of the screen be presenting?” At the time, it could have been anything. People now take for granted that there are “icons” and “windows”—that the computer makes an analogy to a physical desk you might be sitting at, in a room—but really it could have been anything at all. As Alan pointed out, “We read books, and we watch TV, and we talk on the telephone, with very little awareness of how these processes work, or how they might work differently. Once the applications of a technology becomes ‘natural,’ the battle to shape its uses and meanings are already, to a large degree, finished, and what were historically contingent processes are now seen as inherent to the medium. Take, for example, television. We all think we know what ‘television’ is. But that’s not what TV had to be. What could the computer be? That was the question we were asking. People felt alienated from computers. They knew they were alienated. The very clunkiness of computers in the 1970s created such a level of self-consciousness about the computing process that there was no way to pretend it all was happening ‘naturally.’ But this was to our advantage, as inventors.”

“From watching adults and children, we knew that people wanted to work on ‘projects.’ I especially liked to work on multiple projects at once, and people used to accuse me of abandoning my desk. You know, my work got piled up on one desk, so I’d go and use another desk. When I’m working on multiple things, I like to have one table full of all the crap that goes there, and another table full of more crap, and so forth, and to be able to turn to those various desks and access everything in the state in which I left it. This was the interface we wound up trying to model for the user: what if you could experience yourself as moving from one project to another—and could think of the screen as multiple desks holding all the tools needed for a particular project?”

“The problem we quickly encountered was that in many instances, the display screen was too small to hold all the information a user might wish to consult at once. So we developed the idea of ‘windows,’ or simulated display frames within the larger physical display. Windows allowed various documents composed of text, pictures, musical notation, dynamic animations, and so on, to be created and viewed at various levels of refinement. Once the windows were created, they could overlap on the screen like sheets of paper! When the mouse was clicked on a partially covered window, that window was redisplayed to overlap the other windows. The windows containing useful but not immediately needed information could be collapsed to small rectangles that were labeled with a name showing the information they contained. Then a ‘touch’ of the mouse would cause them to instantly open up and display their contents.”

The “window” is what Alan is best known for, and perhaps it is no surprise that when Microsoft came out with one of its earliest operating systems, they stole his idea and called it Windows. Alan didn’t care. The fun part was coming up with the idea, and someone who likes coming up with ideas is always already thinking about the next one.

“With this ‘window’ and mouse system,” Alan said, “users felt like they were sinking their fingers right through the glass of the display and touching the information structures directly inside. They loved it! Windows, menus, spreadsheets, and so on—these all provided a context, a stage, that allowed the user’s intelligence to keep on choosing the appropriate next step. In other words, to follow a story. And the story was their project.”

So that was software. But what of hardware? An engineer in the development of the personal computer who worked at Apple in the 1990s explained some of the thinking behind the development of the iMac. The iMac was the first personal computer to appeal to consumers in a completely new way, in a way that computer scientists until then had only dreamed of: the iMac finally made the computer un-scary.

This Apple engineer said, “We tried to make it simple and elegant. Instead of requiring users to connect a computer tower to a monitor, the iMac would come in an all-in-one shape, letting you simply plug it into the wall and get started. It was all about removing hurdles that might stop a newcomer in their tracks. That was all we talked about. Someone suggested it should come in a variety of bright, fun colors—which was a million miles away from the staid, stale designs of our competitors. Most computers at the time were grey or beige.” They even gave the colors sweetly childlike names: tangerine, lime, purple popsicle, penny whistle red, and blueberry blue. “We also made the outer shell translucent, so users could see the insides of the machine, removing their fearsome mystery.”

But perhaps the most important, appealing, and innovative detail, the one which truly brought the computer into the lives of the people and made it personal, was this: to the computer’s top, they added a handle.

At a conference in the late 1990s, Alan gave a speech in which he said, “A popular misconception about computers is that they are logical. Forthright would be a better term. On it, almost any symbolic representation can be carried out. Moreover, the computers’ use of symbols, like the use of symbols in language and math, can be sufficiently disconnected from the real world to enable computers to create all sorts of splendid nonsense! Although the hardware of a computer is subject to natural laws, the range of simulations a computer can perform with its software is bound only by the limits of the human imagination. For instance, a computer can simulate a spacecraft which travels faster than the speed of light. It can simulate pretty much anything.” Though everyone knew this, it was always exciting to hear it again.

“It may seem almost sinful to discuss the simulation of nonsense, but only if we want to believe that all of what we already know is correct and complete—and history has not been kind to people who subscribe to that point of view! In fact, this potential for manipulating apparent nonsense must be valued in order to assure the development of minds of the future.” This was Alan’s most closely held and heartfelt vision: that although programs that run on personal computers can be guided in any direction we choose, “the real sin would be to make the computer act like a machine.”

A decade and a half later, a chastened Alan spoke uneasily, looking around from an unexpected new present. Standing before a tech delegation, he noted that, “as with language, computer users are feeling a strong motivation to emphasize the similarity between simulation and experience; to conflate these things, and to ignore the very great distance between symbols (or models), and the real world. A feeling of power and a narcissistic fascination with the image of oneself reflected back from the computer is increasingly common.” People were “employing the computer trivially—simulating what paper, paint, and file cabinets can do; using it as a crutch, like having the computer remember things we can perfectly well remember ourselves; or using it as an excuse—blaming the computer for human failings.”

“But perhaps what is most concerning to me is the increasing human propensity to place faith in—or assign a higher power to—this hardware-based, code-reading, machine. We have made the user illusion too great. We have made it so great that the truth of what the computer actually is is no longer understood.”

Alan Kay had predicted wrongly what our collective sin would be: not that we would be so unimaginative as to forever treat the computer as a distant machine, but that the user illusion would grow so strong that it would come to seem like “apparent nonsense” that the computer essentially was a machine.

Theatre is everywhere present in the human world. Our minds play our lives for us like in tiny little theatres. And our computers are tiny theatres whose thrall we are in almost continuously. The engineers had worried about none of this. They had not anticipated that the physical theatres would grow ever more empty, as the spirit of theatre would enter and pulse within every personal computer.

Subscribe now

*Read part one of this series, The Spirit in the Blue Light, here.

Do you know the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, a classification system for European folktales? It was first compiled in 1910 by a Finnish man named Antti Aarne, and it was his attempt to group folktales by plot and motif. For instance, Type 311 is Rescued by the Sister. Type 325 is The Magician and His Pupil. There are also types of fable that can be classified with others that tell of The Maiden Without Hands (706), The Girl as Wolf (409), and The Girl as Flower (407). The entire index ends at Type 2004 with Pulling Up the Turnip.

An American folklorist (Stith Thompson) and a German folklorist (Hans-Jorg Uther) expanded it, translated it, and made revisions, bringing the index to its completion in 2004.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Type 562, The Spirit in the Blue Light, since I spend most of the day captivated by a spirit in a blue light: my computer. Often when I’m feeling muddled, I go to my computer and clean up my files, or classify miscellaneous documents, or trash things, feeling a bit like I imagine Aarne, Thompson and Uther felt as they tried to bring order to the orderless jumble that lay before them. In my case, it is not a history of folk storytelling, but years of thinking, shopping, corresponding, bill-paying, news-reading, and idle fantasizing, as though my computer really is my mind, externalized, or an apartment which needs cleaning, or contains all the stories that have ever been told. It’s as if the spirit in the blue light of my computer and the spirit inside me at some point joined hands, and my eternal spirit is now more comfortable when it is joined with the spirit of this digital blue light, than it ever again will be—alone or apart from it.

I wondered at one point whether the narrative of a Spirit in the Blue Light fable could give me some insight into what increasingly felt like an essential relationship, or an extension of myself, or this need I had to be with my computer almost continuously throughout the day. Here is what I read:

A wounded and wandering soldier encounters a witch in a forest. He asks her if she could provide him with lodging. She agrees to put him up if he’ll help around the house. For two days he helps her, and for two nights he sleeps. On the third day, the witch asks him to fetch her the blue light that is shining at the bottom of her empty well. When the soldier climbs down and reaches the bottom, he realizes he is trapped there. To calm himself—and to think more clearly about his situation—he decides to have a smoke. He notices a matchbox lying on the ground, a blue light glinting off from one of its sharp corners. Striking the match, he lights his pipe. Suddenly, a spirit emerges in the smoke of the blue flame! This spirit tells the soldier that he will grant him three wishes. First, the soldier asks that the witch be killed. She is, and the soldier climbs from the well and runs free. Then the soldier asks to have brought to him the princess of the land, to serve as his maid. The princess is brought and begins sweeping up, doing the chores that the soldier had been doing. The king, furious at learning that a lowly soldier is using his daughter in this way, has him captured. Right before the soldier is executed in the centre of the town square, the soldier asks if he might have a final smoke. His request is granted, and he lights his pipe with the match from the witch’s matchbox, and the blue spirit reappears! The soldier asks it to kill all the citizens in the square, giddy with the anticipation of witnessing his hanging, and the spirit kills them all. Fearing for his life, the king surrenders himself, and gives the soldier his entire kingdom, and his daughter as a bride.

At first glance, it is not clear that this story has anything to say about my relationship with my computer.

In the Arne-Thompson-Uther index, The Spirit in the Blue Light fables fall within the category, Magical Object Provides a Supernatural Helper. This is a sub-class of Tales of Magic stories. (There are only six other main classes of story: Animal Tales, Religious Tales, Realistic Tales, Formula Tales, Tales of the Stupid Ogre, and Anecdotes and Jokes.)

My computer, then, is not an animal, not something realistic, not a stupid ogre—but a magical object, and the applications within it—Word, Gmail, Excel—are supernatural helpers. I guess it is something of a supernatural helper who can connect you with friends across the world or disappear three hundred of your dollars on a red dress that seems perfect and soon arrives at your door but doesn’t fit you at all. I guess it is a supernatural helper that can give you glimpses into the sufferings of humans hundreds of thousands of miles away. I guess it is a supernatural helper that can write your college essay on Robespierre, or a difficult letter to an unfaithful husband, finally asking for a divorce.

Yet the supernatural helper helped the soldier by enslaving an innocent princess, and killing a witch, and everyone in the square. If the soldier hadn’t encountered the Spirit in the Blue Light, there at the bottom of the well? He would have sat there, really bored. He might even have died there.

The soldier didn’t do anything particularly bad to deserve to end up at the bottom of the well. He was just hobbling around wounded, without a home. Yes, he asked the witch for lodging, but he was willing to work for the lodging, and did. Maybe this was a mistake—we can ask the wrong people for help, then find ourselves stuck, as if at the bottom of a well. He started out as the weak one, the underdog, but as soon as he had the opportunity, he made himself much worse than the one who oppressed him. Yes, the witch put him in the well, but she didn’t actually kill him. The soldier ended up doing much worse. He could have wished, sitting there in front of his computer, the Spirit of the Blue light ready to do his bidding, not to dominate or kill anyone; he could have wished for something other than money and power—the kingdom and a concubine, to boot. He could have wished for his leg to be healed, and to be taken to his home to recover in peace; or for the witch to see the error of her ways, and not trap anyone else down there. He could have wished to win a wife who loved him. He could have wished for anything.

What are my wishes as I sit before my magical object, as I sit here with this supernatural helper, this radiating blue light? Are my wishes any worthier than those that the soldier made? To be saved, I guess, which sometimes means to be turned on, sometimes means to be distracted by a puppy, sometimes means to find a nice dress, sometimes means to hear from a friend. Maybe some of these wishes are all right.

But if every time I sit before the computer, it is a kind of prayer—it is the lighting of a match, a summoning of the blue light, and wishing—then how worthy are my prayers? Turning on my computer, it is a prayer and a collaboration both; it is always a wish in a Tale of Magic. Maybe there was a time when my computer was just a word processor, something other than a supernatural helper. My thinking about my computer still lags behind, lags behind with what my computer was in the 1980s. I have to make my thinking about it more current. I have to classify what it is better.

Subscribe now

*Part two of this series, The History of the Personal Computer, will be published next week.

The following is an excerpt from ANTIMEMETICS: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova, forthcoming later this month, and available for pre-order here.

In the last few decades, there’s been a new wave of what’s called “advanced meditation” that offers access to deep, intense mental states – from the euphoric, to psychedelic, to voluntary loss of consciousness – all of which are achieved solely through sustained concentration.

One type of advanced meditation unlocks a series of altered states referred to as the jhanas. Practitioners experience strong versions of highly positive emotions, ranging from buzzy thrills to a pervasive sense of peaceful “okayness” – much like a “panic attack for joy.” This isn’t your average mindfulness meditation app.

For many people in the West, meditation is synonymous with mindfulness practices that emphasize open awareness. In this approach, meditators are encouraged to stay present with whatever arises – sounds, thoughts, sensations – without focusing too much on any one thing. The goal is to cultivate a sense of calm and nonreactivity, where a person can perceive all things as part of a larger experience without feeling moved to respond.

But this is only one version of what is possible with meditation. Less commonly practiced is a style where, instead of keeping awareness wide and open, a person trains their attention on a specific object – such as the breath, a phrase, or a positive feeling. As the mind zeroes in, remarkable things can happen. Distractions fall away, a sense of self fades, and perception of time dissolves as a person enters a heightened state of effortless concentration.

If you’ve ever been in flow state – lost in a great conversation, toiling on a creative project, deeply absorbed in your workout – you know exactly how this feels. This style of meditation just makes it possible to invoke flow states without the use of external stimuli. Instead of having to strap on your skis and carve the hills to get that sweet feeling of perfect synchronicity with the universe, with enough practice, you can conjure it in your body at any moment.

A highly focused mind, in a state of flow, amplifies whatever it’s given. If you train it on writing code, you’ll code effortlessly for hours. If you train it on an anxious thought, you’ll spiral into a panic attack. And – it turns out – if you train it on joy, you’ll burst into a radiant euphoric state known as the first jhana.

Most casual meditators never encounter these states, simply because this style of practice isn’t as widely known or discussed. Most popular meditation schools in the West, such as Vipassana, don’t teach the jhanas. Some teachers view them as distractions from insight, cautioning against attachment to the pleasurable bodily sensations associated with the jhanas. Many also believe that meditators need years of practice to achieve these deep mental states.

In recent years, a handful of teachers in the West revived the jhanas. New teaching methods made them easier to access in shorter amounts of time: sometimes days or weeks, instead of years. As more people – including Bay Area technologists – discovered the jhanas, they took to Twitter to tell others what they’d experienced.

Intrigued by the chatter on my feed, I pitched a magazine about writing a piece on the topic. As part of my research, I signed up for a retreat myself. I had virtually no meditation experience, save for a Zen retreat I’d attended with a friend over a decade before.

With the guidance of my retreat instructors, I found myself in first jhana – intensely euphoric, comparable to taking MDMA – in less than an hour. Over the next four days, I progressed through nearly all the jhanic states, each with its own distinct and surreal qualities. In fifth jhana, my mind floated out of my body to gaze at an infinite space. In sixth jhana, it exploded with indescribable, psychedelic beauty that – in seventh jhana – dissolved into nothingness.

The jhanas offer a rare glimpse into the extent to which our minds construct the world around us. As someone who had hardly ever meditated before, what surprised me most was not just the actual sensations, but realizing that such extraordinary states had been locked away in my mind this whole time. Their existence demonstrates that attention, when summoned to its full strength, can pull off some incredible and counterintuitive feats.

Attention is how we carve our personal realities: it is the breathing valve of our consciousness. Selective attention, or the act of focusing on one object at the expense of others, determines what we perceive. Like a flashlight, selective attention illuminates whatever it is aimed at, while other, equally “real” objects fade into the shadows. As I type in a café right now, I am able to write because I’m unconsciously filtering out the café’s music, the murmur of other patrons, and the clatter of baristas preparing coffee.

This skill – which some meditators hone to an extreme – are a marvelous bit of wizardry that comes pre-installed in our brains. Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or ugly as we wish.

♦

Selective attention is an essential survival skill, but it also creates blind spots – hidden cognitive biases that dictate what we do or don’t see. The same mechanism that allows us to summon flow states can also filter out ideas that are inconvenient or mentally demanding. These blind spots are a type of antimeme that all of us experience regularly.

Economist Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler – in their essay “Going Critical” – explain how attention shapes conscious experience in their book, The Elephant in the Brain. Our brains gently steer us towards narratives that make us feel good, and away from those that don’t. When someone donates a large sum of money to a charity, for example, they tend to frame it as selfless altruism, rather than acknowledging motives like gaining power or assuaging guilt. These hidden, selfish motives are antimemetic: they remain invisible to the perceiver, because noticing them would present a challenge to how they see themselves.

Hanson and Simler emphasize that this behavior is universal, and having such base desires doesn’t make you a bad person. They even reflect honestly on their reasons for writing their own book, acknowledging motives like a desire for status and prestige. Yet even they – the authors of a book dedicated to uncomfortable truths – admit they were “relieved for the chance to look away” after finishing their book. As they observe, “It’s just really hard to look long and intently at our selfish motives.”

We avoid thoughts that are cognitively expensive to process. But ignoring these ideas doesn’t make them go away. Our antimemetic motives loom large in our minds: the eponymous “elephant in the brain,” silently guiding our choices.

Hanson and Simler use the term self-discretion to describe how our brains suppress highly consequential information. When we encounter an idea that disrupts our current version of reality, our brain “conspires – whispers – to keep such information from becoming too prominent.” We do this not just to protect ourselves, but to avoid passing potentially damaging information onto others, including those we love or want to impress. “Feel the pang of shame? That’s your brain telling you not to dwell on that particular information. Flinch away, hide from it, pretend it’s not there. Punish those neural pathways, so the information stays as discreet as possible.”

The Elephant in the Brain is about one type of antimeme: selfish motives that threaten our self-image and social standing. But this same energy-preserving mechanism filters out any antimemetic idea or task that demands significant mental effort to process. For example, I am reminded of a particularly pesky to-do list item that I put off, week after week, after my son was born: sitting down with my husband to write our will.

This task was an antimemetic albatross – seen and forgotten once a week – that I shuffled dutifully across my calendar. I knew it was important to write a contingency plan in case the worst happened. Though the scenario was unlikely, the consequences of neglecting it could be serious for the people I love. Nonetheless, estate planning is annoying work for two people with busy lives. Every week, I’d see it on my to-do list and bump it to the next week.

No one wants to think about their own death, much less the death of themselves and their partner simultaneously, and the horrible implications it would carry for those left behind. (This seems like a good time to quote Hanson and Simler, who lamented that discussing their book was “a real buzzkill at dinner parties.”) Death, retirement planning, getting married and having kids…for many people, these ideas are difficult to prioritize because they force us to confront uncomfortable truths. Hanson and Simler note how ideas that emphasize altruism or cooperation spread easily: “By working together, we can achieve great things!” These ideas are memetic because they’re inspiring and easy to share. By contrast, ideas that emphasize competition or harsh realities often “suck the energy out of the room” and struggle to spread.

From this perspective, antimemes are an immune response to cognitive overload. Whereas memes only require a small fraction of our attention and are cognitively cheap to engage with, antimemes are highly consequential and are cognitively expensive to grapple with. To protect our attention and avoid disrupting our daily lives, our “unseeing” defense mechanism kicks in, and the object slips by undetected.

Any major change in our circumstances, especially those that tie to psychological and spiritual needs, frequently presents as antimemetic. It is difficult to occupy two opposing realities simultaneously, which can also make it difficult to empathize with prior versions of ourselves – and, by extension, anyone who reminds us of who we once were.

When you’re happy, you forget what it was like to be unhappy. When you’re in a fulfilling relationship, you forget what it was like to be single. When you’re financially comfortable, you forget what it was like not to have money. When you have close friendships, you forget what it was like to be lonely. When you’re healthy, you forget what it was like to be physically impaired.

This type of antimeme poses a challenge for medical professionals who prescribe treatments for ailments that must be followed long after symptoms have subsided – such as antibiotics or physical therapy – or mental illnesses, such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, and antipsychotics. When these treatments work well, patients feel good and have difficulty recalling how they felt before – so they stop. One study by The Pew Health Group found that even though most participants knew that the “correct” answer to taking antibiotics was to complete their prescribed course of treatment, nearly everyone in the focus group “admitted they failed to do so, often stopping in mid-course when they began to feel better.”

Handwashing, too, suffers from antimemetic headwinds. Despite a strong public social norm towards handwashing, and clear scientific evidence demonstrating its value, compliance is absurdly low, even in medical settings. According to one meta-analysis, the mean handwashing compliance rate in the intensive care units (ICUs) of high-income countries – in other words, the type of place we’d expect compliance to be highest – is only 64.5%. It’s not that people don’t understand the importance of taking antibiotics or washing their hands; they just can’t seem to stay engaged with these practices. Our health and wellbeing is an all-consuming goal when we don’t have it – but, once obtained, strangely fades from our conscious thoughts.

Attention is a precious, limited resource. We can’t expect to fully engage with every idea that enters our headspace. Yet at the same time, it’s clear that relying too heavily on unconscious filters can leave us blinded to opportunities that would otherwise be useful to “see.”

Given that tradeoffs are inevitable, I find myself wishing for some sort of moral framework with which to evaluate whether I’m investing my attention wisely. Is it equally “good” to focus on human rights activism, versus spending time with my family, versus scrolling on Twitter all day? What is our imperative regarding where to allocate our attention – if there is one at all?

♦

In her short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin describes a town called Omelas that stands shining by the sea. The gardens are covered with moss and the roads are lined with trees. Children play in the streets; there is no suffering or conflict. But this idyllic setting conceals a disturbing, antimemetic secret: the residents’ happiness depends upon the imprisonment of one child, who is kept in misery and confinement. Everyone in Omelas knows about the child, and the horrific conditions it must endure, but they do not do anything about it, because doing so would require sacrificing their own happiness.

One way to interpret Le Guin’s story is as a parable about moral complicity. The child in the story represents the oppressed and exploited members of society upon whom our comfort and happiness depends. We are asked to expand our attention to take in all the unseen realities we’ve filtered out of sight, and to consider whether we would continue to live in Omelas with the knowledge of the bargain required, or be one of the few who walk away.

In attempting to apply this lesson to the real world, however, I am overwhelmed by the number of tradeoffs I face in my daily life. How easy it would be if there were only one child from Omelas held captive in the basement of our consciousness, instead of hundreds or thousands! Global poverty, human trafficking, worker conditions in warehouses and factories, factory farming of animals…an entire shadow city of suffering lies behind every basic task in our modern world today. And in the age of supermemes—ideas which spread quickly and are perceived as highly consequential—where we are navigating not just one Really Big Narrative but an entire marketplace of them, we are exposed to even more of these moral dilemmas today, with each one screaming that they are the most urgent and consequential one.

Refusing to engage with difficult ideas – even those that point towards the deep suffering of our fellow humans – does not necessarily make us cruel and callous, or even selfish. No one can expect to fully address, and reconcile, every dilemma they face. When our attention is being pulled in infinite directions, deciding where to direct it isn’t a simple moral question of “good” versus “bad,” but a practical question of how to spend our limited resources. We need to decide which uncomfortable truths to prioritize and which to let go.

We could try to resolve the dilemma of infinite choice by treating it as a problem of utility maximization. This is the view promoted by utilitarianism, which emphasizes acting in ways that maximize happiness and minimize suffering for the greatest number of people. Implied is that there is some discoverable way to rank the relative importance of issues and allocate our attention accordingly, using metrics like "lives saved" or "quality-adjusted life years."

Effective altruism is a philanthropic movement inspired by utilitarianism, and it uses evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to help others. Effective altruists prioritize actions that maximize positive impact, and in some cases, have developed elaborate algorithms to define what “positive impact” actually means.

But such calculations always reflect the values of those who create them. What one person deems most important – whether it’s alleviating global poverty or combating climate change – is shaped by personal, cultural, and historical contexts. Even metrics that seem purely quantitative mask subjective choices about what we value most. Focusing on causes that prioritize improving lives abroad versus those in our local communities, for example – or vice versa – is a matter of personal values.

Le Guin’s story is a testament to the importance of intuition and taste, which prevents us from accepting utilitarianism as a wholesale solution to the problem of prioritization. Omelas is a dark version of the utilitarian world in which happiness is technically maximized for the most number of people (the rest of the town), but comes at great cost (the child). Her story resonates because – for most people, anyway – it just doesn’t feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers.

In his book Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, philanthropy scholar Peter Frumkin identifies a key consideration for developing philanthropic strategies, which he calls instrumental versus expressive giving. Instrumental giving focuses on measurable outcomes and is driven by a desire to solve specific, often large-scale social problems with efficiency and precision – like the effective altruists’ approach. Expressive giving, by contrast, emphasizes the personal values, beliefs, and identity of the donor. Impact is measured according to individual or community values, even if the outcomes are less deterministic.

Frumkin’s telling of history suggests that we’ve already seen the utilitarian worldview play out. With the passage of time and rise of professional norms in philanthropy – accelerated especially by restrictions imposed by the 1969 Tax Reform Act, such as stricter reporting requirements and mandatory payouts – Frumkin argues that philanthropy went too far in the direction of instrumental giving. An overfocus on efficiency turned into a race to the bottom, where all philanthropic strategies became indistinguishable from one another.

Philanthropy is meant to be pluralistic, reflecting a diverse expression of values from private citizens who exercise the freedom to put their money wherever their ideas are. Instrumentalized philanthropy, on the other hand, starts to mirror the role of government, where there is a single, authoritative way of doing things. Philanthropy and government should ideally work in tandem, where experiments funded with private funds can derisk and inform what’s eventually adopted at the institutional level with public funds. But if philanthropy is too prescriptive, it stifles the experimentation it is supposed to enable.

We can use these two philanthropic dimensions – instrumental versus expressive – to inform how to allocate our attention in a way that benefits our networks. The utilitarian approach feels like monoculture farming. If everyone uses the same calculation to determine where to allocate their attention, we will create a brittle system where too many people do the same type of work, which reduces overall fitness and leaves us vulnerable to blind spots.

Instead of trying to engineer a perfect hierarchy of attention, we should aim to cultivate a “biodiverse” information ecosystem that thrives on a multitude of interests pursued by each of its members. In biology, ecosystems with greater biodiversity are more resilient to shocks and better equipped to adapt to changing conditions. Similarly, a healthy network benefits from having many different nodes pursuing what each finds most meaningful or compelling. Not every gatekeeper will uncover a transformative idea, but the sheer diversity of approaches increases the likelihood that someone will. A decentralized network of curious minds makes the information ecosystem stronger, more adaptive, and more likely to produce ideas that take off.

Each of us, then, is left to decide how we want to prioritize our attention, according to our own values and interests. But how should we balance our personal interests with those of our networks? Is what’s good for us, as individuals, always good for the group?

♦

“Our attention is born free, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains,” declared a trio of activists in a New York Times op-ed. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt are members of the Friends of Attention collective, a network of “collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends” that formed in 2018 due to shared concerns that our attention is being hijacked for others’ private gain.

Friends of Attention organizes lectures, educational workshops, and performative art to remind the public that there is a war being waged on our attention, and that we need to fight back and reclaim control. They compare the fragmentation of our attention to fracking, or the practice of cracking the Earth’s bedrock to extract oil and natural gas. Profiteers, they claim, are “pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.”

I first encountered attention activism when I read Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Odell, an artist and activist based in Oakland, California, frames “doing nothing” as an act of political resistance to what’s often called the attention economy, or the buying and selling of attention in a market, like that between advertisers and media properties.” Advertisers compete for sellers’ attention like casinos bidding for the most degenerate gamblers, tracking consumers’ eyeballs and sentiments and using this information to place just the right ads in just the right places so that they can charge clients as much as possible. Widespread social media use ensures a steady stream of monetizable attention. The producers of attention – that is, all of us – are treated as cattle in these transactions, shuffling around like zombies and staring with glazed eyes at whomever is the highest bidder.

Odell implores us to extricate ourselves from this system, pointing out – as I discovered via on my meditation retreat – that where we direct our focus determines what becomes real. Mastering control of our attention is how we “not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.” Odell is fond of bird-watching, and she recounts how spending her time on the study of birds and local ecology, rather than on her phone, transformed her perception of the world:

More and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them….these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality…. A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be.

I share the activists’ views that taking a hard look at our attention, and how it is being spent, is an important step in helping people reclaim a sense of agency over the world. Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCollough once showed that when students were asked to keep a daily journal about what they were grateful for, as opposed to recording their grievances, they reported significantly more positive moods – as well as prosocial behavior, such as helping others with personal problems or offering emotional support. People who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives – irrespective of their circumstances – would almost certainly benefit from directing their attention to what brings them joy, which also makes them more likely to make positive contributions to their communities.

Where we direct our attention also shapes more than just our personal realities: it influences which ideas do or don’t spread through our networks. The same critique of utilitarianism – that it leads to idea monocultures – applies to unregulated attention economies. Networks ultimately rely on their nodes to evaluate new ideas. If we let others hijack our ability to engage with difficult or complex ideas, we risk shirking our duties as gatekeepers. Giving away our attention to the loudest, flashiest voices in the room ultimately creates a world where we’re all parroting the same set of banal ideas.

Nevertheless, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied with the solutions offered by the attention activists, who tell us to “remain in place” as a means of reclaiming our attention, but in a way that seems disconnected from our responsibilities to the network. Odell, clearly exasperated by memetic overload, dreams of a world in which we free ourselves from “shouting into the void” on social platforms. Instead, she asks us to “replant [our attention] in the public, physical realm.” “Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal,” she writes, “I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse.” Her words reflect a widely felt, contemporary desire to escape the memetic city’s constant churn, seeking safety in smaller communities where we at least know who is vying for our attention, instead of letting it passively trickle out of our brains into the rushing rivers of our news feeds.

In a sense, Odell got what she wanted. Less than a year after How to Do Nothing was published, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and the world ground to a halt. Stay-at-home lockdowns forced us to re-engage with our local, offline worlds, even as it supercharged our online ones. We baked sourdough bread as we scrolled our feeds, but – because we couldn’t see our friends in-person as often, or as easily – we started spending time in smaller online contexts, too. We spun up group chats. We signed up for newsletters. We hosted book clubs and dance parties on Zoom. For a brief period, it seemed that the web had indeed benefited from a “restoration of context.” As a popular meme of the time proclaimed: “Nature is healing.”

But the future that followed didn’t quite look the way Odell envisioned, in which we “reinfus[ed] our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” The reemergence of the private online web was not a mere reversion to Web 1.0, where people socialized on blogs, email chains, and internet forums, blissfully disconnected from a shared narrative. Instead, the web is now composed of both public and private spaces, and these two worlds are closely intertwined.

Odell imagines that in a space that is “small and concentrated enough…the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed.” But, like a genie wish gone awry, the rise of Signal group chats didn’t necessarily lead to a nuanced landscape of ideas so much as a balkanization: a memetic Galapagos where dense networks lead to even greater and weirder idea speciation, which then make their way back into public contexts, both online and offline. While some group chats are innocuous – the kind that Odell had hoped for – a global restoration of context also made our world darker and stranger and more unrecognizable than before.

When confronted with the noise and unpredictability of the public web, it can feel good to retreat to quieter spaces, whether that’s the private web or our local communities. If our attention is truly ours to spend as we wish, there should be nothing wrong with this behavior. But retreating from the chaos only protects ourselves. It is akin to fleeing to gated communities or the suburbs to avoid the dangers of cities, burying ourselves in the comforts of “local community,” while avoiding the hard work of getting things done at civilizational scale. Taken to its logical conclusion, the divestment of all members from public spaces destroys the integrity of those spaces.

Odell, for her part, recognizes this concern and explicitly cautions against escapism. In a chapter titled “The Impossibility of Retreat,” she warns us from following in the steps of communes in the 1960s or seasteading experiments in the late 2000s, reminding us that “there is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world,” even as she acknowledges its temptations.

It is hard to see, however, how one can fully embrace the invitation to “refuse” the world without becoming disengaged from solution building. Odell believes that periodically stepping away is a temporary, not permanent break from reality: a sort of mental reset that reminds us what our lives are really for. But this reminds me of the social media addicts who cycle through deleting and re-installing apps on their phone, instead of learning to cultivate a fluid sense of control in the world they’ve been given.

“Standing apart,” in Odell’s eyes, is “a commitment to live in permanent refusal,” even when actively participating in public spaces. But I find it exhausting to imagine standing in a permanently defiant position, hands on hips, feet apart. How can I learn to act decisively, from a place of ease and confidence, rather than bracing against a constant perceived tension?

Viewed through the eyes of the attention activists, I feel less like an empowered individual and more like a forever-branded piece of cattle that has been rescued from its captors: unchained, yes, but lacking purpose and direction. I don’t just want to stand still; I don’t want to be the naysayer in a sea of people who are doing and building things. There will always be a place for critics and whistleblowers, but if everyone did the same, the world would not be better in the long run. We can’t hunker down indefinitely in cozyweb. Our public narratives and civilizational histories still need to be nurtured. We will always crave the wide, expansive feeling of awe – a supermeme to devote our lives to.

There is no wishing away the existence of the public online web. If we don’t like what we see, we simply have to learn how to engage with it more deeply and meaningfully. We must pick up a paintbrush, find a blank canvas, and paint the world as we wish it to be. Instead of hiding in our safe and quiet communities, we need to summon the courage to step forward and attempt to do great things.

♦

If antimemes are a defense mechanism in response to cognitive overload, we now know how to make things more or less antimemetic: by mastering control of our attention and wielding it to shine a light on whatever we want to make more real in the world. Whether we’re filtering out distractions, grappling with moral dilemmas, or striving to create a better future, our attention is the tool that makes it all possible.

Attention is not something we merely own; it is what we are. Learning to wield it isn’t just about returning to the “present moment,” but rather about creating infinite, dazzling realities.

Subscribe now

Pre-order Antimemetics here.

§1. Like so much of what we contend with in everyday life, professional decorum is a mixed blessing. Political theory, like every other academic discipline, cannot proceed without the decorum of shared suppositions. And no academic discipline can sustain itself unless from time to time its practitioners raise awkward first-order questions about what they are doing and why. Both activities are necessary; attending to both simultaneously is difficult. No athlete can compete within the rules of the game and at the same time question the rules of that game. Paralysis sets in. So, too, with the academic athlete. This is an ancient problem, first identified by Plato in the Republic1. No activity in mortal life, academic or otherwise, is exempt. We get lost in what we are doing, and lose sight of the suppositions that undergird our understanding and our actions. Most of mortal life, Plato thought, consisted of evading the difficult first-order questions about what we are doing and why. Competing in the game, whatever its sometimes immense challenges may be, is less discomforting than asking why we are playing it. Invoking the distinction made famous by the movie, The Matrix—and re-popularized as a meme in recent years—working within the rules of the game involves taking the blue pill, while wondering whether the game is worth playing, and whether some deeper insight is possible, involves ingesting the red pill.

§2. Is political theory stuck in a blue pill rut? Am I raising a problem in the discipline that does not exist? After all, the discipline of political theory, like every other social science and natural science discipline, is humming along, producing more and more “literature” every year. Is that not proof of its health? The honest assessment would be that the literature it produces is useful only to those already playing the academic game, or to the graduate students who will soon join in. Evermore production in the academic world, ever less purchase on the world. A glut in one respect, poverty in another. From the vantage point of the academic consumer, abundance; from the vantage of everyday citizens, scarcity. As political theory simultaneously proliferates and withers, where, in our colleges and universities, is the most necessary first-order question about the enterprise of political theory being raised? The discipline of political theory is humming along. Those outside its guild-network hear only noise, if they listen at all.

§3. Political theory is not now what it was even three decades ago, though the signs of its growing fatigue and impending irrelevance were evident even then. I write this as a teacher and practitioner in a field to which I have formally dedicated over four decades. It is a field that, along with theology, I continue to believe is the most important enterprise in the human sciences. I have, however, avoided the field’s journals and annual conventions for the last two decades. For citizens and the broader reading public, they have become arcane and useless. Thinking that this problem was a grave one, I turned my attention instead to writing political theory for the broader reading public, and to teaching and building universities in the Middle East, in the vain hope that there in distant lands the failures that had become so evident in American colleges and universities might be avoided or delayed. Three decades ago, the capture of the political science journals by hermetically sealed epistemic communities, each with distinct and immiscible political commitments was well underway. The annual and regional meetings of the APSA (American Political Science Association) had become choreographed affairs, purporting to represent conflicting “interest groups” within the field. In fact, however, the vibrant if at times dangerous faction-pluralism of the sort James Madison had observed and written about in Federalist No. 102 had already disappeared from our disciplinary guild. The APSA, like most of our colleges and universities, had become the academic arm of the Democratic National Committee, and tolerated little real dissent. The Claremont Institute, formal gatherings of Straussians, the Voegelin Society—the APSA accommodates these on the margins of its annual meeting. No member of these groups ever seriously entertains the prospect of taking a leadership role in the APSA. It is unthinkable. Their deepest professional fear is that the beautiful gardens they have cultivated will be destroyed by the hostile alien power that the APSA has become. Taxed with annual fees, occasionally harassed, and begrudgingly tolerated; they are the marginalized minority communities of the APSA Ottoman Empire.

§4. It is a forgivable error that other disciplines in the humanities do not grasp the searing twentieth century lesson that when a state is controlled by one faction, things do not go well. But that among political scientists and political theorists this lesson has been ignored or gaslit is unconscionable. Should we not expect that grown men and women, with high priest-like knowledge of politics, would be vigilant defenders of political pluralism, that they would resist one-party control of their very discipline? Yes, we should. We should expect from them a fierce defense of political pluralism in the colleges and universities in which they find their homes. Rare exceptions aside—the AFA from Princeton; courage at the University of Chicago—that has not happened. Far from being a light that shines in the darkness, the discipline of political science and the APSA guild that effectively coordinates it have marched onward into the darkness towards single-party control. Its Democratic Party activist-agenda at the undergraduate level has now swelled the ranks of political science and political theory graduate students and young professors. Little wonder then, that the collective action issue that most consumes its members, aside from “saving our democracy,” is which hotels in which cities have a high enough righteousness score— are they “carbon neutral,” what is their policy on LGBTQIA+ issues, does their state limit abortion, etc. —to merit hosting the annual and regional meetings. When a single party rules, its audacity consists in believing it can control everything it touches, and in insisting that everything it cannot control must be shunned or purged. If I am overly attuned to this perverse arrangement, it is because I contended with this brutality of mind in Kurdistan while building the American University of Iraq from 2008-10. There and elsewhere around the world, politics is a winner-take-all game. The United States, and the colleges and Universities it contains, profess to be different. We have lost that privileged distinction.

§5. I do not conclude from this state of affairs that “scholarship” is the healthy antidote to DNC activism in political science and political theory. Bearing in mind that there is always a kernel of truth in what we oppose, I confess a not-so-secret sympathy with the “activists.” To their credit, they know that something has gone wrong, and seek a way forward in a discipline that displays never-ending motion but no genuine movement. The mind-numbing churn in the secondary and tertiary literature, the low-risk strategy in the academic world of preferring interesting derivative arguments rather than important first order arguments—the activists clearly see these two indicators of disciplinary dis-ease, and they want no part of it. The activists intimate that political theory has become yet another library science that sequesters scholars away from politics even as they write incessantly about it. The activists seek immediacy; they seek the thing itself.

§6. The altered landscape of graduate education over the past four decades is partly to blame for the current state of affairs. First, there is now what could be called the intellectual ecosystem problem, by which I mean the ever-diminishing presence of what makes the “uni” in “university” possible, namely, a rough canon of books with which all of its members must engage, however coarsely. The abolition of the Dead-White-Man-Canon has deprived graduate students of a set of governing questions and provisional answers, and this loss has meant there is no reality-check on scholarship. In a healthy intellectual ecosystem, weeds do not grow. They proliferate only in disturbed habitats. Eventually, it is impossible to discern what the native growth even is. Second, the push to complete a Ph.D. in four or five years and to reduce attrition along the way has effectively ruled out bold and ambitious thinking among graduate students. This would be a less formidable problem if it were understood that they should aim higher later in their career. The unfortunate fact is that once the habit of thinking-writ-small takes hold, it is not easily broken. Moreover, when the announced intention of a graduate program is to get everyone through, scarce faculty time that might have been otherwise devoted to helping a lone super-star advance must be directed in some measure to students who in an earlier age would have been asked to leave the program. Third, there is a growing “ethos” problem. The simple and perhaps overstated way to put this is that courage and risk have been supplanted by an admixture of fear and empathy. Visiting lectures and job talks at our best universities four decades ago were academic versions of Celebrity Death Match. It was expected that one of the two warriors in the arena would be bloodied or slain. Anything akin to that is unthinkable today. Our graduate students are taught, above all else, fear and empathy: fear that they will not get a job if they aim too high, or that they will not get a job no matter where they aim; and empathy for the struggles, obstacles, and suffering they, their fellow-graduate students, and the world’s innocent victims daily endure. The secret that few want to acknowledge is that faculty advising has increasingly drifted into psychological counseling. Those who refuse to transform their offices into intake clinics are seen as callous and insensitive to graduate student “needs.” The solitary scholar of old has been replaced. Because that path today is too lonely, too risky, too frightening, we now have “collaborative learning.” It takes a village. Once faculty told graduate students that the ideas in their essays were wrong; now seminars throughout the academic year are dedicated to helping graduate students improve their writing. Because their ideas are considered to be unassailable, only further clarification of their tender ideas is required. The vicious cycle of cause and effect this pandering and handholding produces is unsurprising: those disposed to the ethos of fear and empathy increasingly populate our graduate programs and faculty rosters; those inclined to courage and risk do not apply, or leave early. Soon, the entire profession is transformed. Fourth, there is the “who says” problem. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America3 that citizens of the future will only trust in the authority of their own experience. A century-and-a-half later, Christopher Lasch saw the pathological culmination of this development in Culture of Narcissism4. When we abandon textual deference altogether, we do not get responsible critique and brilliant breakthroughs; instead we get Selfie Political Theory, in which seminal authors from the political theory canon serve as a backdrop for Me-Me-Me. In the 1980s, any job talk that began with, “I want to argue that . . .” would have been met with howls of laughter and derision, because the first task of political theory was understood to be textual exposition, not personal confession. By the early 2000s, that had changed entirely, and theorists were told—and came to believe—that four years of dabbling in a Ph.D. program justified wandering through the grocery aisle of ideas, gathering whatever they found there to make a meal of their own devising, and then forcing others to eat it at no-exit APSA Panels or at mandatory job talks. This short list of formidable impediments is not exhaustive, but it is long enough to prompt sobriety about the current pathway to professional success in political theory. What political theory once was, and what I think it must again be to thrive, I will consider below, in §12. But first, a survey of the crippled and crippling political theory stratagems that have emerged in the aftermath of the loss, ignorance, or renunciation of the true power of political theory.

§7. Archeology. What lies beneath and behind the world that political science measures? Should we rethink the surface world that numbers reveal in light of what political theorists reveal? This is an interesting question in itself, but in the hands of political theorists who always seem to need to justify what they are doing in political science departments, it offers a way to serve political science without challenging it. An empirical study of the Presidency? Would not an exposition of Tocqueville’s theory of the concentration of legislative power in the democratic age, and his endorsement of Jefferson’s remark that “the tyranny of the executive lies in the future,”5 be helpful? An empirical study of political representation? Certainly the strange and provocative passages in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan6, which work out the first modern theory of representation, will enrich such a study, to which might be added J.S. Mill’s nineteenth century reflections on the same subject7. In these and a myriad of other instances, political theorists satisfy themselves that the quantitative world their empirical political scientist colleagues measure is brought to life and ennobled by the arguments in the books they themselves have mastered. I suspect that most political theorists secretly think that their own investigations are superior to those of their empirically-minded colleagues. Their minority status in political science departments, however, means they must publicly content themselves with making the case that their research is a necessary supplement to empirical political science. That survival strategy—that is what it is—I submit, is a colossal mistake. As computing power accelerates, as Big Data and AI captivate the imagination and inebriate the minds of empirical political scientists, they are finding fewer and fewer reasons to retain the bookish political theory eccentrics in their department whose annoyance consists of reminding them that ideas incapable of being rendered in terms of dependent and independent variables nevertheless matter.

§8. The deep-mining of partisan issues. As the field of political science welcomes evermore left-leaning “activists” into its ranks, not a few political theorists have entered into the fray. Some have done this because they think it the only way to get published; others, because they seek to make a stodgy book-bound subfield relevant, expansive, and timely. Political theory has always been tainted by faction, but the aspiration—sometimes the pretense—has been that theorists somehow rise above it. If they were once baldly partisan, it was episodic and with reservation. That was because notwithstanding the deep political divides that often separated political theorists, a nearly univocal understanding obtained that their differences would be adjudicated using the canonical texts of great authors as proxies. Underneath the academic pyrotechnics, of course, the political differences were personal—but they did not get personal. Academic debate was thus raised to that rarified but necessary elevation where ideological hackery and mean-spirited intolerance was an unwelcome intrusion. In political theory today, these are no longer an unwelcome intrusion, but rather an emerging norm, and this for three reasons. First, without the proxy provided by canonical texts, the attenuating mechanism such texts provide is absent. The academic with a partisan axe to grind, say, about immigration, was once compelled to position that topic within the larger framework of a canonical author’s overarching theory, thus linking it to a contestable theory of how the world works, about which any number of critiques might be offered. In short, attentiveness to canonical authors militated against ideological purity and posturing. It may be argued that the focus on topics—immigration, race, women, representation, sovereignty, etc.—is a legitimate way of doing political theory. I do not doubt this is the case if that enterprise is undertaken as a supplement rather than a substitute for the study of canonical works. That is not what has happened, however, and this directs us to the second reason, namely, that once you step away from the topics lurking in those canonical texts, there is no reason not to replace them entirely with all too contemporary partisan-inspired political topics—diversity, equity, inclusion, unconscious bias, toxic masculinity, etc.—with a view, now, to parsing which texts and which authors are acceptable to the ideologically enlightened partisans in power. These first two reasons why ideological hackery and mean-spirited intolerance have become acceptable in political theory are in some measure a consequence of the truncated education that graduate training now consists in, as I indicated above in §6. Grind graduate students through the Ph.D. mill in four or five years and you will produce scholars who are ill-equipped to engage with canonical texts, and who therefore must lower their sights and investigate a “topic” instead. The third reason is organizational: through omission and commission, academics whose research agenda is, for lack of a better word, “canonical,” are a dying minority, who almost nowhere can put together a three-person dissertation committee suitable for an upcoming generation of graduate students who wish to tend the beautiful cultivated canonical gardens that they, too, have come to love. It is not difficult to imagine that the ideological self-assurance witnessed today at APSA Panels and at job talks would be much more muted if the field of political theory was not dominated by one faction. Confirmation bias is real. Those guilty of it are always the last to know.

The field of political theory originated as an attempt to decipher the crisis of modernity through a deep reading of canonical texts. That is what distinguished it from the sort of scholarship on politics undertaken in history and in philosophy departments. Today, a large portion of the work in political theory involves the deep-mining of partisan issues, with a view to remaining politically relevant, or for the purpose of cleaning up the canon, or remaking it, so that it passes the ideological purity test. In a word, political theorists are encouraged, but never forced, to accept the categories of the APSA academic uni-Party, whose ideologically vetted, fear-and-empathy driven elites annually alert dues-paying political theory minority community members of the latest cause célèbre—“saving our democracy,” “the authoritarian threat,” “climate change”—over which crumbs they must grovel and undertake “research” so that they may be permitted to climb the tenure ladder. If they refuse, they either consign themselves to the dusty outlands where Claremonsters, Straussians, Voegelinians, and assorted other malcontents live out their days, or else suffer professional oblivion.

§9. Prodigal Son Theorizing. Political theorists do more than try to convince their empirical colleagues of their worth. When they turn away from the method-prison in which their scientific colleagues’ dwell, they engage one another on a number of fronts. One such front is prodigal son theorizing. The prodigal son of biblical fame leaves his father’s house, squanders his inheritance, and returns home only when he is reduced to “feasting on husks of corn.”8 In political theory, this mode of thinking—defection, decay, homeward turn—appears in a number of guises: in the defense of “originalism” in legal theory; in the ongoing squabbles about whether the liberalism of John Locke9 is coherent without its Christian framing; in certain Roman Catholic critiques of modernity (more on this below, in §10); and in analyses of ancient political theory that compare (high) ancient virtue with (low) modern self-interest, and impugn the latter. However much these arguments differ in their objects and in their conclusions, they all suppose that the task of political theory is to recover seminal ideas that have been lost, obscured, or wrongly rejected. What is at stake, these theorists aver, is whether our polis—or, on a grander scale, our civilization—can be refreshed or renewed. This concern, first coherently raised in the mid-eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “First Discourse,”10 redounds to the present day. About this, political scientists can and do say nothing, because their method-prison precludes them from posing any grand questions. Many of the members of the ‘marginalized communities of the APSA Ottoman Empire,’ mentioned in §3 above, do this sort of work. It is important work. But it is work that failed to capture the imagination of the undergraduate and graduate students who these scholars teach. The fact that it hasn’t calls out for an explanation.

§10. Playing the Aristotle card. We must pause here to consider an important special case. I mentioned above (in §9), that the field of political theory emerged out of the attempt to make sense of the crisis of modernity through the lens of canonical texts. If we were pressed to offer a singular account of the intellectual precondition for the emergence of modernity, it would be the utter rejection of Aristotle, whose ideas had been the foundation stone on which the edifice of the Roman Catholic Middle Ages were built. Whether in the Reformation thought of Martin Luther11, in the proto-liberal thought of Hobbes12, or in the preliminary scientific ruminations of Francis Bacon13, the modern conclusion was univocal: Aristotle had to go; the world was not ordered teleologically, as he had argued. Religion, politics, and science will now take a different path. Not surprisingly, a distinctive vector of the crisis-of-modernity political theory corpus has supposed that the reason modernity is in crisis has been its mistaken rejection of Aristotle. Modernity, in a word, has been a philosophical error. The crisis of modernity can be attributed to the fact that it was built on a faulty foundation—and the corollary: insofar as the modern project has endured at all, it has been because modernity has either secretly incorporated Aristotle into its underpinnings or relied on the residual echoes of Aristotelian thought that could not be expunged to prop it up.

To the outside observer, this detour into Aristotle may seem odd and unnecessary. Cast a wider glance toward American culture since World War II and the broader significance of what I have described comes into view. It would be an understatement to say that Protestant America has not always been welcoming to European Roman Catholics. Since the publication in 1960 of John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths14, however, Roman Catholics have found an intellectual home in America. With the senescence of the mainline Protestant churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, they became America’s fiercest patriots and the staunchest defenders of the U.S. Constitution. (Six of the nine current Justices on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic). The Reagan-Thatcher-John Paul II Anti-Communist triumvirate in the 1980s presaged the emergent “Catholic Moment” in America in the 1990s, during which time it seemed possible to seamlessly reconcile long-standing Catholic philosophy and doctrine with the innermost logic of the American regime. The notable intellectual contributions of Michael Novak15 and George Weigel16 then, and of Daniel Mahoney17, now, are high-water marks of this important and vibrant intellectual movement. Here, Aristotle and modernity are in tension, but need not be opposed. Writings about both together during the Catholic Moment reflected this conclusion. Two decades of land wars in the Middle East, however, strained the conservative coalition to a breaking point; and in the aftermath of the Trump-induced implosion of the Republic Party in 2016, many Roman Catholic thinkers began to wonder if they had made too cozy of an alliance with conservatism and even with the American Regime itself. This sentiment has produced a flurry of writings intended to undo much of what Murray and his successors accomplished. Patrick Deneen’s work18, not easy to categorize, is emblematic of this emerging critique. I raise this long-developing post-WWII story of Roman Catholics in America in part to trace the changing landscape of Roman Catholic thought, but more importantly to confirm the thesis I have stated on a number of occasions: political theory is that field in which canonical authors—in this case Aristotle and his Roman Catholic heir, Aquinas—serve as mediating proxies for the great questions of our time. Playing the Aristotle card, as I have called it, is not simply a career strategy within political theory; it provides a proxy for engaging in very real debates about whether we live, still, in a modern world that is sustainable, or whether we have, in fact, left the modern world behind, perhaps without yet fully knowing it.

§11. The identity politics indictment project. Political theory originated to address the crisis of modernity, and quickly divided into one camp that thought it was a sustainable project and another that thought the modern turn was a mistake. Identity politics supposes that neither modernity nor pre-modernity can sustain us: we are now in a post-modern moment, and must cast off the prejudices of all previous ages—hence, its political slogans, “Change,” “Forward,” along with its general prejudice against anything that is not “transformative.” Much of the activism within the field, and much of the political axe-grinding referred to in §8 above, is animated by this disposition. Let us focus on the framework of ideas behind these immediately obvious phenomena. The intellectual figure to whom post-modern thought can be coherently traced is Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that for Europe to renew itself, it had to begin anew, without Christianity and without its “poisons,”19 as he called them—the idea of equality, the idea of the deliberating subject, the idea that a meta-narrative of freedom inheres in this, the modern age. Although identity politics is committed to “transformation,” as was Nietzsche20, and to the idea that the true self, so to speak, is deeper than what consciousness can articulate (hence, the claim that “identity” is not open to argumentation), it is distinctly American in several key respects. First, it exhibits the American Puritan prejudice and; second, it exhibits the American egalitarian prejudice. Tocqueville thought the Americans would never shake these two prejudices21. Nietzsche found both contemptible. The CCP in China declares that its regime is built on “Marxism with Chinese characteristics.” This is incoherent. In America, we might say that identity politics is “Nietzscheanism with American characteristics.” This is also incoherent.

With regard to the first American prejudice, identity politics fixes, though in a profoundly distorted way, on the Puritan category of the innocent victim, and eagerly asks who is saved and who is damned. For the Puritan, Christ is the only innocent victim, and God alone knows who is saved and who is damned. In the world identity politics constructs, certain identity groups are innocent victims, while others are victimizers; and everything the victimizers have built must be purged in order to redeem a world blotted by their activities and their ongoing presence. Your intersectional scorecard reveals whether you are saved or damned, a victim or a victimizer. This sort of thinking, Nietzsche argued, was emblematic of a purportedly post-Christian world that can neither return to, nor let go of, its Christian categories. That is why the West cannot be reinvigorated; anything less than a complete repudiation of Christian categories, he thought, only contributes to the slow death of the West. With regard to the second American prejudice about equality, identity politics declares that all Truth claims are merely the will-to-power, and that group privilege based on Truth claims must be exposed and destroyed to achieve equality. Nietzsche, too, declared that all Truth claims are the will-to-power—but in order to repudiate the Western prejudice in favor of equality, which he thought had been justified on the basis of the Christian metanarrative. This prejudice, he thought, had to be overturned in order that a life-affirming aristocracy might arise and renew Europe22. These two Americanisms in identity politics together generate an incoherent half-way Nietzscheanism. In political theory, identity politics has taken the form of never-ending whack-a-mole research whose purpose is to undermine any effort to establish the goodness, the privilege, of what the so-called victimizers have done or are doing—representative government, market commerce, the settling of America, the Constitution and protections it offers, the “traditional” generative family, the historic understandings of the churches, and the physical monuments to all of them. In the Identitarian cosmos, all of these have conscience against them. Political theory, which began as an attempt to salvage life-sustaining ideas from the ashes of two World Wars, ends with the identity politics heirs to that grand undertaking burning down whatever remains. There is much work to do, and there can be no rest until it is done. That is why “activism” must now take the place of mere scholarship.

§12. Red pill, blue pill: the crisis in political theory. How might the enterprise of political theory be renewed? Activism will not save it. We can begin to wrestle with this question by returning to the first great canonical work of political theory, Plato’s Republic, and asking, what, really, has caused generation after generation to read and attempt to decipher it, for 2,400 years? What yearning did it address; to what intuition did it give voice? The movie, The Matrix, mentioned at the outset, and more recently, the red pill, blue pill meme on social media, provide watered-down, but still salutary renditions of the first great insight of political theory: the ordinary world of ever-changing opinion does not provide us with what we need to live well; it is but a shadow of reality itself. Beyond the empty comforts of our blue pill world lies the difficult truth, without which our spell of illusions cannot be broken. In Plato’s Republic, this red pill alternative is portrayed in ‘The Allegory of the Cave,’23 the most formative fiction in Western Civilization. We return to the Republic because it gives us the red pill, blue pill distinction we need in order to live life well—with difficulty, but well. In this formulation and in others that have followed, we learn that the world is so much more than it appears to be.

All the truly canonical authors offer red pill, blue pill distinctions; that is why we return to them generation after generation, and why we will do so into the indefinite future. We are born with translucent vision, and long to see clearly. Aristotle, the Macedonian, followed Plato part-way, but offered a different red pill: the world was ordered teleologically24, which is to say, the lower things point to, and unfold into, the higher things; they are completed by them, and are understandable only through them. That is a red pill breakthrough on the basis of which 2,000 years of thinking about religion, politics, and science was undertaken—and which, for any number of thinkers concerned with the current problems within each of these domains, is a red pill to which we must return. Take the teleology red pill, and it is difficult to un-see the underlying order that it reveals in the otherwise chaotic world. St. Augustine, the Algerian, dwelling in the faltering Roman world 800 years later, offered a red pill that outlined God’s providential plan of history, the malignancy of human pride, and the manner by which rebellious man achieves salvation in a fallen world after the Incarnation25. Absolution for sin, not the search for wisdom: that is a red pill breakthrough on the basis of which the Christian and even the ostensibly post-Christian world has long been sustained—the latest confirmation of which is the postmodern pathology of identity politics, which also searches for absolution. Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, another 800 years later, in the thirteenth-century, offered the red pill through26 which the resolution of faith and reason, Christianity and Aristotle, was and is conceivable. That is a red pill breakthrough for which adherents to the three Abrahamic faiths have perennially longed. Martin Luther, the Prussian, offered a sixteenth-century red pill27 that provided a theological basis for understanding God, His Creation, and man not analogically, as Aquinas had, but rather historically, thus upending medieval Europe and laying the foundation for the development of the German Idealism of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, and the subsequent searing critiques of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche that exploded nineteenth-century Europe. That is a red pill without which Protestantism would never have emerged. John Calvin, the Genevan, and Luther’s near-contemporary, also departed from Aquinas, and offered a sixteenth-century red pill28 that by many accounts is the Reformation high-water mark of covenantal thinking. If the Christian heir to Plato is the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Christian heir to Aristotle is the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian heir to the Hebrew cosmological vision is Calvinism, the regime form of which is Puritan America. That is a red pill breakthrough without which the inner workings of the American psyche then, and perhaps now, cannot be understood. Thomas Hobbes, the Englishman, offered a seventeenth-century red pill29 that revealed the temptation of global governance and the hard truth that we live, always, in a world of nations. That is a red pill breakthrough, a warning that no universal society can be made by mortal hands, tempting though it will always be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman, offered an eighteenth-century red pill that pushes Christianity aside, reveals the natural goodness of man, and the difficulty of achieving transparency in a social world driven by envy30. That is a red pill that so many of our fellow-citizens feel in their bones, even if they have never read Rousseau. Tocqueville, the Frenchman, offered a nineteenth-century red pill he feared must be taken if we were to save liberty in the democratic age: without our full engagement in our mediating institutions, we would be condemned to oscillate between lonely individualism and a euphoric cosmopolitanism that can never deliver happiness. That red pill may be one of the few antidotes to the time-less, location-less digital world that is now upon us.

§13. These authors and many more—Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and C.S. Lewis, to name a few from recent history—all offer red pill, blue pill distinctions. Authors who provide these distinctions have, for much of the last hundred years, been purveyed to students and citizens alike as writers of “Great Books.” This has been a mistake. Tocqueville reminds us that in the democratic age, the idea that citizens should defer to authority is a hard sell31. I indicated at the end of §9 above, that prodigal son theorizing has been good at reminding us about the important ideas contained in what have come to be called the Great Books, but that that enterprise has failed to enkindle the imagination of our fellow citizens, especially the youth. Tell people that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and all the rest wrote books that are authoritative, and their eyes glaze over. It is direct human experience, not the authority of a name, that now compels us. And the most compelling experience of all is the red pill breakthrough that brings clarity to an otherwise mind- and heart-numbing world. If political theory is to be revitalized, it cannot do so on the basis of the crippled and crippling political theory stratagems I have chronicled above (in §§7-11). Political theory can only be revitalized if it is seen as that enterprise, along with theology, which proffers red pill breakthroughs that uncover a hidden world which, once seen, cannot be easily unseen. I do not say that every red pill breakthrough is, speaking theologically, divine. Some may, in fact, be demonic and lead, after a long sojourn, to a disastrous end. “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”32 Which red pill is the one and which red pill is the other is no small part of what political theory should be concerned to determine. That is no easy task.

“Man does not live by blue pill alone.”33 Political theory was invented to give voice to that intuition. If any number of thinkers from Rousseau to Rene Girard34 are to be believed, the closure of the mind that blue pill thinking produces seems to be an especially acute problem in the democratic age. Yet counterpoised to this unsettling development is the palpable longing in our age to find a deeper account than what the monochrome blue pill world we inhabit offers. The political war between left and right in America is far from over, and the latest battle over identity politics confirms this longing. A charitable account of the Democratic Party over the past dozen years would be that “wokeness” was the red pill it offered. Take it, and the entire world now appears to involve a cast of characters who are, in varying degrees, innocent victims or transgressors, each illuminated in a revealing light that must determine their political fate. The numbers will never be known, but perhaps seventy million Americans took that red pill. Many still have it in their system. A charitable account of the Republican Party in that same period would be that its members increasingly came to believe that liberation from the blue pill that “wokeness” really was required ingesting the MAGA red pill, which revealed that “wokeness” does not build a civilization, but rather destroys it. My views on this matter are published elsewhere, and I will not rehearse them here35. What I will say is that from the very beginning of political theorizing, in Plato’s Republic, it has been understood that we may either sit still, enchained by the mere opinions we have been given, or take the red pill and see the breath-taking whole, the final ground of coherence. The political battle in America is over which red pill liberates and which red pill enchains. Political theory can reclaim its glory, as the red pill science of politics. Alternatively, it can maintain its present course and shine its light on what Plato called “swarms of irrelevancies,”36 while fading into oblivion, in the shadow of what it truly is.

Subscribe now

The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises against it. A city “right on the sea, with a good harbor,” he says, would require “some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine, to prevent it from coming to have many diverse and low habits.”

With constant economic and cultural exchange comes the endless introduction of new people and customs. The generally transient nature of the population fosters cultural disruption at a previously unimaginable pace.

San Francisco is the world’s greatest port city because it is the epicenter of the modern economy. Billions of dollars of goods pass through its physical ports, but orders of magnitude more pass through its digital ports. Our ports are not mere economic or military utilities; they are also cultural utilities. The culture induced by port cities is the bedrock of global media and commerce. Today, the speed, multiculturalism, and instability of port cities is alive in every phone and TV. But at the moment port culture emerged as the foundation of global communications, its true significance became concealed.

San Francisco’s beauty, spectacle, and terror is unique. Tech is ascendant across economic, political, and cultural domains. Founders like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk are playing a critical role in deciding elections, shifting the cultural mood, and refactoring the nation-state. But apace with their ascendence, San Francisco’s tech leaders are looking inwards. They are becoming self-aware. They are reckoning with the Gomorrah-like price of their city.

Walk just a few minutes away from its ports and you might find yourself on Mission street, filled with homeless addicts at any time of day. “San Francisco, to some extent, has gouged its own eyes out,” says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. So some tech leaders, like Tan, are leading a movement for renewal. They want to clean up San Francisco, undo ‘criminal justice’ reforms, and return to merit-based schooling. All of these suggestions are commendable. But can short-term questions of governance be solved without asking longer-term—even eternal—questions? Can San Francisco’s civic mismanagement be separated from the eternal problems of a port city?

The Question of Virtue

Today’s technologists are revisiting the importance of virtue. Marc Andreessen praised ancient Roman virtues on the Joe Rogan podcast. “There’s a whole ranking, by the way, of the Roman virtues. If you read them today, you want to burst out crying, because oh my god, you just can’t believe what you’re missing.” While critics of technology eagerly embrace the Athenian Stranger’s argument, both Greek and Roman virtues are gaining attention even within techno-optimist circles.

At the start of Book IV of The Laws, the Athenian Stranger helps Cleinias, the co-founder of a new city, understand how the people and the land shape the virtues of the city.

For although a
land's proximity to the sea affords daily pleasure, the sea re-
ally is a "briny and bitter neighbor." It infects a place with
commerce and the money-making that comes with retail
trade, and engenders shifty and untrustworthy dispositions in
souls; it thereby takes away the trust and friendship a city
feels for itself and for the rest of humanity.

The Athenian Stranger warns against the influence of merchants. In his eyes, Andreessen and Silicon Valley’s ancient predecessors made the guided cultivation of virtue impossible. Distilled into its purest form, his argument is as follows:

1. The people of the city develop higher virtues through habit.

2. Habit requires a stable culture.

3. Commerce is an endless disruption of culture.

4. Therefore commerce erodes higher virtue.

A common rebuttal to this argument is to stress the benefits of modernity: Commerce, science, and technology have ended famine, drastically reduced child mortality, cured historic plagues, increased access to vital resources, and more.

The Athenian Stranger argues that this is a disordered ranking of priorities. “We do not hold, as the many do, that preservation and mere existence are what is most honorable for being beings,” he says. Rather, “what is most honorable is for them to become as excellent as possible and to remain so for as long a time as they may exist.”

Given the Athenian Stranger’s advice, Cleinias would have been unlikely to found a city like San Francisco. But the fact remains: Technologically advanced civilizations have dominated all others and made a pre-technological state unthinkable. It is not possible to reset society to Athens. So what lessons can San Francisco learn from the Athenian Stranger’s scathing words? Aside from moving inland, what other course of action do San Franciscans have?

Reality Shock

Modern communications technology has allowed civilization to conceal both its virtues and vices. Modern and postmodern ideologies make excuses for the degradation of the physical world. Nowhere is this more pungent than San Francisco. The first advice from the ancients to the moderns might simply be to be honest; to discard the concealing narratives and distractions which make the absence of ancient virtues difficult to perceive.

The tensions the Athenian Stranger raises remain true to this day. The price of commerce is the loss of trust, courage, and virtue. Today, we have a near-pathological habit of glancing over these costs, constructing byzantine narratives about why these virtues may be unimportant, outmoded, or oppressive.

San Francisco is the ultimate example of a modern port city. “[S]hifty and untrustworthy dispositions” are equally evident in the homeless along Mission Street and the high-stakes backstabbing of tech’s heroes. Tech founders brag about personality changes after taking psychedelic drugs; San Francisco influencers make statistical diagrams about their orgies. The ideology of disruption permeates all things.

Honesty is the first thing the Athenian Stranger can teach us. The way vice spreads like a contagion is another. In his critique of marine warfare, he describes a protean mimetic theory:

Now the evil imitation of enemies I was referring to is the
sort that occurs when someone dwells near the sea and is
vexed by enemies—as in the days when (I say this not intend-
ing to remind you of ills) Minos imposed a certain harsh trib-
ute on the inhabitants of Attica. He wielded great power on
the sea, while they did not possess ships, as they do now, for
war, nor a territory well stocked with shipbuilding timber that
allows for the easy creation of naval power. As a result they
were not able, through nautical imitation, to become seafarers
immediately and defend themselves, at that time, against
their enemies. For it would have been in their interest to have
had many times seven youths destroyed, if by doing so they
could have remained steady, heavily-armed infantrymen in-
stead of adopting the habits of marines.

While the Athenian Stranger recounts a pattern of imitation in military conflict, the dynamic he describes only grows stronger in modern economic competition. Economic competitors face a constant pressure to adopt tactics from their competition—for good or ill. Competition becomes all consuming. Founders copy more than their competitors' features. They copy whole lifestyles, desires, and belief systems.

In practice, few people draw clear distinctions between the domain of competition and the domain of cultivated stability. Without discipline, unbounded mimesis is second nature. The same is true for political competition. The distinction between politics and non-politics is eroded whenever ‘outside’ cultural factors influence politics or vice versa.

The culture of ports spreads throughout a port city in a rapid contagion. In the modern day, the culture of a port city spreads throughout nations and civilizations. Constant disruption is not only the culture of San Francisco. With global media, all Americans are in visual range of each other, participating in a constant game of persuasion and imitation. National and international political factions are set against each other, sweeping up Americans in a winner-take all election frenzy every four years. The culture of endless disruption has swept across all concepts of American life.

In practice, there is currently no distinction between culture, commerce, and technology. All such divisions have collapsed, spilling into all areas of life.

Rebuilding

What would it take to rebuild the most important aspects of the city? The Athenian Stranger tells us “[I]t would have required some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine”.

In their hubris, many Silicon Valley leaders have rejected faith, spirit, or any kind of higher authority. They have nothing to protect themselves against the fate of Plato's port cities.

However, not all is lost. Despite our global port culture, many San Franciscans continue to hold close to permanent things. We continue to hold on to faith, philosophy and literature. In practical terms, it is possible to learn from Plato without fighting in a land war. It is possible to hold an eternal faith without working a subsistence farm. But it is harder. It requires conscious insistence on a separate loyalty to sacred traditions.

I believe that it is possible to cultivate virtue despite the flux of the port. San Francisco can still form a culture of virtuous habits. But to do so, we must make a conscious commitment to something beyond ourselves, beyond the constant change, and beyond the allure of the sea.

San Francisco has the discipline to learn, think, and build. Technologists have a focused intensity to their work that is rarely matched in modern day industry. Across the entirety of The Laws, Plato reminds the reader that the cultivation of virtue requires not only discipline, but direction. San Francisco is a city without a common direction. Its offices host a rapid turnover of peoples and cultures. Individual discipline is constantly tested by the trends of novel fashions and stigmas.

As the Athenian Stranger advises Cleinias, rapid change can erode the moral foundation of a city. When moral foundations are based on what is constantly changing, they form no foundation at all. For San Francisco to reclaim virtue, it needs a foundation that does not change with the fashion of the season. Instead our stable moral foundation must begin with respect for an authority higher than what is merely useful.

We must commit ourselves to founding institutions. San Francisco doesn’t need a new kind of institution, but an indisputably old one. It is easy to found a startup on the premise that everything will change. The great institutions of the past were founded on the opposite premise.

At this moment more than ever, it is time to build institutions with an ear to the eternal.

Subscribe now

During the summer of 2019, an English teenager named Mary-Belle Kirschner—better known as Belle Delphine—burst into the mainstream by selling small jars of “GamerGirl Bath Water” for $30 apiece. The stunt spread rapidly across social media and the press, generating a predictable churn of headlines and think pieces. Was she a troll? A “performance artist”? Our era’s Andy Warhol? (A title inevitably conferred on every ambitious attention-seeker online.) If someone drank her bath water, would they get herpes? Inevitably: Had the Internet “gone too far”?

To much of the Internet, Delphine seemed to appear out of nowhere. Her 4.1 million fans were proof of some strange alchemy conjured in the borderlands of YouTube, Twitch, and OnlyFans. Her persona blended cosplay, J-fashion, gamer culture, and practically every negative stereotype associated with women online. It was playful, erotic, absurd—and, at times, even a bit gross.

Shortly after the bathwater stunt, Delphine launched a PornHub account featuring videos like “Belle Delphine gets huge dripping cream pie,” which turned out, to her fans’ great disappointment, to be a baking joke, rather than pornography. As her career matured, in both senses of the term, she became increasingly provocative. One infamous photoshoot showed Delphine in the backseat of a car, tied up with rope, with duct tape covering her mouth. Another photoshoot, even more alarmingly, had her in a child’s “My Little Pony” bathing suit, surrounded by children’s toys, holding an oversized lollipop. These stunts, of course, only inflamed the controversy about her work—and in turn, her popularity.

Her rise didn’t just prompt, as Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson put it, “a cottage industry of reaction videos.” It also inspired something known as the “Belle Delphine Effect.”

According to the meme encyclopedia, Know Your Meme, one Reddit user remarked:

We can all agree that belle Delphine is kinda a genius, she found a niche market and has finessed us all,.

However it’s a sad reality that people are buying these very strange fetish items, it kinda makes me ashamed to be Male.

My problem is this will clearly have an effect on e thots and Influencers, I’m literally waiting for a new girl to dress up like Nami from one piece and cover her nipples on tape and start selling toe nails and salvia.

The future doesn’t look to bright, this will clearly inspire others to copy and sell more gross items, lemme cop some of that Tana mongeau fanny fart in a bottle £50

For this user—and for a surprising number of “Terminally Online” spectators—Belle Delphine was radically new. Like Zooey Deschanel’s Summer in 500 Days of Summer, Natalie Portman’s Sam in Garden State, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—all characters blamed at some point for “ruining a generation of women,” as the famous Negative XP song put it—Delphine became a scapegoat. Delphine, YouTube video essayists and professional opinion-havers began to argue, was emboldening a new wave of e-girls with turbo-charged marketing tactics. In 2019, it seemed as though we’d met the “Mr. Beast of Sex” in the shape of a British teenager sporting braces and a My Little Pony bathing suit.

Yet the apparent novelty of her persona said more about her audience’s short cultural memory than her own originality. Her pastel wigs, ahegao faces (the exaggerated orgasmic expressions borrowed from hentai), cosplay, and nods to gamer culture only seemed pioneering.

These tropes were not new—in fact, by 2019, when Delphine’s popularity exploded, they were well-worn. By the 1990s, early camgirls and “lifecasters” had already mastered the art of forging intimate, parasocial relationships with their audiences, including behind a paywall and with extreme marketing tactics. Jennifer Ringley, widely credited as being the first creator of this type, was so popular that she eventually landed on late-night television. And she herself emerged among a sea of women who were selling their lives—or if not their lives, some aspect of their sexuality—online: Anna Voog and Danni Ashe being just two popular examples of content of a similar template of an ultra-confessional, ultra-intimate, and importantly, erotic style of posting.

Delphine’s trademark style, too, emerged as a crystallization of trends, as opposed to something purely original. What came to be called “e-girls” would draw from a mix of influences. J-fashion infused their looks with pastel colors, exaggerated eye make-up, and over-the-top girliness. Meanwhile, the “Living Dolls” of the mid-2000s and early 2010s—a group of young women, like Venus Palermo and Valeria Lukyanova, who meticulously curated doll-like appearances through makeup, clothing, and their YouTube personas—helped popularize the heavily-stylized, anime-inspired femininity that would become associated with Belle Delphine.

She was hardly the first to tap into the “horny lonely guy”—specifically, the horny lonely gamer—demographic, either. In the mid-2000s, a pattern was emerging on image boards like 4chan and, later on, 8chan.

Sometimes, women, and even more disturbingly, young girls, posted images or videos of themselves deliberately (“self-posters”)—performing, flirting, or simply seeking attention—while others were posted by anonymous users, sometimes without their knowledge. Young women like Boxxy and Cracky-chan became fan objects for boys and men on imageboards who circulated their images, transforming their presence into a kind of cult phenomenon. Both cases, and many before and after them, revealed that among “Very Online” men, there was a powerful audience ready to mythologize young women who fit the archetype of the quirky, cute, and accessible. These young women were also, often, mysteriously, quite neotenous (charitably, “anime-like”).

Meanwhile, women who played or commented on video games—especially if they were conventionally attractive—were often accused of weaponizing male loneliness for personal gain. Sometimes these accusations were baseless, fueled by misogyny; other times, they weren’t entirely wrong. While gaming communities always included female players, the “gamer girl” stereotype emerged as a shorthand for a woman perceived to be feigning genuine interest in geek culture to “simp farm” for attention, fame, money, or all the above. This tension, arguably, lay at the core of #GamerGate, where underlying fears suggested that women were infiltrating male-dominated spaces, reshaping cultural norms, and exploiting male vulnerability. As Delphine would demonstrate, these men were not devoid of agency, yet the presence of a fertile market for flirtation, parasocial relationships, and porn remained undeniable. Just as Boxxy, Cracky-chan, and countless others found fans eager to put them on a pedestal, Delphine proved that the historical template of the “cute girl on the Internet” was profitable.

Delphine simply refined these existing motifs and amplified them to attention-grabbing extremes. Her genius came not from inventing something from scratch, but from exploiting the “gamer girl” or “e-girl” archetype to its maximum effect. The “Belle Delphine Effect” is not because she “invented” anything. Rather, it describes a process anyone involved in a subculture has seen before: a savvy person taps into existing currents, intensifies them, achieves fame, and thereby prompts a wave of imitators.

This pattern—where novelty emerges by rearranging and amplifying older traditions rather than conjuring something entirely new—lies at the heart of René Girard’s essay “Innovation and Repetition.” Girard challenges the assumption that true innovation can and should unfold without any link to the past. He details how, historically, “innovation” was once condemned as a type of heresy, while “good” cultural forms were expected to remain stable and consistent with longstanding traditions. Over time, as societies shifted and modernity took hold, the meaning of innovation changed.

By the modern era, “innovation” became synonymous with progress, originality, and genius, with people now craving dramatic breaks from tradition.

According to Girard, our contemporary culture praises creators who seem to break entirely from what came before, yet true innovation is never rootless. It’s our language that’s changed, not the underlying processes of cultural development. Even in Internet culture—often described as obsessed with endless, escalating, even spiritually deleterious novelty—the most viral successes belong to those who recognize, recombine, and re-energize established trends. In fact, online, being too different often works against you. The social media platforms and subcultures that Belle Delphine drew upon already had established aesthetics and audiences. She succeeded by tapping into these reservoirs and selling them back to the public as a fresh spectacle. Using Girard’s metaphor, expecting novelty without imitation is like expecting a plant to grow with its roots dangling in the air.

The roots of Belle Delphine’s success were already there. The genius was in the way she remixed them and exploited them—not in the invention itself.

Girard’s essay also helps explain why certain other online phenomena that appeared shockingly new turn out to be skillful remixes. Mukbang, for instance, is a video format where creators eat large quantities of food on camera. In the early 2010s, Western viewers who first encountered mukbang considered it strange, unprecedented, and borderline-pornographic.

Yet the building blocks were already present: vloggers had already accustomed audiences to personal, intimate camera addresses; haul videos had normalized consumerist spectacles; and eating challenges introduced the idea that watching people eat could be entertaining. More explicitly, there was also the subterranean “feeder” fetish that lurked in the corners of almost every major content platform, from DeviantArt to Instagram to Reddit to YouTube. Feeders were essentially performing mukbangs with a clearly stated sexual bent. For ordinary viewers, as opposed to those who had this fetish, they were the online equivalent of tabloid content or rubbernecking—“can you believe people are actually into this stuff?”

The fetishists, on the other hand, view mukbang differently. In the feeder fetish, food symbolizes unrestrained sexuality, with both the messy, explosive displays of binge-eating and the subsequent body growth acting as metaphors for sexual arousal. What unsettles mainstream viewers excites fetishists: the raw display of appetite becomes a stage for lust and voyeurism. Power dynamics also play a role, with some aroused by control (the ability to make others eat large quantities and thus grow) and others by submission (the act of eating beyond their physical comfort).

The mukbang did not arise spontaneously in the West and it was not “merely” an import from South Korea. It combined familiar elements into a pattern that felt surprising to those who had never noticed the common threads, demonstrating once again that new trends often emerge from tradition. Much like Belle Delphine’s persona, mukbang succeeded not by creating something from nothing, but by remixing old elements into a format that appeared new. This happens again and again online.

Indeed, the most reliable path to Internet fame is imitation and then iteration.

Andrew Tate offers another example of how cultural patterns evolve online through recombination rather than pure invention. At first glance, Tate—a “masculinity influencer” and “male supremacist” who rose to prominence long after the original pickup artist and manosphere communities peaked—might seem like an entirely new type of internet personality. Indeed, he’s been described as one; a sign of both the “end times” and the “startling” misogyny of Zoomer young men. Tate preaches almost parodic ideas about masculinity.

He, too, is often spoken about as if he emerged in a vacuum.

Yet his tactics also have deep roots. On Substack, Peter Limberg writes that long before Tate, “pick-up artists like Ross Jeffries, David DeAngelo, Mystery, and RSD Tyler taught ‘average frustrated chumps’ how to manipulate social dynamics and ‘improve their game’ with women.”

Limberg goes on to say that these methods eventually morphed into the manosphere, personified by figures like Roosh, Rollo, and Roissy (Heartiste), the “three Rs,” who added political and pseudo-scientific theories to explain men’s perceived failures in sexual marketplace. Limberg also describes how this happened alongside other “memetic tribes”: Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and incels, who were a direct response to perceived “failures” or oversights in PUA culture. Tate, then, is the latest iteration of this lineage. He did not emerge without precedent; rather, he exploited long-standing resentments that earlier generations had already refined. Just as Belle Delphine did not invent the e-girl or gamer girl persona and mukbang hosts did not conjure food spectacles from nothing, Tate did not pioneer a new ideology. He only updated it, once again exemplifying Girard’s principle that supposed breaks with tradition are almost always recombinations of what came before.

Earlier PUA or meninist figures also relied heavily on self-promotion, cultivating mainstream celebrity status as much as they focused on seducing women. Ross Jeffries, who considers himself the first pick-up artist, once made a notable appearance on the Faith Daniels Show, a popular talk show in the early ’90s. Erik von Markovik, better known by his stage name, Mystery, didn’t just show up on talk shows—he eventually hosted a VH1 series called “The Pick-Up Artist.” But only Andrew Tate managed to move beyond notoriety to become a global menace. Where Jeffries and Markovik were relatively harmless sideshows, obnoxious, even straightforwardly misogynist, Tate took things to a far darker level. He wasn’t just promoting sexist ideas. He took these ideas to their worst conclusions. It wasn’t about seducing women anymore: In Tate’s worldview, women weren’t people to be manipulated for sex; but rather, objects to be bought and sold.

Once we trace the lineages and repetitions, we may feel disappointed that we aren’t witnessing “pure” originality. Girard would argue that such purity never existed. Every seemingly new phenomenon online—be it Belle Delphine’s porn, mukbang, or Andrew Tate’s inflammatory rhetoric—has historical precedents.

Recognizing that these figures, formats, and trends are not rootless can make it feel like “culture is stuck,” that nothing new is happening. But every cultural development stands on the shoulders of what came before. All great innovators must be great curators. It’s not “cheating”—it’s a different, though under-appreciated, skillset. This also explains why some talented creators find that they’re not particularly successful in online ecosystems. Girard’s argument suggests that straying too far from established patterns is risky.

Innovation as we contemporarily perceive it is a type of heresy online as well: you must tap into existing currents to grow.

There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than what we see in the “hot take” media market. In this ecosystem, “take-sellers” present themselves as public intellectuals, each vying for attention in what they claim to be a true “marketplace of ideas.” Yet there are still established boundaries. You can’t move against the prevailing currents. As one particularly ornery, anonymous political commentator once put it: “There are two shows in town, dissident, and leftist. You’re one or the other. Pick one or pack it up.”

While it’s fair to say there’s more diversity in opinion than this writer suggests, his observation still captures something important: within the “take market,” not all ideas can find traction. The rules of this game may be implicit, but they ensure that only certain narratives gain an audience, limiting the range of what’s considered a “viable” hot take. In this environment, Girard’s logic applies once again. The supposedly free marketplace of ideas is not free at all but structured by inherited traditions and recognizable categories. You see this with the way centrists are treated within these Internet discourse bubbles: they’re viewed with suspicion, at worst, even hatred. And the few centrists who succeed are ultimately not veering too far from left-wing or right-wing camps—it is implicit which side they “truly” belong to. In fact, the purpose they serve is to provide a liberal gloss on an ultimately conservative idea or vice versa. But the ones that go too far off the beaten path—who promote nuance—are bullied and excluded. There is no place for them in the conversation.

It’s tempting to view this constrained “marketplace of ideas” as a pathology peculiar to the Internet’s echo chambers. But this tension between old and new, between the constraints of tradition and the lure of innovation, has always shaped cultural evolution. Even the “take-sellers,” who pride themselves on their “heterodox thinking,” ultimately rely on ideas that were well established before their arrival. Just as Belle Delphine relied on preexisting expressions of online sexuality, and mukbang hosts drew on older spectacles of consumption, the “marketplace” take-sellers inhabit is less a frontier and more a curated bazaar, stocked with familiar wares that have simply been re-labeled and rearranged for the present cultural moment.

Accepting this can feel disappointing, but it should be liberating. There is something strangely comforting in the fact that even someone like Belle Delphine is in a continuous dialogue with tradition, not a random burst of spontaneity who materialized from thin air. She is the pinnacle—the ultimate expression—of the camgirl, the gamer girl, the e-girl.

Subscribe now

*The above is an essay from Be Not Conformed: Rene Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis and forthcoming from Catholic University Press later this year.

We have moved on. Ours is the era of looking.

We visited galleries and heard lectures, watched arts programming and read criticism, all that time like we were wandering a highway gas station in search of a piece of fruit. Is any substance to be found here . . . substance . . . any, at all? We listened to looped conversations, open-ended, never-ending. “What does this artwork say about us?” “Well, it raises questions.” “Questions about what?” “About how we think of ourselves.” “And how do we?” “We think of ourselves very dourly and often.”

The talking never stopped. Their highest praise for an artwork was that it prompted conversation, gave them reason to talk. Things they discussed were worldly, social and theoretical. Some critics lamented how the commercialization of art had ruined their enterprise—but were not critical conversations being had, out there, beyond the pages of periodicals, continuous, overlapping, the activists’ hot litanies, clinical patter of the seminar, all sorely needed, urgent and ongoing, in ever-widening, more open, more welcoming spaces?

Had the intrinsic value of great art been self-evident to them, those who ran museums might have said the institutions existed for the art in their collections. Instead, they said museums existed to inspire conversation and the exchange of ideas. Art was for audiences to explore the issues that concerned them.

We are free of such concerns. All that talk is noise to us. We’re here and here to look.

The artists who first used their eyes show us how to see. Our subject is that which claimed their full visual attention. Representations of the human form are there in our prehistoric art through to the figurative art of the great early civilizations—but it was the Greeks of the 5th century BC who perceived as we never had before, whose sight awakened, and what they saw was the human body.

Figuration can train the eye as abstraction cannot: This much is obvious. For the artist, so for the viewer. And what object could be more worthy of depiction than the unclothed human figure? In the span of a few decades, with the Persian Wars going on about them, the sculptors and painters of early Classical Greece revolutionized the style of their art such that they revolutionized its substance. What so angered Plato—the new illusionism—was the breath of life into marble, bronze, and pigment. With the birth of naturalism, the features of Archaic art (the stiff arms and clenched hands, the flat feet, rigid hips, and passive smile) left the body; and in came anatomical accuracy and far more: movement, animated asymmetry, character and emotion, narrative surrounding the figure, shoulders that engage, torsos that might glisten, hips that rock and sway, and skin as we know our own, to the touch.

Their nudes were soldiers and victorious athletes and heroes, those favored by the gods and so raised to them in dedication—and their nudes were gods, Zeus and Apollo, Dionysus and Hermes, and a little later, Aphrodite and the Graces.

To love divinity, to love vigor and abundance, harmony and one’s ancestry, was to love the body.

From few original works and many Roman copies, we can follow a thousand threads: how the human figure, once given life, became real and swiftly more than real; why the names Phidias and Polykleitos are with us after two and a half millennia; the spread of Greek naturalism across the Mediterranean, into the Near East, and down through antiquity; changes in artistic craft; how, like the Baroque spun out from the Renaissance, nudes of the Hellenistic period after the Classical became increasingly theatrical and emotive, tipping into the extravagant.

The forms, or motifs, these artists captured are such embodiments of unalloyed human states and qualities, are so spring-loaded with resonance, they ricocheted through the centuries—assimilated, adapted, echoed, and alluded to by later artists. Our eyes can trace all this.

After antiquity, reverence for the body returned again in the 1400s in Italy. Borne of the new will to know physical reality, to perceive the world around them and trust their sight, Brunelleschi invented linear perspective and the Renaissance painters and sculptors following him rediscovered the nude. We’re spoilt for nudes from that time on.

In public and private life today, a person’s primary visual encounters with imagery of the naked or semi-naked human figure are through neither art nor worship but advertising, entertainment, and porn. It’s pathetic that this is true. We choose another way.

That men once stood before the Rokeby Venus and gawped means nothing to us.

In the bleak mid-January of 1972, British households with their television tuned to BBC Two were invited by the critic John Berger to join him in “question[ing] the assumptions” of the Western art tradition. Berger’s audience was the general public, and the analysis he offered not only was taken up, quite immediately, as the dominant intellectual approach to the nude but remained so in the decades that followed.

Ways of Seeing defined the nude as a naked person made into an object and thereby stripped of their humanity. For Berger and generations of feminist critics and artists, the nude in Western art history is exclusively female, is passive, and so embodies stereotypes of femininity that both reflect and reinforce the status of women (as object, as vulnerable, as sexually available) in Western societies. That Berger was oblivious to the ancient tradition of the nude form is plain. Moreover, he psychologized the nude figure—saying “the truth about oneself” is denied her—to the point of wild conspiracy.

We were raised in a culture where the conspiracy theory of the male gaze received near total institutional endorsement. Nakedness in art existed, according to our educations, for the purpose of “male consumption.” Art was said to be a service industry like any other, with male artists serving their male patrons’ libidinous needs.

Feminist scholarship emerged as a political project and an expression of the concerns, often intensely personal, of a class of professional women living in the seventies. Art was a wall they could tack their social hang-ups onto. Half a century has now passed. Their hang-ups are not ours.

To us, they are like those evolutionary psychologists who explain romantic love as “a biological lease agreement.”

When art historians called the nude “a tool of colonialism and conquest,” “a means of naturalizing power differentials,” we have ignored them, as we do any other raving lunacy. They cared about the treatment, visual and otherwise, of women’s bodies in the history of Western society. We care about paintings.

What knowledge of art did their analysis ever demand? If they spoke of the Venus de Milo, it was to deem her “typical.” The names Felski, Kristeva, Kant, and Derrida filled their indexes. No Praxiteles or the Pergamene school, no Giorgione or even Correggio.

They saw in artworks only what they had already decided was there. You would never know from how the social or feminist art historian described a nude by Ingres, among them some of the most arresting depictions of the female form ever created, that it isn’t a digital illustration but a painting, oil on canvas. For them it was an image, one expressing social norms.

With these approaches, inevitably many scholars gave up on the pretense that artworks needed to be looked at, at all. So they became historians of art history itself, their own discipline; they spoke not of images but of discourses and texts—and a new conspiracy arose. The genealogy of figurative art as a record of influence and innovation stretching over centuries, the passage of motifs through history, directly and in memories and traces, is a phenomenon as real as the moon in the sky. Any time given to those who think the canon, this material record, a discourse is time wasted.

The nude in art gives pleasure. Since the art of Ancient Greece, pleasure has been inherent to the subject. The existence of nude masterpieces that seem to us pure manifestations of aching lament, of nudes that are distressing or alarming, only confirms this. We want the nude to take us where awe and serenity meet, or else lure us in and invigorate, for the reason that its gratifications have no equivalent in other spheres of life. Nothing approximates beholding the Belvedere Torso or Michelangelo’s David.

Directing at the nude our whole aesthetic attention, seeing it as we do, is more pleasurable still. Sophistication is pleasure.

Those who deem the nude in art a “sex object” betray themselves as prudish and crass. Certainly history has seen its share of plastic-seeming nudes. The most candidly erotic paintings of 19th-century French academicism are largely artifacts of the past, and those artists barely remembered. Their marks on canvas captured something synthetic, not life; their works have more in common with modern advertising imagery than with the finest nudes in art.

Every nude is an occasion for the eternal drama between realism and idealism to play out. From the art historian Kenneth Clark, we can discern three senses, at least, in which a nude may be “ideal”: as in beautiful, as in unreal, as in expressing an idea or concept. The last meaning is most significant to Clark’s study of the form. For him, the foremost nude figures in art are substantiations of the archetypal forces and states that distinguish our species—ecstasy, pathos, energy, Apollonian clarity and order, divine and physical love. Much of our sight we owe to him.

Clark did falter in underestimating, or downplaying, the sexiness of the great nude tradition. Few passed-out, drunken men are as hot as the Barberini Faun. The Doryphoros of Polykleitos, for all his mathematical perfection, is more than beautiful. His body looks Adonis-like to us: Aphrodite herself might steal him from his mortal lover.

Feminists suppose that a thin line separates high art from pornography. From our vantage point, the line is prominent. “Everything is oversexualized, nothing is sexy” has been a valid complaint about our culture for a generation. Only the most immature mind conflates sensual attraction and prurience. It is no coincidence that the naturalistic nude form was invented by a people who believed in physical life as spiritual life. That which appeals to our animal nature can be a thing of reverence.

Five decades after airing Ways of Seeing, BBC Two brought to the screens of British living rooms The Shock of the Nude by classicist Mary Beard. What had changed? With her village-pantomime delivery, Beard presented a history of the Western tradition in which artists, patrons, and audiences are a mass of “blokes” and behave accordingly. There are memes with more penetrating cultural analysis than was offered here. Beard selected controversy as the theme around which to organize her hodgepodge of nudes.

As an animating factor in art, and as a subject in itself, controversy is over. To overstate its staleness is impossible. A swirl of talk, and then an empty subject for further, ever-more-desiccated post-controversy talk: This is all it can be.

Public controversies surrounding artworks including nudes have been generated and sustained always by idiots. When it was erected to the façade of the Palais Garnier opera house, Carpeaux’s exuberant sculpture La Danse caused a scandal. Klimt was almost run out of Vienna for his “perverted” Faculty Paintings. Because he depicted them with pubic hair, Modigliani’s nudes were taken away by the police when first exhibited. More recently, Hylas and the Nymphs by Waterhouse, a scene of proto-anime banality, was removed from Manchester Art Gallery by hapless interventionists, and a show of Titian’s poesie paintings sent critics into a moral flap about the artist’s imagined pardoning of sexual violence.

Except where they succeed in destroying or irreparably altering works of art—as in the case of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which had much of its nudity painted over the year after this death—why should we care about the life-squandering outrages of idiots?

The intensity of loving art necessitates aloofness to public controversy. We adore Manet. We know its historical context such that we feel the proper shock of Olympia; and we know the era of Manet is over.

Our educations aside, proof of the male gaze conspiracy’s acceptance is found in the state of the contemporary nude. “Find something here to gawk at!” appears to be the sentiment driving many of them. Newer nudes fall into two main categories: those that are said to celebrate the variety of the human form, and those that are expressions of anxiety. Each type stems from a reaction to the Western tradition, well or poorly understood.

Because we are not anxious about our bodies or pleasure, most contemporary nudes confound and bore us. Lucian Freud’s repetitive oils from the seventies onward, Louise Bourgeois’s nude sculptures and watercolors from her later decades, all self-portraits of anxiety in disguise, confound and bore. Sharing Dürer’s aversion to the body, both artists made nudes for the neurotics of the world.

Marc Quinn’s and Jenny Saville’s nudes are the epitome of artwork as mere conversation starter, the subject for classroom assignments. Who wants to look at them for long? No line connects these artists’ confrontations to Manet’s.

Ugliness is in no way disqualifying. Intensely expressive, unsightly nudes go back to the Hellenistic period. Dark visions and fanatical curiosity drove master painters as unalike as Goya and Schiele, and in our own time Marlene Dumas, to create their sublimely ugly nudes.

In an age saturated with images, the faculties of perception are coarsened and weakened, like silk put through the dryer. Refining and strengthening one’s sight, a rewarding enterprise whenever, is only more rewarding now.

We are greedy and honest. To the extent that being historically informed helps us see, we’re all for history’s contexts. When our eyes tell us otherwise, we trust our sight. The raw facts convey that Savonarola, he who set the bonfires of vanities ablaze, mounted Donatello’s David in the courtyard of Florence’s city hall—implying he found no eroticism in the sculpture. But we know what we see.

Of course we’d become citizens of ancient Knidos for a day and visit Praxiteles’s Aphrodite at her sanctuary, if we could. Who doubts that a gulf separates the ancients’ world from ours? Lamenting this is like lamenting that we haven’t wings. Even Roman spectators were unable to experience Classical art for its original religious force. For an artwork to mean differently over time is not a tragedy.

Our focus on perception is as far from watery subjectivity as it gets. Robust formal knowledge is what allows us to see. Take the unrivaled naturalisms of Myron and Bernini, how they differ. With the Borghese nudes, the Baroque artist gifts us human bodies of such gorgeous and shocking realism, emotions real as our own, marble soft as flesh, we forget all storytelling and we witness. The Athenian, living two millennia earlier, with his Discobolus captured a moment of such unspoiled potential, all torsion and intent, it’s a wonder the sculpture never inspired a poem by Keats. Myron’s idealist nude, whose muscles do not strain as a real discus thrower’s would, is a portrait of human honor and self-command, the stuff civilizations are made of.

Paint is what paintings are made of, and attentiveness to an artwork’s materiality is most of the work of looking. There’s no separating an artist’s treatment of a figure from their treatment of paint. For a century and a half, France alone gave us experts on the nude—Corot, Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Bonnard, Matisse—who used light and color and brushstrokes to the most divergent effects.

For all that we use the term naturalism, history’s great artists never claimed to represent the body in its natural state. The artistic drive is borne of the instinct, too strong to be articulated, that nature’s provisions are inadequate, they do not satisfy. Birdsong is not music enough. We believe in artists themselves as the great believers. Made things can communicate what would otherwise go unknown, unfelt, unexpressed: Every great artwork is a manifestation of this instinct, this certainty. Art is not a bundle of questions but the hard record of an answer. A nude study by Raphael, with its simple clean outlines, its red-chalk shading as soft as caresses, is a manifest certainty.

In the middle of 1508, having heard of the young painter’s accomplishments in the north, at Perugia and Florence, Pope Julius II summoned Raphael to Rome. The artist was then twenty-five and would take on as his first solo commission the decoration of a state room in the Vatican’s new papal apartments. That room, the Stanza della Segnatura, served both as the meeting place for the papal court’s high tribunal and as the pope’s personal library. Over three years, Raphael painted its walls and ceiling in fitting with the Stanza’s private function.

The School of Athens fresco, covering one wall, is known to us from innumerable book covers and website banners, and for its portrayals of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and Raphael himself. The painting represents philosophy (including science) as one of the four major realms into which man’s wisdom could be divided—that is, the four principal subjects of Pope Julius’s book collection. Theology, jurisprudence, and poetry are each represented on the other three walls. In the Parnassus fresco, the god Apollo, playing music, is surrounded by the nine Muses along with poets from the present and past, including Dante, Sappho, and Homer.

Even here, at the seat of the Catholic Church, the spheres of philosophy, law, and the arts are not subordinated to religion but treated as complementary, distinct. In our own time, the subordination of art to discourse, the endless talk of sociologists and theorists, is no longer abided. We give our attention to the art.

Subscribe now

This month, Cluny Journal is publishing a series of old and new works by academics, poets, technologists, and more, on the theme of “Preservation, Innovation and the Formation of Culture.” This is the first in the series.

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

δ δε νους ισως Θειοτερον τι και απαθες εστιν

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

Subscribe now

The first major task you undertake in Indika—a third-person, puzzle-based, narrative video game—is to tediously fill a water basin from a well, bucket by bucket. Walk over, lower the bucket, raise the bucket, walk to the basin, pour the water out, repeat. The story then follows a young nun living in a snowy monastery in a remote, fantastical version of late 19th-century Russia. The titular heroine is either possessed by the devil or mentally ill—plagued by persistent intrusive thoughts that alarm the other sisters, who all come to see her as cursed, and despise her.

After being sent from the monastery to deliver a letter in a nearby town, Indika encounters Ilya, an escaped convict who is on his way to find the “kudets,” a holy artifact, believing that God told him to find this relic in order to heal his severely wounded, gangrenous arm. On their travels, Indika eventually reads the letter she was sent to deliver, which turns out to be her expulsion from the monastery. The two become friends and make their way across Russia in search of the holy artifact, discussing existential questions—Indika ironically playing the perpetual voice of doubt against the hardened criminal’s firm religious beliefs.

Indika captures something about the bizarrely commensurate relationship between video games and theology. Both ultimately concern the relationship between “true” and illusory realities, and their creators. In ludology—game studies—the created world is often referred to as “the magic circle,” a space delimited for a game which operates in accordance with its own set of rules and values. As a rebellious child of the Catholic school system, this is more or less how I understood religion to operate—with the exception that it laid claim over the totality of space for the entirety of our lives, and an eternity beyond them.

Game worlds are products of intelligent design, and thus serve as a natural analog to Christianity. This parity is more evident in video games than in other artistic mediums, as participants in these virtual worlds inhabit them in a way far closer to our lived realities. Although games are curated experiences, a player generally has far more agency in their virtual inhabitation than audiences when they are being jerked around or held in place by a director, author or painter. Choice is at the heart of the ludic experience, as are questions as to whether or not the player’s agency is merely notional. Video games thus invite the same kind of existential questions that have become deeply integrated into the cultural religious experience since modernity. Even as a youth, while ostensibly rejecting religion, I always chose clerics and priests in RPGs. Within these “magic circles,” prayer invoked the direct intercession of divine justice, leaving no room for doubt. Here, God was power, God was vengeance, and I was the ultimate zealot. Only later would I come to understand the critical importance that doubt plays in genuine faith and meaningful agency.

While the history of video games abounds in analogies between the player or developer and God, games are simultaneously the genre which has maintained the furthest distance from any actual religious influence. Religious games have always existed, but they’ve been relegated to a niche experience that the average gamer wouldn’t ordinarily encounter. There are a variety of reasons for this: The early dominance of Japan in the industry; the fact that modern video games didn’t become popular until the 1980s, when secularization was in full swing. But whatever the reason, earnestly religious video games are mostly known in popular culture through derision in meme culture—one unforgettable example being Zoo Race The Game, which asks the daring question: What might it have been like if Noah hosted Mario Kart style animal races with the creatures he collected to repopulate the planet?

This extreme lack of religious sincerity in gaming has also meant a lack of popular interrogations of religious ideas in popular games. The saying goes that all J-RPGs begin with rescuing a cat and end with killing god—but the “god” in question almost always has a distinct sci-fi flair. This is the first refreshing thing about Odd Meter’s Indika: It’s unapologetic efforts to address religious and existential questions of the precise type we tend to find in mature art forms, explored without naivety or ignorance. Odd Meter and its lead designer, Dmitry Svetlov, have undoubtedly accomplished their goal to “show that games are art no worse than Bergman and Tarkovsky."

As a self-critical gamer, sentenced to life exploring this medium, I’ve developed a certain disdain for developers who use their projects as surrogates for films. I’m a rarity among my peers in my contempt for auteur game designer Hideo Kojima’s cut-scene-laden, star-studded, dialogue-heavy “games” and have uttered the phrase “just make a film, bro” more than once. I am so obnoxiously attached to the avant-garde "medium specificity" perspective that, when I am recommended a game, my first question is, “How long before it actually starts?” If the answer is longer than five minutes, I usually pass.

Indika, however, is a rare example that showcases precisely why my prejudice can’t be made into some universal dogmatic philosophy. Indika is as much about video games as it is about God: It is fully aware of the “parity” I spoke of earlier, and explores this allegory from start to finish. Does it do so in favor of presenting an experience sympathetic to Christianity? The answer is a resolute no: This is a profoundly sacrilegious game, that is highly critical of the Russian Orthodox Church I belong to, and organized religion as a whole. However, the sincerity and seriousness with which it treats the topic is something to be celebrated, and the ambiguity with which the game explores religious ideas until its final moments creates ample space for it to offer something original and substantive about the intersection of virtual and spiritual progress.

Aside from its unrelenting and serious examination of theological doubt, Indika is also heavily Dostoevsky-coded in the way it frames these questions in the guise of a popular genre—instead of a detective story, we have all the trappings of an adventure RPG. If we were to limit our analysis solely to Indika’s narrative arc, this is a travel story with elements reminiscent of a hagiographic pilgrimage text with no small dose of skazka, Russia’s idiosyncratic brand of fairytale. On first glance, the Russia the story takes place in looks extremely familiar—one of the game’s strengths is its exemplary graphic fidelity which makes it look better than many AAA titles, despite its indie budget. Having visited many such snowy, isolated monasteries in Russia, the game captures the vibe well. Indika herself looks so good that we easily pass through the uncanny valley and into a perspicacious realism. The life-like characters and landscapes are only then made stranger and stranger as the game progresses and the player begins to notice bizarre abstractions—giant animals, impossible Escheresque architecture, imagined steam-punk technologies—yet all of these are placed in the game world with such quiet assurance that the player experiences cognitive dissonance: Are these things are somehow as normal as the game world insists they are? As the story progresses, however, there are certain moments that totally dispense with any semblance of realism, such as a particular puzzle which requires you to operate a giant crane to move full-sized bridges to complete a pathway.

There is a general rule in game design that you put your best foot forward first: A perfect example is 2024s breakout hit action game Black Myth Wukong, which starts with the player experiencing a taste of the endgame power they have to look forward to—just before it is taken away, forcing the player slowly regain it bit by bit throughout the game. Contrast this with the Sisyphean act of repeatedly filling a bucket with water. Here, in conventional video game style, each rep is rewarded with a giant flashing fraction—“x/5”—to inform you of your progress. There is a giant score meter ever-present in the top left hand corner of the screen like some kind of late-80s arcade game. The juxtaposition between the bleak, lifelike graphics and that glowing green score meter is perpetually uncanny.

In addition to earning points for your in-game activities, Indika also includes an RPG style “leveling” system, where points can be invested into different implicitly Christian values such as shame, grief and piety. However, before the player can get excited about speccing into a grief build, the game makes it clear on a splash screen that both the points and levels are entirely meaningless. When you look at what boons the choices in the leveling tree afford you, they amount to nothing more than a chance to get more points immediately, or to get extra points every time you earn more points in the future… which is difficult to get excited about when you realize that the only thing these points can be used for is to gain more meaningless levels.

The story's extremely bleak climax begins when Indika and Ilya reach the town where the kudets is located. A priest tells the pair that they are too late and will have to try to catch it in the next town, despite the relic being in the next room over, and then attempts to turn them in to the police. A soldier arrives and shoots at Ilya, but hits the priest instead when Indika pushes Ilya out of the way. Ilya escapes with the kudets, and when Indika finds him later, drunken and sullen, he tells her that he pawned the holy relic in exchange for a trumpet he can’t even play.

Indika eventually gets her hands on the relic from the pawnbroker, at which point the player is granted access to its miraculous power: It is hollow inside, but you can shake it for limitless, meaningless points by mashing a button. Ilya’s prayers for his arm to heal go unanswered. The point is clear: The magical mcguffin that inspired this entire adventure is completely useless, and all the energy and effort expended to reach it has been nothing but an exercise in futility.

Too often in video games there is a gap between the narrative and ludic elements—the player is generally either increasing their skill or leveling to improve their power for a cathartic reward, regardless of the storyline. I can think of no other game that ends by telling the player that its systems have no value, intentionally leaving them in a state of confusion and despair. Despite much being left open-ended throughout the game, Indika chooses the Dostoyevskian strategy of ending with a pointed certainty that upends the ambiguity at the center of the experience—but it’s the opposite conclusion of the one notoriously chosen by Dostoevsky at the ending of Crime and Punishment, wherein Raskolnikov comes to God in Siberia and finds peace with himself. Dostoevsky’s choice is still seen in the West as an aesthetic failing that undermines the element of his writing that Western scholars are interested in, i.e. in taking his doubts and questions as ends in themselves, presenting the writer as an atheist, existentialist thinker alongside Camus and Sartre.

Do we then conclude that Indika, while offering some value in the execution and its capacity to ask important questions in an unusually compelling way, ultimately surrenders to the cultural values of its time, and thus should not be considered a “religious” game at all? Svetlov alleges he has received death threats for his heinous depiction of Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the game presents an earnest assessment of the religious doubt invoked by challenging times, one that tells the story of two people who maintain a flame of faith in their own ways, through overwhelming pain and numerous obstacles. The tradition of apophatic theology attempts to understand God through determinate negation, by peeling off the layers of the world and our consciousness one by one, until we find ourselves “in a place of pure darkness, with no light from the burning maps of the world." There is something akin to this in Indika’s exploration of radical doubt.

That said, there is positive content here as well—despite the demons Indika wrestles with throughout her journey, it is impossible not to take note of the care and reverence with which she lights a candle or prays before an icon, even after being defrocked. The game designers' attention to detail and effort also betray a certain respect: Each icon is gorgeously rendered, the spaces where believers once lived are true to life and earnest. Who is to say that people of faith can’t approach a work of art like this one in much the same way the “existentialist” interpreters of Dostoevsky did, rejecting the author’s conclusion while recognizing the truths and value of the work as a whole? In sincerely wrestling with these topics, Indika leaves more room for what it ultimately rejects than almost anything else available to us in the modern video game industry. If video games can be redeemed and made into art, perhaps something could be made of us sinners as well.

Subscribe now

The most important moments of our lives happen in silence: in the development of life inside the womb; on the quiet walks when we have a flash of self-awareness and come to know something essential about ourselves for the first time; at the mysterious moment we fall in love with someone; even in the precious moments before death. These things happen in the space between the noise—in the silence of our own hearts.

Modern society is making it harder to fully experience or appreciate these moments. Almost everything conspires against them. Noise presses in on us from every side. There are strong incentives to become yet another voice, competing for attention.

Times of silence are one of the few remaining ways that we express a widespread, shared experience of sacredness. On the anniversary of September 11, there are sports stadiums packed with 60,000 or more fans that pause to observe a minute of silence broken by the flyover of jets. Numerous heads of state have observed a minute of national silence to honor lives lost during the Covid-19 pandemic. On a recent trip to Gettysburg, my wife told me that after months of studying the battle in her high school history class, she and her classmates took a trip to Gettysburg and walked across the field in silence, reflecting on what they had learned and what had happened there in a less heady and more visceral way. They were some of the most transformational minutes in more than twenty years of formal education.

Silence functions like a universal language. It encourages reflection, and allows information and experiences to sink in. Why, then, do we limit structures of silence to the remembrance of national tragedies? They should be built into the fabric of our institutions, our cities, our culture.

Most people in modern economies admit to being overwhelmed with content. But they are still consuming more of it. Content producers, from influencers to streaming services, are making money by satiating the growing demand for more. We are in a non-stop and endless feedback of content, and we have no hope of real progress unless we find a way to step outside of it.

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.” This has been detrimental to civil discourse. When information consumes our attention, we lose sight of the real people behind it. We lose sight of humanity.

The answer to the flood of content is, for many, to make more content. This is often done with the best of intentions. Because so much of existing content is low-quality or superficial, they reason, there is a need for something different, something better—and thus creating new content will be a positive contribution. But they are fighting fire with fire.

It’s tempting. There is a natural desire to make our voice heard in the cacophony. When confronted with loud voices, discord, and disagreement, the reflexive (and mimetic) response is simply to get louder. To say more, and to say it more forcefully. To do more, and to do it faster. To add rather than to subtract.

The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” That means, in part, that the vehicle through which content is received determines how it is perceived and the way in which a person engages with it.

Anyone who has witnessed two or more people on Twitter debate such weighty topics as, say, God, knows how quickly the words and the conversation seem to lose contact with the object of discussion. The big questions simply don’t lend themselves to the medium. Social media is designed to cycle through content rather than encouraging people to sit with it, to understand it at a deeper level. New content is the fuel on which these platforms run.

Instead of focusing on new content, we should focus on new forms. The most important question to ask is: what are the new forms out of which better content, qualitatively different, might emerge?

I believe the best way to do that in the coming years will be creating new spaces where people can come together with none of the social anxiety associated with typical conferences and events saturated with content. We can find ways to make contemplative, re-creative experiences both attractive and accessible to more people.

These experiences have not been tried and found wanting; they have simply never been tried by the vast majority of people. But those who have been fortunate enough to participate in a well-run contemplative retreat often describe it as a life-changing experience.

I believe that we can build something that offers people a chance to participate in these new types of experiences, punctuated by silence and other opportunities for reflection. And they must be offered—because they no longer emerge naturally in the world that we live in. In other words, people don’t naturally fall into them or opt-in to them. They cannot. But if they are offered at scale, there is the potential for widespread and profound cultural change.

This practice will require, but also cultivate, intellectual humility.

“I have discovered that all of the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” wrote Blaise Pascal in his 1654 work, Pensées. The ability to sit silently in a room is the mark of a healthy person. But one recent study showed that people would rather be electrically shocked than sit alone with their thoughts for as little as six to fifteen minutes. There is a pandemic of noise that is causing us to lose our faculties of reflection. It is reflection, not experiences, that lead to learning.

Can intellectual humility be cultivated? I believe so. Intellectual humility recognizes the limits of one’s intellect, how easily it errs, and the sheer number of things that we do not yet know. But intellectual humility is also the acceptance that we often need more time to digest and understand something—even of our own experiences in life—before moving to the next thing. And one way to learn this lesson is having to sit with something, including yourself, for more than fifteen minutes at a time. If people aren’t given a space in which to do that, it may never happen.

I am not sure if Pascal’s statement is true—at least, I am not convinced that all of humanity’s problems stem from this inability—but I do know that at least some of my own problems have been recognized and ultimately addressed because I have been able to go on an annual silent retreat for most of the past twelve years. I only attended the first because I was encouraged to by a wise mentor. That experience was planned and made frictionless for me; it was not something I would have chosen on my own. And yet this practice has changed my life.

We can change the culture not by saying more, but by creating better spaces of encounter.

Subscribe now

***

This past weekend, Cluny Institute hosted its first silent evening at Earth in Manhattan. Sign up at www.cluny.org to stay updated about future events.

A version of this essay was originally published by Templeton Ideas.

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humor. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found—that on which we were born.

But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)—we do actually treat talking in children as marvelous, walking in children as marvelous, common intelligence in children as marvelous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter—that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.

We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvelous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would “understand when they were older,” we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humor that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

*Reprinted from The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton (1901)

Subscribe now

Near the beginning of the film Amadeus, the reigning court composer of Vienna, Antonio Salieri, wanders through a palace trying to guess which of the guests at a lavish party is Wolfgang Mozart, once a famous child prodigy but now a young man acclaimed for his genius as a composer. Salieri, who has risen from humble origins to his position of eminence through sheer hard work, is a deeply devout man, having vowed that he would offer his life and music to God if only God would grant him artistic genius. Momentarily distracted from his search by a passing tray of pastries, Salieri enters an empty room. Suddenly a woman bursts into the room, hotly pursued by a man who proceeds to chase her under a table. The man’s silly giggles and goosings are cut short when he hears a chamber orchestra begin a piece of surpassing beauty. “My music!” he exclaims, and tears out of the room to take up the conductor’s baton.

Salieri is stunned. How is it possible that such an undignified, scandalous youth could be the creator of music as noble and elevated as that which is echoing through the palace? In a moment, Salieri’s world is undone: instead of rewarding piety and unremitting labor, God has seen fit to grant a callow brat a share of divine power. 

Even if we acknowledge that Sir Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus involves a considerable amount of artistic license in embellishing and distorting the historical facts, the dramatic premise of the film (adapted from Shaffer’s stage play) somehow rings true. Creative genius often seems to be ladled out to those who are manifestly unworthy of it. Indeed, artistic genius has been so frequently bound up with vanity, neurosis, lust, and the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins that it might be considered more of a curse than a blessing. The literature of the West is replete with stories of geniuses whose hubris brings about tragic consequences, from Oedipus Rex to Doctor Faustus to Frankenstein and beyond. Whether in art, science, or politics, creative genius is a form of power, and power, as we all know, corrupts.

As these examples attest, the same capacity we speak of as creativity can also bring about destruction—of personal relationships, social order, and even of human life on a mass scale. We live in a time when human ingenuity has added a series of apocalyptic scenarios to our imaginations. Biological, chemical, and electronic terrors now compete with nuclear weapons in our collective nightmares.

The Poisoner and his Prose

So in what sense might we say that creativity is a virtue? Oscar Wilde, a creative individual if there ever was one, and an artist with his own share of problems, framed the question with his usual wit. “The fact of a man’s being a poisoner,” he once said, “is nothing against his prose.”

If Wilde strikes you as suspect in voicing this opinion, given his own notorious troubles, how about those two paragons of reason and rectitude—Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas? They provide a philosophical basis for Wilde’s position by distinguishing between two different types of human action: making and doing. Doing involves human choices, the way we exercise our free will. In the realm of doing—or Prudence, as it has been called—the goal is the perfection of the doer. In other words, in our behavior we are seeking to perfect ourselves as moral agents. 

But in making—or Art, if you will—the end is not the perfection of the artist as a person but the good of the made thing. The moment that art is made subservient to some ethical or political purpose, it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda. Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects. Thus our poisoner with his exquisite prose style. Or Picasso brutalizing the women in his life. Or the legion of artists and scientists who drank or drugged themselves to death.

Of course, many people have condoned—or at least downplayed—the anarchic and damaging behavior of the creative mastermind. One of the enduring legacies of the Romantic era is the cult of genius, which pits the heroic artist, attuned to Nature, against the moral norms of Society, which are seen as artificial and restrictive. A professor of mine once pointed out the enormous cultural divide separating a composer like Franz Josef Haydn, who (like Mozart) worked for a patron and saw himself essentially as a craftsman, and Ludwig von Beethoven, who was the independent genius par excellence, the formidable titan with the knitted brow, prepared to bring everyone around him into thrall. The lives of Haydn and Beethoven overlapped for nearly forty years, but the cultural sea-change that took place in those two generations was epochal.

It would be wrong, I think, to blame the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of art as tending toward the perfection of the made object for the rise of the Romantic cult of the genius. For one thing, those philosophers were anything but antinomian in their thought; the artist was still subject to the laws of Prudence. Moreover, these thinkers had a broad definition of art, one that did not elevate the genius above the common man—the cobbler and the composer were, in a sense, on the same plane—a fact still alive in Haydn’s self-understanding. 

The ultimate extension of Romantic ideas about the artist can be found in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom the genius was the superman, beyond good and evil. In the composer Richard Wagner, Nietzsche thought he had found an artistic avatar. Wagner’s epic operas, with their sense of the ending of the old order of gods, to be followed by a new era of human emancipation, seemed to embody Nietzsche’s belief in the superman. But when Wagner composed Parsifal, based on the mythology of the Holy Grail, rooted in Christian metaphors, Nietzsche abandoned Wagner, accusing him of “falling at the foot of the cross.”

There have been plenty of other creative individuals in the modern era who were quite content to consider themselves beyond good and evil, and their antics have done much to turn vast segments of the population against the arts. 

An Invitation to Virtue

So where does this leave us? If creativity seems unequally distributed, can bring about destruction, does not intrinsically aid in the moral perfection of the creative individual, and has been tainted by the Romantic cult of the genius, the case for calling it a virtue would seem to be a lost cause. 

And yet there is something in most of us that accords a high measure of dignity and worth to the creative impulse. Nearly all the world’s religions are grounded in a creation story, one that also ennobles human beings as agents who continue the divine act of creation through their own actions, each of which partakes in some measure of the supernatural powers of the creator. 

On a personal level, we witness and are enriched by the grandeur of creativity when we see it in art or engineering or statecraft. We sense that creativity lies at the heart of what makes us human, and that without it, our lives would be spiritually and materially impoverished.

I would argue that the truest, most unsentimental thing we can say about creativity is that it is a constant invitation to virtue, that if we step back and look for the deeper meanings of the creative urge, and the lessons of the creative process, we will discover myriad opportunities to develop our inner lives, whether we are makers ourselves or are simply responding to the creativity of others. In what follows, I will draw primarily from the realm I know most about, literature. But one could just as easily search for analogies in almost any area of human endeavor.

Flannery O’Connor and the Habitus of Art

In 1950, at the age of twenty-six, Flannery O’Connor was on a roll. She had left her childhood home of Milledgeville, Georgia, behind, along with her unimaginative and sometimes overbearing mother, Regina, and was living in Connecticut with a young literary couple, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. O’Connor had already received a degree from the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a literary prize that gave a New York publisher an option on her first novel. A residency at Yaddo, an invitation-only artists’ colony, had introduced her to such literary stars as the poet Robert Lowell and the critic Alfred Kazin. She had been to dinner parties with Mary McCarthy and her circle of New York intellectuals. 

As a Southerner and a Catholic, O’Connor had many reasons to feel an almost adversarial relationship to New York as a citadel of American cultural elite. But she was there to take it on, headfirst. She was feeling her oats.

Then, at Christmas, she developed the first symptoms of lupus, the disease that had taken the life of her father when she was just fifteen. Her father had lived for only three years after the onset of symptoms, and so O’Connor assumed that she would have only that amount of time left. Aware that she would become debilitated and could not ask the Fitzgeralds, with their growing family, to care for her, O’Connor made the only decision she could: she packed her bags and returned home to the family farm, Andalusia, and her sometimes querulous mother.

The defeat could not have been more total. Living with her mother and a family of ducks on the farm, she was cut off from any intellectual or cultural stimulus, confined to letter-writing for contact with the outside world. Her fiction, which employed violence and the grotesque, horrified her mother. “Why can’t you write something uplifting,” Regina would say, “like the folks at Readers Digest?” As O’Connor confided in a letter to a friend: “This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Despite the pain and enervation of lupus, and the daily domestic frustrations, O’Connor did not collapse into self-pity and paralysis. A self-described “hillbilly Thomist,” she embraced the Aristotelian-Thomist view of art, especially as she found it described by one of her contemporaries, the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his Art and Scholasticism. She was grateful to Maritain for making the distinction between Art and Prudence, because she believed that a Christian writer’s “moral sense” and “dramatic sense” ought to coincide with one another. For O’Connor, as for several other important modern Christian writers, including T. S. Eliot and David Jones, Maritain provided a sort of liberation: he helped explain why a religious writer ought to resist the temptation to turn their work into didactic or propagandistic art.

But she also noted Maritain’s argument that art did involve what the ancient philosophers called habitus, or the virtue of artistic craft and discipline. Every day she sat down at her typewriter for a minimum of two to three hours, however wretched she may have been feeling, physically or emotionally. She was tart and unsentimental about the creative process, belonging to the school of artists who believe that inspiration can only be found by sitting down at 9:00 am each day and meeting it halfway. At public lectures, she was often asked why she wrote. “Because I’m good at it,” she invariably replied. And if some in the audience were offended by this remark, others recognized that she was simply being true to her Thomistic understanding of art.

However, for O’Connor writing fiction involved more than the virtue, or habit, of disciplined effort. She believed that creating a convincing, enduring world in a story required the author to achieve a difficult balance: between judgment and mercy, reason and mystery, nature and grace. She saw the model of perfect balance in the Incarnation of Christ, who was both human and divine, infinitely holy and yet infinitely merciful. She would have agreed with J. R. R. Tolkien that the artist (or creative person in general) engages in an act of “subcreation”—not creating out of nothing, as God does, but creating a microcosm in a manner analgous to that of the Creator. 

Good storytelling, she held, was grounded in metaphysical concerns. The creative writer tells us about lives where something ultimate is at stake. “Where there is no belief in the soul” and its need of salvation, she once wrote, “there is very little drama.” 

A Trinitarian View of Creativity

O’Connor’s theology of the imagination was close in spirit to that of another twentieth-century Christian writer, Dorothy Sayers. Like O’Connor, Sayers was tough, choosing Dante and Aquinas as her heroes, rather than the Romantics. Though she is known primarily for her mystery novels, Sayers was an enormously gifted thinker; she was a playwright, a translator of Dante, and something of a theologian. In The Mind of the Maker, one of her most profound works, Sayers contends that the creative process in art-making is analogous to the Christian theology of the Trinity—and that the activity illuminates the other. She first made the point at the end of her play The Zeal of Thy House, in which one character says:

“For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other; and this is the image of the Trinity.”

Or, to put it more succinctly, there is the mind of the author, the act of writing, and the experience of reading and comprehending the story.

All this might seem a bit schematic, but Sayers draws out the implications in a variety of arresting ways. The artist makes things out of love, she says, but this does imply some sort of jealous possession or domination over the work. Rather, the “artist never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative she is, the more she will want her work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.” For a writer this means giving the characters in the story free will, seeking their good rather than her own. It also means that as readers we can come to know, in some measure, the mind of the Maker.

The imagination works through empathy, which requires the artist to place herself in the experience of an other—and thus lose herself. While the death of the self may appear to be a loss of control and individuality, the paradox of artistic creativity is that only through this openness to the good of the story and the characters who inhabit it can the maker discover meaning and order.

Flannery O’Connor understood this. Though she has sometimes been caricatured as a testy spinster and a hyper-controlling artist with a rather narrow emotional range, anyone who reads her letters, collected in The Habit of Being, will see that this is a misreading of her life and work. She was funny, generous, intensely loyal to her friends, and able to see her own foibles and temptations. She frequently turned that unflinching gaze of hers upon herself.

Parables of Pride and Grace

More often that not, the characters in her stories who are the most obtuse, the most prideful, are the isolated, would-be intellectuals who believe their genius puts them beyond good and evil. Take the character of Julian, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Forced to accompany his tiresome mother, a woman obsessed by distinctions of race and class and sporting an absurdly inflated aristocratic sensibility, Julian believes that his cynical, disillusioned mind can see through everything—until he suddenly experiences loss. 

Or what about Joy in “Good Country People”? Stuck in a rural home with a narrow-minded, pragmatic mother, Joy decides to withdraw into her own arcane studies (which sound a lot like deconstruction theory) taking the harsh name of “Hulga” to complete her self-reinvention. When a seemingly naïve and gawky young man comes to her door with Bibles for sale, she thinks she can see through him. But she has another thing coming, something that strikes down her pride. Did the writer, who chose to go by her unusual middle name rather than her somewhat plain given name, Mary, see something of herself in the lonely, angry Hulga? 

O’Connor’s tales are parables of human pride being confronted by the shock of divine grace—the violence in her story is caused not by God but by the stubbornness of our human attempt to live as autonomous agents. By the same token, the grotesque in her fiction is not an unhealthy obsession with deformity but a metaphor for what we make of ourselves, the distortion that takes place when creatures attempt to think of themselves as gods, as creators of their own world. In the moment of violence that often concludes her stories God’s judgment and His mercy are one and the same. That is why the endings of her stories are open-ended: we don’t know whether the protagonists will choose the virtuous path or not. Which throws the question back at us, her readers. What would we do?

In one sense, O’Connor’s creative writing gave her the opportunity to learn and relearn the virtues of self-knowledge and humility: by seeing her own sinfulness in some of her characters she recognized her own need for mercy. But O’Connor did not believe that art is merely self-expression—another problematic legacy of the Romantic era. Rather, she saw herself as a “Christian realist,” and believed that art had to do justice to the world beyond the self. In one her letters, O’Connor writes: “Maritain says that to produce a work of art requires the ‘constant attention of the purified mind,’ and the business of purified mind in this case is to see that those elements of the personality that don’t bear on the subject at hand are excluded. Stories don’t lie when left to themselves. Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.”

Since O’Connor’s untimely death in 1964 at the age of 39, one of the dominant strains in Western thought has held that traditional ideas about the creative individual are false. A host of postmodern thinkers have asserted that the very notion of creativity is an illusion. Meaning, they say, is “constructed,” not by an individual who has developed the habitus of art, but by other forces: the “selfish gene,” or the unconscious, or the economic means of production. Postmodern artists and critics have spoken of the exhaustion of art; awash in the fragments of past cultures, eclectic “quotation” of older artistic works supplants the drive to synthesize the achievements of the past into something fresh and new. 

It is no accident that this worldview has no time for the Judeo-Christian understanding of art as subcreation, something analogous to God’s creative fiat. The postmodernists reject Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of the imagination as the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Like Hulga, these intellectuals think they can see through everything, but they do so at the expense of their own humanity.

The undermining of traditional Western ideas about creativity has brought about a deep cultural impoverishment. Creativity may be only an invitation to virtue—an invitation that is not always accepted—but it exists only in individual souls, souls that must struggle to observe the world, empathize with its inhabitants, and shape an artifact into a form that communicates meaning to others.

Subscribe now

*Order Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age here.