American Hero: Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

American Hero:

Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

America is a remarkable place; this nearly everyone seems to agree on, including Americans. 

One of the magical things about the present moment is the ability one has to instantly reach out across the earth, and see videos of nearly every kind of people under the sun. Not merely manufactured Hollywood versions, not merely posed photographs for adventurers or anthropologists, but the real thing: Amazonian tribespeople, Bedouin herdsmen, Papa New Guineans, Zulus, merely living their lives, wearing their clothes, cooking their food, doing their dances, every exotic sight that Europeans once colonized and conquered and killed to be able to see and gawk at and exhibit and anthropologically analyze. And in every such authentic, native sight, one can see these people holding smart phones.

The implications of this are vast, and in a sense unimaginable. There has never before been a cultural phenomenon quite like this, of so many peoples and languages and religious and anthropological ways of life brought into contact through a highly particular linguistic and cultural and economic and technological matrix. 

This has effects everywhere: and in the last century produced at times a very potent kind of existential terror throughout the world. In the nightmare visions of Jean Baudrillard, a deeply French and European thinker if ever there was one, the European dream of liberation was achieving its end in total, eternal hegemony: the creation of an infinite space of interchangeable symbols, where all particularity and singularity would be overcome by uniformity and exchange, all meaning and value negated in their own sign. We would no longer be Frenchmen or Arabs or Bantu or Mongos: we would no longer even be human beings, individuals, persons: our dreams and desires, lives and deaths, would simply be simulations.

Baudrillard's vision found its complement--as he himself occasionally acknowledged--in the spontaneous backlash to "Americanization" in the rest of the world: a backlash emerging from nearly every angle, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, Leftist, reactionary, religious-conservative and indigenous-cultural and nationalist movement, every ideological or economic or cultural movement of any kind, anywhere in the world. When Pope Francis spoke of the dangers of "ideological colonization," he was referencing a tradition more than a century old, one that had born fruit around the world, both within and outside the Catholic Church: and in his Magisterial social teachings, he gave this tradition perhaps its most eloquent form to date.

Yet, in the year 2025, it is hard not to feel that something has changed, something so fundamental that it threatens to render this entire century or more of discourses simply obsolete. This change is, depending on how one sees it, either the final triumph of this tradition, or its total annihilation, or its transformation into something different still, and perhaps less strange.

Since I first travelled to Europe at the age of 11 and encountered Frenchmen eating McDonalds and arguing about George W. Bush, I have been pondering this mystery, day by day and hour by hour, thinking about it, in one form or other, in nearly every waking moment, even dreaming about at night. What I encountered in France was not just France, but America: but an America even stranger to me than anything foreign could ever be. 

This was not the America of the places where I grew up, the overshadowed valleys of Birmingham, AL, not the America where my mother grew up, the intensively settled, social and familial world of the Appalachian hills and farms of Eastern Ohio, not the America of my Jewish relatives in New York or Florida or Ohio, no America that I ever found at anytime in any place, but the thing that somehow unimaginably ruled them all, that even Americans, I suddenly realized, related to as something distant, something foreign, emerging not from their hearts or souls or lives, but from somewhere infinitely far away, a placeless place, a desert.

And in that time, I have gone back and forth, many times, between rival images of what I was seeing, rival images of just what this infinitely foreign America truly was. 

The most obvious answer to the riddle is merely that America is an Empire: the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. This Empire, like all great Empires, was not merely the rule of a certain kind of settled people over another, but of an essentially manufactured breed, a homo imperialis, moving among over all peoples, including my own, with the self-assurance and strangeness of shepherds among sheep. It was not that the farmers of Coshocton, OH were ruling over the herders of Afghanistan and the townsmen of Strasbourg: there was a certain kind of people ruling over all of us, who in all of our native places had come and established their military bases and depots and arrayed their tools and entertainments. 

Wandering France in trains, and finding everywhere intensively social, intensively political, intensively French people full of outrage and discourses and opinions about the American President, the first impulse of most Americans, I think, is merely confusion. It is only when I realized that he was their President too that the picture started to come into focus. 

Still, this Empire was in a genuine sense American: and as an American, I was in some ways a beneficiary of the overwhelming, iconic power of its culture, its entertainments, its projected image of itself. Resources were taken from the ancient, settled peoples and transferred to places closer to me: to the towers and shopping malls and Internet hubs I could see emerging all around me, as if pulled out of the aether. The homo imperialis overseeing all this was a manufactured breed, true, but he was made mostly from people like me, or at least sorts of people familiar to me, so that in a sense I could understand it better than most, was closer to its cultural nexus, than a Frenchman or an Indian or an Indonesian. 

Everywhere I have been in the world, I have been mistaken for this kind of person, or at least compared to it. A beautiful Italian woman told me, with delight, that I looked like an American: a Romanian man told me, with an odd disappointment, that I did not. I have been in American-themed restaurants in Greece and Italy, with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and scrawled English text on the walls, and in them eaten food that in no way resembled American food, but was in a sense trying to resemble it.

In a sense, this is nothing new. There is always a glamor and attraction and in the proper sense charisma to Imperial power to the people ruled over it: there is always a drive to adopt the language and culture and way of life that has in some mysterious sense enabled one people to rule over another. 

It is too often forgotten today, in a very different climate, that at its height, the American Empire had not only a breed of bureaucrats, not only an exported culture, but a certain, highly potent political legitimacy. Frenchmen denouncing George W. Bush still praised America's salvation of France in WW2, still instinctively related the French Revolution to the American Revolution, saw our President as their own not merely in power, but via some genuine political relationship.

It is hard, today, to convey precisely the sense of outrage that greeted American denunciations of French perfidy over the Iraq War: the sense, not at all of America as a hated foreign power, but as a betraying friend, almost an unfair parent. What struck me even at the time was the overwhelming gap between the reality of this outrage and the way in which it had been described to me via mass media while in America. There was nothing at all in it of the sneering disdain that all Europeans, in American art, are supposed to show for the simple and sturdy pioneers. It was in truth the exact opposite: an outrage of admiration, the disappointed anger of someone finding their moral exemplar going on the spree, going off the rails, betraying not just your principles but their own. 

Most puzzling of all was the sense of betrayal, betrayal of a relationship that I had never known or imagined we had with anyone else. This was not the annoyed regard of a servant or distant cousin, but the outraged feelings of an abandoned spouse, complaining not that we were imposing on them but that we were disavowing them, renouncing them, refusing to recognize just how much the French were truly bound to us, how much their own actions and reactions were for our own benefit, how much they belonged to us, how deeply and completely they loved us. 

I can still remember an older Frenchmen, born and raised in WW2, weeping with emotion as he told us that, while Americans might think that the French had forgotten how we had saved them from the Nazis, how they might think they were being ungrateful in not supporting the Iraq war, the French had not forgotten, would never forget, would never cease remembering their debt to us, their friendship with us.

I wonder at what stage the truth dawned on that man that it was we who had forgotten; or rather, who had never remembered. I wonder at what stage the rest of the world realized how little they truly meant to us.

And yet...I feel, deep in my bones, that this picture has changed since I first went to Europe: that everything has changed. A strange coldness has settled over the eyes of Europeans when they contemplate America. Their feelings are no longer the feelings of an abandoned spouse, a betrayed friend, but something far more distant. When they look at the American President, they no longer feel he is their own. 

This is not merely, or primarily, a cultural change. With the rise of the Internet, the rest of the world has in a sense grown far closer to America and Americans; the average person in France or Thaliand has seen far more American films, American videos, heard more American jokes, watched more American porn, engaged far more directly with American politicians, and argued with far more Americans on Twitter, than ever before, including in 2003.

Yet I cannot help feeling that the gig is up, that the trick has been seen through: that they have realized, one and all, not only that American President never cared about them, that American politics and culture were never really their own, but that Americans were never really worthy of their admiration at all. In the age of the Internet, American cultural and political power has merely become a technique, a technology: one eagerly adopted by ordinary people and elites the world over. They have seen through the magic trick, in the way that all children inevitably do when they realize they can do it just as easily themselves.

In truth, I think there was always both more and less to American power than it seemed at its height. In the year 2025, America is in a sense more powerful than ever. Peoples the world over, even more than in 2003, want America to be powerful, want the American President to tell them what to do, to negotiate their treaties for them, to make their trade deals for them, to make movies for them, to run the Internet for them, to manage the global market for them, to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken to them. Yet there is a cynicism to it all that to me is somehow more shocking. The glamor is gone: the admiration is gone: the legitimacy is gone: the love is gone. 

What is true in 2025 of most of the world looking at America is something much harsher than any hatred or disdain: that the world simply does not see an alternative to America.

When I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world possessing and using American commodities to speak to each other and buy and sell and entertain themselves--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the American language as a means of trade and diplomacy across ethnic and national divides--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the techniques of American politics and culture and business and social media and military technology to rule over their populations--a strange, creeping feeling comes over me, and the image shifts, and the angle changes almost imperceptibly, and I no longer see America at all. I forget that there ever was such a thing as America: and I begin to think that they have forgotten too.

What is true for the rest of the world is true, to a much greater degree, for Americans themselves--that strange, perpetually shifting melange of peoples out of which the homo imperialis has been manufactured. 

Whatever American power means for the rest of the world, for Americans the question of what America means is neither economic nor political, but existential. 

But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.

In 2025, the question of what America is for the rest of the world is intimately bound up with the question of what America is for Americans, what it is in itself and for itself. Indeed, I think that in the deepest sense the latter question is dependent on the former: what America is in the future depends more on what the rest of the world makes of America than what America makes of itself.

It is the belief of Europeans, of Chinese, of Mexicans, of Bedouin and Vietnamese and Iranians and Nigerians in America that has sustained and fed Americans' faith in themselves throughout history: and never more than now. That faith has been lost again and again throughout American history; and in the year 2025 exists perhaps less than ever before. And in a way nearly unique among historical cultures, America without faith in itself simply cannot endure.

Aristotle was a very smart man, and like all very smart men said a lot of incredibly stupid things: but the smartest thing he ever said is the one most objected to by most moderns, namely that the telos, the purpose, the intention, the end, the goal, the final cause, is always and everywhere and for everything the cause of causes, the preeminent thing that makes a thing what it is. This is really, even profoundly true: and never truer than about societies and cultures and cities and nations and Empires. What defines a people is what it is aiming at. 

For Aristotle, a state's purpose is supposed to be simple one: the self-sufficient prosperity and health and virtue and happiness of its people. In this sense, America is not, and never has been, a state. Like a few other great Empires throughout history, it has always aimed at something quite different, more tenuous, but infinitely more exciting: an ideal, an image, a way of being. 

Chesterton said that America was a nation with the soul of a Church: which raises the question of just who, exactly, this Church is supposed to be worshipping. American intellectuals right and left have for the last sixty years or so said that America was a proposition nation, defined by assent to certain ideas, certain beliefs: but they have rarely agreed on just what those beliefs are.

I have come to believe something rather particular. I agree that America as a political and cultural project has always been held together by a goal, an ideal, a belief: but I do not think it has for centuries really been a belief in liberalism, or human equality, or even utopian social organization. 

Hence the thesis of this essay: that America, at least since the 19th century, has been most bound together by a religion: and that religion is a cult of heroes.

I really think that if one were to really understand the image of the American Hero, one could deduce, as if by magic, nearly everything that makes America as a project unique and powerful in history--even deduce, to a degree, its likely fate. And that is the goal of this essay.

The Hero as Hero: The Iliad

If one wants to know what the rest of the world will ultimately make of America, what history itself will ultimately make of America, one the most important things to do is to look at American art: for it is American art, more than anything else, that has defined the image of the American for the rest of the world.

Americans as individual people run the gamut of personality types and cultures and religions and ideologies as much, or rather far more, than the rest of humanity--for the political America, the America of history, has always been more a union of different types, a alliance of different entities ruled by a common bureaucratic structure and type or person, than a single political or cultural thing. America has always been both something much more and much less than a nation in the European sense.

Nevertheless, in American art, and therefore in the psyche of humanity affected by that art, the American has been as singular an entity as anything in all of history: and it is this paradoxical clash between political and cultural diversity and mythic uniformity, more than anything else, that has made America what it is in history. While Americans are many, the American is one: or more precisely the American Hero is one.

Hero is a difficult term. In Greek society, where it originated, a hero was defined by an odd dual existence: a hero was most essentially a cultic entity, whose worship took two contrasting forms: a living man sung about in myths and epics, and a dead man propitiated at a tomb. 

This alive/dead, tomb/story dichotomy defines a hero in opposition to a god, who is a much simpler and more univocal thing, a definitionally immortal entity worshipped via natural and artistic manifestations. Gods are hoi athanatoi, the deathless ones: they are defined, confusingly, by a privation of a privation, a constitutional inability to cease to exist. Like their nature, their presence is both fluid and constrained: they are in images and enduring natural realities, statues and paintings and invocations and hymns and lightning and thunder and sheaves of grain. They can be, in principle, anywhere, though not all the time. They are not human, not really, but they are recognizably like us: they have names and powers and wills and intentions. Most fundamentally of all, they, like us, live in a society, a political union, a kingdom: one that does not include us. They are alive. 

Heroes are not like this. Their presence is not fluid, but fixed: they are in their dead bodies, in their tombs, and nowhere else. They do not really have free-standing purposes or intentions: they act in their place and in their role, cursing, blessing, or taking vengeance according to that limited purview, and always in response to living, human action and intention. They wield power, but only in response to living human beings, only near the places where their bodies lie.

This is the essential problem of the hero: that there are no natural features of the world, no enduring realities of grain or sky or sex or thunder, to maintain their selves: they are dependent on us, the living, to maintain their tombs, to offer them sacrifices, to give them living people to curse and bless and living intentions to fulfill, and most of all to keep telling the stories about them, day after day, year after year. Without those stories, their names would be forgotten, and their tombs would crumble, and they would cease to be.

When Odysseus descends to the underworld to meet the souls of the heroes, his former friends, he finds them gibbering like bats, irrational and purposeless, until he slits the throats of living animals and offers them blood--which is to say, precisely and ritually the animals' life. It is only by this borrowed life that the heroes gain some measure of memory and intelligence and personal existence--but even so, only just enough and for long enough to respond to his request. This cultic exchange is the essence of the hero as such: the living offer the dead temporary, borrowed life so that they may do our will.

The dead, though, do not always do it--sometimes, when returned briefly to a garbled remnant of their memory and identity and self, they try to act out, not our intentions, but their own. Sometimes, they are stirred, like Achilles, to wrath. 

In a story from Herodotus made famous (in a highly garbled form) in the terrible Zach Snyder film 300, the Spartans throw Persian messengers in a well in response to their demands for earth and water (the symbols of territorial submission). In 300, this is a crowd-pleasing, indelibly American moment, a political rejection of tyranny via murderous violence towards unarmed civilians--in Herodotus, though, it is something very different: the summoning of the dead. 

Talthybius, the herald of Agamemnon, has his tomb and shrine in Sparta: and by casting the bodies of the heralds into the depths of the earth, the realm of the dead, the Spartans have awakened him. Fed, perhaps, with blood from the heralds' bodies, and filled with furious rage at the Spartans' violation of the indelible sanctity of his profession, he takes his vengeance. Desperate to placate him, the Spartans offer to let Xerxes kill their own heralds in repayment for the lives of his: and Xerxes refuses. In the end, it is the children of the Spartan heralds who suffer bloody deaths, the result, Herodotus tells us, of Talthybius' enduring wrath--a wrath, that is lifeless, pitiless, moving automatically from object to object and from generation to generation. 

That heroism, in Greece and America alike, is defined first and foremost by death may come as a surprise to people: but it remains absolutely crucial for proper understanding of either culture. A god is by definition alive; a hero is by definition dead. 

A saint, in the Catholic sense, is a third thing altogether. Saints are by definition alive, but they live via a transcendent, eternal life that comes only through a prior, necessary, already-overcome death. Hence, even their dead bodies are alive. While for heroes, the most constitutive things for individual, personal human life--presence, sensation, understanding, will--are diminished to gibbering nothingness, for saints these things are not diminished, but infinitely increased. They are present everywhere, feel everything, know everything, and will our good.  They defend us with the weapons that killed them, touch us through their severed limbs, and look at us through their own plucked-out eyes. They are something entirely outside the cultic world of antiquity.

The living man lives by relationships with man; the saint lives by his relationship with God; and the Hero lives by his relationship with death. 

Achilles in the Iliad is in this sense a hero: which is to say, he is someone set apart and consecrated to death. The Iliad is the Avengers: Endgame of ancient Greek myth: which is to say, it is a self-conscious attempt to take every single hero known from throughout the Greek-speaking world and shove them into one giant story that all Greeks will for all time thereafter acknowledge as the biggest and most important story ever. And out of all those heroes, Achilles is acknowledged by all as the best, the most famous, the strongest, the greatest; the central character of the greatest of all heroic stories. And this greatest hero in the greatest of all stories spends the bulk of his screen time sitting around his tent, distraught and depressed and occasionally manic, refusing all pleas by friends and enemies alike to come out and actually do something heroic, and thinking all the time about death.

For here is the crux of the heroic dilemma: death truly and genuinely sucks. More immediately, being dead sucks. There is an afterlife, sort of, but it is a mere hole full of shadows. It is better to be the lowest slave on earth, Achilles tells us, than the greatest hero in the underworld. Life is good, the long, peaceful life of city and farm and family and women and children: death is evil. Life is what all people want, what they cannot help but want. Achilles does not want to die. He knows, though, that, he is a hero, and must.

It is precisely this liability to death, this obsession with death, that makes Achilles a hero: but, in the proper sense, he is not a hero yet. He knows that he is the best, the strongest, the fastest: that he has the potential to be the greatest hero of them all, to be remembered in song and worshiped at his tomb forever. To do that, though, he will have to die--not far in the future, of old age, but here, now, by violence. And he does not want to. 

What makes Achilles the protagonist of the Iliad, though, is not that he is a hero, or even that he is the greatest of heroes: it is that he is a power utterly unique among heroes: freedom from the decrees of Zeus and the power of fate. He alone has the power to make a genuine choice. If he wishes, he can go home and live a long, happy life, and then die--or he can stay, and die now, and be a hero.

The Iliad is itself defined by, and deeply aware of, the paradox of its own existence as an oral, epic poem, a conveyer of immortality through song. By singing about him, the poet of the Iliad is making Achilles immortal, making him a hero: which is to say, at the same time also making already dead. Whether or not Achilles had a choice, that choice was made long ago, and its outcome is clear from the poem's first word.

The characters of the Iliad, this assemblage of all the famous dead heroes of all the Greeks from across the Mediterranean, are as aware of all this as the audience. Zeus has decreed that Troy will fall after ten years of war: and they are in the tenth year of the war, and they are losing. Clearly, what has to happen, what is in that sense fated to happen (which is to say spoken, sung), is for Achilles to come out of his tent, and be a hero, and die. As the story stretches on for verse after verse and book after book, the other characters grow increasingly impatient with Achilles' dithering. They feel none of his anguish, his doubt. They are here to be heroes, to die and be sung about: and he is ruining their song. So again and again they come to him, thinking about death in his tent, and again and again demand that he get on with it already.

What is true of the characters is even more true of the poem's audience. The characters know that Achilles has the potential to be a hero: but the audience knows that Achilles is a hero, for the simple reason that he is being sung about in an epic poem. Therefore, they know that Achilles has done great deeds and died violently; and, inasmuch as they enjoy hearing epic poems about heroes, they want this to happen. The audience shares the frustration of its characters at Achilles' delaying of the action, but to an even greater degree; because they have an even stronger reason to want Achilles to leave his tent. The characters only want to win a war. The audience has been promised entertainment. 

The anticipation of Achilles' heroic violence and death defines the dramatic character of the Iliad as a whole. Achilles' death, when it comes, comes by popular demand.

Of course, the poet of the Iliad never directly shows Achilles' death: he merely shows Achilles making the choices that he and the characters and audience and gods all know make that death inevitable. Here, there is an even deeper point to be made: which is that the incompatibility between heroism and life is not merely accidental, but essential, and constitutes the hero as hero even before their actual death.

As the Iliad shows again and again, the world of the living is essentially a communal one, an interpersonal one, defined by institutions like kingship and family and (in a more paradoxical way) religion. The Iliad begins with the aged priest of Apollo coming to the Greek camp to beg back his young daughter, kidnapped by the Greeks--at which Agamemnon mocks and curses him and sends him on his way. In the world of peace, the world of the living, as the Shield of Achilles vividly portrays, the aged are respected and powerful, while women and children are protected and cherished. Not so with the world of war, which is to say the world of heroes, the world of the dead. Here, women are war prizes, and children and the aged lose those who care for them and are finally slaughtered without pity. 

By mocking the priest of Apollo, disregarding both his care for his daughter and Apollo's care for him, Agamemnon is not accidentally, but essentially choosing death: a death that is not long in coming for his men, as Apollo wreaks bloody vengeance on the Greek camp through plague. Indeed, Agamemnon's main social function appears to be to get his men killed: a fitting role for the king of heroes. Nor is it an accident that Agamemnon's sin here--summoning vengeance by disregarding a daughter and wanting a woman too much--neatly parallels the crime that (in the broader course of mythology) will result in his own death: the sacrifice of his own daughter, and the vengeance of his wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon, certainly, has chosen death, if anyone has. 

Achilles' choice for death, though, is far less certain and far more consequential. It is not merely an accident of fate that Achilles' choice to fight in the Trojan War will lead to his death--it is absolutely essential to the actual choice he makes, which is not simply the choice to kidnap a girl or sacrifice a daughter, but the choice to kill endlessly, pitilessly, without human purpose and beyond any human measure. The wrath of the Achilles, the proem of the Iliad tells us, brought many heroes of both the Trojans and Achaeans down as shades to the dead--or, in other words, made them heroes. Achilles is not just a hero, but the maker of heroes.

In this, he is not a passive victim, but an active agent of death--and so, in a sense already dead, and in another sense absolutely and infallibly fated to die. He is a worshiper of death, a worshiper of heroes, being the first to "canonize" Patroclus as a hero precisely by murdering in his name and sacrificing Trojan youths to his shade: offering young, borrowed blood to one who can no longer act and choose on his own. By this point in the story, neither can Achilles: in choosing heroism, he has lost the power to do anything but kill.

This is perhaps the fundamental point of all to grasp: that heroes are dead precisely because they are by definition incapable of the social and political and familial relationships, the social and political and familial emotions, that motivate human persons to act and choose and live. When Achilles decides to be a hero, he becomes instantly a kind of automaton, incapable of feeling anything but rage, incapable of doing anything but kill. As much as any hero in a tomb, he has become a parasitic entity, feeding on borrowed blood. 

Note well: in contradistinction to modern and American views, the hero's loss of will and intention is intrinsically and necessarily the result of his loss of human emotions and relationships. Achilles can only kill, in part, because he no longer belongs to any human society, even the Greek army of Agamemnon, because he no longer has his friend Patroclus, because he has given up forever his life with wife and children and father in the city, because he no longer cares anything for anyone. It is this nexus of human relationships and emotions that, in the view of all settled peoples, creates the capacity for human freedom and choice: the man standing totally apart from them is not more free, but less, incapable of anything but killing and dieing.

Achilles the hero no longer has family or friends or wife or children: and so, he no longer has αἰδώς, the most essentially human of feelings in the Greek worldview, which is to say reverence, shame, honor, respect, piety, for the old, for the young, for women and children, for kings, for gods. He kills old and young alike, mocks the concern of parents for children and children for parents, and attempts to fight the gods. 

He is not the only one to do that in the world of the Iliad: indeed, this heroic state of pitilessness, though to lesser degrees, is a recurrent state for all the heroes of the Iliad, because a necessary precondition and result of heroism as such. Achilles, though, is more or less the only person to legitimately upset the gods. The gods, like the audience, are spectators: they enjoy watching heroes doing and suffering death. They do not enjoy watching Achilles, though. They are disturbed by his actions; and they want him to stop.

After all, in a strange paradox, the gods, despite being non-human, are really much closer to living humans than heroes. The gods, like humans, live in relationships, in a single incestuous family and a single great kingdom. They have friendships and rivalries and grudges, feel love, hate, sexual desire, discuss and debate and make alliances and compromises and secret plans. They are familial and social and political animals. The only meaningful difference between gods and mortals is that gods do not die: which is to say, they never lose their ability to continue having relationships and forming intentions. Their kingdom will never collapse; their family will never be exterminated; they will never be a shade gibbering in the dark, begging humans for blood. 

Ironically, though, it is precisely this that makes their emotions and intentions, from the human point of view, both weak and ephemeral: capricious being the word used by textbooks and Spark Notes and high schoolers imitating them. Humans stick to their choices and commitments, but gods do not--precisely because none of their choices and commitments ever touch the most fundamental features of their lives. The things the gods want they never want too badly--because they can never want anything badly enough to suffer or die for it, or even to lose their fixed familial and social and political statuses for it. Their wills are fluid like their presences: they are fundamentally vague, with the vagueness that only profound security can give. 

Hector will not betray Troy, will not yield to the Greeks, will not even hand over Helen to them, because to do so would threaten the web of relationships that make up his life. Zeus, though, tries to save his own mortal son from death, but then immediately yields to family pressure and watches him die--because it doesn't. 

The gods in the Iliad really only fight over mortal affairs, because only those mortal affairs have any stakes, because only they involve difficult choices between irreconcilable options. The stakes are never for them, though. Hera wants Troy to survive, and is angry at her husband for decreeing its destruction; but when Troy burns, she goes on with her life. This is more or less the only moral of Greek mythology as a whole: don't get involved with gods, because fundamentally, whatever they promise you, however they feel about you, they will live on, and you will die much sooner than otherwise.

Still, for all the moralistic critique of the gods in the Iliad, which begins with the Iliad itself and by the time of Plato had already become proverbial, it is nonetheless important to note that the gods of the Iliad are at the end of the day decent, living people. Regardless of their quarrels and conflicts and immoralities and games, when the chips are down they will always choose to abide by the relationships of their little incestuous aristocratic society, respect their king and father Zeus with his rages and inscrutable decrees, their queen and mother Hera with her stratagems and abusive rages, and all their confused, homicidal brothers and sisters and cousins. And though they will not save us, they will feel sorry for us.

It is here that Achilles, the paradigmatic hero, transgresses perhaps the only important moral boundary within the world of the Iliad. The gods are capricious, but the gods pity us. When they see mortals suffering and dying, they feel something, something mysterious: ἔλεος, pity, mercy. 

Mercy is really the only thing that can fundamentally bridge the contrary worlds out of which the Greek cosmos is constructed: living and dead, god and mortal. The living pity the dead, weep for them, beat their breasts and tear their hair for them. They know that they, too, will die. 

More surprisingly, immortals, too, pity mortals. Humans are defined by their orientation to death: gods are defined by their incapacity for death. The gods cannot die, and so, by definition, cannot know what it is like to die. It is this that, normally, is responsible for their general indifference to human life and death, destroying cities and laying low armies for their own purposes. 

And yet...sometimes, when they look upon us, and see our mysterious death, they pity us, and, for a moment, seem to understand. For a moment, they seem to know what it is like to be us. For a moment, they are like us. And they weep.

The dead, though, do not feel pity: and neither do heroes. When Achilles begins his heroic rampage, it is determined by, defined by, his loss of all pity whatsoever. As a hero, he must kill, kill endlessly, infinitely, beyond all boundaries--and he cannot kill if he sees his victims as fundamentally akin to him, if he pities them, weeps for them, feels anything for them at all. To be a hero, he must be something different, something, other, something incompatible with both human kinship and divine pity alike: in other words, he must be dead. 

The hero is pitiless: he kills those pleading for their lives, murders children in front of their fathers, drags Hector around and around the city while his mother beats her breast and wails. All these things mean nothing to him. After all, if mercy is what bridges gaps, between gods and mortals, living and dead, then there are no longer any gaps to bridge. He has already crossed the only boundary that matters, the only boundary that no god can cross. He is dead.

It is this, within the Iliad, that most fundamentally angers the gods. As a dead man, Achilles is outside of the kingdom of the gods, something strange and apart and other not just to humanity, but divinity itself. Yet he is not just dead, but alive as well: and it is this that is his true, greatest offense, his most potent threat to the gods and their dominion.

The dead are purposeless, powerless, reliant on borrowed blood; Achilles is alive, and powerful. He is in truth something even worse than a dead man: a living worshiper and servant and agent of death, offering to the dead not merely small amounts of animal blood, animal life, but all his own life, his own blood, his whole body and soul, and endless blood and lives and bodies and souls of humans in sacrifice. In becoming a hero, he has made himself an enemy to the kingdom of the deathless. 

Yet for all this, Achilles is not dead yet, has not entirely lost his will and intention and blood and life to its kingdom. And to preserve their kingdom, preserve human life on earth, the gods choose to remind him of this fact. In the Iliad's best and most central and transcendent moment, the gods send the elder to the tent of the hero, and Achilles looks at Priam, the father of the man he has murdered, the king of the city he has helped destroy, and realizes, suddenly, that he is exactly like his own father, who will soon weep over him: and he pities him, and the two men, old and young, enemies, heroes both, weep together, and for a moment are human once again.

What is true for the heroes of the Greek world is true also for the heroes of America--that they are in the fundamental sense cultic entities, but cultic entities defined, like heroes but very much unlike gods, by the fact of dependency. 

Heroes, as many many films on Santa Claus, the Muppets, and Captain America alike remind us, need us to believe in them. One can see this merely in economic terms--that heroes are first and foremost franchises and brands that can only endure given a healthy profit margin for the corporate entities that control them--but I think it goes deeper than that. A hero can be pleased by an offering of money, but most fundamentally they require blood. What they need from us is not just our money, but our attention, enthusiasm, engagement, our words and thoughts and energy and activity and, in short, life. 

In America, every hero has their coterie of devotees, people who write about the hero, post about them, speak about them, sing about them, draw pictures of them, even dress themselves as the hero, making their bodies, in an ancient ritual known to many cultures, receptacles for the hero's presence.

At the same time, American heroes are no less dead than Greek heroes. 

That all America's heroes are in fact dead may seem, at first, glance paradoxical. After all, isn't heroism in the American sense--as criticized by serious people in Europe and the rest of the civilized world--defined precisely by its adoration of youth, beauty, strength, power: in short by obsession with life? Or at the very least, aren't American heroes a species of secular saints, defined by a (childish, secular) fantasy of overcoming death? American heroes die hard, which is to say never die at all: armies and nations may crumble around them, but they always ends the story riding off into the sunset, promising more to come. 

There is truth in this, I think: but for all that, I do not think it is really true. In this essay, I will attempt to maintain the admittedly paradoxical thesis that the American concept of heroism, as much or more than the Greek one, depends upon an essential orientation towards death, an essential status as dead. 

In the first place, it is simply not true that being dead and wanting to overcome death are opposed concepts. For Greek heroism, at least, they are one and the same thing. Achilles wants to live forever, but he cannot--so he settles for the derivative, borrowed survival that constitutes the post-mortem existence of the hero. He will not be one more forgotten shade among the dead: he will be sung about, his name remembered, and offerings of blood brought to his tomb, to revive, for a moment, the memories and intentions of his departed life. What is true for Achilles is even more true for James Bond, who was never alive at all, but is no less dependent on offerings to maintain his continuing existence. 

Likewise, for American as for Greek heroes, this status as dead is not merely a matter of literal life and death, but of the essential nature, activity, and operations of human persons. To be alive is to be a personal, communal being, situated in families and kingdoms, susceptible to emotion, respect and pity above all else, and capable of intentions and commitments. To be dead is to be alone, fixed, obsessed, driven mechanically and pitilessly to transgress all human and divine boundaries to achieve a single end, which in whatever form is always in essence the spreading of death. And when we recognize this, we recognize immediately and simply that the prototypical, unifying American Hero is always and by definition dead.

Taken in this sense, American art is very obviously about heroes in this sense: men who died and became immortal symbols in stories, but remained dead men in tombs nonetheless. Superman is a hero in this sense; so is Marilyn Monroe; so is Iron Man; so is John F. Kennedy; so is Captain Kirk; so is Elvis. The most prototypical American hero of them all is, of course, Kurt Cobain. 

This is the principal reason why people who aspire to heroism in America so frequently die young; this is also why people who aspire to heroism in America so frequently kill others. Like Achilles, they are obsessed with death--even or especially when pretending to be forever young. They know that the only way to be sung about forever and so receive their offerings in perpetuity is to fundamentally deny the values of a living person, reject all reverence and shame and honor, divest themselves of all pity for the old and young and suffering, deny their families and kingdoms, sacrifice their brief personal and emotional life on this earth: in short, to become dead before they die, and spread that death to others.

To explore this case, though, I will be looking at two of what I regard as the most insightful (if not the most popular) distillations of the American Hero, in text and cinema, as well as, in best Adventures of Captain Peabody increasingly-random-works-of-art-thematically-connected-in-an-increasingly-strained-way, a number of books on the Mongol Empire. Let us begin!

The Hero as Detective

There are many American heroes; so many, in fact, that even attempting to list them, let alone analyze them, is probably impossible. Whenever a new Marvel project comes out, inevitably there will be a rush by fans and frightened critics alike to track down the 10-20 additional superheroes portrayed or referenced or foreshadowed in the latest effort in Marvel Studio's increasingly desperate and indeed deranged attempt to make multi-verse films work. Was that really Gambit? Who is Gambit? Which Gambit is this? 

Every cultural discourse has its center, its orientation, its fundamental activity: and if for traditional Islamic madrasas that discourse it is the exposition of Shari'a law through the citing of Scriptural and juridical authorities, and for traditional Jewish yeshiva the delineation of personal and communal commandments with their exceptions and applications, for comic-book fans it is mostly the listing of different heroes with their attributes, costumes, powers, versions, and, most confusingly, entirely different personal existences. 

Yes, Willem Dafoe portrayed the Green Goblin in 2002's Spiderman: but he was only portraying the Norman Osborn version of the character. Did you know that Harry Osborn was also the Green Goblin at one point, as well as people named Bart Hamilton and Phil Urich and a protoplasmic entity Wikipedia refers to only as "Nameless construct"? But then, there's also the Hobgoblin, a similar but not identical character with a similar costume and powers that was retroactively revealed to be inspired by the original Green Goblin, and whose mantle has also been taken on by at least eight different people, including sometime Green Goblins Phil Urich and Norman Osborn.

(Note once again: all of these people have at some point died. It is not the person that survives, but the mask, the costume, the name: it is this that is the real hero, not the human person that for the moment contains or embodies or even originates it).

For those unfamiliar with these discourses, they can end up seeming both alien and somewhat silly--and this is of course equally true of discourses that I myself participate in, including the arcane worlds of Christian theology and overly-detailed Star Trek analysis.

Still, for all the wild, exuberant polytheism of American heroic culture, for all its frequently insane commitment to diversity--Marvel has both a heroic Palestinian superhero, and a heroic Israeli super-hero, who is also a member of the Mossad--the thing that strikes me most about American heroes, super and otherwise, is how similar they are, how identical in fundamental substance. This was, I think, always all along the point of the American concept of diversity, in every sphere: an indefinite infinitude of accidental externals surrounding and manifesting a core of absolute, transcendent sameness. 

Captain America and Iron Man are theoretically the polar opposites of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; but both are independent agents whose unique powers were gifted to them by the Military-Industrial Complex, who operate independently from the Military-Industrial Complex but support it, who kill an awful lot of people for ostensibly positive goals, and sacrifice themselves for their families. Also they wear similarly metallic costumes mostly painted red, and their faces would be difficult to tell apart in a dark alley at night. One has a beard.

If in some future wilderness, the tribes of the world return to polytheism and to mythology, I fear that all of the innumerable heroes of the American mythos will be quite easily boiled down to one: the American, with his brightly-colored cape, spandex underwear, cool haircut, rumpled suit, and, above all, his fedora.

People today are obsessed with superheroes: but I don't actually think that superheroes are the best or the most insightful manifestations of American heroism. They are in most cases second or third order references, simulacra in the Baudrillardian sense: entities shaped by worlds that made their particular brand of heroism comprehensible, but which no longer exist. 

What is perhaps most important to remember about the American Hero is how late he emerges in American history, and how detached he is from the central political traditions of the United States. 

Americans have always looked back to the 18th century founding for inspiration: but the 18th century Founding Fathers are, in the year 2025, utterly foreign. They are, in fact, far more foreign than most foreign things. Most of the political debates of the French Revolution are still quite legible to Americans; even the Ottoman political and religious debates I have been reading about lately, where jurists and Sufis struggled over whether rulership flowed from grace, merit, or subjugation, are more legible. The highly particular mix of aristocratic idealism, liberal Protestantism, utopian agriculturalism, social urbanism, economic interest, ethnic chauvinism, and personal eccentricity that powered the American Founding is simply unrecoverable to Americans today. Try actually reading through the Declaration of Independence sometime; most of the tangible charges against George III simply no longer make sense, or are actively offensive to present-day sensibilities.

This is not precisely a criticism: there is a lot to be said for the American Revolution and the American founders, much more than there is to be said for the American cultic-heroic tradition. The 18th century American founders are unrecoverable not because they have been proved wrong, not because they have been defeated, but for the simple reason that they, as individuals and types, have been superseded. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and many other founders were educated, cultured, humane gentlemen-farmer slave-plantation-owning agrarian businessmen--a type that was within a few decades entirely superseded by a new brutal, ideological, expansionist Southern planter class. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and their ilk were educated, cultured, liberal communalist urbanite merchants--a type that was within a few decades entirely superseded by a new, brutal, ideological, industrial Northern business class. 

As with all usurpers lacking legitimacy, these new groups loudly declared that they were just the same as what they had replaced, and so strove as much as possible to use the same words and images and uphold the same concepts and ideals. In the process, though, they completely changed the meaning of all those words and images and concepts and ideals, and erected a nearly impenetrable barrier to recovering their original meaning and content. When Thomas Jefferson used the word "liberty," he meant something absolutely opposed to what a 19th century industrialist meant by "liberty"--but both used the same word, and so succeeding generations of Americans have simply used the word according to the more recent definition, and never even paused to consider whether that definition might have changed.

Most fundamentally, though, the fatal flaw of the American Founders, relative to the preoccupations and beliefs of later generations of Americans, is that none of these people and types were really heroes--not even American heroes. They were many things--generous, pedantic, courageous among them--but most fundamentally they were people who believed in politics, in the ability to unify people and reconcile conflicts using political machinery and political ideals. George Washington was a general, and fought all kinds of battles: but he never made Achilles' choice, nor was he ever portrayed as doing so. Benjamin Franklin told the Americans that if they did not hang together, they would all hang separately: or, in other words, told them that death was avoidable, and that they should avoid it. And politics, like family, is the domain of the living. 

In the 19th century, and since, attempts were made to turn the Founding Fathers into heroes, or more precisely into gods--as in the famous Apotheosis of Washington. I don't think they ever loomed particularly large in American imagination, though, or ever seriously competed with the overwhelming, crushing rise of the American Hero, which amounted to a kind of religious conversion of a whole people to an entirely new cult, as dramatic or more than the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

By the early 19th century, legendary pioneer heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett--apolitical individuals, cut off from family and community in the wilderness, existing in relationship only to hostile Indians, and defined by their proclivity for violence--had fully supplanted the intensely social and political figures of the American founding. By the end of that century, the full mythology of the Frontier, Western and Great Plains alike, had taken hold of America like a fever: a lawless world where armed criminals struggled with lawmen and businessmen, doing great deeds and both dealing and receiving death. I would argue that very few events in American history from the late 18th century onwards can be understood without reference to this novel heroic ethos. 

As the frontier closed, though, the frontier hero gave way, gradually, to more urban and even political heroes: to the Detective, the Spy, the Mafioso, the Rock Star, the Teenager, the Scientist, the Influencer, and so on. In all these forms, he has stood apart from human life and relationships, and in all these forms he has dealt death. The moral of every John Le Carre story is precisely the same, which is that one can be a successful spy, in service of the global American Empire, only at the cost of sacrificing all human morality and pity and every familial and personal relationship, only at the cost of betraying and killing others and dying oneself. The moral of the Godfather films is that one can be a successful Mafioso only at the very same cost; and the same is true for every Rock Star biopic ever made.

In principle, I could argue from every one of these archetypes--and many more. Yet in this essay, I want to focus on the Detective. Part of the reason for this is merely person pique; but part is because I feel, and have always felt, that he is the most fundamental and insightful incarnation of the American Hero. At the very least, he is the most literal, the least glamorous, the closest to the real life of the real people, and so the most true to the purely American history and culture and spirit. 

Detectives are perhaps the only truly democratic version of the American Hero--the only type defined, not just by specialness and singularity, but commonness. Most Americans have never been, and never could be, Spies or Mafioso leaders or Rock Stars--they are intrinsically exceptional types, intrinsically foreign. 

Most Americans, it is true, have not in a literal sense been private detectives either--though certainly many more have been private detectives, since it has at times been a relatively commonplace profession, and never at any time an exclusive one. Virtually all Americans, though, have at some time in their life been isolated and unhappy and penurious and alcoholic and horny and aging and out of their depth and confused and violent and unimaginably tired--and it is this ubiquitous, immediately accessible American experience which is the core of American Detective literature. Any American can drink a glass of whiskey alone in a bar and feel themselves as tired and tough and worn and lonely as Philip Marlowe himself.

The Western cowboy and lawman hero, and his forebear the American pioneer hero, is in essence an idealization, a distant vision of something that in a sense exists, but not at all as it is seen or imagined. He is a figure fundamentally created by distance, through the human process by which the safe and the comfortable attach their own inchoate frustrations and desires and political and religious and moral and social ideals onto any figure that happens to appear on the horizon. 

Feeling themselves relatively isolated, relatively moral, relatively adventurous and daring and a law unto themselves, Americans looked West, and imagined people who could be these things in their true purity. In this, the American cowboy is difficult to fully disentangle from its European roots, difficult to not see as merely the last in a long line of essentially Protestant figures. 

At the heart of Protestant religion is the concept of the total individualization of morality, belief, and action: a man who refuses to follow any laws but those he bears in his own head and his own heart. This vision was never remotely fulfilled in European Protestant societies, with their coercive State Churches and toppling bureaucracies: perhaps could never be fulfilled in Europe at all, in the ancient, intensively settled lands of farms and villages and great cities and allied tongues and peoples, with the roads made by the Roman Empire and the nations made by the Roman Church: perhaps could never be fulfilled on earth at all, ever, anywhere. 

Still, there is something to the intuition of modern American Evangelicals that only American Evangelicism has ever really been Protestantism, that only Americans ever have been, or ever could be, Protestant. There was something to the instinct that for three hundred years has driven all religious radicals, from the Puritans to the Mormons to contemporary UFO cults, Westward and ever Westward to the frontier, the horizon, the fabled Promised Land of isolation and anarchy, where no State or Church or community or family can impose its order, where alone a man could ever really be a Protestant. 

It is this elusive dream of the triumphant, isolated conscience, secularized and muddied in a thousand ways, that stands at the heart of the original American Hero, the hero of the frontier. 

Seen up close, though, such heroes entirely break down. This vision has its place--but it has very little to do with what it is actually like to live in a commercialized, colonial frontier town, dominated by business interests and robber barons and the Federal government. The people who lived in such places were much bloodier, much messier, much more unhappy, but also much less truly isolated on a lawless frontier, and much more connected to the broader political and economic forces that drove them onwards to claim new land, not for themselves, but for their rising Imperial nation--as the best Western art has always acknowledged. They were not really men alone.

The Detective, though, is a man alone in a much deeper sense--a much more modern and American sense. He is a very literal figure, existing in a very literal world: a world without enchantment, a world defined by the failure and loss of faith in the Protestant ideal and the American frontier. In this world, there are politics, religion, family, and all the accoutrements of the living--but they are all strangely changed and strangely chilled, and they do not rule the world. Nor do they rule the Detective. 

Unlike the frontier hero, the Detective is defined not so much by distance as closeness; he inhabits the back end of everything, the narrow alleys of the crowded cities, the cramped houses, the dusty offices, the dirty little places of the human heart, the bitter and lonely moments of all our lives.

The Detective is not just a man alone, but a man fundamentally without law: a man with his own peculiar code, but a code neither Christian nor Protestant nor even really human, a man defined by vices rather than virtues, who drinks too much, smokes too much, hits too hard and too readily, embraces strange women: a man at variance with mortal law and mortal life alike.

In all this the American Detective is quite strikingly different from his forebear, the Detective of British fiction. Sherlock Holmes, like his imitators, is fundamentally a figure of law and rationality, or more precisely of organized science and organized policing. His entire enterprise is premised on the belief that the new science of criminology is capable of fully classifying criminals, the new system of policing capable of unfailingly detecting them, and the new machinery of justice capable of justly punishing them. He is in theory a private detective, but in reality a mere appendage of these great, public institutions: hence his clients include not only the rich and powerful, but quite frequently politicians and governments and the police themselves. 

In terms of the larger system he serves, the British Detective is a specialist, called in to carry out one highly particular function: which is not violent, but almost purely intellectual. He has no real knowledge of or even interest in the system as a whole, its means or ends or outcomes. Powerful men bring him puzzles: he solves them, and in the process unmasks criminals, who are in essence a type and species apart, lawless and violent men opposed to rationality and society and family and politics, men who are devotees and dealers of death; and then the police capture them, and the Justice System deals with them. The British Detective is in the precise sense an Anti-Hero.

The American Detective is not like this at all: he does not work, usually, for the government, but for a private client, or for himself. He works, sometimes, alongside the police (which is quite a different thing), but he does not trust them, and they do not trust him. The American Detective does not solve crimes like intellectual puzzles, but uses a mix of social savvy, cynical knowledge, boldness, recklessness, and brutal violence to throw himself into the thick of things and find and destroy his enemy. And wherever he goes, people die.

This year, I have read a large number of "classic" American Detective novels from the 1930s through 1950s--largely from the two canonical authors Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. The two authors are more known, though, by their archetypal "hard-boiled" Detective heroes, Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe, respectively, and through the many classic film noir movies adapting starring these heroes. 

These two characters are recognizably the same archetype, and heroic in more or less the same way--a reality made more striking by the overwhelming differences between the two authors in atmosphere style, ethos, and morality.

Mickey Spillane is both a hack and a fascist. I do not mean this merely in the generic sense in which we call someone a fascist who admires power or violence: I mean it about as literally as one can mean anything. Raymond Chandler started writing in the 1930s, when actual political fascism was at its height--in America, though, such things were quite distant indeed, and little traces of it show in his work. Mickey Spillane wrote in the late '40s and '50s, when the experience of conscription and collectivization and Total War were fresh in everyone's memories, including his. When he wrote his debut Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, he was a recently-discharged military man frustrated with society and desperate for a job--precisely the materials out of which Italian fascism was formed.

His hero Mike Hammer, is in all essentials a Blackshirt: a man whose mission in life, as he expresses it frequently, is to use violence to "cleanse the streets" of all the degenerate moral filth--pimps and pushers and thugs and corrupt cops and corrupt politicians and corrupt rich men--who stain it. Unlike Chandler's hero, Hammer openly admires and frequently extols the police, who he sees as allies in his crusade, and who frequently call upon him directly to aid them; nevertheless, the police, as he sees it, are hamstrung in their ability to cleanse society by ethical and legal codes, and so fundamentally cannot succeed in their task: at least not without his help. They cannot simply gun down the filth in cold blood. 

A Mike Hammer adventure is difficult to describe in narrative terms: it is a kind of shifting tableau of of brutal violence and easy sex with the barest hint of a plot sort of hanging out in the background, waiting to be shot. Still, the thing is held together by a basic narrative directionality, a straightforward telos and aiming at an apparent good. In the beginning of every Mike Hammer novel, our hero declares that he will murder someone. At the end of every Mike Hammer novel, he does, in fact, murder that someone. In between, he wanders around aimlessly, brutalizing and sleeping with various men and women, respectively, as he happens to stumble across them. 

Still, the Mike Hammer version of a hero is not best understood through the lens of politics--which, even in as extreme a form as Italian fascism is still fundamentally concerned with living, social realities like states and nations. The Mike Hammer hero is simply the American Hero in his basest and most literal form--and so is defined above all else by his relation to death. 

The title of the first Mike Hammer novel is I, the Jury: a kind of ritualistic invocation of the authority that, in America then and now, holds the only fully authorized license to kill. This authority is always, in however sanitized or modern form, a religious and cultic thing--so that the audience of Aeschylus' Oresteia really felt no fundamental wrench of absurdity and bathos, as modern audiences do, seeing the goddess Athena serve on a jury and cast its deciding vote. To wield the power of life and death is to be either a hero or a god--and in either case to be something sacred.

Mike Hammer, though, is a jury of one: which is to say, he is an entity that by his very existence is antithetical to human community and its authorities. His singularity is the counterpart to the community's unity, his freedom from moral restraints a kind of mirror image of the community's authority via law. A god can serve on a jury; a hero can only be a jury. 

Like all heroes, like all dead men, he is fundamentally alone, and can find no partnership with humans. Unable to partake of any of the operations of the living, he cannot relate to them via any of the regular human relations: community, family, friendship, love. He can only relate to living humans via the fundamental cultic relations--which is to say, violence, sex, and sacrifice. It is no accident that when Mike Hammer meets a man, he threatens him, and when he meets a woman, he sleeps with her. He has, quite simply, no other way to relate; because he is not a living man at all, but a dead one. The dead can be propitiated with blood, and take revenge on those who wrong them--but they cannot enter into any covenant with the living.

Of course, in literal fact, Mike Hammer is alive: but even on the most literal reading of his adventures, he is a man obsessed with death, a man who believes to the core of his being that only death, only a great, cathartic shedding of blood, can possibly save society. It is to bring about this salvific, sacrificial bloodletting that he has dedicated his soul and body--so that like Achilles he is a man destined and set apart, a man consecrated as both priest and victim, to death. Hence he does not merely brutalize and kill others: he himself is brutalized, beaten, nearly killed--and though he may (barely) survive each incident, the character himself periodically acknowledges that his life and purpose make his own death simply inevitable. 

This death, though, is not inevitable merely for him--or even merely for his victims. When reading the Mike Hammer novels, one cannot but be struck, and increasingly disturbed, by the fact that that all the women he sleeps with, prostitutes, waitresses, and wealthy psychiatrists alike, are all murdered shortly thereafter. 

This state of affairs, as silly as it may appear in literary terms, is not a mere plot contrivance, nor even a mere fantasy about unattached sex; it is the much more fundamental logic of the American Hero. What defines the hero's status as dead is fundamentally, as argued above, his total, definitional inability to take part in communal and interpersonal relationships. Hence, the hero cannot get married, cannot procreate, cannot even really have a girlfriend or a love interest or even a living ex. This is the bedrock rule of his existence. In one case only, Mike Hammer considers and plans marriage with a woman: and, appropriately, this is the one and only woman that he kills himself. 

Of course, one could argue that the real reason Mike Hammer cannot get married is because he must be available to star in another Mike Hammer adventure where he can continue to sleep with random women for his audience's titillation and delight. Yet even here, as in so many areas, corporate business and the cultic-hero milieu share precisely the same logic. The hero as hero must be essentially free, always available for their worshipers' requests and demands, always indefinitely ready to act in their characteristic heroic ways, whether at a tomb or in a play. 

After all, if Achilles got married and had children, he would not be free to kill hundreds and die under the walls of Troy and be sung about, and hence would not be indefinitely available to be sung about and answer requests and take revenge in exchange for blood at his tomb. And if Mike Hammer got married at the end of I, the Jury, instead of gunning down his lover in cold blood, he would not be free to wander the streets killing and having sex with women, and would not be indefinitely available for sale and purchase and reproduction and adaptation and simulation to serve his customer's needs and desires. His life and his choices would be inevitably shaped by community and family, and hence by care and law and justice and morality and love: and what kind of hero would he be then? 

Here, then, is a fundamental rule of the American Hero, or indeed of any hero in the proper sense: the hero can have sex, but only so long as that sex does not either derive from or result in life. The hero is essentially contraceptive: and it is no accident, but rather the most basic logic of history and culture, that the most hero-obsessed society in the history of the world also developed the Pill. It is for this same reason that the hero having sex always results in death. Cultic relationships are all in essence forms of violence: and what is essentially non-procreative, non-interpersonal sex but violence in its most heightened form? And the telos of all violence is death. 

It is not merely the people Mike Hammer has sex with who die, though: every time he shows pity or care for another human being, that human being dies by violence. In I, the Jury, he has had a friend whom he respected and liked: that friend is dead as the novel begins. At the beginning of his next novel, he meets a young prostitute for whom he feels pity and buys a cup of coffee; she is immediately murdered. Later in the same novel, he runs into a small-time crook, a kid, whom he likes and pities; he, too, is murdered. In generic terms, these deaths all provide the hero with a pretext to swear revenge; on a deeper level, though, they all serve to head off threats to his aloneness. The death of all around the hero is not a mere artifice of plot, but a fundamental necessity of his existence.

Unlike in the world of Sherlock Holmes, this essentially inhuman, anti-social death-dealing creature is not an outcast, pushed to the margins of society: he is a hero also in the more common sense of the term, admired by all, desired by women, looked up to by men, and, most mysteriously, largely affirmed by the political authorities of his world. 

Both in theory and in practice, the American Hero is totally opposed to the political as such, his way of life absolutely antithetical to law, justice, human dignity, human equality, and basic human commonality alike. 

Yet in the American world of Mike Hammer, the hero is accepted by the authorities of society, the authorities who are supposed to stand for and represent and implement the political--not only accepted, but licensed and supported by them at every turn. At the beginning of every story, the police point Mike Hammer in the direction of a killer; and at the end of every story, they sanate his murder of that person. In between, they pop in periodically to provide him with additional evidence and smooth over his beatings and murders. Mike Hammer loves the police, but believes they cannot fulfill their purpose without the help of his brutal, cleansing violence; and the police seem to agree with him.

In the Iliad, as discussed above, a basic dichotomy is set out between the realm of the city at peace, and the realm of the army at war. In the city at peace, women and children are respected; in the army at war, they are either slaughtered or become war prizes. In the city at peace, the elders, the oldest and wisest members of society, govern together through counsel; in the army at war, the king rules through force and honor and wealth. In the city at peace, the role of the elders is to maintain peace through enacting justice, protecting the weak and restraining the strong. In the army at war, the role of the king is to systematically favor the strongest members of society, coordinating their spoliation of the weak, divvying out war prizes while giving them the largest share, and at all costs maintaining and affirming their superior honor. 

In the world of the Detective, no such dichotomy exists: or rather, American society as described by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler corresponds almost precisely to the Homeric concept of the army at war. In the world of the Detective, women and children are prizes, liable at all times to personal and sexual violence; businessmen rule like kings through money and private force; and the authorities of society, the government and above all the police, have as their primary function to systematically protect and favor the strong in their persecution of the weak.

If Mickey Spillane represents the fascist underbelly of the American Detective genre, Raymond Chandler, by general agreement, represents its literary face. Chandler is, put simply, a very good writer, with a style that remains inimitable despite the last eighty years of people trying to imitate it, a unique penchant for atmospheric surrealism in ordinary surroundings, and a smooth, glib, but still effective approach to characterization and plot. The fundamental irony of his role in literature, though, is that he is both a better and more mysterious character than his famous invention Philip Marlowe, and has a much better name.

What makes the Iliad one of the greatest works of human art in all of human history is not that it happens to tell a story about the gathering of all the greatest heroes. The Iliad is not just Avengers: Endgame. What makes the Iliad one of the greatest works of human art in all of human history is that, nearly alone among the multitudinous myths and literatures of the ancient Mediterranean, it dares to ask the question why?

The same is true, to a lesser degree, about both Raymond Chandler and his woebegone hero Philip Marlowe. Like Achilles, Philip Marlowe is a hero, destined to do great deeds and die: and also like Achilles, he wonders, constantly and incessantly, why he is doing this, and whether it is really worth it.

If Mike Hammer is a man with a mission, a cause, that he willingly offers his body to in sacrifice, Marlowe is a man set on a path that he follows most unwillingly, knowing all along what it will lead to, and knowing all the way that it is all wrong.

I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. 

This is one of a thousand similar statements with which Chandler's books (narrated, famously, in persona Philip Marlowe) are littered. 

Unlike Mike Hammer, who is not rich but always seems to have enough money, Philip Marlowe is ostentatiously poor. Unlike Mike Hammer, who has acquaintances everywhere he goes who recognize and adore him, Philip Marlowe is a nobody, never known, never recognized, universally despised. Unlike Mike Hammer, whose office is minded by a beautiful secretary who is madly in love with him and constantly begs him in vain to propose to her, Philip Marlowe has no secretary, sidekick, assistant, or accomplice. Whenever a new mystery appears, he is always in the same place: sitting alone in his dusty office, playing Chess against himself, or simply staring into space.

I guess there's nobody home. Nobody home to you. I hung up. Who would you like to call now? You got a friend somewhere that might like to hear your voice? No. Nobody. 

Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop. Even a Maglashan. Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.

All the same, inevitably that phone does ring: and on the end of the line, usually, is some rich person with a problem, and Marlowe receives his payment and sets off to do his job. That his job involves being beaten, arrested, drugged, imprisoned, shot, lied to, tricked, conned, threatened, and seduced is something that he accepts as his apparent destiny: but not something that he likes, or something he has ceased to feel. 

Indeed, unlike most modern heroes, but very much like the heroes of the ancient world, Marlowe is defined above all else by feeling. His main personality trait is a kind of heightened susceptibility to nearly everything, a vulnerability that pierces to the heart of his being. As much as Jane Austen's heroes, he is a person of sensibility.

"I heard you were kind of hard-boiled," Toad said slowly, his eyes cool and watchful.

"You heard wrong. I'm a very sensitive guy. I go all to pieces over nothing."

Philip Marlowe does, in fact, go to pieces very frequently in his adventures. Unlike Mike Hammer, he never kills anyone directly, and rarely does violence to others. On the other hand, violence is very frequently done to him. He is easily led on, easily tricked, easily outdrawn, easily shot, easily captured, drugged, arrested, imprisoned, murdered. That he manages to stay alive at all is a constant, standing mystery.

In relation to women in particular, he is a sap: his heart is broken, frequently, by flashy blondes (real or dyed), by nice (or apparently nice) young brunettes, by sexy (but heartless) Latinas, by sincere (or evil) redheads. He never sleeps with them, though; and they rarely die. He falls for them, and helps them, and occasionally kisses them, and more often protects them from prosecution, but in the end they disappear and he remains. In The Wide Window, a doctor calls him a "shopworn Galahad": and while he may lack his Christian comparandum's crystal purity, he is at least equally celibate.

'Why didn't you ever get married?'

I thought of all the ways you answer that. I thought of all the women I had liked that much. No, not all. But some of them.

'I suppose I know the answer,' I said. 'But it would just sound corny. The ones I'd maybe like to marry--well, I haven't got what they need. The others you don't have to marry.'

Still, he wonders why: why doesn't he have what these women need? Why is he getting older alone in an empty office without family or friends? Why are people trying to kill him?

He also wonders why, wherever he goes, people die. He goes to a house, or a hotel room, or a lake: and there is a dead body, shot or drowned or stabbed in the spine with an ice-pick. So he investigates, doing his best to protect his client's interests but eventually calling the police (usually anonymously) regardless. He tries to figure out why these people have been murdered, and who they are: and in the end, in some sense, he does. 

Still, he wonders why. Why did the rich woman push her husband out the window? Why did the crooked cop murder his girl? Why did the nightclub singer turn her boyfriend in to the cops, and kill him when found out? Why did--

I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. I thought of nasty old women beaten to death against the posts of their dirty beds. I thought of a man with bright blond hair who was afraid and didn't quite know what he was afraid of, who was sensitive enough to know that something was wrong, and too vain or too dull to guess what it was that was wrong. I thought of beautiful rich women who could be had. I thought of nice slim curious girls who lived alone and could be had too, in a different way. I thought of cops, tough cops that could be greased and yet were not by any means all bad, like Hemingway. Fat prosperous cops with Chamber of Commerce voices, like Chief Wax. Slim, smart and deadly cops like Randall, who for all their smartness and deadliness were not free to do a clean job in a clean way. I thought of sour old goats like Nulty who had given up trying. I thought of Indians and psychics and dope doctors.

I thought of lots of things. It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling. I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and rubbed the back of my neck.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

All these questions, of course, only lead to one greater, more fundamental one: Why is America like this? 

What is this system, this all-encompassing spider's web, that all these people, and he himself, are trapped in? Why is it filled with rich men and women surrounded by private armies of servants and bodyguards, by inscrutable mobsters running bars and casinos, by old men and women dying alone, by isolated, vulnerable women producing pornography or working as nightclub waitresses or prostituting themselves or trying to become film stars, attaching themselves to mobsters or studios or agents or anyone and just as often killing those they attach themselves to, by isolated maniacs from the country driven mad by the city, by alcoholic old men and women begging for liquor, by corrupt police working for any of the above, and by invisible politicians who claim to run it all but never seem to do anything or be anywhere? 

"Cops don't go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes him smell like violets, only it don't—he ain't giving the orders either. You get me?" 

And above all, why do all of these people come to Philip Marlowe, and demand he work for them, demand he be beaten and tortured and shot and drugged and heart-broken for them? Why do they all come to him and pay him and demand that he be the hero? 

Mike Hammer is a hero with a vocation: Philip Marlowe is a hero hampered by a conscience. Everyone in his world demands that he be a hero: which, he knows full well, means to seduce women, to kill, and to die. And he does not want to do any of these things: he wants to live. He cannot, though, for some mysterious reason that may also be the reason why no cop he meets can manage to not be corrupt, no doctor he meets can manage to not sell dope, no woman he meets can manage to not be calculating and self-interested, and no poor person he meets can manage to not be afraid. Nor is Philip Marlowe fundamentally any different from these people: he cannot get married, or get another job, or even make a single friend who sticks with him. All he has is a a conscience, a dash of pity, and a moderate, cynical intelligence, by which he cracks jokes and interrogates liars and, in the end, barely figures out who killed who and why. For all that, though, he never really understands.

The truth is, Philip Marlowe is caught in a bind, a crushing vice pulling him in two fundamental directions: which we might call, academically, an older Christian and European way of life, and a newer, modern and American way of life, but which it would be more correct to simply call life and death. He has, however unknowingly, found the essential problem of the world in the modern age. He wants to live: but he has found that no one can live alone. 

As Achilles knew well, to be a moral person, to be a religious person, to be Sir Galahad, even to be a decent human being, requires the city at peace, with its elders, its laws, its families, its religion. None of these things, though, exist in an army camp: nor do they exist for Philip Marlowe in the 1930s in Los Angeles, California, America. 

That Achilles chooses in the end to be a hero and not a man of peace is not, in the Iliad, a surprise at all, but something close to inevitable, for the simple reason that he is totally surrounded, for the whole play, by nothing but heroes and aspiring heroes. Everyone around Achilles wants him to fight and die, demands that he fight and die, for the very simple reason that that is what they want, too; that is why they are there, why they left their families and cities to come to Troy, why they joined an army and league and makeshift society whose whole purpose is to kill them and make them heroes. 

Achilles' father is a man of peace ruling a city and family at peace: but his father is far away, and Achilles never thinks of him at all until, too late, with his choice already made, he sees the aged Priam begging for his son's corpse, and remembers, and weeps. In the camp, though, there is only his friend Patroclus: and Patroclus wants to die.

Equally, the really terrifying thing about Philip Marlowe's life--the really terrifying thing about Mike Hammer's life--is that they are not alone. Like Achilles in the Trojan War, everyone they meet is a hero too: or at least, an aspiring hero. They all, without exception, are there to die.

The rich, the people defined by their wealth--which is to say, their social credit, their eminently interpersonal power to make other people do as they wish--who would in every other society in history be brazen, proud, public, in this society are unaccountably in hiding, huddled behind walls with hired guards, desperate above all else to protect their privacy. The police, whose task it is to wield public authority, are shy, jumpy, constantly afraid of being held to account for their actions, afraid of being fired, afraid of being seen wielding power. The politicians are totally invisible. 

And what applies to the powerful applies equally to the poor and the ordinary. The indigent hide in tenements, with their doors locked, desperate to escape attention from the police, from strangers. All the strivers, nightclub dancers, incompetent detectives, bouncers, cops, petty thieves, drug dealers, and aspiring actresses Marlowe meets are all alike fugitives, fleeing from place to place, changing their names, trying to escape all social connections whatsoever, all sight whatsoever. Even the moral middle class is only moral on the surface: below their facade of respectability hides a terrible desire to escape society and family and religion and God, to be alone, to be dead. If they are married, they want their spouse to die; if they have a family, they want to leave them; if they have friends, they want to use them; if they are a citizen, they want their city to burn; if they are alive, even the smallest amount, to the smallest degree, they want to die.

Most fundamentally, the criminals, in most societies in hiding, are here readily apparent, totally unashamed, for one, absolutely essential reason: because it is their business to deal death in all its forms, and they live in a society where everyone wants to die. Whether that death comes through murder or blackmail or drugs or prostitution or gambling hardly matters. These criminals are not enemies to society, but, to use a term from not too long ago, its Essential Workers.

And most bitter of all, all of these people need Philip Marlowe. Most despise him, many abuse him, but all see him as in some sense the very pinnacle of heroism in this society. He, after all, is a Private Detective--which is to say, precisely and in himself the contradiction that they all live for: someone with the authority to investigate, to snoop, to wear a gun, to shoot, to kill--and yet remain totally private, totally without responsibility. A man who is invisible, unknown, unknowable, acting totally outside all the networks of family and politics and wealth and fame and film and studio politics and even crime that define and shape the actual lives of all these aspiring heroes. He is what they are all seeking, what they can never attain.

And yet, for some unaccountable reason, by one chance in a million, perhaps, this man has a conscience. He knows what he is, what he is doomed to be: and he does not want to be it. And yet... 

"A guy can't stay honest if he wants to...That's what's the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don't eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again."

But Philip Marlowe cannot make the world over again. All he can do is keep working, keep cracking jokes, keep investigating crimes and not committing them, keep asking questions, keep falling for women and not sleeping with them, keep being nearly killed and yet not killing, and, in short, when the next inevitable crisis comes, keep holding back, barely, by the smallest remaining strip of his conscience, from taking the final leap into death. 

Because somehow Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler know the one thing that neither Mickey Spillane nor Mike Hammer ever knew, the one thing that Achilles always knew: that there is only one choice in life, and it is between life and death. The very first time Achilles throws his spear in anger, he has already chosen to die; and the very first time Mike Hammer guns down a man in cold blood, he has already chosen to die; and the very first time Philip Marlowe murders a gangster or sleeps with a starlet, he will have chosen to die, too.

Unlike the others, Marlowe has just barely not made that final choice yet: but he and we both know that, in his present circumstances, it is only a matter of time. 

The Hero as Nomad

So why is America at war? And who is it at war with?

Over the past six months or so, I have been reading books about nomads--mostly, though not exclusively, about Mongols, but also about earlier and later nomadic, Central Asian peoples such as the Scythians, the Turks, and so on. In the process, I have been struck, as I think nearly everyone is who reads on this subject, by three things: (1) the sheer historical continuity in culture, beliefs, and action displayed by entirely unrelated nomadic peoples over three millennia of recorded history, (2) the outsized impact of these groups on the events and crises of human history, and (3) the paradoxical lack of cultural and and economic and political independence and vitality and coherence and staying power shown by every nomadic people and Empire in history.

Yet nomadism, more than almost any historical topic, is a very tricky thing, a thing not easily amenable to the methods of history as such--a thing that belongs in many ways more to the realm of legend than literal fact. And nowhere is this more visible than the basic, staring contradiction present in nearly every historical treatment of nomadism. 

If one looks back at history from a certain angle, the impact of nomads and nomadism becomes simply overwhelming: one sees them, again and again, like magic, as the absolute protagonists of the ancient and Medieval and early modern worlds alike, always and everywhere the driver of events and changes in dynasties and eras and epochs, always appearing suddenly out of nowhere with the best military technology, the most effective military structures and tactics, defeating larger and better-equipped armies with startling ease again and again, again and again riding roughshod over nations and peoples and Empires, destroying whole cities, annihilating entire religions, putting whole civilizations to the sword, sparking mass migrations as entire tribes flee before their faces, always building not only the largest but most effective Empires, Empires that convey trade from one end of the earth to the other, Empires that move entire populations thousands of miles on a whim, Empires that gather the luxury goods of all the earth in unimaginable heaps at the feet of their rulers, Empires that make all crowned heads of the earth bow before them. 

And yet...when one looks from another perspective, the nomads simply disappear, and there is only civilization, only the settled, agricultural peoples, Rome and China and the Etruscans and the Sumerians and the Egyptians and a thousand more, all with their roads and farms and villages and towns and cities built patiently over generations, with their religions and cultures and beliefs and ways of life integrated into and defining every part of life, year after year pouring out of their enormous surplus the wealth by which palaces and bureaucracies are built and on which kings and Emperors feed: and all the while on their fringes a perpetually changing crowd of cast-offs shift and murmur, staring with jealous eyes and feeding on scraps of food and culture tossed to them, always hungry, always desperate, always ready and willing to be hired as merchants or mercenaries to fight for one civilized group or another, to take your goods away and bring back different luxury goods, but, from time to time, suddenly washing like a terrible sea over the walls built to keep them out, destroying and raping and killing with jealous abandon, and perhaps for a generation or two submerging the civilized peoples altogether--but then, inevitably, the sea recedes, the towns and farms and cities are rebuilt, and when you look to the palaces and mansions of the rich, you find in them new people with strange faces, and ask them if their fathers were really those poor men from the desert, and they look down in shame and say, yes it is true, but do not worry, I am one of you, one of the civilized. And life goes on as before.

The real paradox, though, is that these two perspectives are not merely contradictory positions adopted in opposition to each other: they are found together and ubiquitously in nearly every work, ancient or modern, scholarly or popular, to deal with historical nomads. 

Where the wise are so confused, it is perhaps safer to stick to the popular legends. Here, nomads ubiquitously take on an air of the supernatural, whether demonic or divine. The history of Europe contains many legends of the barbarians from the terrifying steppe to the East, from the wild Scythian to the inhuman Hun to the monstrous Tartar. Europe, though, has never in historical times seen a conquest by true nomads--at least not since the fabled (and mostly fictional) pre-historic migration of the purported proto-Indo-Europeans. The Western Roman Empire was conquered, not by steppe nomads, but by agriculturalists fleeing before them, often resettled on agricultural lands within the Empire, but increasingly turned into armed warbands working for the Roman military. 

Still, for all this, nomads have had a profound impact on European culture, precisely as a terrifying, inhuman, practically unreal other--a distant rumor, a legend of fear, spread from mouth to mouth by fleeing refugees telling of a kind and degree of mass murder and rape entirely unknown to the settled worlds of Rome or Medieval Europe alike, very rarely a sudden wave lapping the edges of civilization, only to disappear again almost as quickly. Nevertheless, the impact on historical consciousness remains profound: modern people are occasionally shocked to learn that Tolkien's orcs were, in his own imagination, precisely monsterized (black blood, red eyes, fangs) "Mongol-types," and unaccountably ascribe this to personal racism against Asians rather than to his knowledge of folklore and tales of the Mongols themselves.

Still, Europeans (and other Mediterranean peoples) mostly interacted with steppe nomads through their effect on other, non-nomadic peoples--whether via settled peoples fleeing from nomads or settled cultures informed by or heir to nomadic traditions like the Arabs or the Turks.

A more instructive example of the relationship between settled peoples and nomadism is Islam itself--precisely because of its straddling of the line between these two worlds. Islam, though heir to the settled world of the Eastern Mediterranean, was both born in nomadism and in its expansion it has taken to itself nomadic peoples the world around, absorbing their traditions into its own. 

The Mongols were in their origins the great enemy of Islam, invading every Muslim land, breaking every Muslim Empire on the battlefield, razing mosques and slaughtering holy men, and finally laying siege to Baghdad itself, where the last Abbasid Caliph, successor to the authority of the Seal of the Prophets, confidently threatened them with the curse of God if they opposed him: after which the Mongols sacked the town, punished its people for their defiance with a week of bloody slaughter that killed hundreds of thousands, and meanwhile took the successor of the Prophet and deputy of God on earth and contemptuously had him trampled to death by horses.

And yet...within a few generations, the bulk of the Islamic world was ruled by petty Muslim warlords who all bore the Mongol title "Khan," many of whom claimed to be descended from Gengis Khan or acting in the name of his descendants, while Sufi holy men loudly proclaimed that the Mongols had been given sovereignty of the world by God. To this day, the name "Khan" is associated everywhere with Islam. 

Likewise, the great and terrible Tamerlane spent his reign crushing Muslim sultanates, burning Muslim cities, slaughtering Muslim clerics, and exterminating entire Muslim peoples--but was himself at least nominally a Muslim himself, who built magnificent mosques out of the spoils in his capital of Samarkand, and was remembered everywhere by Muslims as a Lord of Conjunction and Renewer of Islam, the chosen one of God who had brought a new era by destroying the old. More importantly still, he was and is remembered to this day throughout Asia and the Islamic world as the hero of any number of romantic tales and epics of war and adventure.

When the dust eventually settled, the Islamic world was divided between two or three regimes centered precisely on the historical centers of settled agricultural civilizations: the Mughals in the agricultural villages of India, the Mamluks in the breadbasket of the Nile, the Safavids in the ancient homeland of Persia, and the Ottoman in the fertile, intensively settled farms and walled cities of Asia Minor. All of these dynasties claimed descent from nomadic warriors, and continued to tell their stories in oral epics and written histories alike, from the Shahnameh to the Dede Korkut to the voluminous folk literature and hadiths about the adventures of the Prophet Muhammed and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Like the Arab conquerors of the 7th century before them, though, the native traditions of the nomadic conquerors had become merely a strain of culture identified with a ruling warrior elite, whose entire way of life and economic and political position was now premised on settled lifestyles and rule over agriculturalists.

Still, I am not primarily here interested in the history of nomadism as such, but on the figure of the nomad itself that emerges, both from history and from the legends and literature of more settled peoples. In this, I will be following my own reasoning and concerns, in a way that does not precisely track with any scholarly account of nomadism I am aware of. 

First, it should be clearly understood that nomadism is not simply a natural, immemorial cultural identity of particular peoples or dwellers in certain climates. It is essentially, and not accidentally, a way of life that depends upon the existence of agricultural civilizations. 

In this, it is important to note that nomadism is emphatically not the same as pastoralism, though it does depend on it. Pastoralism, in the sense of the grazing of herds of domesticated animals for meat, textiles, and milk, is merely one aspect of agriculture, came into existence with it, and has always existed mostly in tandem with it. Farmers raise cattle alongside grain and hay fields, shepherds raise sheep in grazing grounds adjacent to vineyards, and so on.

There are basic reasons for this: not only the fundamental synergy of husbandry and cultivation taken together (animals being used to pull plows, to fertilize fields, being fed in winter on grain and hay, grain and greens and meat and milk together providing a more complete and nutritious diet, and so on), but also the fact that it is difficult to generate enough nutritious calories merely from meat and milk, particularly from animals that themselves depend on plants for their growth and live in relatively dry climates. 

Depending on soil and climate and availability of fodder, agricultural societies do and have differed enormously in their particular balance between cultivation and husbandry; and, very frequently, conflicts and competitions have erupted within such societies between the resource-needs of farmers for ploughland and draft animals and the resource-needs of herders for pasturage and meat animals. In all such cases, though, these societies have remained fundamentally settled, agricultural societies.

For the last one hundred years roughly, America has been subject to an intensive anti-agricultural propaganda campaign, beginning with the World War necessity of driving Americans off the farms and into industry and the military, extending through Cold War campaigns against Asian peasantries, taken up by hippies and professionals alike terrified by the conformity and sociability of traditional agricultural life, and now pushed by various types of health and political influencers blaming agriculture for creating a less nutritious diet and more powerful state structures and holding up hunter-gathering as the apex of health and politics.

Most of the charges produced by these campaigns against historical agriculture are false, and indeed laughably so; others merely lack perspective. 

Within the broad sweep of history agricultural societies are notable for their enormous, overwhelming abundance and prosperity, the ability to regularly produce enormous overwhelming surpluses of food and to grow populations to levels unimaginable by any other form of social organization. 

Looking back on past eras of history, we too often see agriculture as defined by essentially inevitable, natural famines, and believe that we have fundamentally overcome this problem using (essentially modern and hence non-agricultural) technology--yet the reality is that the natural issues (climate, weather, soil health) and far more common unnatural issues (war, disease, over-taxation, and economic exploitation) leading to periodic times of famine have both in history and today been overcomeable, and actually overcome, not so much by technology as by human social and political and economic organization and effort. 

The first complex states, in Egypt and Mesopotamia and China alike, functioned essentially as famine compensators, establishing large domains at peace to prevent the artificial disruption of agriculture, building roads and transportation infrastructure to move food from place to place and overcome localized scarcity, taxing and storing grain and other goods in prosperous years to dole out during less prosperous ones, acting in essence as great gatherers and distributors of the surplus of agriculture. Modern narratives blame these great states for being hierarchical and warlike and cruel (and indeed quasi-totalitarian and even communistic) yet the truth is that in most respects they functioned quite efficiently for their purposes. 

That these great states, and the wars they unleashed, many times ended up becoming the main drivers of famine, through over-taxation and large-scale warfare, is simply one of the ironies with which history is replete--not fundamentally different from the reality that modern states under the American Empire have been directly or indirectly responsible for many, many famines of extraordinary severity throughout the world over the past century, famines caused precisely by our promotion of large-scale warfare and economic disruption and desire to drive people off the land into cities and industry. 

Indeed, while ancient societies were fundamentally distributionist, with a basic assumption that every member of society was entitled to government-enabled subsistence, many modern societies have managed to institutionalize famine as a more or less permanent condition for large parts of the population owed neither the necessities of life nor the ability to access the overwhelming (essentially agricultural) abundance enjoyed by the higher classes. 

Still, for all the anti-agricultural ideologies of modernity, modern societies are no less fundamentally dependent on the abundance provided by agriculture than ancient ones: it is merely the self-conscious function of the state that has changed. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that 19th century industrial-capitalist-colonial economies and states functioned as instruments, not for overcoming famine, but for creating and maintaining it as a perpetual condition for the poor and a necessary precondition for the economy of scarcity and cheap labor necessary to build the systems of resource-extraction and industrial production and the massive, toppling military-colonial governments characteristic of the period. While the 20th century saw many alterations of that model, it has not yet left us entirely.

Nomadism, though, stands largely apart from all this, the stuff of human civilization and human history--for reasons that have made it intrinsically difficult to integrate into history at all.

Nomads are peoples who have chosen another way of life, a life that in most contours contradicts the life of abundance in food and culture characteristic of agriculture--for the simple reason that it is not aiming at abundance at all, but making use of scarcity. Settled societies from the Sumerians to the French have had as their most basic telos the production and maintenance and distribution of a super-abundance of food and other necessities. True nomadism, though, has as its most basic telos the deliberate cultivation and exploitation of scarcity in food and other necessities for the purpose of maximizing power over others.

Nomadism, it should be noted, is for most historical peoples not a long-standing characteristic, but an essentially temporary phase, existing most commonly in a somewhat cyclical form. 

It very often emerges as the result of warfare or migration or climate change or the loss of lands to enemies. In the absence of the complex social infrastructure and specialized knowledge necessary to easily achieve agricultural abundance in their present environs, peoples instead exploit their newfound poverty to access by force and commerce the resources they no longer have the ability to produce for themselves. 

At other times, it is the result of something approaching a deliberate choice, but one also made precisely in relation to surrounding agricultural civilizations. Faced with a rich, prosperous society on their borders, marginal peoples grow dissatisfied with their relative penury, and instead adapt to cultivate their scarcity for the purpose of preying on the rich and easy pickings left by that prosperity.

The most fundamental reality to understand here is the simple fact that nomads have rarely if ever generate themselves all the food and other goods they need to thrive, or even at times survive. Their existence as such is normatively parasitic on the civilizations they are in contact with and from which they leech resources through trade or raiding or outright conquest. Nomadism has only ever existed stably only in zones adjacent to large agricultural civilizations, where they can siphon resources from them through raiding or trade--above all and paradigmatically the Central Asian steppe, bounded by the great settled civilizations of Persia and Egypt on the one side, and China on the other, where various nomadic peoples have for the past few thousand years acted as a primary conduit for commerce between them, at the same time preying on and from time to time conquering both.

This is in part due to the relatively inhospitable climate of the steppe: but only very partially. Most of the Asian steppe is in fact perfectly suitable for cultivation; much of it has been cultivated in the past at different times, and vastly more is cultivated today following the gradual extinction of the nomadic peoples. Indeed, historical nomads have not uncommonly enabled or instigated such cultivation themselves, by subjugating or moving communities of agriculturalists and forcing them to produce food for them.

Even in Central Asia, though, nomadism has for most of its practitioners been a temporary and relative condition. In the zone adjacent to China, innumerable nomadic peoples have either invaded settled Chinese agricultural lands and then settled down to become new Chinese dynasties or sub-groups, or done their best to simply adopt the culture and cultivation of Chinese civilization in their own environs. In the era of Genghis Khan, there were three copy-cat "Chinese Empires" existing outside of the traditional Southern Chinese heartland, the Jurchen Jin, the Qara Kitai, and the Tanguts, all living settled agricultural lives with different capitals but the same basic Chinese religion and politics and organized- and abundance-focused way of life--and at the heart of each of these Empires was a formerly nomadic people that had "gone respectable" and settled down. The Mongols forcefully rejected this settled way of life in favor of heightened nomadism and conquest--but within a few generations had settled down and adopted settled lifestyles throughout essentially their entire conquered territory also. 

Nomadism, then, is not a fixed way of life, emerging from within societies and capable of sustaining itself and producing and reproducing itself indefinitely like intensive agriculture or hunter-gathering. It is a specialized, adaptive role and set of behaviors, an essentially para-civilizational and inter-cultural way of being. Indeed, properly understood, nomadism is defined by its inability to generate from within itself prosperity and abundant life: and hence its intrinsic orientation toward dealing death.

In legend, and to a great extent in history as well, the nomad is an intrinsically uncommon, deliberately specialized kind of person existing in relation to other, more common kinds of persons--yet a person that, from the perspective of the settled peoples, cannot help appearing extraordinary in nearly every way. 

For if there is one thing that thousands of years of art by settled peoples about nomads indicates, it is that nomads are extraordinary.

They are strong, impossibly strong, with the stature and strength only possible to people fed from birth on scarce meat and milk. They are lordly, with strictly hierarchical social structures based on competition over scarce resources, tribes and bloodlines and hierarchies. They are organized, with the kind of organization possibly only to people struggling to survive, obeying without question and arranging themselves like magic in straightforward, mathematical divisions whose raison d'etre is not family or community or religion or culture, but the collective achieving of collective goals. 

Nomads are talented, trained from birth on impossibly specialized skills, the ability to travel light over thousands of miles, to find fodder for their mounts in the frozen tundra, to survive on dried meat and fermented mare's milk and small amounts of blood taken from their own mounts, to maneuver on horseback with incredible alacrity and in organized groups, to execute with ease complicated tactical strikes, feints, retreats and ambushes and sudden counter-charges, to shoot arrows from moving mounts. They are adaptive, taking technology, culture, religion, and structures alike from the settled peoples around them without a hitch. They are technological, adapting any military or transportation technology they come across and honing it to incredible degrees. 

Likewise, nomads are intensely sexual, defined as such by their orientation towards non-familial, non-interpersonal sex, the capture and rape and purchase and concubinage and even marriage of foreign women in numbers that are, from settled perspectives, simply unbelievable, and either horrifying or titillating or both. And they are luxurious, their lives and economies centering not on storing or transporting food, but on commodities, rare clothing and crafted objects and precious metals taken from many societies and piled up to no purpose in amounts that are, from the perspective of societies and governments focused on the abundance of foodstuffs, simply absurd and obscene but nevertheless compelling. 

Nomads are not permanent, but temporary, cyclical, even apocalyptic, with larger governments and political structures that do not exist, like agricultural civilizations, to ward off famine through constant effort, but which emerge only periodically, for the purpose of overwhelming conquest, before collapsing again. 

Above all, though, the nomad is free, not bound by the moralities and familial and political and religious strictures, and not subject to the physical limitations, intrinsic to agriculture and settled, intensive communities. 

Paradoxically, the very harshness of his existence, the very absoluteness of his organization and hierarchy, the very scarceness of his food and drink, are what liberates him from the intensely social and communal and political and familial existence of the settled peoples, and allows him to focus his energies on violence, on the piling up of commodities, on the gathering of innumerable women, on the conquest of other peoples, and, in short, on amoral and unlimited power over other persons.

Hence, from the other side, the intense contempt of nomadic cultures for the kind of individual produced by settled cultures: this cringing, servile being, small and weak, without skills or technology, without a work ethic or drive or ambition, conformed in every aspect of his person and identity to the social structures around him, without courage, without personal honor, unable to follow orders, always scheming and plotting, whose whole life revolves merely around laboring to pile up more and ever more of the food he and his family need to survive, who exists not as an individual but only in masses, like cattle. The nomad's whole life is defined by him not being this type of person, but something different, higher, nobler: someone whose goals in life are not merely to eat and build and live.

On the contrary, the nomad as such is defined, not by the production of resources or the reproduction of life, but their systematic destruction. He does not build cities, but burns them down; he does not plant crops, but spoil them; he does not dig wells, but poisons them; he does not produce cultural commodities, but some of it he steals, some of it he trades, and some of it he simply destroys; he does not care for women, but exploits them; he does not raise children, but begets them in vast numbers and destroys them in even larger numbers; and so on.

This is historically a vast simplification, of course. Nomadic peoples always have their own family structures where, in the historical cliche, women have a higher social position than for agricultural societies--in the very specific sense that they are fully part of and subordinated to the hierarchical and military organization of the society, expected to prepare and maintain their husband's readiness to ride away to war at any moment, and just as ready to govern family affairs in the absence of men. Similarly, while nomadic conquerors are famous for their proclivity for producing literally hundreds of bastards from captured women, their few favored legitimate children are always raised carefully, cherished and trained from birth with hardships and food and knowledge to become as skillful as their parents.

Still, the overall effect remains the same. Nomadic conquerors are the only pre-modern groups to produce bloodlettings comparable to modern genocides, destroying incredible proportions of the peoples they conquered and turning incredible numbers into homeless refugees. From the perspective of settled peoples, they have often appeared less like a human group than like a divine punishment, a plague or famine or storm, as destructive and as temporary.

So far, I have spoken of nomads primarily in economic and political terms. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that it is possible to understand nomadism not as a mere adaptive behavior defined by resources or opportunities, but as a religion. 

Indeed, what is most striking about the three thousand years of nomadic history, looked back on from any perspective, is the striking, overwhelming commonalities present within all these historical traditions. From one perspective, nomads have been chameleons, taking ideas and gods from here and there like commodities with little attention to origins or impacts, with the Mongols merely adapting the concept of the Mandate of Heaven from China, and the Turks merely adapting the concept of a universal Caliphate from the Arabs. 

Yet from another perspective, things appear almost the other way around, with all concepts of whatever peoples inevitably twisted to the same basic shape by nomadic peoples the world over. 

This fundamental concept is that of a divine charisma descending from above onto a single individual and a single people, giving them the right and license to conquer and plunder and rape and steal and rule without limit. This basic concept may be expressed in many different terms taken from many different peoples: as illumination by divine light, or the choice of divine grace, or physical descent from the gods, or the shadow of the Huma bird, or the Mandate of Heaven. Yet though the terms may be the same as those used by settled peoples, the meaning is not.

The Chinese Mandate of Heaven delineates a function and a burden: the Emperor must rule over society with justice and ensure the prosperity of his people, or he will earn heaven's wrath and be unseated and replaced by another ruler, another dynasty, who will carry out the same function better. The Mongol Mandate of Heaven has nothing to do with either justice or prosperity: it is a divine destiny to conquer the whole world, a license to kill and plunder anywhere and everywhere, and it imposes moral burdens, not on the ruler, but on other people and other peoples, who must submit to the chosen one or face divine wrath. Genghis Khan quite solemnly put whole cities to the sword as punishment for the crime of rejecting the chosen one of Heaven. Tamerlane may have spoken of himself as the Sword of Islam, but this in no way obliged him to follow or impose Shari'a law as the jurists understood it, nor did it prevent him from burning mosques and slaughtering clerics who refused to submit to him; rather, it justified him in doing these things. 

Nomads may consider themselves the Chosen People of God; but this chosenness, unlike the Jewish variant from the Old Testament, does not come with curses, nor even blessings, but only licenses.

In this, understanding nomadism in religious terms allows us to understand that its influence is not limited merely to peoples who happen to be engaging in piracy or conquest or pastoralism at the moment. The idolization of this type of person, the freer, more powerful, less limited human, extends in history from its beginning to its end and through every type of culture. In many cases, that image can be traced back to contact with an actual historical nomad culture, Mongol or Arab or Greek or Turk or Viking or Jurchen; in other cases, the legend is more detached. 

As noted above, in many, many historical settled cultures, the ruling class has traced its origins back to nomadic peoples; and many many epic traditions and mythologies of settled peoples have likewise focused on past nomadic heroes, historical or imagined. Even in the modern world, many people have been obsessed with the Vikings despite having no connection with them at all. Yet as stated in the proem of this essay, what defines a culture most is not what has happened to it, or what it has done, but what it seeks, what it idolizes, what it worships.

One of the forms this nomadic tradition takes is the cultic and epic tradition of the hero. The hero as a semi-divine, semi-human figure, mysteriously freer and more powerful than the ordinary person, dedicated to and dealing death, is closely tied to the nomadic way of life, and indeed cannot be strongly distinguished from it.

In the particular instance with which we began, it is likely that the Greek cultic hero emerged from the nomadic milieu of the early Greeks, seafarers and raiders who along with other Sea Peoples devastated the settled world during the period of the Bronze Age Collapse. For while Europe, at least since the fictional migration of the Indo-Europeans, has never seen a true conquest by steppe nomads, it has throughout its history periodically seen another kind of nomadism unknown to the Central Asian domain: pirates and slave-traders sailing the waves to strike and plunder the towns and farms, beginning with the ancient Greeks and extending to the sea-faring Saracens and Vikings of the Middle Ages and arguably culminating in the modern British Empire.

The world Achilles emerges from, then, and the entire model of warfare and heroism that defines his existence, is inextricably shaped by nomadism, by the turning of whole peoples into organized tools for death and plunder in distant lands. The Greeks were by culture and tradition a settled, agricultural people--but mainland Greece was also a famously poor land for agriculture. And so, many Greeks took to the sea, conquering other peoples and planting colonies throughout the entire Mediterranean, including the coast of Asia Minor where the epic of Troy takes place. 

The options between which Achilles is torn--death or life, heroism or humanity, the army at war or the city at peace--are fundamentally defined by this polarity between civilization and nomadism. The nomad kills and dies, but leaves a legend behind him; the settled person lives and gives life, but is quickly forgotten.

In the modern world, where most of us believe, or pretend to, that we have found the one, true, correct way of life, the one, true, correct pathway to unlimited prosperity, it is hard for us to fully share the anguish of ancient cultures and peoples caught between these two incompatible choices. 

On the side of the settled peoples, we whose lives are defined by automation find it hard to understand the anguish of endless labor and toil in service of life. We whose families are defined by no-fault divorce find it hard to fathom the discomforts of a life defined in every dimension by unchosen community. We whose politics are mere exercises in personal opinion and entertainment find it impossible to grasp the burden of being subject to a political entity that actually offers us food and justice but which just as insistently demands our worship. 

On the other side, we who are fundamentally homeless and without community find it hard to feel the true horror of homelessness and severance from community and culture and meaning that made the nomad a figure of fear. We whose desires are defined by illusions of security and simulations of violence find it hard to imagine the historical horror at the limitless violence of nomads. We whose economies are defined by the sacrifice of necessities for commodities find it hard to feel confusion at the nomads' unlimited acquisition of useless commodities. 

Still, even if we could feel the true sorrow of Achilles' choice, the question would remain: which of these paths is the right one?

Or perhaps more immediately: which choice has America made?

It is in most senses rather silly to argue that contemporary American society is nomadic; yet in the terms discussed so far, this remains a nearly inevitable conclusion. If a society is most defined by what it values and idolizes, and if America most values and idolizes the hero as nomad, then America is most defined by at least a religious and cultural nomadism, if not a physical one.

Yet there are also more straightforward reasons to associate modern American civilization with nomadism. Anyone traveling in America after having traveled in Europe can help but be struck by the immediate, overwhelming contrast between the intensively settled landscape of the Old World and the vast empty spaces of America, the deserts and plains and forests and wildernesses, cannot help but realize the degree to which America is built around modern transportation infrastructure, ever longer roads filled with ever faster vehicles connecting ever more distant towns and cities and depots, a linear progression aimed Westward to the endless frontier. At the heart of America is a vast steppe, the Great Plains: but in truth most of America, in comparison to the landscape of Europe, has the feel of a steppe.

Still, this feeling can be deceptive: particularly since America has always been inhabited predominantly by small populations of agriculturalists and urbanites and townsmen, people who still to this day never move very far from home. 

Yet this conflict is to an extent only apparent: since while historical nomads *could* travel great distances in a way seem by many as magical, their ordinary lifestyle was defined less by moving great distances as by *circulation*, the regular, cyclical moving of pasturage and therefore residence. Similarly, though the average American lives and dies within about fifty miles of where they were born, this average person also makes about 12 changes in residence in their lifetimes, am extraordinarily high number for any settled society. And even where their residency does not change, the American lifestyle has for nearly a century been one defined precisely by circulation: from home to work, from work to home, from home to vacation, from vacation to home, from the desk to the couch, from the couch to the bed, and back again. Even American leisure activities are frequently focused on mere movement and circulation, driving or running in endless, fixed circles. 

It is this kind of circulation, circulation as an automatic, indefinite travel with no end goal, travel for its own sake without reference to destination, that the very French and European Jean Baudrillard (in one of only two good books ever written by Europeans about America) saw as truly characteristic of America as such. As he saw it, the true America was the astral America, the America of the roads and highways, the America of the Desert.

And there is certainly something to this: particularly if one takes into account the overwhelming American obsession with the personal car, an obsession that is far from confined to the rich or even the middle class, but permeates every group of people down to the poorest of the poor.

 The fetishization or rather personalization of an *instrument of travel*, seen as an essential extension of the individual person, a kind of second body, can be found in every kind of person in America--and it is difficult for me, at least, not to connect this to the fabled interrelationship between nomads and their horses, who served as their shelters and weapons and second selves and whose milk and blood they drank. Certainly if Americans were ancient pagans, they would worship their cars.

And this fetishization of the car, in turn, would make very little sense if Americans did not *use* their cars. And they do: the average American spends an hour a day in a car, much more than more historical societies. French people like Jean Baudrillard, in contrast, spend about an hour a day traveling--but only about half of that time in cars, as opposed to walking, cycling, or public transportation. And this, too, for an expensive method of travel not really accessible to the true poor.

Still, if my thesis of the hero as nomad has any meaning, cultural nomadism cannot be defined by any mere physical motion, but by more personal forms of movement and dislocation and placelessness. What has always struck most nomads about agriculturalists, and vice versa, is the intensive sociability of the latter and relative isolation of the former. In keeping with this divide, the last fifty years in American have above all been marked by the gradual dissolution of every personal and social and political bond that once defined settled civilization. The average American in 2025 has only around 3 close friends, a number unimaginable in any but a nomadic people at war. Nearly half of Americans are born to unmarried parents, a number likewise unimaginable for any but conquering nomads. More than half of Americans adults are not married at all. 

Yet in truth, I do not really think that the American people as a whole, in 2024, can be characterized as nomads in lifestyle terms. America is simply too vast and productive society: and nomadism has never been a lifestyle accessible to the many, or a lifestyle capable of reproducing itself. Like China or Persia, no great civilization can sustain itself except on the extraordinary abundance produced by a population of agriculturalists.

Yet a civilization can be conquered and ruled by nomads, as both Persia and China were many times: and I think the truer context in which to view the extraordinary social dissolutions of modern American society is not with reference to nomadic societies as such, defined not only by freedom but by strict hierarchies and set tasks and power over others, but with reference to the peoples conquered by them. There are innumerable places in America today that one can compare only to the bombed or burned out shells left by conquering armies. There are innumerable people in America today whose lives can only be compared to those of people whose institutions and economies have been recently and violently annihilated by invaders.

It is when we come to the true American elite, then, that we find something more closely approximating the nomadic vision of yore. There is and always has been a natural kinship between nomads and Imperial elites, based on a shared devotion to mobility and organization and violence; a kinship that has again and again allowed nomads to easily slip into the position of rulers over large agricultural civilizations, becoming new Chinese and Persian dynasties with little break. All the same, though, the actual lifestyles adopted by Imperial elites have generally been defined by the sociability and the stability of settled culture. Not so the American elites, who are historically a truly extraordinary group: people whose lives are defined by rigid hierarchies of status and obedience, people with highly specialized skills unimaginable to regular mortals, people adept at organization and logistics to a degree unimaginable even to the Mongols, people who circulate with such overwhelming speed that the very concept of home is an anachronism, people whose families are at best parts of the machinery preparing them to go to battle at any moment and at worst simply superfluous, people whose psyches and status are defined by infinite impersonal, non-familial, non-procreative sex with infinite women, who people whose whole way of existing is defined by power over others. 

American ruling elites post-WW2 have far more than anyone else been defined by their mobility: moving for work not merely once but again and again, and on business trips not merely as a task but a way of life. After all, how could such a huge Empire, an Empire spanning the globe and every human culture, be conceivably administered except by a breed of people, a homo imperialis, of a quite extraordinary mobility? It is they who have above all been characterized by mobility not just in place, but in culture, in language, in mindset, in sexuality, and in mores.

And it is this American, this homo imperialis, that has been largely or entirely the American seen by the rest of the world. When Europeans and Chinese and Arabs have encountered Americans, they have not encountered the slow-talking farmers of the Midwest, or the slow-talking urbanites of the South: they have encountered nomads, tall, powerful, mobile, sexual, and free, entering their societies and ruling over them, bringing military technologies and goods to trade for commodities and everywhere dealing death just like the Mongols. It is in this kind of person that the rest of the world has believed when they believed in America--and this kind of person, this kind of hero, that the Americans themselves have worshiped and served. And it is this kind of person who is a nomad.

As argued above, no great civilization could conceivably exist populated merely by nomads: but great civilizations can certainly be conquered by them. In the ordinary course of things, this conquest leads within a few generations to the total breakdown of the nomadic mindset and way of life and their gradual incorporation into the existing settled lifestyle around them. Along the way, the nomads have brought new military technologies and organizations and techniques and social hierarchies, strengthening the states of the settled peoples. Yet the simple reality has always been that the agriculturalists had in themselves the power to produce and reproduce life, and the nomads relatively only the power to produce and reproduce death. And in history, as in religion, it is always life that defeats death.

No one has been more aware of this inevitable fading of nomadism than nomads themselves: and many nomadic ruling classes have worked very hard to prevent or retard the process. The Mongols, for their part, turned whole tracts of farmland in China into pasturage and hunting grounds and frequently did their best to continue living in tents. In the end, though, all these desperate measures failed: and nomadism was subsumed back into civilization.

Modernity, though, has been marked by the opposite movement: the spontaneous generation of nomadic lifestyles by essentially settled and agricultural elites armed with nothing more than an ideal. So the British aristocracy in Early Modernity went mad as any Mongol horde, and for three centuries waged a savage war of annihilation on the agriculturalists around them, systematically seizing their land and turning them out of their homes and reshaping the countryside of England into one vast steppe for pasturage and hunting and wandering. The American elites, gentlemen farmers and urban businessmen alike, went mad in a quite different way: mad for business, for administration, for logistics, for greater and ever greater efficiency, for more and more and more resources circulating across ever greater and greater spaces without end. Yet the root of both madnesses is precisely the same: the ideal of the truly free person, the gentleman, the businessman, the hero, the nomad. Likewise, the effect of both madnesses is the same: decultivation, destruction, death.

In the 16th century, the native religion of the common people of England was exterminated by force and replaced with an entirely new one: the worship of the gentleman. Similarly, within living memory all the religions of all the American peoples have been exterminated and replaced with the worship of the hero. It is this that defines the moment-to-moment psychology and goals of Americans of every race and color and creed and class--even or especially where that ideal is simply impossible to live out, even or especially among people most deeply harmed by the depredations of elites living by the hero's creed.

I am, at least academically, an expert on historical Christianity, and have spent much of my life pondering the kind of habits and passions and affections and virtues that define both the ideal figure of the Christian in theology, and the reality of the Christian person in history. And what strikes me most talking to contemporary Americans, even or especially most contemporary Christians, is that they do not resemble this person at all, neither in intention nor in action. The reason for this, though, is always quite straightforward: which is that regardless of what people believe, the truth is that human lives are always most shaped by values and ideals. And the ideal person to which American Christians look, whom they admire and emulate, after whom they model their lives and selves, is neither Christ nor the Virgin Mary nor the Saint nor even the Protestant Reformer, but the American Hero. It is his voice I hear in theirs, his gnawing hunger I see in their eyes, his limitless violence I see in their actions.

Nor should we be overly surprised by this. In the end, for humans, value (which is to say, the desire for a real or apparent good) is always stronger than either mere opinion or mere fact. So it was with the Ancient Greeks, who lived settled lives but sang songs about nomadic heroes who sailed the seas to kill and plundered and rape, and who learned to reproduce this lifestyle to a remarkable degree in their own aristocracies and their own internecine wars. So it was, too, with Medieval Muslims, who quite quickly learned to love and serve and valorize the Mongols who had tried to exterminate them, to tell stories and sing songs of them, to appeal to them and emulate them in name and lifestyle and governance. So it has been, too, with the Americans.

And yet...if it is really true that the American Hero is a nomad, that the American elite is nomadic, that the American Empire is like the Mongol Empire...the creeping feeling I have had lately may be right after all. The Roman Empire endured forever, endured even its fall, because it was in essence an agricultural Empire, an Empire that served a function, which was essentially to produce, to generate enormous surpluses of food and distribute them and trade them and convert them into ever larger surpluses and populations and religion and culture and great cities and temples and bath houses and triumphal arches, in short, to give prosperity and life. When the Roman Empire fell, people's lives became, like magic, both harder and scarcer: and so, the people left behind continued to insist that it had never fallen at all, that they were still Romans, still inhabitants of a great civilization, and again and again, through every political or Imperial project from the 5th to the 19th centuries, tried to build it back up again. The Mongol Empire faded like foam and was forgotten in all but legend because it was in essence only a nomadic Empire: an Empire that sparked migrations, and destroyed cities, and piled up commodities, but made those it ruled over both poorer and scarcer--in short, an Empire that dealt death. And so, in a generation or two or five, the Mongols were gone, and only Chinese and Persians and Muslims remained.

And when I look at the faces of all those people with phones, Europeans and Chinese and Persians and Muslims, members of the great ancient civilizations of the world, I begin to wonder. Is it really true that they are all turning into Americans? Or are the Americans, like the Mongols, only turning into them? 

Is it really true that we have transformed their lives forever, given them life and prosperity: or have we only dealt death for a time, and taught them how to deal death? Have we been rulers, or only nomads?

When the American Empire fades, will it be remembered? Will people still want to be American, live under America, build it up again when it has fallen? Or will we only be one more group from nowhere, another gang from the tattered edges of civilization, yet more ragged horsemen from the sunset, who came and burned and destroyed and ruled and then melted away, leaving behind them only new tools, new weapons, new luxury goods, new organizations, new legends of heroes, to be taken up and used and sung about and played with by the enduring peoples?

Will the American Empire endure? I have my doubts. And it is that doubt, present both in the subjects of the American Empire and in its citizens, that defines the present moment, and perhaps will define the whole century to come.

Regardless, the American Hero cannot possibly survive: for he is already dead.

The Hero as Artist

But if Americans are ruled by heroes, if they model their lives on them, if they in a real sense worship them: what is it like to be a hero?

In some way or other every genre of American heroic literature since Daniel Boone has striven to answer that question--most in exceptionally dishonest ways. 

As I discussed recently, wish-fulfillment art has become a genre of its own in America over the last decades: art that exists not so much to tell a story as to allow people to pretend to be a hero. So much has this concept obsessed the American people that not only songs, not only poetry, not only novels and plays and films and television shows, but even entire genres of non-fiction have been created alleging to put people in the place of the hero, living a freer, more meaningful, more impactful life. On the Internet today, this genre has now perhaps reached its true telos, as that millions upon millions of people not only watch television shows about heroes, not only read books about heroes, but hour after hour watch their heroes do their makeup, eat lunch, and live the most mundane parts of their lives via TikTok and streaming services. 

What would it feel like to be Superman? To be James Bond? To be an Instagram model? What would it feel like to be Kurt Cobain? Taylor Swift? John Malkovich? There is art about all of this now--whether in the form of art published through corporations, or merely through an entire internet of art made by people. You too can pretend to be someone you are not--someone who is on television, fixed forever in an image of the past. You too can imagine what it is like to be dead.

As I argued above, I think that the American Detective is in some ways the purest and most literal form of the American Hero--and there can be no doubt that there has never been a better visual embodiment of the American Detective than Humphrey Bogart. 

For as long as I can remember, I have had an odd fascination for the man--a fascination that begin in simple childhood acceptance, extended through youthful admiration, and has ended in something more like puzzlement.

Put simply: what is it that makes Humphrey Bogart admirable? 

Hollywood has had many leading men over the decades, but most have conformed to one of only a few archetypes: the handsome everyman, the debonair everyman, the young everyman, the buff everyman, and so on. 

Humphrey Bogart, though, is neither handsome, nor debonair, nor young, nor buff, nor an everyman. He is an exceptionally strange-looking fellow who looked older and more worn-down at twenty than most men at sixty, whose most natural expression is a kind of undirected sneer, whose voice is a harsh smoker's rasp, whose build is slight, whose gestures are muted. He looks more like the alcoholic one sees drinking alone at cheap airport bars, or the homeless man smoking a cigarette behind a gas station, than anyone's idea of an American Hero.

Yet somehow, he got away with it: and I have always wanted to know how. Perhaps someone can tell me: is Humphrey Bogart really attractive to women? Or is it merely the Magic of Cinema?

Humphrey Bogart is by no means the only actor to play Philip Marlowe onscreen; but he is the most famous, and the most ideal. Philip Marlowe is not supposed to be handsome or debonair or young or buff or an everyman; he is supposed to be a sad aging lonely man barely holding on to the last scraps of pity and decency in a world gone mad. The film The Big Sleep does not do justice to either the themes or the plot of the Raymond Chandler novel The Big Sleep; it takes this downbeat narrative about pornography and the corruption of the young and the disappointment of the old and turns it mostly into a madcap adventure story with a solid helping of Bogart-Bacall sex appeal. Amid this, though, Bogart fairly effortlessly embodies Raymond Chandler's hero, in his wryness, his cynicism, and the broken heart behind it all. 

What Bogart did in The Big Sleep as Philip Marlowe, he did again and again as different fictional detectives in many different film noirs, along the way forging the single indelible image of the American Detective, the only one that really remains to this day.

Yet for all the cynicism of Bogart's heroes, for all the sensitive self-awareness of Chandler's hero, the American Detective is not real; and never was. Whoever the hero is in American society, the man alone standing apart from law with the power to kill, it was never private detectives. Whoever the nomadic elites of America have been trying to emulate for the past fifty years, it was not a poor man in an empty office with a gun in his pocket. Like the pioneer, like the spy, the Detective is in the end only a symbol for something quite different.

In a Lonely Place is among Bogart's filmography a rather strange entry: a downbeat, depressing drama made by an aging Bogart himself, through his private production company, and released to general bemusement in the 1950s. Though it has in the decades since slowly grown to the position of critical darling, it has remained among the most obscure films in his oeuvre.

There is good reason for this, I think: because In a Lonely Place is not a film about a Detective. It is a film about a hero: but the hero is, for the first time in Bogart's career, an entirely real and literal person, with no distance between him and those watching him.

There is another embodiment of the American Hero that I mentioned above, but have yet to address in depth in this essay--despite it being arguably the most potent of all in the contemporary world. American elites do not in fact aspire to be detectives, or cowboys, or spies--they do not even literally and in the real world look up or admire or emulate such people. There is a kind of person, though, that they do frequently aspire to be, and even sometimes succeed in being--or at the very least, spend as much time around as possible. This is, of course, the Artist.

The idea of the Artist as a hero is a strange one historically, strange and nearly unprecedented. Most artists in most societies have been intensely socially and politically networked people, far more so than the average person--totally reliant on patrons and costumers for support and appreciation and so desperate to protect their reputations and avoid criticism. Far from nomadic heroes free to conquer, they were usually men more bound than others by social and political and familial ties, more subject to the opinions and desires of total strangers. 

In the modern world, and most of all in America, that has entirely changed. Our model of Artist is a very different one--one corresponding more than any other American figure to the cultic nexus of the ancient hero. 

Put simply, for Americans an Artist is first and foremost a person set apart, marked like Genghis Khan from birth with a divine charisma, which not only gives them a fixed destiny above other mortals, but also like Genghis' Khan's charisma comes with a nearly unlimited right to kill and rape. Like Achilles, though, what they are set apart for is death. 

Nearly every musical biopic follows the same basic narrative, which is from another perspective precisely the narrative of the Iliad: an Artist who we already know will become the Artist (because we are watching a film about him) struggles with his unique destiny to become the iconic Artist we already know from films like this one, but inevitably chooses to embrace it, which always means among other things to commit violence and impersonal sex and die violently himself, but then be remembered forever and sustained on the borrowed blood and life of his fans and their money offered freely to the makers of the present film. 

This narrative is among other things straightforwardly a cultic and sacrificial one: the Victim, set apart from birth for the sacrifice, must consent, and then be formally consecrated to death and offered on the altar, after which his dead flesh is shared out in the form of images among the assembled worshipers. 

Indeed, no other type of American Hero has ever been quite this literal in its cultic actions, or quite so obsessive in its fixation on violence and death. In this, the Artist has a very strong claim to be the truest American Hero of them all.

The question still remains, though: what is it like to be an Artist? Most artist biopics show surprisingly little curiosity about this question, so fixated are they on fulfilling the iconic and cultic demands of their audience. This function is left mostly to biographers and documentary makers, who have for the last thirty years made enough books and films about Kurt Cobain's suicide to satisfy even his most devoted worshipers. Still, the sad truth is that most even of these works of art are so overwhelmed by their cultic nature that, while they sometimes to limited degrees succeed in conveying what it was like to be the Artist, they very rarely succeed in telling us what the Artist was actually like.

In a Lonely Place is a very good movie, among other things, because it is one of the only movies I have ever seen about an artist that even begins to answer this question. Along the way, it tells us something about Humphrey Bogart, something more about the other American Heroes he played, and something more about America.

In a Lonely Place is a film about Dixon Steele, an aging, alcoholic writer in Hollywood--a man who despises the actors and writers around him and most of his own work, but nonetheless continues working regardless. Like the Philip Marlowe otherwise played by Bogart, Dix is cynical, clever, weatherbeaten, uninterested in systems and laws, but nonetheless beneath the crust both sensitive and romantic. 

Unlike most of Humphrey Bogart's heroes, though, unlike even Philip Marlowe, he has two fundamental problems that in real life usually accompany the former traits: a strong proclivity to drink, and an accompanying proclivity to violent rages.

The film's plot, such as it is, is quite simple: after taking a young woman home with him, not for sex, but to help him with a script to please his long-suffering agent and only loyal friend, Dix instead finds himself accused of the girl's murder. While attempting to prove his innocence, he meets and falls in love with his beautiful and much younger neighbor, Laurel Gray; and, surprisingly, she falls in love with him back. Inspired by this new love to a frenzy of creativity, he continues to be dogged by the police, who still believe he is responsible for the murder--and every time he reacts to their intrusions not with the fear typical of innocent men, but with sudden, violent rage. 

So far, this is a complex, but not fundamentally atypical story: what makes it both stranger and more realistic than any film noir I have seen, though, is the fact that the film does not in any sense center on the mystery of who killed the girl, but on the even greater mystery of Dix's character. Dix does not become a detective, even an amateur one, in order to clear his name by catching the real killer; nor even does Laurel. Whatever investigation takes place occurs almost entirely offscreen, and is carried out by the police, while we watch the two lovers struggling with themselves. After a lifetime of disappointments and squandered opportunities, Dix feels for the first time free and happy and hopeful; and Laurel feels the same. 

Yet Dix is something both more and less than an American Hero--or rather, he is one of the very few actually realistic American Heroes ever put to film or paper. Philip Marlowe may have the power of life and death, but he never kills; Mickey Spillane may spill blood by the buckets, but always according to his own private code of fascist justice. 

Dixon Steele is both the same as and entirely different from these people. Like them, he is a man alone, with no friends and no family: unlike them, he desperately, passionately wants them, and is mostly unable to function without them. Like them, he despises the powers of the world, and lives by his own code: unlike them, his code is neither decency nor pity nor even fascist justice, but merely the drunken emotional reactions of the moment. Most fundamentally, like them, he wields violence and the power of death: but while they do it because they are powerful and in control, he does it because he is not in control of himself, because he has power neither over the world around him nor even over his own body and mind. 

Whether or not he is a murder, then, there can be no question that Dix is a deeply troubled person. As his young lover gradually realizes, Dix's proclivity to both alcohol and violence goes much deeper than mere discomfort at being suspected: he is a war veteran, a loner, a lifelong brawler, who brutally beat a former lover but had this and other violent incidents over the years covered up. To Laurel, it is true, Dix is tender, patient, passionate: but as their time together lengthens, she sees more and more often his other side, the bitterness and desperation and violence that comes out at even the most trivial slight. And she begins to be afraid.

This, it should be said, is a very literal scenario: and a very literal picture of a man. As numerous people behind the scenes affirmed, this man corresponds almost exactly to the genuine character of Humphrey Bogart: a sensitive, obsessive artist with a passionate need to be loved but also prone to alcoholism and sudden, violent rages, whose first two marriages featured numerous incidences of domestic violence. On another level, the film is difficult to separate from its director, Nicholas Ray, another troubled, erratic man with numerous marriages and divorces in his career, who was married to the film's star Gloria Grahame but separated from her during its filming. On the deepest level of all, it is simply a film about the American Hero in all his literal reality: a man alone, incapable of living in society, capable only of wielding power over others through violence, and himself dedicated to death.

The idea of Dix, it turns out, as a murderer is not at all an implausible one. For most of the film, neither the characters nor the audience really know whether or not our hero has killed a young woman--not until the very final scene.

Such a person may make for a sympathetic hero, like Achilles; he may make for an attractive fantasy object, like James Bond; but like all the dead, he can have no true partnership or community with the living.

As Dixon himself tells Laurel, in a poetic couplet written for a script: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” A man alone is a dead man. Yet a man who lives only temporarily, only by small chunks of borrowed life taken from the living, was already dead: like the gibbering shades that swarmed to Odysseus, and spoke for a few moments, and then faded away. Like Achilles, Dix died long ago, whether in his childhood or in the War or slowly and gradually in the nights and days of a long and lonely life. And though he has in a sense come to life again through Laurel's youthful love, this may be only temporary.

Dix's decline in the film in the most immediate sense is triggered by mounting police suspicion; but perhaps from another perspective is merely the borrowed life inevitably wearing off. Whatever the reason, he begins to act more and more erratically, culminating in a road rage incident in which he nearly beats a fellow driver to death before being barely stopped by Laurel's intervention. Faced with this evidence, and very much against her will, Laurel begins to believe that Dix did kill the young woman--and more immediately, to fear that he will kill her if she even thinks of leaving him. 

All this culminates in a nightmarish sequence of scenes that embodies in itself the nightmarish sequel to any cultic contact with the dead. Desperate, in fear for her life, Laurel decides to leave Dix; but when he asks her to marry him, she out of fear agrees, hoping to use this compliance as cover to escape. 

Of course, one cannot really deceive the dead: and it is dangerous to try, since their vengeance, as Herodotus knew, is more terrible than any mortal vengeance. 

When Dix finally finds out that she has lied to him, he reacts, predictably, with rage against everyone around him--a rage that is in its essence the rage of Achilles, a rage that breaks every boundary and every bond of fellowship and destroys every trace of sentiment and love and pity. 

In real life, though, such a rage is not epic, but pathetic: it does not look like Achilles murdering hundreds of armed soldiers, but like a miserable, old broken-hearted drunk striking his agent and only friend, a small sad man with glasses, and then pursuing his young girlfriend to her apartment, screaming at her incoherently, and finally, in pathetic, childish desperation, beginning to strangle her.

Still, in real life, choices are never quite irrevocable. Though Dix has begun to kill Laurel, he does not do so; he stops, and the phone rings, and it is the police, who say they have found the real killer, and want to apologize to Dix for even suspecting him. His name is cleared: he can go on with his life without shadow.

At this point, though, this hardly matters. Regardless of his intentions and sentiments and romanticism and sensitivity and tenderness, Dix's relationships are irrevocably broken: the line he has crossed with both his only friend and his lover is a line that cannot be uncrossed. He is now a man totally alone, without home, without family, without society, capable only of violence against himself or others: a true hero. 

As the woman watches, the hero wanders off into the night, alone. He is not going forth to conquer Asia or take Troy or even solve a crime: that was only ever a fiction, a pretext, was never really what the hero was aiming at. By all his actions and choices, he was always seeking only one thing: death.

That, I believe, is the truth of the American Hero. I do not think there is much hope for America, or any one of us, until we learn to worship worthier gods.