"You can combine up to a certain point; you can distort up to a certain point; after that you lose the identity; and with that you lose everything. [...] A thing that has changed entirely has not changed at all. It has no bridge of crisis. It can remember no change. If you wake up tomorrow and you simply are Mrs. Dope, an old woman who lets lodgings at Broadstairs—well, I don’t doubt Mrs. Dope is a saner and happier person than you are. But in what way have you progressed? What part of you is better? Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”
“No,” said Phillip, with suppressed but sudden violence, “I deny that any limit is set upon living things.”
-G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914)
We live in a time where more and more people want to stop existing. Considered historically, this is a surprisingly common desire--and a key to understanding many things present and past otherwise incomprehensible.
Last year, numerous otherwise normal people online, and an even greater number of abnormal people online, and also many people working for the United States Federal Government, embraced a twenty-year-old meme in which Werner Herzog narrates a single pilgrim penguin inexplicably leaving its colony and heading out into the frozen tundra to die alone in the cold. While for the old-fashioned pessimistic humanist Herzog this was supposed to once again point out the inhumanity and cruelty of the natural world which humans must transcend through reason, for innumerable people in America today this nihilistic story about an individual seeking death through isolation was instead seen as inspirational, even aspirational. Numerous otherwise sane people started talking about "Being the Penguin" as though lonely death by exposure and starvation was a desirable goal--and perhaps, for them, it was. Whatever Americans are in 2026, we certainly are not normal.
Still, if Americans are abnormal, they remain human; and our passion for death can in fact be understood in the light of universal human nature, via the concept and pragmatic, ethical reality of transcendence, which understood properly is as foundational to human action as food and drink is to human bodily life.
If, as Aristotle says, the soul is in a sense all things, at least by way of relation and telos, then the soul quite naturally and necessarily wants to transcend itself. If, as Aquinas says, man is ordered towards God as to an end that transcends his reason, then man quite naturally and necessarily desires to transcend himself.
Transcendence, though, is a confusing concept. In the most basic sense, one thing transcends another when it has something in common with it, but also goes beyond it. In the proper Thomistic-metaphysical sense, one thing transcends a group of other things when it contains all their perfections in a higher, simpler, and more eminent way. Either way, though, a puzzle emerges: for what could it possibly mean for a thing to transcend itself?
One rather simple answer to that question might be that a thing transcends itself when it ceases to be itself, and becomes something else. If today I am Nathan Israel Smolin, and tomorrow I cease to be Nathan Israel Smolin and become Captain Bob "Captain Peabody" Peabody, a blue clayman veteran of the Second World War and also a blogger, there can be no doubt that I have transcended Nathan Israel Smolin in at least some sense. As Captain Peabody I can certainly reflect with satisfaction that I have left behind all the difficulties and limitations of Nathan-Israel-Smolin-hood; as well as in the concomitant fact that as Captain Peabody I will evince perfections and have experiences that Nathan Israel Smolin could never have had. And if it is the case that Nathan Israel Smolin must and will inevitably die, a transformation into Captain Peabody could well extend my life, and an indefinite series of such transformations extend it indefinitely, and so constitute a kind of eternal life beyond the span of human years.
For all that, though, there are (at least) two reasons that such a transformation does not constitute transcendence in either its metaphysical or ethical senses. The first is the simple fact that in gaining the perfections and advantages and experiences and memories and indefinable spark of being a blue clayman with a large apparent-rocket-launcher attached to the right side of my body I will have at the same time lost the indefinable spark of being Nathan Israel Smolin. Or, put another way, I will not have transcended or moved beyond the entire category of human (and clayman) personalities in such a way as to contain all the perfections of them in a supereminent way; rather, I will simply have moved from one member of that category to another. Or, put in the most fundamental way of all, I will not have found eternal life, but died.
In the second place comes the difficulty pointed out by G.K. Chesterton (via the honorable Dorian Wimpole) above, that in ceasing to be Nathan Israel Smolin I have in the proper sense simply ceased to be. Human personality and personhood, it turns out, is not simply an accidental relation added to a kind of quasi-physical substance; as rational beings, our personhood defines and constitutes each one of us in toto, body and soul. Even if (arguendum) in the transformation from Smolin to Peabody and from flesh to clay every single atom currently present in my body were kept and none discarded, the mere fact of altering my personal and rational identity from that of a human being from Alabama to a clayman from Claymatia would involve my destruction. For a transformation to be an improvement, let alone a true form of transcendence, something of the original must be preserved and survive the transition.
As I have pointed out before in this space, America has over the past fifty years been obsessed with the concept and term of identity as no other in history--even while showing little or no understanding of what identity actually is.
If personhood and personality and therefore identity is for rational beings (as both Aristotle and Aquinas new) fundamentally defined and even constituted by relation, we could quite easily predict that the pervasive isolation and atomization of our society would result in an obsessive fixation on identity. People always become obsessively fixated on important things they are in the process of losing. And if at times our society has seemed to show a kind of naive utopian optimism about identity as such--assuming as an article of faith that every asserted or imagined or even merely vaguely felt identity was ipso facto good and just and necessary for happiness and compatible with every other identity--we can also recognize in this identitarianist optimism the kind of avoidant magical thinking present in nearly every psychological experience of loss.
Still, if there is a primal terror that makes us cling to our identities against the world, if there is an animalistic rage that makes us use them as weapons, if there is an avoidant naiveté that makes us accept any and every identity merely as a shield against the infinite dark, there is nonetheless no denying that there is also, deeply rooted in us, a desire to transcend our identities, chosen or unchosen, shallow or deep; and that this desire can quite easily be twisted into an unslakable thirst for annihilation.
In the remaining paragraphs of this essay, then, I will be tracing this human thirst for annihilation through a number of different fictional stories and historical accounts, in all of which we will be attempting to understand the human proclivity for self-destruction not through the lenses of ethics or metaphysics, but via psychology and narrative and history. By understanding these accounts, we will, hopefully, come closer to understanding ourselves and our society--and in so doing, hopefully learn to counter the thirst for death wherever it is found in America, in others, and in ourselves.
Annihilation (2018)
I have long had a thing for high-concept science fiction; I have even written some of it myself. At its best, this kind of art can portray a concept with more insight than any definition--precisely by way of atmosphere, character, and narrative. Unless one is talking about a Platonic form, confined to the abstract worlds of the mathematical and transcendental, a concept is a pragmatic way of getting at some facet of the world of time and change and the human beings that live in it. Everything that enters the human mind, though, has for that reason alone an atmospheric color, a narrative value, and an ultimate impact on the choices and character of human persons: and these things can only be conveyed in a story.
The concept around which the film Annihilation centers is annihilation: or, more precisely, the human desire for annihilation. There is nothing fictitious or fantastical about this desire; it is known immediately in some form by every person at some point in their lives.
As with most science fiction, though, in the movie Annihilation this real and tangible desire is examined with reference to something that is fantastical. A thing, a "zone," a "shimmer," has appeared on the surface of the earth: every person sent into it has disappeared and never returned. Certain people, though, have volunteered to enter it one more time; and each has made that choice because they, consciously or unconsciously, are seeking annihilation.
Annihilation, though, can be said in more than one way; and sought for more than one reason. What makes Annihilation a great film--indeed, probably the best high-concept science fiction film I have seen in the last two decades--is the subtlety and insight of its portrait, not of alien entities, but of human beings.
The main character of the film, played by Natalie Portman, is a woman who cheated on her husband--after which her husband volunteered to enter the zone, and never returned (until, of course, he did--or someone like him). In a sense, this is a straightforward enough tale, a story of desire and wrongdoing and guilt and regret familiar in some form to all human beings. As it turns out, though, the story is not quite as simple as it first appears. Our protagonist Lena's marriage was in fact a happy one; and she did not cheat on her husband out of either a desire for something better, or a dissatisfaction with what she already had, but rather out of the same seemingly inexplicable impulse for destruction that will later inspire her to enter the zone.
In an opening scene, Lena teaches her students about the origins of life on earth in the processes of cell division--the cutting off of a living thing from itself--and autophagy--the self-consumption by a living thing of parts of itself, leading sometimes to its own death. Without these two processes, she points out, life could never have spread across the earth. From one point of view, both processes aim at survival, at propagation, even at immortality. Since an individual cell will eventually die, dividing itself in one sense extends its existence through its offspring; by consuming parts of itself, a cell fuels its continuing life; by dying, a cell enables the continuance of the living being of which it is a part. From another point of view, though, both processes depend upon, or even aim at, not survival, but death. As if to illustrate the point, she displays a cancerous tumor, where cells divide and grow out of all measure, killing both their host and, ultimately, themselves.
The alien shimmer, it turns out, is in itself the instantiation of a very similar principle. Everything in the zone--animals, plants, and finally people--is in a state of continual mutation, changing and growing rapidly and beyond all measure. A single plant grows numerous flowers of different types--an alligator grows into a hulking monster with shark teeth--a bear speaks with the human voice of its victim--a man's insides writhe and pulsate like worms. Somehow, the "signals" that make a thing what it is, starting with DNA and extending to the human mind itself, are being "scrambled" by an alien force, "refracted" like a jammer randomizing a radio signal or a prism refracting light.
But, as it turns out, this process is not random at all: it is being directed by something, an alien thing at the heart of the zone that is somehow, unimaginably, using animals, plants, and people alike as its materials in the act of "making something new."
And isn't there something rather desirable about all this, this idea of being changed, recreated, renewed, becoming something other, something new, something different from our tired, old, boring selves? Isn't there, at least, some impulse, some desire, that this thing is feeding off of, animating, using, for its own purposes?
As it turns out, for every member of the team to enter the zone, there is something attractive about the zone, something tied to their own lives and their own past choices, that has led them to volunteer for this seeming suicide mission.
"You're confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke. We destabilize the good job, or the happy marriage. These aren't decisions, they're...they're impulses. You're a biologist. Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?"
All five members of the team, then, are in some way self-destructive; and all have their self-destructive impulses magnified or exploited by the alien being at the heart of the zone.
Lena, as already specified, destroyed a happy marriage for reasons not even she understands; and she enters the zone for reasons she cannot understand either.
Cassie's child died of cancer; she is trying to find, not so much her daughter, but the person she was before she was irrevocably changed by the loss, in a way not entirely different from the way people are changed by the zone. In the end, she finds, not her former self, but a monster that devours her body and soul.
Anya is a former drug addict, who sought something through the extremes of experience and addiction and dependency, and is now seeking the same thing in the zone. She goes mad with paranoia, tries to find and detect and fight the thing that is changing her, and likewise is killed.
Josie wears long sleeves to cover the scars where she cut herself, not so much to die as to feel alive. She is the one person to fully embrace the zone, giving herself over to its continual change, to its violent and overpowering life as flowers grow from her wounds and her body and mind are both consumed.
And Ventress, the team's leader, has cancer, and is dying. What she wants, in essence, is to confront the thing that is killing her, the overpowering, unending growth and change and division that is consuming her body, and to face it without fear before she dies.
When she finds it, though, she finds that, perhaps, fear would have been the wiser choice.
The alien thing that descended from outer space is in fact something a great deal like a cancer. Its promotion of unchecked change and growth in earthly life is one and the same thing as its transformation of earthly life into itself. Its exploiting of the impulse of earthly life towards self-destruction is one and the same thing as its cancerous consumption of earthly life. Its making of earthly life into something wholly new is one and the same thing as its destroying all earthly life.
"It's not like us. It's unlike us. I don't know what it wants. Or if it wants. But it will grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts, until not one part remains. Annihilation."
The final conclusion of the film Annihilation, then, is more or less identical to the final conclusion of G.K. Chesterton in the quote at the top of this page. To change entirely and in every part is to be annihilated. To become wholly something else is to be annihilated.
"You aren't Kane...are you?"
"I don't think so."
We all want to grow, to change, because to grow and to change is to live. More fundamentally, we all want to grow and to change because we all desire something, something that transcends us entirely, and hence is in that sense entirely unlike us. We are not satisfied with our lives, even our happy lives; with our marriages, even our happy marriages; with ourselves, even at our best. It is this desire that is the foundation of all religion, and absolutely central among other things to Christianity. But it is also this desire that can be scrambled, refracted, and so lead us, step by step, down the road, not just to death, but to annihilation.
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990)
The film Annihilation portrays the human desire for transcendence, and its collapse into a desire for self-destruction, through a single fictional narrative about five people and their encounter with an alien being. Yet it would be a mistake to confine this desire and its effects to the realm of fiction, or even to the realm of the private and personal. When one looks closely at the history of the human race, one quickly comes across far more, and far more extreme, examples of this same phenomenon.
Many people have over the past several centuries created theories of history--most centering on belief in one imminent divinity or another. Oddly, though, very few such theories have ever centered on what seems to me to be straightforwardly the main driver behind historical events: the motivations of actual people making decisions and taking action.
Perhaps one reason for this lack of academic interest in concrete human motivation is that when we focus on what people have actually done, and try to figure out why they did it, we very frequently find ourselves both confused and disturbed. People, by and large, are not normal; they rarely if ever act in the ways we consider rational, from the motivations we expect, or for the goals we consider important.
Most people, in America in 2026, spend our lives in ever decreasing social circles made up of ever more similar people; and yet, one can simply watch in real time these groups continually splinter and fall to pieces and turn on each other in the most unanticipated ways. And this is, if we are honest, genuinely disturbing. As I have again and again pointed out, nothing is in the final balance as threatening to a human person as another human person--and the odd thing is this remains true even after the person in question has been dead for hundreds of years.
I imagine most people's first encounters with history as children involved some sense of disturbance: the Ancient Greeks did what? The American Founding Fathers did what? The Nazis did what? When one surveys the human race over the past thirty thousand years or so, one sees many, many people acting in ways that are genuinely disturbing, with motivations that are genuinely disturbing, and for goals that are genuinely disturbing.
No wonder, then, that the basic temptation for historians is always and everywhere to avoid the actual concrete acts and motivations of human beings, avoid having to grapple with them honestly and instead replace them with say, a satisfying narrative or a heroic cult or mechanical process or immanentized divinity.
It is quite true that a cultic narrative about a hero embracing death is, if nothing else, much more straightforward than the actual things that motivate someone to become a rock star or a soldier or a detective. It is quite true that the story of an immanentized divinity of immortal utopia embodied in the American Constitution and working out its flaws and imperfections via slavery and Civil War and World War and destined to rule the world forever is much more satisfying and inspiring than examining what actually motivated a small collection of colonial elites to reject Parliamentary tax legislation and end up building an expansionist federal Republic.
The issue, though, with avoiding actual human motivations is that it results in you not ever actually understanding anything. And this does occasionally have its downsides.
Anyway, one of the things that people in 2026 by and large most want to avoid understanding is historical European and American colonialism. There are good reasons for this desire to not understand, beginning with the actual continuing existence and frequent demands and spiraling disasters of post-colonial "Third World" states the world over. If Western people were to remember, say, that Mali, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Gabon were all ruled by France until the late 1950s, then Western people might start to wonder what was going on in those countries right now, what responsibility they and/or their governments and/or France might have in regards to what was going on, and what the "coup belt" even was anyway. Much simpler to simply forget that colonialism ever happened and/or replace its actual history with some much simpler narrative about capitalism or independence or development. Say, have you ever heard of the Green Revolution?
In 2026, though, the simple undeniable truth is that if there is one phenomenon that it is absolutely necessary to understand in order to understand even the most basic rudiments of world affairs, it is colonialism. And there is no historical topic that the average American understands less.
Richard Francis Burton the book is a lengthy biography of Richard Francis Burton the man. Richard Francis Burton the man was the the kind of person that made European colonialism, and especially British colonialism, happen. To understand his motivations is not to understand everything about colonialism, let alone about the very many disparate groups of people European and African and Asian who made that process what it was. It is, though, to understand a great deal.
The first thing that Richard Francis Burton helps us to understand is that colonialism was not simply an economic or political process, but eminently a cultural one--and that it was not simply a cultural process in the colonized countries, but above all a cultural process in the colonizer countries. In his heyday, in England Burton was a celebrity--every bit as much of a celebrity as public intellectuals or writers or scientists or poets or actors. The author of my lengthy popular biography wants very much to make the case that Burton was to some extent all these things: not just an explorer but a poet, scientist, and public intellectual.
What he primarily conveys to me, though, is that Burton was above all things and preeminently an actor--someone who carefully crafted a public image and shaped it and publicized it and exploited it for his own personal profit. A simpler way to say the same thing might be that Burton, and the broader class of 19th century colonial heroes to which he belonged, were perhaps the first generation of true celebrities--people valued not so much for their intelligence or accomplishments or status or power as for their iconicity, their presentation and self-presentation via mass media, their narrative roles and highly colored backgrounds. In modern terms, we might say that Burton and his fellow colonial heroes were audience-insert characters; like Bella in Twilight, their job was to do things, or pretend to do things, that their domestic audiences wanted to do, or at least wanted to want to do, or at least found titillating to imagine they wanted to do. They were transparent figures on highly colored backgrounds; blank men with white faces against bright red African and Asian tapestries.
Few 19th century men were as dedicated to this role as Burton--or as unsubtle in their approach. Burton in his lifetime wrote and published dozens of books chronicling his travels and the lands and peoples among whom he lived. If the book Richard Francis Burton is to be believed, a huge proportion of these books were dedicated to graphic descriptions of sex; and Burton's primary anthropological research method was to sleep with local prostitutes.
Whether or not Burton actually slept with all these prostitutes, though, is perhaps somewhat besides the point. His public certainly thought he did; or more accurately could not have cared less if he did or did not, so long as he gave a detailed enough accounts of novel copulation methods and sex acts and female bodily attributes and behaviors.
In the year 2026, Freudianism is, thankfully, finally considered passe and absurd by nearly all educated people; and I have no wish to revive it. Nevertheless, if there is one thing that the book Richard Francis Burton conveys about the historical person Richard Francis Burton and his career as a British celebrity, it is that colonialism was for him at least, and to a large extent for his public, mostly a weird sex thing.
Of course, even for Burton it was not only a sex thing; or rather, like all weird sex things it was not ultimately about sex, but about much deeper personal and cultural dysfunction.
If there is one thing that I took away from reading the book Richard Francis Burton and would like to convey to my readers, it was that Richard Francis Burton was not a nice man; he was also not a particularly smart man; nor he was a particularly effective man. Nevertheless, he was a genuine character of a certain type, driven by certain overriding motivations that are well worth understanding, if only to understand the effects he and those like him had on the world.
One central and overriding motivation was indeed merely sexual, albeit elaborated on in various pseudo-intellectual ways. Throughout his life, Burton frequently asserted in print the proposition that a major, if not the, problem with Western European society was the culturally-enforced inability of its men and women to have good and satisfying and creative sex. This was partly due to the unnatural institution of monogamy, which Burton continued to attack in print even after his own marriage. Another part of it was the purported obstinacy and coldness of European women, which Burton also railed against frequently, and which allegedly kept European women from behaving as pliantly and creatively as the submissive native prostitutes he preferred. A big part of the problem, though, as Burton saw it, was simple ignorance in European men; who needed detailed manuals on sex acts and female sex characteristics to enable them to properly service women and end their coldness and obstinacy and hence bring about utopia.
If all this sounds rather familiar, it is for the straightforward reason that we are in 2026 largely living in the world that Burton and his compatriots created. It is a simple and straightforward fact that one cannot even begin to understand the origins and history of the Sexual Revolution without understanding the history of European colonialism, the sexual violence it occasioned, and the cultural movements it spawned. There would be no Sigmund Freud and no Margaret Mead without Richard Francis Burton; and no Sexual Revolution without colonialism.
As always, though, Burton's sexual obsession was grounded in a much more basic personal dysfunction. If there is one thing that Burton managed to convey in and through all his treatments of sex, it was above all his profound discomfort in the actual company of his fellow Western Europeans. This base discomfort was central to Burton's psychology since his childhood, which was mostly spent, after his birth in 1821, in moving with his tyrannical Anglo-Irish father and brothers through various British expatriate enclaves in France and Italy. Marked out as foreigners to his British and Italian neighbors, Burton and his brothers were equally marked as foreigners to more ordinary British folk. British expatriate communities on the Continent following the Napoleonic Wars were havens of violence and vice, with the British garrisons viewing the continental Europeans around them with contempt, brawling with and harassing locals, and making frequent use of local prostitutes. By Burton's own account, he and his brothers participated in such culture enthusiastically, and were for most of their childhood more or less unmanageable to their parents.
When he finally returned to England to attend Oxford University, though, Burton found with contempt that his fellow students refused to fight duels with him, while the dons demanded a deference he was entirely unwilling to give. After two years, in 1842, Burton was provisionally expelled from the University, and, despite opportunities for reinstatement, instead chose to enlist with the Army of the Bombay Presidency and head for the frontier. For the rest of his life, Burton spent as much time as possible away from England.
Put simply, then, Burton was a person--a very real kind of person throughout human history, but one particularly prominent in the history of European colonialism--who from his early childhood felt fundamentally dislocated from any sense of belonging to family, nation, people, or community, and who was consequently most comfortable when thus dislocated.
The next and most famous phase of Burton's career was premised on his other most notable personal characteristic: his unique ability as a mimic, manipulator, spy, and con man to impersonate natives wherever he travelled. From his early days in India, Burton took to donning Muslim dress and leaving the English garrisons behind to wander freely through native civic, religious, and sexual spaces. This was helped by his extraordinary facility with languages; but at least as importantly by his ability to mimic the very particular sense of status, wealth, and power displayed by traveling Muslim traders, the way they carried themselves, the way they related to other Muslims, to Hindus, and to the British.
For the next several decades of his life, Burton normatively travelled in the guise of a Persian merchant and observant Sufi Muslim holy man--a character also clearly set apart from the ordinary people among whom he moved, also clearly privileged and superior, but nevertheless capable of accessing networks and methods of support hidden to the ordinary British officer. Wherever he travelled, Burton was welcomed by local Muslims, fed and housed by them, honored by them as a Sufi and a rich man.
Still, Burton could not precisely be accused of "going native," as his viewpoint on the natives among whom he moved was explicitly racialist and frequently contemptuous--including a particularly strong and enduring animus for Sub-Saharan Africans, who Burton saw as congenitally inferior to both Asians and Europeans. Nor was Burton at all unwilling to claim the status due to his British birth and military status where necessary. One of his favorite tricks, in fact, was to approach a British officer or official in Muslim disguise, fool him completely, and finally reveal himself to the official's astonished eyes by switching to English and displaying his official papers. Whatever else he was, Burton was privileged, and happy to be so.
Then, too, if the book Richard Francis Burton is to be believed, one of the reasons Burton played this part was because he was for some or all of these decades a spy in the service of the British crown. At the same time, though, there can be no doubt that Burton himself showed a strong personal preference for dressing in the clothing, praying the prayers, and living the social relations of his assumed character whenever and wherever possible.
If there was another motivation that defined Burton's life, it certainly was not the goal of British military advancement, let alone the patriotic mission of furthering British power. Burton found British soldiers by and large impossible to get along with, especially his own superior officers, and frequently saw his projects thwarted and his promotions held up as a result. Nor was Burton remotely a Jingo in a conventional sense, retaining to his dying day an inveterate dislike for British culture, religion, climate, and even religion, and a strong penchant for comparing not only Muslim and Hindu but even French and Italian culture favorably to the blandness of Victorian England.
Whatever Burton did to advance the project of the British Empire (and he did a great deal), however, there can be no doubt his activities for the Empire also helped him achieve his personal goals, including sleeping with native women, finding native texts to translate and publish, establishing a cult of personality and celebrity status with the British public, and getting initiated into as many native cults and religious groups as possible.
Most fundamentally, I would suggest, Burton was simply more psychologically comfortable under an assumed name and an assumed culture, as someone else, than he ever could be as himself. Burton was far more at ease living out a culture and language and way of life and even religion that was not his own, and which therefore he could control and study and manipulate and simulate with far more ease and facility than he could those of his own heritage; just as he felt much safer among natives that he was fooling and manipulating for hidden ends than among British people to whom he was bound by genuine duties and commonalities.
There can be no question that a Baudrillardian sense of "simulation"-- or the repetition of a thing symbolically for the purpose of rendering it more manipulable and exchangeable--was central to the historical project of colonization, both in America and in Asia.
Still, for all his love of imposture for its own sake, it is clear that Burton was also centrally motivated by what can only be called a religious obsession. Wherever he went, Burton played a religious role, made religious contacts, underwent religious initiations, and collected religious texts. Despite the greater popularity of his general travelogues, Burton spent many hours laboriously transcribing and translating Hindu and Muslim and native religious texts into English, then publishing them for private subscription--and he continued doing so, importantly, long after his association with the British government had lapsed, and indeed up to his dying day. Admittedly, a great many of these texts were, like the Kama Sutra that Burton played a large role in popularizing to the British public, focused around weird sex things--but not all.
Nor could Burton's interests be plausibly confined to mere scholarly interest or curiosity. Wherever he went, Burton worked very hard to gain secret religious knowledge and personal initiation into any religious group he could--including the Naga cult, various tantric sects, multiple Sufi orders, and the Catholic Church. Burton's most famous accomplishment during his lifetime--which made him a kind of folk hero with the British public and nearly precipitated an international crisis--was his decision to undergo the Muslim haj pilgrimage to Mecca in its entirety and in disguise as a Muslim: a feat popularly described as him having been the "first white man" to do so, but which certainly involved him having been the first Western European to do so while pretending to be someone else and then publishing a bestseller book about it afterwards.
If there is one area that has been the subject of continual, fierce debate since Burton's own lifetime, though, it is the question of which religion Burton really belonged to; or, alternately, which one he really believed in. From the evidence catalogued in Richard Francis Burton, this does not strike me as a particularly difficult question to resolve.
Still, it is clear that this debate has raged so fiercely not primarily due to the difficulty in interpreting facts as due to various people's personal investment in Burton as a folk hero and/or source of profit. During his lifetime, Burton was a hero to very many people in Great Britain and Europe--and a source of profit to many others. However much his fame might have come from detailed descriptions of the rape of child prostitutes in Arabia, many, many people have had very strong reasons for wanting his religious search to coincide to some degree with their own.
To Burton's eventual British wife Isabel, an aristocratic Catholic a decade his junior who idolized him from girlhood and pursued him ferociously over the opposition of her parents for about two decades on the self-confessed basis of her dissatisfaction with Englishmen and romantic fixation on the Orient produced by childhood reading of Disraeli's novels, it was important that Burton, whatever else he may have dabbled in, was in the end a Christian in at least some basic belief, and a Catholic by legal status and conversion.
To Burton's British family members, on the other hand, who saw him rarely but profited extensively from his celebrity status, it was equally important to establish that Burton was not in any sense a Catholic (a status that would have threatened their access to British high society far more than any association with Islam or Hinduism) but a genuine religious searcher and advanced thinker who saw religion in broad and progressive terms but nonetheless ultimately doubtless believed that the Anglican Church was the most advanced religious institution available.
To the author of the book Richard Francis Burton, Burton was at the end of the day a committed Sufi Muslim, with all the progressiveness and sexual flexibility that it was once soothing and advantageous for Westerners during the War on Terror to see in Muslim Sufism. No one, so far as I know, has ever tried to claim that Burton was first and foremost a devout Hindu, his attachment to the Kama Sutra notwithstanding.
There is truth to all these claims. Unfortunately, though Burton was certainly baptized an Anglican as a child, there is little question that Burton despised the Anglican Church with every fiber of his being, with not a single positive reference to it or English religion occurring anywhere.
There is, on the other hand, good evidence that Burton viewed Catholicism in much more positive terms, and periodically attached himself to it. At Oxford, he apparently heard, and was impressed by, Newman's sermons; then, during his early tours in India, he regularly frequented the "brown priests" of the local Catholic Church, and may even have gone through some kind of formal conversion during this time; then, of course, he finally married a Catholic Englishwoman, and apparently was presented to her parents and relatives (including several priests) as at least some kind of Catholic.
If there was one set of religious rituals that Burton practiced most regularly, even in private, however, it was certainly the basic Muslim prayers and accompanying Sufi practices; and if there was one religious document he appears to have valued over all others, and frequently displayed both to Westerners and natives, it was his official "diploma" as a member of a Sufi order.
Nevertheless, as I said, there is to me little mystery about Burton's actual religious beliefs and commitments. Even his own description of his Catholic participation acknowledges the frequent denunciations by the "brown priests" of his dalliances with native prostitutes, and his own refusal to give them up--and this conflict eventually extended itself into his works into numerous ethnographic descriptions in which Catholicism is denounced for its encouragement of intermarriage between natives and Europeans, producing half-castes that Burton castigated as lazy, stubborn, greedy, and (worst of all) unsexy. By his own description, so incensed (and horny) did Burton grow at the dearth of prostitutes in Catholic Goa that he appears to have made a number of attempts to kidnap young girls from convents--all, thankfully, thwarted by the "brown nuns" that Burton regarded as his nemeses. We can only applaud, retrospectively, these heroic women.
While there can be no doubt that Burton was most attached to Islamic culture and practices out of all those he attempted--with his works replete with general praise for the simplicity and manliness of Islamic religion, the ease and pleasantness of Muslim culture, and the sexiness of Muslim prostitutes--there can also be little doubt that Burton did not regard himself as a Muslim. At the end of the day, Burton's Muslim "costume" was just that--a costume. Even our redoubtable author admits that Burton did not practice the Islamic prayers for most of his life; and that the Sufi diploma that Burton proudly displayed to Englishmen and local Muslims alike was mostly a con, with Burton declaring to all that it made him a high-level Sufi Master capable of initiating others while the actual document recorded only the lowest-level initiation available.
In any case, Burton's varying practices aside, his actual beliefs as recorded in his writings did not accord particularly well with any of the various religions he associated himself with. By his own account, Burton's religiosity was centered on the idea of secret knowledge and power accessible via innumerable esoteric paths found in different traditions--even as he struggled throughout his life with a fundamental doubt over whether there was a God or ultimate reality at all. In the meantime, he founded the Kama Shastra Society, which privately circulated pornographic texts to its members.
Taken together, then, Burton's discomfort with himself and paired religious and sexual obsessions were enough to motivate a large number of extraordinary actions that truly made history--and what was true for him was true for many other people who made up the history of European and especially British colonialism. Burton aided in the overthrow and conquest of a number of native regimes by the British Empire, served as British consul in Damascus, Guinea, Brazil, and Trieste, published enormous amounts of highly detailed descriptions of the sexual and religious practices and texts of British subjects for the benefit of British colonial elites and a hungry British public, made the haj and wrote about it, and went on expeditions into "Darkest Africa" that discovered the source of the Nile and paved the way for the British part in the Scramble for Africa. All these things he did out of these rich and complex motivations, and also because he could not stand to live in Britain and/or with his wife and/or family for more than a few months at a time.
If there was one thing that struck me about reading the accounts of all these extraordinary actions, however, I would have to say it is the remarkable unglamorousness of most of Burton's actual experiences in these places and with these people. Burton traveled, to be sure, to quite interesting places, and met many quite interesting people; yet a surprising amount of Burton's engagement with them appears to have come from the rather uninteresting activities of writing on esoteric texts and sleeping with prostitutes. Like many other colonial heroes, Burton appears to have spent a shocking amount of his career sick in bed with various diseases, including siphylis, malaria, and infinitely variable eye infections, sexually transmitted diseases, tropical fevers, and forms of diarrhea. Most of the famous expedition that discovered the source of the Nile was spent with Burton and Speke carried by native servants in hammocks on poles as they sweated and vomited.
Disease is, to be sure, as much a genuine source of suffering and therefore heroism as any other hardship; still, there is something singularly odd about the reality of colonial exploration relative to its highly colored and romanticized versions passed on through later popular fiction. As I have again and again pointed out in this space, the modern genre of science fiction is first and foremost the descendant of colonial and Imperialist fiction--with space as the new "final frontier" ready and waiting to be explored by heroes who are indubitably and in a thousand ways lineal descendants of Richard Francis Burton, right down to their religious agnosticism and penchant for having sex with natives. Still, one hardly thinks of Captain Kirk exploring a strange new world by dressing up as a local and then using money to hire a caravan of natives to carry him sick and sweating through the jungle. Perhaps one should?
For our present purposes, though, we can take Richard Francis Burton and the sort of colonial explorer he typifies as one extreme of the human desire for transcendence. What Burton teaches us above all is that this desire habitually takes on its most extreme external forms precisely where its internal faith and hope has most waned. The British society that embraced Burton and his endless violent pornographic fantasia was certainly not one ensconced in orthodox Christian faith and morality; it was, rather, the Victorian England that Chesterton described so well, where agnosticism was established by law and the newly literate masses and their aristocratic masters titillated themselves with every variety of sexual and religious obscenity.
On the most personal level, Burton was a man motivated, not by a faith, but by a doubt--even by a fear. Burton was afraid of England--its dull climate, its dull food, the rules and manners that he had never learned and could never quite live up to. Burton was afraid of women--which is naturally the reason he slept with so many prostitutes he could not even speak with, and finally married a silly sheltered aristocratic woman who worshiped him as a god and used him mostly to play-act Orientalist fantasies as he continually avoided her presence and chronicled his continued conquests of native prostitutes while complaining about the horribly unnatural institution of marriage. Burton was afraid of religion--of its moral rules and strictures, which he could never abide by and so strove to manipulate, and with its beliefs, which he could never accept and so strove to chronicle in endless detail and penetrate with esoteric knowledge. And Burton was afraid of God--afraid that God did not, in fact, exist at all, and even if he did was most likely unknowable and inaccessible and entirely indifferent to Richard Francis Burton.
And so, like many a contemporary American, faced with the ultimate despair of transcending himself, Burton wandered and conned and spied and posted about it all, and so became a celebrity.
Before passing on from Burton, though, I will confess there is one story that has stayed with me, and which I will repeat, for what it is worth, one more time. Most of Burton's life, even in mass-market format, is boring and forgettable, and I have already forgotten most of it. There is, in the proper sense, no mystery about it at all--just an endless succession of similar things, one more set of prostitutes, one more esoteric belief adding up to the same reverent Victorian agnosticism, one more conquest painting the map red. About this one story, though, there is a genuine mystery: and I will leave you with it.
In the weeks and months leading up to Burton's death, he became increasingly obsessed with a new translation project--one centering on the 15th century Muslim text "The Perfumed Garden," a religious treatise and sex manual. Although the text was known at the time, Burton claimed to have found a new manuscript with additional salacious details and methods--and in his elderly ruminations apparently told many people that this work would be his magnum opus, his final legacy to the world.
Then Burton died, and his distraught wife called a Catholic priest to his deathbed to administer Last Rites; and shortly thereafter took up management of his surviving papers.
Among these scattered texts, though, Isabel quickly found the translation of "The Perfumed Garden." Reading it, she was by her own account utterly shocked and horrified--though by what she does not say--and began considering what to do about it. Her husband had clearly wished the book published, despite or rather because of its shocking content, and Isabel did not want to disregard his will--yet surely her husband could not have wished such vile things put out into the world, to the everlasting harm of his own reputation and that of his family? Hesitating and agonizing, Isabel claims at last to have seen a vision of her dead husband, who told her, emphatically and repeatedly, to burn the manuscript: and so she did.
This is an excellent place to leave Richard Francis Burton--with the mystery of whether he did or did not appear after his death to his Catholic wife to instruct her to burn the manuscript of his English translation of an Arabic sex manual. One could argue that this does not, really, matter a great deal; but it mattered to Burton's wife and family and public, and, if Isabel was right, also to God. But was she right?
This mystery is at least a hundred times more interesting, religiously and psychologically and even sexually, than anything in Richard Francis Burton's endless books about how the secret of all religions is that you should sleep with prostitutes because you're not sure whether God exists; and if it has an answer, I do not know it.
Stalin and the Bomb (1996)
If one is trying to chronicle the human desire for annihilation, one cannot help talking about the Bomb. In all of human history, there has never been, and probably never will be, so clear a manifestation of the human love of death in itself than the invention and production of nuclear weapons.
A few years on, I am still as angry as I have ever been over Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer--but I understand perhaps more now why Nolan made Oppenheimer, why audiences embraced it, and why the Oscars awarded it.
Given that human beings find themselves inevitably and totally consumed by a desire for transcendence, there are still any number of ways in which people may choose to gratify this desire, thwart it, or (worst of all) falsify it. The simplest way to falsify the desire for transcendence is to identify transcendence with something that is not transcendent, but definitionally beneath one and under one's control--a move I pointed to a while back as defining for modernity. And within that modern nexus, perhaps the stupidest thing one could identify transcendence with is the power to destroy, or in other words to break things. I would call it childish, but in fact I don't think any child has ever actually identified their urge to smash a vase into little pieces with absolute meaning.
Nor, to do him credit, did Joseph Stalin identify the ability to blow up a city and/or the world with nukes with any of his goals or desires. I have been reading a really silly number of books about Joseph Stalin over the past year or so, and while I can't say any of the books have made me think him less evil than I thought him at the start, they have at least made me aware of his few positive qualities: being an effective manager, for instance, or not overindulging in alcohol. It was not until I read Stalin and the Bomb, though, that I learned of what was perhaps his finest quality overall: his absolute contempt for the American obsession with nuclear weapons.
The main new thing, though, that I learned from the book Stalin and the Bomb, an extremely lengthy academic volume that mostly has nothing to do with Joseph Stalin the person but rather with the Russian scientists who labored for about three decades to make nukes for him, was just how deep the American obsession with atomic weaponry really went.
The set of facts that the book does not center on, but which I found most remarkable, and have spent a lot of time over the last few months telling to everyone I know, consequently has to do with the roughly ten years between 1945, when America detonated its first atom bomb at Hiroshima, and 1955, when the Soviet Union tested their first successful hydrogen bomb and high-level talks between the two governments began to limit nuclear proliferation.
Two essential things remained true all during this period: 1) the Soviet Union possessed no capability whatsoever to threaten the United States of America with nuclear weapons, and 2) America was fully committed politically, militarily, and institutionally to a "nuclear-first" strategy that called for massive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union in the event of a conflict.
The reason for the former condition was the simple backwardness of Soviet military technology--including not only the late development of both the atom bomb and the H-bomb, but more crucially the lack of long-range strategic bombers like the American B-29 and B-36 and B-47 and B-52 and places to stage planes in striking distance of North America. The reason for the latter condition was primarily political: America was dedicated to a new policy of global expansion and business and had committed by treaty to defending Western Europe from a Soviet attack, yet American politicians and the general public alike were fundamentally unwilling to maintain a peacetime conventional military large enough to protect Western Europe even nominally.
Hence the table was laid for a fundamentally asymmetric conflict, in which the Soviets tried to make up for their lack of nuclear weapons by the rapid advance of their conventional forces into areas that the Americans would be unwilling to bomb, while the Americans tried to make up for their lack of conventional forces by murdering as many defenseless people as possible.
What really shocked me about this story was the degree to which the American military and political leaders alike were aware throughout this entire time period that their chosen strategy of mass murder was in fact military useless if not actively counterproductive. In the famous Harmon Report of 1949, a committee reviewed the current war plan of the US military, which called for a single massive air campaign in which 133 atomic bombs would be dropped on 75 Soviet cities immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities. According to the Report, this campaign would not end the war, prevent the conquest of Western Europe, bring down the Soviet regime, or indeed reduce Soviet industrial capacity by more than 30-40% at most. On the other hand, the campaign and resulting civilian deaths was likely to increase hatred for America and inspire a greater will to fight among the Soviet population, end the possibility of negotiated settlement, turn large swathes of Western Europe against America, and have negative effects on the morale of the American military and public. Nevertheless, the report acknowledged that the US was committed to a nuclear-first strategy, and recommended proceeding with it regardless.
By 1954, the war plan that would have been put into effect upon the outbreak of a war called for the Strategic Air Command to launch a massive attack lasting about two hours during which between 600 and 750 atomic bombs would be dropped on 118 major Soviet cities. A SAC briefing that year estimated that 75-84% of the people in those cities would die, resulting in 77 million casualties or 60 million dead overall. The total death toll of all six years of World War II, I might remind you, including disease and famine deaths, is generally estimated as between 60 and 75 million.
Given what we now know about the effects of radiation and EMPs caused by nuclear attacks, the actual death toll of any such nuclear attack on the Soviet Union would have been far, far higher. Still, the essential fact remains that American military and political institutions up to the President nonetheless by 1954 had fully decided upon a war plan in which the United States of America would murder as many people as the entire death toll of World War Two in about two hours, the overwhelming majority of whom would be civilians. Meanwhile, Soviet troops would be marching unhindered through Berlin, Paris, and Rome.
Retrospective history tends to blur the Cold War as a whole under the single rubric of "Mutually Assured Destruction," but in fact MAD was not a genuine possibility until well into the 1960s, and was not even theoretically broached by either government until about 1955. Rather, the focus of the early Cold War was on the very real possibility of a war in which the Soviet Union would invade a depleted Western Europe as American conventional forces retreated in disarray and American bombers murdered civilians. And indeed, this almost happened on a number of occasions during those years; and if it did not, it was in large part thanks to Joseph Stalin.
From 1945 to his death, Joseph Stalin showed in public and private nothing but contempt for the atomic bomb and the American devotion to it. As the author of Stalin and the Bomb points out, this may to an extent have been feigned for diplomatic reasons, but nonetheless rings true to Stalin's basic worldview and preoccupations. Put simply, Stalin was a thoroughly 19th century man, whose view of international politics was defined by access to natural resources and the building up of industrial production leading to large standing armies for the taking and holding of territory and construction of effective defensive borders. One possibly apocryphal story recounted in the book has Stalin after WW2 looking with satisfaction at a large map on the wall showing the Soviet Union's recent territorial conquests, commenting on the loveliness of some borders while deprecating others and suggesting modifications. Stalin, in other words, was a gamer.
For all the above purposes, Stalin pointed out, atomic bombs were useless. Too destructive and unwieldy to be used effectively against other armies, they could really only be deployed in large-scale bombing campaigns against civilians and infrastructure; and Stalin had no use for such campaigns either in WW2 or after.
Report after report commissioned by the Russian and American governments during this period showed that the American and British-led strategic bombing campaign against Germany had dropped the equivalent of hundreds of atomic bombs on the country, and nonetheless had little significant effect on German military capacity or industrial infrastructure. For the Americans, the solution was to drop even more bombs with even more destructive power; for Stalin, though, this was simply absurd. As he quite correctly pointed out, the goal of a war with America was not to destroy New York, but to conquer and rule it. Any technology that simply destroyed New York was thus in the strict sense useless.
In this, at least, Stalin was right; and the American Empire has again and again proven this over the past seventy years, and continues to prove it in 2026.
Nonetheless, Stalin wanted a bomb of his own, and asked Beria, the famously murderous head of the NKVD, to get him one. The main reason, as Stalin expressed it, why he wanted a bomb was to remove the American "nuclear monopoly" and so nullify the effects of what he called "atomic diplomacy"--that is to say, the ultimately irrational but nonetheless quite real boost of confidence the American government and people got from being the only ones to have nuclear weapons, the confidence that was likely to make them, as Stalin shrewdly pointed out in 1945, act much more aggressively and rashly towards the Soviet Union than they would have otherwise. The Americans, numerous Russian negotiators during this ten-year period complained, seemed to show up to international meetings with a cowboy swagger quite openly founded, in the American negotiators' own phrase, on the atom bomb in their pockets. The Americans seemed to think they had all the power in the world, and so every right to make the most extreme demands without any real force to back them up.
By any rational calculus, America was on the back foot after WW2: demobilized, politically hampered, vastly outnumbered and outgunned, tasked by treaty with defending a continent they had no intention of actually defending. They thus had every reason to give ground to the Soviet Union, and make concessions aimed at dissipating Russia's WW2-inspired fear of an aggressive attack. Instead of trying to dissipate these fears, though, the Americans did everything in their power to enlarge them, reminding the Soviets at every opportunity, not only that they had nukes and they did not, but that they were ready to use them to kill millions of Russian civilians at the slightest provocation.
Whatever modus operandi might have been possible between America and Russia in the immediate aftermath of their alliance in WW2 quickly dissipated in the face of this atomic diplomacy. And the great irony is, it largely produced whatever Soviet aggression took place during this time period, rather than preventing it.
One of the basic ironies of Stalin's 19th century mindset was that he very much did not want to invade and conquer Western Europe. Taking Germany, France, and Italy would not only stretch his supply lines beyond all reason, would not only add new and very bad borders, would not only add endless costs of occupation, but would of course plunge the Soviet Union into never-ending war with America and Britain and likely end, as WW2 had ended for the Germans, in defeat. Stalin was first and foremost a manager, and this was poor management.
Stalin was also, to a limited extent, a Communist; and, to a larger extent, a 19th century Russian Imperialist. On both grounds, Stalin believed that capitalism led naturally and inevitably to competition between Great Powers for resources; and competition between Great Powers for resources led naturally and inevitably to war. As he gnomically remarked frequently during these years, the basic system of capitalism meant that a World War would be fought every twenty to twenty five years from now on until the final triumph of utopian Socialism. As a Communist nation, Stalin argued, Russia was naturally peaceful--nevertheless, if World War II and the German invasion had shown anything, it was that a conflict between Great Powers would inevitably draw Russia in regardless, to the ultimate dialectical-historical benefit of Communism. Russia's main task in the interim between World Wars, then, was to do what Stalin had done during the 1920s and '30s, and build up heavy industry and military capacity in preparation for the next war. The very last thing they should be doing was initiating aggressive wars with their neighbors or getting drawn into a war with America before they had even had time to rebuild from the war with Germany.
Most importantly, perhaps, Stalin was a man of a certain age, formed in the crucible of WW1, and therefore constitutionally obsessed with the threat of Germany. Stalin was exceedingly slow to accept the idea that the Americans were now the main threat to the Soviet Union, and even slower to buy into the idea of a Cold War between dual superpowers. Rather, he continued to insist that the most likely threat to Communism would come in a few decades from a resurgent Germany and Japan, who would kick off another World War through aggressive campaigns of conquest. It was absurd in the light of history, he argued, to think that France and Germany could ever form a lasting alliance, let alone that both of them could be swallowed up by American hegemony. Sooner rather than later, the capitalist world would revert to its natural state of competition between Great Powers for resources. America was at best a short-term threat, one that would in the course of things vanish.
In the short term, though, America was admittedly formidable; or rather, what was most formidable about America was the belief America had in its own dominant position, its own ability to throw its weight around and get whatever it wanted regardless of the cold hard realities of geopolitics and economics; and this belief of America in itself was grounded most tangibly in the atom bomb. Thus, it was urgently necessary that Russia convince America that it could not push the Soviet Union around--and the primary way to do this was to get a bomb of its own. In the meantime, though, it was imperative that Russia show no weakness whatsoever, give no ground on anything, or in short mirror America's "atomic diplomacy" as much as possible despite its own lack of the Bomb. To do anything else was to invite an attack.
As Stalin and the Bomb suggests, it was this belief in America's atomic-driven aggressiveness and the need to counter it psychologically that was the primary cause of most of Stalin's famous episodes of "saber rattling"--including most famously the Berlin Blockade and the intervention into the Korean War, both of which nearly led to actual war. Still, throughout this period Stalin continued to not want war, and continued too to consciously set limits on his actions to avoid being drawn into a war; and if hundreds of millions nearly died on more than one occasion, but did not in fact die, Stalin certainly deserves some of the credit; though the overwhelming majority of it should go to dumb luck and/or God. Very little of it should go to anyone in America with the possible and highly partial exception of Joseph McCarthy.
When we let go of the fascinating charms of Stalin's magnetically unlikeable personality, though, we are left with a psychological enigma nearly unique in human history. Why did so many American governmental and military officials during this period commit themselves to a course of action based on and leading to the tactically purposeless and strategically self-defeating murder of hundreds of millions of innocents--and not only decide on it, but double down on it, recommit to it, up the ante, over and over again, for more than ten years? Why did so many European leaders accept this, encourage it even; why did so much of the American public, albeit with highly limited knowledge and exceedingly imperfect understanding, applaud it? What could possibly motivate so many seemingly sane and responsible people without even racial hatred or totalitarian ideology as justification to elaborately plan and prepare to carry out the greatest prospective act of genocide in all of human history?
On one level, the answer is an easy one, and has already been given above. American elites wanted to rule the world, at least commercially; American elites wanted to rule Europe, at least commercially; American elites had for a variety of reasons promised to defend Europe from the Soviets; American elites were unwilling to actually defend Europe from the Soviets; and American elites just happened to have recently built up a massive fleet of long-range strategic bombers and also coincidentally been the first and only people in the whole world to learn how to make atom bombs. Given all this, manufacturing 600+ atom bombs and making plans to turn Russia into a smoking cinder was really the least they could do. At least while the Soviet population was watching newsreels of Russian tank brigades touring the Eiffel Tower they would have some newsreels of burning Russian children to show in their own theaters. At the height of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, Winston Churchhill had personally brought newsreel footage of burning German cities and murdered civilians to a devastated Russia to screen for Joseph Stalin; and Joseph Stalin seems to have enjoyed it. What else could they do?
On a deeper level, though, it is exceptionally difficult to account psychologically for what appears to have been the root of most the above: precisely the "atomic swagger" identified not only by Stalin and Russian negotiators, but even by American government officials and politicians beginning with Harry Truman. American leaders did not, by and large, feel forced by circumstances into adopting an atomic-first strategy as the best of many bad options--rather, the atom bomb itself made them feel powerful, confident, free, eager to take risks, and consequently ready to burn civilians to death in fire.
When one reads the Harmon Report and other accounts of American war plans during this period, the impression one has is not of people reluctantly forced by logic into dropping atom bombs on children for strategic reasons; rather, the obvious impression is of people compelled by logic to admit that dropping atom bombs would do little or nothing for them strategically and probably make things worse, but nonetheless at the end of it all eager to drop atom bombs on children regardless.
The mystery of the American atomic swagger, then, is to some extent the same mystery presented in the movie Oppenheimer. Why does Christopher Nolan think that Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person in the history of the human race? Why do American political and military and financial elites nearly to a man in 2026 think that the ability to produce a very large explosion is the one true path to meaning and significance and ultimate transcendence?
Destructive power is by any standard the weakest form of power there is--as even Joseph Stalin knew. Stalin was a very bad person obsessed with very bad forms of power: but the power he was obsessed with was by and large the reasonably understandable power to dominate people and nations and territories and mine materials and build tanks in factories and ship them to the front lines to take more territory and dominate more people. Stalin certainly killed a lot of people, but, to his credit, generally as a means, not as an end, and certainly not as an end in itself.
Nor is destructive power a particularly good candidate or even a particularly reliable sign of transcendence. The ability to control a thing does sometimes indicate that one transcends it--the ability to destroy it never does so. An atom bomb, it is true, can destroy a human person; but this hardly makes it special. A bear can destroy a man; a microbe can destroy a man; a virus can destroy a man; hell, a rock can destroy a man. A bored child with a hammer could destroy more masterpieces in an hour than Michelangelo created in a lifetime; but would not by that act prove himself to be God. Painting the Mona Lisa might, under some circumstances, be a demonstration of transcendence; putting your foot through the Mona Lisa never can be. Inasmuch as American elites felt themselves transcendent because of their ability to kill Russians, they cannot possibly have aspired to any transcendence not shared with fires, cliffs, and flea-borne microbes.
If I cannot, at this point, appeal once again to the American cult of heroism as the worship of death, then I confess I am left more or less at a loss.
Still, the book Stalin and the Bomb is not really either about the psychology of Joseph Stalin, or the psychology of American war planners. What it is actually about is the psychology of the Soviet nuclear scientists who developed and built first the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb more or less from scratch in the ten years between 1945 and 1955. The author of our book wants us to find these people interesting, compelling, even heroic--and to say that he failed to convince me is to utter one of the most profound understatements of the 21st century so far.
In a recent post, I argued that the 20th century was made by the alliance between two groups or classes, which I called for convenience the managers and the technicians. In this system, the managers always and everywhere dominated the technicians; and indeed the technicians were generally happy to be so dominated.
There is a great deal one could say about the psychology of the managerial elites who dominated so much of the history of the 20th century. There is, really, very little one can say about the psychology of the technicians who worked under them. Admittedly, neither psychology is that interesting; and if the managers have retained a certain fascination in the year 2026, it is largely because they have long since vanished, like the dodo, from the face of the earth, while the technicians still remain and post on Twitter. More upsettingly, there is no shortage of books and novels and poems and tweets and substacks by technicians trying to convince people that their psychology is in fact profoundly interesting and tragic and in need of analysis; and I don't wish to add to that lamentable pile.
Still, if there is a limit case to the technical mindset, it is certainly the creation and production of weapons that by their very design were aimed at killing hundreds of millions and possibly ending the human race. Presumptively, the question of why so many Soviet scientists worked so hard, sacrificed so much, for the sake of this ultimately murderous goal might well be a genuine mystery, even a tragic one; Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer might be an interesting movie.
In fact, alas, there is no mystery to be found; and Oppenheimer is as boring as its protagonist. As Stalin and the Bomb chronicles in excruciating detail, the scientists who worked on the Soviet nuclear program were almost to a man totally unconcerned about the ethical and moral questions involved as well as the likely consequences to the human race of their work; rather, what they really cared about was the technically absorbing interest of their labors, the technical success of their efforts, and, above all, the regard of their colleagues.
Status-seeking is, as Plato long ago acknowledged, fundamental to the human psyche; similarly, as Christianity discovered a bit later, human beings are fundamentally relational creatures who to a real extent do not stably exist unless and until and to the degree to which they know and are known by others. In the light of both of those realities, Soviet scientists' obsessive concern about the need to do better work in the exciting new field of nuclear physics, catch up with and surpass Western nuclear scientists, and ultimately win their respect and approbation is completely comprehensible; as is their obsessive dedication to their work, which took them away from their families to live mostly in abandoned Orthodox monk cells and work night and day for ten years to build the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Admittedly, the latter goal was motivated also by Beria's constant threats of execution.
Still, for all the efforts of the author of Stalin and the Bomb, very little of any kind of recognizable political or ethical or aesthetic or moral thought appears to have ever penetrated the consciousness of Soviet nuclear scientists, any more than it did that of Robert Oppenheimer. While some American scientists did push to delay or shelve the atomic bomb program after Germany's surrender, and make various suggestions to avoid proliferation and an arms race, no Russian scientists appear to have raised any such concerns; after all, America already had the bomb, so what was the point?
On the other hand, the Russian scientists were working after Hiroshima, and so with more understanding of the likely costs of nuclear weapons. And along the way, they did see some sights that might have led to some qualms in ordinary people not fully professionalized into a proper technical mindset. After the first nuclear test, in 1951, the chief Russian nuclear scientists were horrified to see Ground Zero littered with writhing birds whose eyes had been burned out by the flash of the explosion. The first thermonuclear test, meanwhile, resulted in the deaths of two civilians, including a little girl who was burned alive and whose death purportedly haunted the chief Russian nuclear scientist for days thereafter.
The overall thesis of the book Stalin and the Bomb, however, is that in the context of a totalitarian Stalinist Russia, the Soviet scientists constituted the closest thing to a true "civil society" and the closest thing to citizens around. As evidence of this thesis, he showcases the Soviet nuclear scientists' relative indifference to Stalinist propaganda and Communist belief, contrasted with to their profound concern for the opinion and judgment of foreign scientists and the international scientific community as a whole.
If citizenship primarily refers to belonging to a tiny closed international group of highly privileged and similarly educated professionals who value their bond with each other more than their bonds with their families and/or nations and hence care more for each other's opinions than for anyone else's, then I suppose this thesis is right. If that is what citizenship means, though, then I will be immediately calling up Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Jeffrey Epstein on the moon and personally apologizing for all the mean things I've said about them.
I fully grant that the author is right that Soviet nuclear technicians in fact cared more for each other's opinion than they did for Soviet Communism or Russian patriotism. Still, it does not appear that this ever resulted in them doing anything contrary to the will and command of the managerial elites that totally dominated them and directed their energies for more or less their whole lives. Nor does it appear to have ever led to any particularly meaningful ethical reflection, let alone courageous ethical action.
Rather, the scientists generally did whatever Beria told them to do, and in the process designed and presided over a Soviet nuclear infrastructure that depended for the vast majority of its labor on gulag prisoners working under brutal conditions with no protection around extremely radioactive materials. As Stalin and the Bomb chronicles, the four-year Soviet effort to make the bomb likely killed hundreds of thousands of people in itself; and no Soviet nuclear scientist ever expressed any particular concern or took any particular action about this. After successfully making a nuclear bomb, Stalin declared the chief scientist a Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest civilian award that also cames with a brand-new car.
Still, one could hardly find a better summation of the essential mindset of the 20th century technician than our author's choice of narrative climax. Only a few pages after the chief Soviet nuclear scientist has accidentally burned a little girl to death with fire and expressed his horror and remorse about the whole thing, he and the other Soviet nuclear scientists are finally allowed to attend an international nuclear conference with their fellow Western nuclear scientists: and what unfolds is as much a vision of a certain kind of heaven as Eusebius' dinner with the Emperor in the Vita Constantini.
Face to face for the first time in decades with their American and British and French colleagues, the Russian scientists are astounded to discover that everyone loves them. Not only do their conference talks go well, not only is their research is well received, but praise is showered on them by all the famous Western scientists they had looked up to all their lives. Soviet nuclear science has clearly not only caught up with, but in some ways even surpassed that of the West. How did they accomplish all this on their own, behind the Iron Curtain, unable to interface with Western research? How did they succeed in building an atom bomb and an H-bomb on their own (with some help from espionage) in just ten years? Well, clearly, they've done some good work that's worthy of professional recognition.
The jubilation of the scientists is visceral. At last, the moment they've waited for through decades of lonely toil! At last, the crowning moment of their whole lives! All those long nights and days, all those abandoned wives and children, all those birds with burned-out eyes, all those hundreds of thousands of irradiated gulag prisoners, that one little girl with her skin burned off...it was all worth it! Niels Bohr noticed me!
Hooray!
Again, there is nothing particularly noteworthy, or particularly interesting, about this psychology. Transcending oneself through belonging to a group is one of the most basic human forms of transcendence. Professional status and public recognition are not the same thing as genuinely personal love, but they have something to do with it, and are easily mistaken for it. That people are willing to work so hard, sacrifice so much, shape their entire bodies and souls and psyches into technical tools for the making of bombs, in order to get these things is in fact remarkable; but fully consonant with the intensity of the basic human desire for transcendence.
Still, if there is a basic absurdity to the technician's way of life, a basic humorousness not often found in such human extremes, it is that fundamental to the psychology of the technician is a very basic and extreme disproportion between means and the end.
I do not deny that there is a legitimate, if rather abstract and impersonal, thrill to be had from Werner Heisenberg telling you that your physics work is cutting-edge. If there is something rather funny about the whole thing, something that makes me want to laugh out loud in disbelief after reaching the alleged climax of a thousand-page book about the Soviet nuclear program in which Russian scientists have occupied an abandoned Orthodox monastery and turned it into a nuclear lab surrounded by tents for slave laborers and hundreds of thousands of gulag prisoners have died in agony and birds have flopped about the ground eyeless and a little girl has been cooked alive in her skin and scientists have worked day and night for decades and died of exhaustion trying to understand the structure of the atom and break the most fundamental building block of all matter and find uranium and mine it at enormous cost in human lives and refine and enrich it through enormously complex processes and create the ultimate weapon and give history's greatest tyrant the capacity to destroy the world, it is simply the idea that professional recognition is the end, and all these things only means; or, put differently, the idea that all these things are worth it because Edward Teller complimented my Powerpoint talk.
And--I cannot stress this enough--this idea is funny! It's hilarious! Or, more correctly, it is absolutely, totally, completely, and utterly absurd! And, following from this, everyone whose psychology can be reasonably described by this idea is by definition totally and absolutely insane!
The Unconsoled (1996)
Still, if we would criticize these people, if we would laugh at them, if we would fear them, we cannot pretend to not understand.
The wonderful thing about being human is how close we are, simply by our moment-to-moment existence, to every kind of insanity that has ever existed. If you doubt this, much of my favorite art is dedicated to proving the point.
The Unconsoled is one of my three favorite novels; it is by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist who is best known for The Remains of the Day, a book about an unhappy British butler. His best book, though, or at least my favorite, is The Unconsoled, a book about an unhappy British pianist.
To say The Unconsoled is about a pianist, though, is to convey very little about the book. There is a surrealistic quality to all of Ishiguro's writing, a mastery of tone and atmosphere that has always commended him to me; but The Unconsoled is perhaps his only book that can be straightforwardly designated surrealist. Since no one really knows what surrealism is anymore, though, one could as easily call it a comedy--or a tragedy--or both.
What makes The Unconsoled one of my favorite three novels of all time is that it is maybe the only book that has ever succeeded to any degree at portraying the actual insanity of the moment-to-moment consciousness of modern professional travel. Perhaps this does not seem to you a particularly worthy goal; but probably you have never been to an academic conference in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The protagonist of our novel is Mr. Ryder, a world-famous concert pianist who spends his life traveling from town to town playing concerts. On the surface, in the abstract, this is a successful, glamorous life; in Mr. Ryder's actual consciousness, though, it is something much, much stranger.
To begin with, Mr. Ryder is always tired--a basic and inevitable concomitant of frequent travel. In the face of all the dramatic events and narratives he encounters, Ryder is frequently overcome by an overpowering urge to sleep, and frequently falls asleep wherever he happens to be. His sleep, though, is always stolen from some scheduled task or another, is rarely if ever satisfying, and nearly always ends with him waking up in confusion and/or being woken up by someone reminding him he is supposed to be and/or have been somewhere. Anyone who has ever engaged in professional travel can relate.
Similarly, Mr. Ryder is always hungry--for which ditto. Meals are, to say the least, extremely irregular for this world-famous artist. Sometimes he goes inordinate amounts of time without eating anything; sometimes he is offered the strangest foods by strangers, cakes and mints and steaming bowls of mashed potatoes; sometimes he tries to take food for himself, usually furtively and with shame. Wherever possible, he tries to grab some down time and enjoy a leisurely and luxurious meal, but is frequently interrupted when doing so. In the welter of his missed appointments and broken obligations, though, his main relief is food; and very few works of art have ever captured so well precisely that sense of being exhausted and confused and stressed out and harassed and far from home and ravenously hungry and desperately, distractedly trying to enjoy a short meal undisturbed.
Most fundamental to Mr. Ryder's consciousness, though, is his overwhelming confusion. Ryder never knows what is going on, or what he is doing, or where he is supposed to be. There is allegedly a schedule for his visit to this small Central European town, but no one has given it to him; he can remember reading over it on the plane, but can no longer remember what it contained; and everyone he meets assumes he knows it well. Anyway, the schedule is only a small part of the problem. Ryder is constantly being told he has missed a scheduled appointment, but equally constantly being asked to take part in an unscheduled one, and equally constantly being told to take his time and enjoy himself. People constantly ask him for favors, for interviews, for interventions, for minutes and hours of his time; sometimes he grants these requests, and sometimes he doesn't. Some people tell Ryder to do something, and he does it; other people tell Ryder that he was supposed to do something but did not, and he apologizes; other people still ask Ryder to do something and he refuses, even gets angry. Regardless, everyone says he did a good job. But do they mean it?
All of this is relatively straightforward, even if rather nightmarish in its portrayal of what it is actually like to be someone traveling professionally.
What truly makes the novel The Unconsoled what it is, though, is not merely its surrealistic treatment of modern professional travel, but its much deeper and more profound look at the human psyche and the human desire for transcendence seething beneath and through the life of a distracted, confused, hungry, and sleep-deprived professional.
To begin with, there is the slowly emerging reality of what Ryder the famous pianist is in fact being asked to do during his visit to a small Central European town. In the simplest sense, Ryder has come to town to give a piano concert; but as it emerges, his efforts both in his own mind and that of the town's are in fact directed at resolving "the crisis" that has allegedly taken hold of this town, a crisis that is increasingly desperate and growing more so all the time, approaching a point of no return beyond which lies total collapse and complete disaster.
But what is the crisis? And how is Ryder supposed to fix it?
Well, in the first place, the crisis is that the people of the town are not happy. And Ryder is supposed to fix it because he is an artist and celebrity, and hence allegedly possessed of the unique ability to give meaning to people's lives and make them truly, deeply happy.
One can call this surreal; but it is in fact simply true. People are unhappy; their marriages are failing; their relationships with their children are strained; their artistic potentials are unfulfilled; they feel ashamed, and confused, and disappointed, and upset. And what are they looking for from artists, celebrities, from art itself, if not a solution to this problem, something that will make their lives meaningful, important, vital, real, something that will allow them to see the solution to their problems, something that will help them to rise above, overcome, transcend, something that will make them happy?
Except, well...as it turns out, they really aren't looking for this from Ryder at all. Ryder, after all, is a complete stranger, who they do not know, and who does not know them. As it emerges through an endless series of intimate portraits of the psyches of the people of the town, all of people's actual sense of happiness and unhappiness comes from, and has to do with, not a work of art but their actual lives and their actual intimate human relationships. The hotel proprietor is unhappy because he feels that his wife despises him for not being an artist; the hotel proprietor's son is unhappy because he feels that he never fulfilled his artistic potential and so disappointed his mother and ruined his parent's marriage; the hotel proprietor's wife is unhappy because she feels that she is a cold and remote person constitutionally unable to give her husband and son the love and warmth they deserve. None of these things have anything to do with Ryder the concert pianist; nor is there any reasonable way that Ryder, or his music, can fix any of these problems.
Rather, as it emerges, each person is in a sense using Ryder as a means or instrument or counter or substitute or weapon in their complex relationships with each other. The hotel proprietor is using Ryder to demonstrate to his wife that he is capable of recognizing and valuing great art and being of service to great artists, and is not the pathetic mundane bore he thinks she thinks he is; Ryder's son is using Ryder to validate his artistic efforts and give him the confidence to reject his parent's domineering influence on his life; Ryder's wife is just using him for a few minutes to have someone to talk about her problems.
And anyway, even as artist and carrier of hopes of happiness, Ryder is not the main attraction; he is, after all, only a stranger, only a temporary visitor, here today and gone tomorrow. What the people of the town really want is a truly local artist, one of them, someone who can offer them hope and meaning not for one concert, but day in, day out, for years to come; and Ryder at best merely backdrop and means and external validation for this person's new status.
On one level, then, The Unconsoled is a book about the ludicrousness of the modern and postmodern cult of art; an unflinching and indeed rather cruel mockery of the idea that artists can help us or make us happy. Ryder is, we assume, a good pianist; but no one particularly cares to listen to him play the piano. What his public wants from him is something he can never give to them, something they would not know how to receive even if he did. In the meantime, the great artist is shuffled from place to place in an endless blur of exhaustion and hunger, a worthless prop in other people's shows.
If there is a center to the Unconsoled, though, it is not the cult of art in the abstract, but the examination of the psyche of the cultic artist himself, and the gradual revelation of his own insanity. Ryder's problem is not merely that other people are asking him for things that he can never give, or using him as a prop in their own relational conflicts; it is more fundamentally that he knows all this, and yet refuses to admit it either to them or himself. As it turns out, there is a vast, enormous, and increasingly unbridgeable gap between Ryder's actual moment-to-moment consciousness, which centers on being shuffled around from place to place by indifferent strangers, and his claimed perceptions of what is going on, what he is doing, and who he is.
Again and again, Ishiguro presents us with Ryder making a decision at random or at someone else's instigation or because he is tired or hungry--and then, a few moments later, Ryder telling himself that of course his decision had been carefully considered and calibrated according to his own expertise and goals and profound understanding of local conditions. Again and again we see Ryder making an ass of himself, failing to understand what is going on, putting his foot in his mouth, offending people, or otherwise messing up, and then a few moments later we see him telling himself that in fact he handled everything extremely well. Insofar as Ryder ever acknowledges a problem, he blames it on someone else, usually the locals; but these rages never last long; within a few minutes, he is desperately catching some sleep or eating and telling himself that after all, it went just fine, and didn't particularly matter anyway. And all this time, the people around Ryder are telling him the same thing.
Ryder's insanity, though, is not a function merely of his micro-interactions, but of his whole life. As he again and again tells both himself and the people around him, what he is doing is in fact enormously, terribly important. People are relying on him to fix their problems, help them, make them happy. The situation is desperate, and only he can help them. After all, so many people are relying on him, so many people desperately need him; don't they tell him so? He cannot be selfish; he has a mission to fulfil.
Of course, Ryder's actual moment-to-moment consciousness is entirely selfish--defined by confusion, petty desires for food and sleep, and the endless need to be soothed and praised and patted on the back. All his interactions with others are defined by their indifference to him, and his indifference to them. Nevertheless, in Ryder's words, and to a large extent in his mind, he is a man with a vocation, tasked with saving the world from the scourge of human unhappiness.
In service of this glorious task, of course, sacrifices have to be made; including his relationship with his family. In perhaps the novel's most brilliantly surrealistic touch, Ryder first encounters his wife and young son as complete strangers, the daughter and grandson of his hotel porter. It is only once he has been tasked with helping the porter fix his relationship with his daughter that Ryder seems to recall that, in fact, the porter's daughter is his own wife. Ryder's family, in other words, only appears in his consciousness once and to the degree they appear in his professional life as a professional task.
Once there, though, Ryder is constantly and increasingly frustrated with his family's need for time and attention. His life, he tells his wife Sophie, is hard enough in itself, with so many continual demands on his time and energy; he simply cannot put up with her "chaos" as well. Ryder has an important mission to perform, after which they will find a nice house and live happily together as a family; they simply need to wait just a little bit longer, for him to finally perform the concert, the perfect concert, the truly successful mission he has been waiting for his whole life. Once that is done, they will no doubt be very happy; and in the meantime, he will spend time with her and his son wherever he can.
As it turns out, though, Ryder does not particularly enjoy spending time with his family; nor is his relationship with them merely or even primarily defined by external factors. Ryder intensely resents his wife, and secretly enjoys tormenting his son--facts he does not even admit to himself. Every petty impulse against his family is immediately justified by some external task or goal or by his tiredness or by his mission or by the needs of people outside the family. People need him, after all; they are so unhappy! He cannot be selfish.
Most fundamentally of all, I would suggest, Ryder's hatred for his family is a simple function of his insanity, or in other words of his constitutional need for self-deception. The strangers Ryder deliberately surrounds himself with are all basically indifferent to him, his emotions, his words, and his desires; and so either easily deceived by Ryder's insistence that everything is alright and he has handled everything perfectly, or at least mostly unconcerned either way. Ryder fails again and again at everything, fails utterly to help anyone: but as a stranger with no real power or connection with the people around him, these failures do not really matter very much. However poor his performance, at the end of it he will board a bus, eat a croissant, take a nap, and feel better; and in a few days, he will be in a new town, with new people, praised and appealed to all over again.
None of this, though, works with his family. They are not deceived when he claims to have done something well when he did it badly; are not deceived when he claims to be fine but is really upset, when he claims to be generous but is really selfish, when he claims to have succeeded but has really failed. They know him; and worse, depend on him. When Ryder fails to save the people of a small Central European town from their personal unhappiness, no one particularly cares about it or blames him; when he fails to love and care for his wife and child, though, they do blame him for it. After all, he never really had the power to help a town of strangers find happiness; but he did have the power to help his family find happiness. It is only, finally, in regards to his family that Ryder has power, and therefore responsibility.
In the end, then, Ryder's punishment for his only consequential failure is one that precisely matches his crime: his family becomes merely one more group of strangers, left behind for a cup of coffee and a muffin and a restful sleep and new town and new people. And isn't that what he wanted?
Through and beneath this portrait of an insane psyche, and many, many characters and incidents I have not described, the novel's fundamental thesis on human life and psychology emerges.
Put simply, overly simply, every character we encounter is unhappy because they do not feel they are or are capable of loving and being loved. The reasons differ, the people differ, but the ultimate reality is the same. The hotel proprietor feels that his wife cannot love him because she is a sensitive and artistic person and he is a mundane clod incapable of creativity; the town's rejected former artist feels that his wife will leave him because she is someone special who needs to be married to a man who is the center of the town's social world; the towns prospective future artist fears that his wife will not take him back because of his years as an aggressive drunk; and so on and so forth.
Yet these surface reasons are in almost every case deceptive. People's failures to love and be loved are tied not so much to external conditions as internal wounds. As a matter of fact, the hotel proprietor's wife does love him, or at least wants very much to; it is he who is elaborately planning a way for her to finally leave him. The town's would-be next artist has an old war wound that he nurses endlessly; he drove his wife away from him by deliberate, gratuitous violence and obscenity, because he loved his wound more than her. And Ryder, throughout the novel, continually remembers his childhood in which his mother and father would fight as he hid from unpleasant reality in one fantasy world or another.
If there is a heart to the world of human life as the Unconsoled portrays it, it is more or less all in the title. All these people, to a man and woman, want to love and be loved; and yet, each has some deep, internal wound that is unhealed, some deep, internal sorrow that is unconsoled; and because of it, they cannot love and be loved, or believe they cannot love and be loved, or again and again consciously or unconsciously sabotage any hope of loving or being loved.
At the heart of The Unconsoled, then, lies a kind of fundamental, twisted Catch-22 of the human heart. People have wounds and sorrows that can only be healed and consoled by love; but their unhealed wounds and unconsoled sorrows prevent them from either giving or receiving love. So what is there to be done?
In the most basic sense, we transcend ourselves through love--that is to say, through another person that is in relation to us, but is not us, and thus in the most absolute sense imaginable transcends us. Yet if the novel The Unconsoled has a thesis, it is that there is something fundamentally broken, or at least radically incomplete, about human love as we find it in ourselves and others and the world as it is. Human love is what makes us happy, and fulfills our desire for transcendence--but human love is never enough.
In one sense, Ryder is driven to travel endlessly, to endlessly lie and posture and pretend, to endlessly suffer, as a substitute for the simple human love he is incapable of either giving or receiving. Ryder is struggling to manifest through his actions a kind of false transcendence, a transcendence of public recognition and repetition of places and multiplication of people and numerical increase of effect, that is infinitely lesser than the transcendence he would experience by actually loving and being loved by his wife and child.
After all, for the people he encounters in the world he can in fact do nothing; and he can have a dramatic impact on his wife and child, can make them happy. For the people he encounters in the world he is ultimately a stranger, insignificant and meaningless; for his wife and child, he is someone. And it is again precisely this that makes Ryder flee from his family--the recognition of his family's genuine need of him, of his genuine need of them, and all the infinite desire it excites, all the fear of failure and rejection it arouses, all the bottomless sorrow it awakens. Ryder is, at the end of the day, only another lonely man, only another unconsoled child; and it is precisely his need to be consoled that makes him flee from consolation.
On another level, though, there is a genuine sense in which the novel The Unconsoled is structured, puzzle-like, around the need for a love and healing and consolation that is more than human. The desire of the human heart, as our many, many characters find out to their profound shame and confusion, is not easily and totally fulfilled by the love of another human person. Indeed, what is so frightening and wounding about even human love is precisely that it excites an infinite need and desire that it cannot wholly satiate.
Even if the artist was able to live with his wife, the pain of his wound would still remain. Even if Ryder was able to live permanently with his family, it would not wholly take away the memories of his childhood, or wholly satisfy the desires of his heart.
To embrace love, then, is in a sense to live in perpetual incompleteness. And in the present day, even this frequently seems impossible. How can people be healed by love if they can neither give nor accept healing? How can unconsoled people console each other?
Well, the answer that the novel The Unconsoled suggests, but never directly states, is: by a love and consolation that is more than human, that precedes and enables human love and brings it to a infinitely higher and infinitely more satisfying end. And this is, in fact, the only answer to the human heart, without which all of human life and all of human history is in vain.
It is not, though, an easy answer to understand in theory; or an easy answer to bear in practice. In the final balance the struggle is not so much to understand our mad, totalizing desire for transcendence as to live with it, to moderate it, to direct it, and, somehow, to fulfill it at last.
Art and history alike can help us reflect on this desire, understand its nature, and avoid its harms; but it cannot fulfill the desire of our hearts.
There are many ways for the human desire for everlasting life to go wrong, and many false objects for it to lose itself on. There is also, however, as I have found by experience, one true object that consoles all sorrows, heals all wounds, and satisfies every desire; and I hope you find him too.
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