Column 08/26: Homo Vanus Patiens: On The Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

Homo Vanus Patiens 

On the Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

The passing of Gene Wolfe in 2019 went, like much of his literary career, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. As before, plaudits were published by his admirers--a piratic crew of literary critics, academics, fellow science fiction authors, Catholics, and nobodies--declaring him, for the umpteenth time, the greatest [blank] of his generation--with the blank to be filled in, depending on one's personal preferences, with "literary sci-fi writer," "sci-fi writer," or even just "writer." These praises make for odd reading, and I imagine would be odder for anyone who had not read him before: as they consist usually of writers struggling to find the right adjectives and express just what about this guy was so good. And usually failing.

Gene Wolfe, it must be said, is hard to describe. He is also, at least for some, hard to read. As I write this, the top prompts for "Gene Wolfe" on google include the plaintive cry, "How do I read Gene Wolfe?" 

How do I read Gene Wolfe? This is very emphatically the right question to ask. Most classic works of literature are, at heart, exceedingly simple in content--love story, adventure, horror, relationship drama, novel--even if frequently daunting in execution. For most such books and authors, the right advice is exactly the opposite of what we were taught in high-school English class: relax, forget all about symbolism and subtext and social and cultural context, and try to enjoy the book exactly as you would Animorphs. The paradox of Gene Wolfe, however, over which many literary critics and random forumgoers have struggled in the decades since he began his career, is that despite writing for a "pulp" genre shared with Animorphs, he is the rare author who does, in fact, demand to be read carefully, thoughtfully, analytically, considerately. 

Column 8/19/2023: Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King

Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King 

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three]

Day had dawned before he was even aware he had been asleep, and when he awoke the priest Apollon was waiting by his cot, his old face drawn and worn, as if he had slept even less than Theodotus. Such hours suit me; the soldier and the deacon alike. Less sleep means less time for dreams.

Surely the old confessor must have similar dreams? For a moment, as the sleep cleared from his mind, he toyed with the idea of asking him about them. I saw so many like you, old man. Do you dream of the walls and the chains that held you? Or the men in fine robes who questioned you, day after day, always the same question, over and over again? Or the soldiers who held you by the arms and struck you on command? Or do you merely dream of the day they put out your eye? But the first words he spoke were more to the point: 

"My investigation of the palace is proceeding well. Today I must interview the clerics of the court."

Column 08/01/2023: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity 

Movies are back.

This, it seems, is what everyone is taking away from the unprecedented Barbenheimer phenomenon, which out of nowhere rocketed ticket sales from post-pandemic lows back to blockbuster levels. Two bizarre and bizarrely ill-matched movies released on the same weekend that somehow, instead of undercutting each other, ended up boosting each other, entirely through the power of Internet memes. 

What a strange time to be alive.

There is, really, nothing quite like modern Internet culture, a culture where incongruity and bizarreness and the power of a single ephemeral joke are valued, literally, above all else--and are powerful enough to get millions of Americans out of their homes and into movie theaters. Chesterton in the 1910s said that there had never been a power like the modern press: and he was right. But he hadn't seen nothing yet.

This is supposed to be an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, but discussing Internet memes is not a bad place to start. For what makes Oppenheimer so horrifying, at least for me, is the degree to which it associates and intertwines and simply and precisely treats as the same thing the power of mass media and the power of mass destruction.

Let me start over. I saw the movie Oppenheimer recently, and hated it as I have never hated any work of art produced by human persons before. It is the only film I have ever watched that made me absolutely livid with rage and sick to my stomach and unable to speak coherently for hours thereafter. I am still mad about it.

This is not precisely because it is a bad movie. In matter of fact, it is a clumsily made movie in many obvious repects--but rehearsing these would be largely besides the point. This is very much a film that does what it sets out to do, that makes the point it wants to make, that conveys what it wants to convey, to such a degree as to almost qualify as a genuine revelation. 

That being said, what it aims at, what it reveals, what it piously and intently worships, is, in my humble opinion, evil--and not just any evil, but precisely the evil of our time and place and society, the underlying belief and devotion and preoccupation behind all the most central and mainstream trends and all the most wasting moral and intellectual and social and political diseases of the world since 1945. And the movie loves this, and wants us to love it, too. And that is why I hate the movie.

Column 07/19/2023: Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]

There is something very strange about the human mind. 

One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization. 

One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.

A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.

Column 06/26/2023: The AI Revolution Already Took Place

 The AI Revolution Already Took Place

The most interesting thing about modernity is the degree to which it depends, for its basic functioning, on generating a constant sense of novelty. 

On such novelty depends not only such trifles as human life and livelihood, but also "the economy," "politics," and, perhaps most importantly of all, the ever-growing Internet-conspiracist-Take-Worker sector of the global economy.

To easily grasp what defines "modernity," I often point out to students that in Latin, as in most ancient languages, the term "new" normally has negative connotations--and can be otherwise translated as "strange" "rash" and even "revolutionary." In itself, this is far closer to a sort of human baseline response to novelty as such. Most ancient societies realized that "new things" were almost by definition disruptive things, things that created complications for the social networks and institutions they valued so highly and thus hardship and suffering and conflict. Families and institutions and Empires alike run on the old, and are thus largely and inevitably run by the old--especially in Rome, but increasingly in America as well. And as the recent disgusting wall-to-wall press coverage of the anniversary of overturning Roe v Wade reminds us, for institutions and established powers of all kinds, new things, and new people, always cause problems.

Merely saying that contemporary societies are the opposite of this, and regard novelty and the new as positive, though, is insufficient and somewhat deceptive. Certainly, modernity features any number of "progressive" narratives and theories and philosophies and theologies whereby what is new is always and by definition good, no matter what. Many popular works of progressive narrative and theory are, in fact, nearly comical in the degree of religious and moral fervor which they openly show and glory in the enormous conflict, social and familial disruption, and even violence that result from a given new trend, while still dogmatically insisting on that trend's goodness and the absolute moral necessity of embracing it and encouraging it and never questioning it at all. Yet even here, it would be easy to misunderstand the actual content and basis of the belief. 

To understand the history of the last few hundred years, one has to understand, first and foremost, that the negativity and conflict generated by modernity and modern trends is, in practically every case, not the result of "anti-modern" or "reactionary" or even "conservative" forces, but merely the inseparable twin and means of modernity itself. It is not, as one might expect, consistently and inevitably the progressive forces that advocate for novelty and portray it in positive terms, and the anti-progressive forces that portray it in negative terms. Rather, in almost every case, the novelty and its reaction are simultaneous and inseparable.

To give an obvious example, science-fiction taken as a whole is without a doubt a "progressive" and "modern" genre, yet the bread-and-butter of science fiction since its first days has been horror stories about technology and its negative consequences, demons and mad clones and evil androids and nuclear apocalypse and genetic engineering and Morlocks and erasing your family from the timeline. Frankenstein is the first modern science fiction novel precisely because it is nearly the first work of art to make extensive use of the terminology and concepts of modern science for primarily aesthetic purposes: and the aesthetic purposes to which it puts science are silence, distance, isolation, fear, and incalculable moral horror. 

Dystopia is not an opposite narrative mode to utopia, composed by different authors for contrary purposes. Nor is science horror opposite to science excitement. The Twilight Zone and Flash Gordon, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and L. Ron Hubbard, Gene Wolfe and Gene Wolfe, Star Trek and Black Mirror...all accept the radically new in science and technology as powerful and inevitable and beyond any rational control or regulation; all use this assumed reality both for aesthetic strangeness and horror and for aesthetic excitement and novelty and positivity. The same society, the same genre, even the same people produce both modes.

And in just the same way, a conspiracist or alarmist narrative about how a new technology or social trend will destroy the world is not, in practice, the opposite of a progressive or "pro-science" narrative about how a technology or social trend is "cool," must be embraced at all costs, and/or will save us all. The two are in most cases sponsored and paid for by the same tech companies, run in the same outlets, consumed by the same people, even at times created by the same people.

Again, there is a sense in which all this is distinctively modern, but also a sense in which it represents simply a universal human reaction to the truly and radically new, which always offers powers and possibilities and experiences and threats we have no prior experience with and so do not understand and so are not morally and intellectually equipped to handle, and so always to some extent moves us into an aesthetic space of excitement and horror and distance and alienation and strangeness. 

This is not in itself what makes modernity modern. What makes modernity modern is that both the "goodness" or "positivity" assigned to new things, and the "badness" or "negativity" assigned to new things, do not follow the typical senses of those words, which in most human languages and contexts emerge from morality and/or human comfort and/or prosperity and/or health and/or happiness and/or aesthetic preference. What defines modernity, rather, is precisely the sense that these novelties have truly and permanently and almost definitionally eluded the grasp of any human understanding or reason, and so cannot be properly categorized in terms of goodness or badness at all.

Hence, the concepts of goodness and badness applicable to these novelties end up representing something much closer to a metaphysical or definitional claim. What is new is good not in the sense in which, say, food or drink or shelter are good, or Star Trek Generations is good, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle or a law of physics or an ancient Mesopotamian god is good. Likewise, what is new is bad not in the sense in which, say, being mean to your sister is bad, or Marvel Avengers Infinity War Endgame is bad, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle may be bad in its implications for your own life, or a law of physics may cause you to fall unexpectedly off a cliff, or an ancient Mesopotamian god may wipe out your city and your family in an excess of spleen. Or, in other words, and in both cases, because it is fundamental, because it is inevitable, and/or because it is powerful. 

At the heart of modernity, then, is a kind of worship of inevitability and power as such, derived ultimately from a sort of immanentization into history of a metaphysical divinity transcending human reason and morality and identified with novelties good and bad. 

Here, though, is the problem with the worship of novelty, power, and/or inevitability as such. Metaphysical principles and laws of nature and even Mesopotamian deities are things that, by their nature, tend to be transcendent, not just temporarily but permanently beyond our reach and comprehension. Novelty, power, and inevitability, on the other hand, are things that can inhere in anything and everything, and things that by their inmost nature do not have much of a shelf-life. Something is divine forever; it can only be novel for a few minutes or a few days or perhaps a few years at best.

Most new things are only new in one respect, and then not new for very long; most inevitable things are not really inevitable at all, only very probable, and in constant danger of becoming un-inevitable; powerful things are only powerful to some limited degree, and usually only from one angle or one context. As fundamentally aesthetic phenomena, all suffer enormously from the basic hedonic treadmill effect. Maintaining a sense of novelty or power or inevitability at the center of a personality or a culture, then, requires an enormous and constant expenditure of time and attention and resources to find these qualities, demonstrate them, and finally give up on the current entity and start the process all over again.

And then, of course, even then most of the time finding actual genuine novelty power or inevitability is too hard, and in practice people simply settle for the aesthetic effects that suggest it.

Column 06/12/2023: Death of the Son, Episode Three: The Haunted Palace

Death of the Son, Episode Three: The Haunted Palace

[A continuation of my pulpish historical-fiction story on the deaths of Constantine's son Crispus and wife Fausta in AD 326. Part one may be found here, and part two here.]

"Theodotus."

In a heartbeat she had entered the room, her bare feet floating just above the marble floor. Moonlight surrounded her, but did not reflect off her or the jewels that covered her; it merely hung about her, illuminating and discoloring, turning rubies to sapphires and gold to silver. She was dressed as he had seen her statue in Antioch, in a long tunic with gems sewn in elaborate patterns down the front. Her hair, dark as the night air, was teased elaborately into rows of curls and bound just behind her head, exposing a long, slender neck wound about with gold chains, a neck too thin to hold up the ponderous diadem that bowed down the top of her head; but she stood erect and wore no veil. 

When he saw her, he made to get up from his bed, but his legs felt heavy, like lead; he managed to swing them to the floor, but there they sat, fixed in place, refusing to lift him. His arms too were like weights, pinned to the bed at his side. Another second more, and she had sat down beside him, with no weight, no presence, not even a whisper of breath; her face seen up close was hard and angular, with full lips and a long nose; her eyes, large and dark, looked intently into his.

"Theodotus." She said again.

"Yes, Empress."

"Theodotus. You must help me."

A wave of familiar emotions swept over him, sorrow, contempt, anger...for a second, his voice caught in his throat.

"I'm sorry. It is too late."

But her face only moved closer to his, and one of her hands, small but with long fingers, touched his arm; it was cold as ice. She was no longer dressed in her finery, but in the rags of the young woman in the arena; the wound he had made on her face, under her mouth, dripped blood. "No, Theodotus. Not for me. For my children. My children. My children. My children. My children. My..."

Her voice grew more shrill with each repetition, and the cold on his left arm grew more intense, spreading up his arm to his shoulder and across to his chest. He cried out; and in a second more, old instincts had taken over, and he had leapt up out of his bed, clutching at a non-existent spatha. 

Column 05/17/2023: Varieties of Leftism

Varieties of Leftism

I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.

There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.

There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism." 

When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.

Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again. 

All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.

Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles. 

That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.

In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.