Lament for the Maker

    At the museum of his life,
    his leather duffle coat is behind glass.
    It felt like a poem-protection center.
    It was my responsibility to go home,
    put food out in the same place every day,
    talk to the people who came to eat,
    then organize them, food and poetry being
    a nourishment that shares a syntax.
    There were many back roads to this far town,
    but at the end of a path over pluff mud
    I lay my shield down and stretched out on a bank.
    Wool-gatherer, day-dreamer, bird-dogger,
    I was sorry to have to leave,
    but my hands felt less tied.

    Like herons in a grove—or rain on mountains
    or in a deep ravine—the realm of the immortals
    releases and renews us. We want to live as if
    we are going to die tomorrow. We want to learn as if
    we are going to live forever. We want our bodies
    to belong to us. Wider seems the path. On the train,
    there was maple viewing and word games: alone, atone,
    bemoan, daemon: “Thy word is all, if we could spell.”
    The sun seemed hush-hush, then later,
    like a sword sinking thru stone. At the hotel,
    there was black tea and murmuring.
    After supper and a bath, I felt glad,
    drinking water at the sink,
    though usually I despair.

    Guns

    Stick in the mud, old fart, what are you doing
    to get the guns off the street? I am not here to pick
    on anyone. But now that they have shot Yosi,
    who ground my meat in Hingham, and his shiny pink
    meat-truck is for sale, I feel desolate. A gun is
    a vengeful machine exacting a price. A gun rejects
    stillness. It wants to get off. A man can be vain—
    almost like a god—but inside him is a carp biting
    the muck of a lake. A man who speaks too softly
    gets hit with a big stick and lopes along behind.
    A gun is minatory. Still, a week of kindness is greater.
    Run, hide, evacuate; don’t fire, duck, take cover.
    At Yosi’s ceremony, his family put a gold cloth on his face.
    Self-reliant, autonomous, tough, he lay in a shroud of silk.

    Glass of Absinthe and Cigarette

    This is a poem about a man who is dead.
    Sodomy laws treated him like a second-class citizen.
    There were ripple effects. With the aid of stimulants,
    he spoke like a truthteller and hungered for touch.
    Even when repugnant, his disinhibition seemed godlike,
    and what came out of him ravished me.
    Alas, tolerance builds rapidly, and many lines must be
    insufflated to produce that all-is-right-in-the-world euphoria:
    “Feeling good. R U there. Come right now.”
    To keep myself sane,
    I fled, dear reader,
    but I’d give my kingdom
    to see myself in those
    dilated black eyes again.

    Slowly in Haste

    Those leaf blowers sure make a lot of noise.
    Since love is the way, we nuzzle in the morning,
    but wake up to high-decibel screaming,
    dust, and exhaust smoke. More and more, being myself
    seems to oppose the nature of the world. I don’t want
    updated privacy statements; I don’t want to accept
    cookies; I don’t want active-shooter drills.
    Lustful, moody, shy, I want to keep revising myself,
    like a protean creature, but in a smart-phone free,
    non-GMO space. Something like the Quiet Car.
    Not hands-free though:
    I want to be adjusting the sails;
    a realist trims the sails
    and doesn’t whine about the wind.

    Don’t get me wrong—my life didn’t turn out as expected.
    Who knows what to expect out there? After
    a wandering path has led over weird abysses,
    I am here at the kitchen table eating cage-free eggs.
    I am a HE still. It would be okay if a horn blared to herald
    a finish, like in a symphony (“slowly in haste”).
    We suffer the ravages of Time & Weather, like trees holding on
    to their leaves for color-change. From spring to spring,
    we eat and avoid predators. The past intrudes,
    the present languishes, the future is uncertain.
    I hate leaving friends when the Here is simple and happy.
    As I put on the radio and drink a ginger ale,
    tanks and missiles surround the garden,
    the wild horses neigh.

    Horace

    We were driving North. A sign read,
    There will be no more wilderness;
    I thought of my grandfather’s softness
    whilst hugging him when I was a little boy.
    It was as if God hadn’t created us naked
    or defenseless and we had all we needed.
    It was as if wilderness would never cease to be.
    Now we must attend to it or die.
    Unlike the rat in good Horace, I am mostly content
    with my lot. Get out of the way, I mutter,
    when pain approaches. We live in such tragic times,
    buffeted like stone more than flesh.
    Yet each day the fulgent sun rises,
    blackbirds gather on the wire.

    Sanctimony Literature

    As many have noted and some have lamented, politics are multiplying: these days everything seems to have one. The search term “the politics of” yields over a million results in my university’s library database. There is “the politics of dirt,” “the politics of sleep,” and even the politics of abstracta, such as “presence” and “absence.” Obviously political entities, such as “authoritarian rule,” have politics, as do things that might seem to the uninitiated to be staunchly apolitical, such as “dogs” and “snow.” In a quaint display of reactionary nostalgia, my thesaurus suggests that “governmental” is a synonym for “political,” but the political has evidently bubbled beyond the bounds of the state apparatus by now. It would make little sense to speak of the “the government of dirt” or “the government of absence,” but both of these things apparently have “a politics.”

    Many of these freshly politicized phenomena do not just have politics so much as they are political, no matter what else they might appear to be. Like Plato’s forms, a thing’s politics have come to constitute its true if invisible essence, or so the popular story goes. The ethical, for instance, has become political: there are more than nine thousand hits for “the politics of ethics,” whatever that means, in the library database. The aesthetic, too, is on the verge of annexation. As Lauren Oyler observed in Bookforum, “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism.” By “good person,” contemporary novelists and critics do not mean someone rational, as Plato did; or someone merciful, as Augustine did; or someone who regards others as ends rather than means, as Kant did; or someone who celebrates the singularity of others, as Buber did. Instead, a person qualifies as “good” only if she conforms to a specific set of political standards, her personal virtues be damned. The standards in question, of course, are the ones endorsed by the crudest, most online leftists. “A good person,” Oyler explains in her criticism of her moralistic peers, “possesses a deep understanding of power structures and her relative place in them.” This is not understood by Oyler’s adversaries as merely one of the many aspects of goodness: rather, it is all that they suppose virtue to consist in.

    That is to say, a good person is concerned about global warming; she #believeswomen; she voted for Bernie and posted about it on Instagram. Admittedly, she bullies Warren supporters from an anonymous Twitter account with a snake avatar, but this amounts to “punching up” and is therefore morally commendable. A good person acknowledges her privilege frequently, and when she apologizes for it, as she often does, she pledges to “Do the Work” (but uncharacteristically declines to demand adequate compensation). A good person understands that “owning the libs” is of paramount importance, though she doesn’t know any libs personally, probably because she understands that good people do not ever associate with bad people. (In any case, she is ultimately opposed to ownership.) In a word, a good person has no unpredictable opinions, no friends with whom she disagrees about anything of any importance, no views that could not be distilled into slogans and printed on canvas tote bags, and no unruly appetites. (Naturally she is a vegan.)

    This person shows up in contemporary fiction as character, author, and regulative ideal alike. She is Bobby in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, Adam Gordon in Ben Lerner’s Topeka School, and Mia Warren in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. She is also the conscience of all three novels, and under her watchful and unforgiving eye a body of writing has emerged that we might call “sanctimony literature.” Its flourishing, commercially and critically, is one of the most salient features about this moment in the politicization of culture.

    Sanctimony literature is, in effect, an extension of social media: it is full of self-promotion and the airing of performatively righteous opinions. It exists largely to make poster-cum-authors look good and scrollers-cum-readers feel good for appreciating the poster-cum-authors’ goodness. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin wrote of sententious reformist fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that “we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.” Sanctimony literature has similarly affirming and consoling effects: it serves to make us feel proud that we share its ethical assumptions.

    Though it purports to treat themes of great gravity and complexity, such as sexism and economic inequality, sanctimony literature is suspiciously easy to read. Perusing a sanctimony novel feels like binge-watching a series on Netflix or scrolling through Instagram, pausing every now and then to read an inspirational caption. (Unsurprisingly, Rooney’s Normal People and Ng’s Little Fires have both been adapted into popular TV shows.) The vocabulary of both texts is often unambitious, and the syntax undemanding, for despite the sanctimony novel’s pretensions to subversion and system-smashing, it is usually formally unadventurous. (Ben Lerner, an inspired stylist, is a notable exception to this rule.) The little exploration that the genre permits is so easily digestible that it hardly constitutes experimentation at all: in place of Proustian effusions we get fragments, strewn strategically amid complete sentences, to signal that the text at hand is capital-L-Literary. Emma Cline’s The Girls, a gem of a sanctimony novel, is full of such shards: “Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriend’s hands.” These slippery non-sentences may seem daringly ungrammatical, but they are so easy to gulp down. A good person knows that ethical consumption and creation are impossible under capitalism, so she sets out to write a blockbuster, reminding herself that naked clauses are Tweet-adjacent and therefore apt to sell better. Like the protest novels that Baldwin so deliciously excoriated, sanctimony novels contain morals that are, as he puts it, “neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving motoes sometimes found on the walls of furnished rooms.”

    Above all, sanctimony literature is defined by its efforts to demonstrate its Unimpeachably Good Politics in the manner of a child waving an impressive report card at her parents in hopes of a pat on the head. The Topeka School is admittedly stylistically sophisticated, but Lerner nonetheless makes sure to lambaste Trump in no uncertain terms, lest we mistake his narrator’s adolescent wrongthink for his own mature worldview. In the final scene of the novel, the author’s alter-ego attends a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nefariously known as ICE. Flush with the sense of his own bravery, he reflects that “It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be a part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again.” In Conversations with Friends and Normal People, two fine exemplars of the sanctimony tradition, Sally Rooney reminds us over and over that her characters, like their author, are Marxists with the Right Opinions. “I’m gay, and Frances is a communist,” one character in Conversations announces as she introduces herself and her friend to some new acquaintances. Later, Frances the communist avows that she “want[s] to destroy capitalism and consider[s] masculinity personally oppressive.” In Normal People, one character remarks that an injustice has occurred for reasons she cannot comprehend: “it’s something to do with capitalism,” she concludes gravely. Her interlocuter replies dolefully, “Yeah, everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

    These books — millennial agit-prop, millennial middle-brow — are inflated and animated by an unshakable faith in their own rectitude. Impossibly foreign to their guiding sensibility are such characters as Henrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the mesmerizingly bloodthirsty protagonist of Michael Kohlhaas, or Philip Roth’s Portnoy, the venomously sexist yet perversely charismatic anti-hero of Portnoy’s Complaint. Now all the eponyms read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle. When and if they do make minor political gaffes, they acknowledge their faults and repent immediately, in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable torrent of external criticism. In the era of sanctimony literature, Oyler writes mockingly, “a good person is not perfect (she has read enough not to fall for that trap), but she is self-aware.”

    Traps though they may be, these displays of preemptive self-flagellation have proved commercially irresistible, which is to say that they have elicited the coveted pats on the head in the form of prizes and plaudits. Their authors closely resemble masochistic Tweeters eager to cancel themselves before any of their enemies has a chance to close in for the kill. As Ligaya Mishan explained in her incisive genealogy of “cancellation” in the New York Times T Magazine,

    On Twitter, people speak scoffingly of canceling themselves…There’s the hope that if we have the grace to cancel ourselves first, our ostracism will be temporary, a mere vacation from social media. Absolution is reduced to performance, a walk with a bowed head through jeers and splattered mud.

    Mishan’s prognosis may sound exaggerated — but recall the self-erasing contrition of Jessica Krug, the white professor at George Washington University who confessed to posing as Afro-Puerto-Rican in a deranged and remorseful blog post. “You should absolutely cancel me,”, she imperishably declared, “and I absolutely cancel myself.” The literary sanctimonists are likewise tripping over themselves to repent loudly and in print.  

    Often they do so by explicitly renouncing their past failures. The Topeka School is a sort of rejoinder to Lerner’s first two novels, both of which sparkle because they take a mordantly ambivalent stance towards a narrator who is craven yet sympathetic. Sometimes they do so by introducing politically suspect characters solely for the sake of loudly disavowing them. It is telling that both Rooney and Lerner pit themselves against debaters who believe in earnest engagement with opposing positions: Rooney’s villain of choice in Normal People is a college debater who defends freedom of speech, and Lerner’s adversary in The Topeka School is a high school debate coach who urges his students to consider conservative arguments. Their respective protagonists flirt with these corrupt influences not because they suspect that thinking through Bad Politics might prove philosophically fertile, but rather so that they can demonstrate personal growth when they finally denounce disagreement for good. The enemy is anyone who would countenance the Wrong Position even for the sake of rebutting it. Beware the contamination that may result from exposure to the other side even in a good-faith exchange. Protect yourself! Lerner and Rooney demonstrate their piety by practicing what they preach: their novels are both exercises in retiring intellectual curiosity, and the result is a literature of consummate self-cancellation.

    It is probably just as well, at least in the case of the sanctimonists, that aesthetics is dissolving into politics, because novels that cancel themselves and all their wayward characters do not make for strong art. For one thing, they are stupefyingly smug. As the critic Nathan Goldman has remarked about the passage in The Topeka School in which Lerner’s protagonist recollects how much he loved performing cunnilingus on his high school love interest,

    To be sure, the tone playfully mocks the young Adam’s self-seriousness, self-congratulation, and self-regard. But it also reaffirms his understanding of himself — an understanding his parents share — as an outsider to the world of crude misogyny which, though it is his milieu, remains fundamentally external to the proto-feminist, Ivy-bound poet who goes down on his girlfriend.

    It is not insignificant that so much of Lerner’s novel ridicules his adolescent alter ego for being such a “man child,” a term with which he intends to highlight the link between masculinity and childishness but which in fact illuminates the link between sanctimony literature and “young adult” fiction, colloquially known as YA. In truth, YA is something of a misnomer, as the books that qualify are not really for young adults so much as they are for tantrum-prone children. Now, there is nothing wrong with fiction written for ten-year-olds, much of which I loved when I was ten; but just as Lolita would fail as a children’s book, a novel supposedly composed for moral and intellectual adults errs when it offers up moral nuggets that would sustain a fourth grader. Baldwin disparagingly compares Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Little Women, and it is flooring how many recent literary hits are likewise set in the simplified ethical universe of adolescence: both of Rooney’s novels are about college students, Lerner’s is about a high schooler, Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is sort of about parents but largely about their teenaged children, the protagonist of Cline’s The Girls is fourteen, the viral story “Cat Person” follows a jaded college student, and so on and on.

    Sanctimony literature is aesthetically wanting not only because its language and moral outlook are juvenile, but also because its characters are not human agents so much as avatars of identity categories. In Normal People and The Topeka School, evil debaters are no more than roughly sketched ambassadors for unpalatable conservatism. In The Girls, a sexist cult that doubles as a symbol for The Patriarchy effaces the subjectivity of its female members. The book is indeed about girls, members of a group defined by their abuse at the hands of lecherous men. The cult’s leader, Russell, is sexism personified. Though he is modelled on Charles Manson, he is stripped of the murderer’s more memorable quirks: according to the logic of sanctimony literature, to represent someone evil as interesting or even idiosyncratic is necessarily to “glorify” him. (In this sense, the greatest anti-sanctimonist text of all time is Paradise Lost, with its irresistible portrait of Satan.)

    All three of these novels and their characters lack what Lionel Trilling called “the personal vision affirming itself against the institutional with the peculiar passionateness of art.” Their approach is familiar. In accordance with the tenets of progressivism, the collective and the systemic are their primary units of interest. In activist contexts, of course, a focus on structural reform is sensible: it seems manifest that, say, the anti-racism movement would be better served by prison abolition than by milquetoast corporate trainings in which white people are urged to fortify their fragile psyches. But a novel is not a social movement, nor is it a piece of political theory, and good fiction homes in on particular people — people who are shaped by their social environments, to be sure, but who are also so irreducibly singular as to amount to more than just epiphenomena of their conditions. As Trilling cautions in an essay on John Dos Passos, written in an earlier era of progressive piety, “too insistent a cry against the importance of the individual quality is a sick cry.” And as Baldwin warned a generation later, there is not much to be gained from attempting to “lop” the human “down to the status of time-saving invention. He is, after all, not merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is — and how old-fashioned the words sound! — something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable.” Irving Howe, who wrote an important book on the political novel, echoes both Trilling and Baldwin when he reflects that his literary contemporaries believe it beneath them to consider “anything so gauche as human experience or obsolete as human beings.”

    You do not need to deny that people’s habits of mind are to a significant extent the product of their material contexts in order to accept the essential corrective of Trilling, Howe, and Baldwin’s bold anti-reductionist approach. It might turn out, though I doubt that it will, that people are, at the most foundational level, nothing but accretions of social circumstance — but even if it does, we will have to persist in perpetuating the fruitful fiction of personality if we are to produce profound and persuasive novels. Fiction flourishes when it reflects actual individual existence, and no matter how enthusiastically theorists accept a “systemic” analysis of art in principle, few manage to experience themselves, their lovers, or their enemies as reducible to socio-economic tokens in practice. In our daily interactions, Trilling notes, “we do not easily tolerate people who are content to ascribe their personal — I do not mean their practical — failures to circumstances alone.” This is not to say that we are not sometimes delusional: it is only to say that fiction succeeds when it captures our real, if perhaps mistaken, sense of self. Trilling goes still further, asserting that social and economic determinism’s inability to account for our basic experience of individuality is a strike against its truth. And Baldwin, too, carries his critique of the politicization of art in a similar direction: “the failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization which is real and which cannot be transcended.” The upshot is not that we should abandon social and economic analysis altogether — Trilling, Howe, and Baldwin were all, to say the least, sophisticated social and political thinkers— but rather that we should not export a method well-suited to political criticism into the foreign province of fiction, where it frequently deserves no place. Heretical as it sounds, there are realms of life in which politics does not always belong. After all, as Baldwin rightly observes, “literature and sociology are not one and the same.”

    Of course, even in the realm of the novel, concern with morality is not misplaced. If sanctimony literature is soporific, it is not because it portrays people who strive to live ethically. Trying to be good is an important — if not the only important and not always the most important — part of being a person, and nothing that is human can be alien to literature. There are plenty of honest and unsentimental fictions about people trying their best to be good, or to figure out what goodness entails. Vasily Grossman’s monumental Life and Fate is in large part about Viktor Shtrum’s struggle to retain his integrity in the face of totalitarian pressures, and an entire planet away, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice follows Elizabeth’s Bennet’s vexed efforts to judge her acquaintances with charity and justice. These are careful and complex creations that neither lapse into homily nor shy away from ethical conundrums.

    They succeed in part because they resist Manichean temptations: both are populated with characters who are neither angelic nor diabolical but morally mottled, compound creatures, as real people are. Elizabeth Bennet is usually a sharp judge of character, but she occasionally succumbs to the prejudices of the title. Her certainty in the infallibility of her initial impressions prevents her from grasping that Mr. Darcy is well-meaning, despite his apparent standoffishness. For his part, Mr. Darcy can be pretentious, though he is ultimately honorable. And in his reduced and terrifying circumstances Viktor Shtrum also vacillates, alternately colluding with and defying his Stalinist oppressors. The sanctimonists maintain a tidily bifurcated interest in good people and bad people, when in fact what they should be studying is the good and the bad in all people — the full murk of human motivation, the tangle of tensions and contradictions, of desires and principles, that is the permanent condition of human choice. 

    Sanctimony literature errs, then, not because it ventures into moral territory, but because it displays no genuine curiosity about what it really means to be good, and is blind to the distinction between morality and moralism, and exhibits no doubt about its own probity. Isn’t it funny that a good person, as envisioned by Lerner and Rooney, is exactly like Lerner and Rooney and all of their readers? And isn’t it striking that all these Lerner-clones and Rooney-clones are depicted as irreproachably upstanding, while all of their enemies are represented as one-dimensionally irredeemable? The heroes and heroines of sanctimony literature are so steeped in self-satisfaction that they provide an inadvertent moral lesson. It turns out that someone can have all the de rigueur political opinions without thereby achieving any measure of meaningful ethical success. A novel’s goodness is bound up with its beauty, but there is more to goodness than boilerplate leftist fervor.

    If I think a little rhetorical ribbing about the “politics of every-thing” crowd is in order, it is because I wish to combat sanctimony literature’s resistance to self-examination and its accompanying humorlessness, even stylistically. But I would hardly deny the obvious, namely that the way in which a society is organized has some bearing on the art that its denizens produce. Nor would I deny that there may be something fruitful about analyses that delve into an artwork’s political context. Patently, it is profitable to read the black novelist Nella Larsen with reference to the history of American racism, or to read the Jewish poet Paul Celan with the Holocaust in mind. Indeed, it is hard for me to think of any book that would not be illuminated by a discussion of the conditions of its production. Even books that are about the chilly detachment of the aesthetic domain are the artifacts of a particular time, place, and worldview. Readers and writers are also people, which is to say that they are always members of political communities and are therefore always situated at what Trilling once called “the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Authors who attempt to withdraw from political and social life, like Thoreau, are defined indirectly by the political affiliations they reject; writers who oppose the regimes in power, like Victor Serge, are members of political communities of resisters.

    But everything that I have just described about the historical circumstances of the imagination is truistic. The question is not whether aesthetics is political in this anodyne sense but rather whether political value is the supreme value, the only sort of value — and, by extension, whether every analysis of every artwork must always advert to political factors, on pain of moral and evaluative failure. Is it permissible to write anything about Celan that emphasizes his choice of imagery rather than his heritage? Is he only a Holocaust survivor? Is there anything to be gained by praising his work’s formal qualities without delving into his traumatic past? A related question is whether an artwork that is politically suspect could nonetheless show a degree of aesthetic promise. Portnoy’s Complaint is manically sexist: must its locker-room lechery vitiate its sense of humor? And, really, are there no great conservative novels?

    I am not sure whether anyone is enough of an avowed zealot of politicization to insist outright that there is no point in discussing the formal features of Celan’s poetry, or that Portnoy’s Complaint cannot be funny because it is sometimes misogynist. The novelist Viet Than Nguyen came closest to recommending the omnipotence of politics in an absurd New York Times column in which he urged his fellow writers to write exclusively political fiction in the wake of the Trump presidency. “What will writers do when the outrage is over? Will they go back to writing about flowers and moons?” he asks, as if flowers, wilting in warming temperatures, were not an appropriate object of political regard — and as if flowers and moons could only ever matter for political reasons.

    In practice, many writers who do not go so far as to explicitly endorse such a cartoonishly extreme position nonetheless behave as if they regarded political virtue as the only or most important kind. Why else would they so often act as if criticizing a book’s politics were tantamount to issuing a wholesale aesthetic indictment? Why else would they so often intimate that literature can only matter if it has salutary political effects? Why else, for instance, would the novelist Lauren Groff take to Twitter to assert that the political turmoil of the Trump era could have been averted if “a small percentage of Republicans read up to two books a year?” If Tweets such as Groff’s are a perennial scourge — if literary people are often compelled to shout from the rooftops that books can spark revolution and save the world — it is because many of them are unable to conceive of something mattering for apolitical reasons. Expostulations such as Groff’s are the logical endpoint of a culture in which we desperately want to regard literature as a worthy pursuit but cannot admit that aesthetic and ethical worth count as such. If books have to make a political difference in order to make any difference at all, then dedicated readers are left to stake out a losing position, for it is simply not plausible that literature will ever tank capitalism or keep the ice caps from melting.

    This is not to say that works of literature have never had any tangible political effects. On the contrary, a handful of books — often the worst ones, aesthetically speaking — have had outsize influence: for all its flaws and immaturities, Uncle Tom’s Cabin ignited a nation-wide debate about the horrors of slavery. But if political utility on the ground were the only measure of a book’s value, we would be hard-pressed to defend the vast majority of masterpieces, among them Moby Dick, The Wings of the Dove, A Remembrance of Things Past, and so on. Did Proust change the world? I think he did, but not in the way the activists want to change it. Even more obviously political fictions, such as Invisible Man and The Yellow Wallpaper, did not yield many immediate or concrete reforms. Admittedly, books that do not directly launch social movements can raise political awareness, which may qualify as a virtue whether or not it ultimately precipitates action. But do we really want to say that this is the only way a work of literature can succeed? Do we really want to conclude that the merits of Days of Abandonment and Beloved are limited to their rather obvious political implications?

    A person is allowed to have many priorities. In fact, she must have many priorities. She can — and she should — care about both beauty and justice. Problems arise not because writers are doing their best to balance a range of sometimes conflicting commitments, but because they seek to resolve the tensions by convincing themselves that there are no conflicts to speak of. If essays about madeleines and memories are to be shrunk to political gestures, then the Proustian does not have to deviate from the dogmas of the day or admit that she is failing by her own professed standards. But her delusion is as self-serving as it is dangerous. The fact is, you have not discharged your political duties by writing a Marxist analysis of Henry James, and even if you routinely criticize poetry with “bad politics,” you have no excuse to skip the protest. If your primary goal is to become as politically righteous as possible, you would do better to become an organizer, a labor lawyer, an investigative journalist, or a politician — all dignified careers that double as admirable expressions of citizenship.

    So should you fling these critical observations to the floor and rush out onto the streets, pounding your chest and shrieking? Not necessarily. Organizers, labor lawyers, investigative journalists, and (some) politicians are commendable, but there are many ways to strive for different iterations of the good. The Grand Canyon is majestic, but it didn’t vote for Sanders (given its location, it more likely would have voted for Trump); Babette’s Feast is a compositionally perfect film about the euphoric maximalism proper to both religious revelation and artistic creation, but it has absolutely nothing to do with #believingwomen. Maybe we could coax a political lesson out of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ racked sonnets, but why on earth should we try? Nor do political merit and moral merit always overlap. Political virtue may be a species of ethical virtue, but there are ethical qualities that cannot be construed as merely political boons. The authorial voice that declaims loudly in The Topeka School opposes racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but it is still objectionably self-congratulatory. At times it is even patronizing, and its condescension betrays a lack of respect for — or even a lack of belief in — its readers’ moral agency. Rooney’s characters are communists, but they are also insufferably hubristic (so much so that they often seem more like caricatures than like real human beings.) Plenty of people advocate for universal healthcare while inflicting interpersonal injury; there are any number of political paragons who fail as parents, lovers, teachers, and friends. (In a better literature than the sanctimonists’, the frequent distance between our ideals and our practices would itself be the subject of interesting novels.)

    Materialists often scoff at calls for compassion, as if the injunction to cultivate private kindness amounts to an alibi for public inaction. But if we abandon the fiction that all value is political, we can see that it is possible to recommend compassion without recommending it as a political strategy. Philanthropy is not a replacement for material redistribution, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be said for being generous to the people around you. Even progressives are reprehensible when they are narcissistic, sadistic, rectitudinous, dogmatic, patronizing, hectoring, and dismissive. Sanctimony literature may champion admirable political aims, but it does so at too high an ethical cost: it flattens complicated moral landscapes into children’s jungle gyms and addresses its readers as if they were prepubescent. And these ethical failings, it turns out, are not irrelevant to the genre’s enormous aesthetic deficiencies.

    As long as we are wedded to a narrow conception of the ethical as inseparable from the political, it will be hard for us to trace much of a link between the ethical and the aesthetic: as sanctimony literature demonstrates, books with politically upstanding characters and politically saintly sensibilities are often pat and pappy. But once we renovate our notion of the ethical, we can see how it might come to stand in a more intimate relation to the aesthetic — and how a novel lacking a certain sort of moral complexity might therefore suffer artistically. Lionel Trilling knew this.

    In his early examination (and commendation) of E.M. Forster, the critic wisely insisted that rich writing must display what he called “moral realism.” This, he clarifies, “is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life.” In a later essay he added that “to act against social injustice is right and noble” but “to choose to act so does not settle all moral problems but on the contrary generates new ones of an especially difficult sort.” “Moral realism” becomes important precisely when people are most committed to “moral righteousness”: at such times, among them the era in which the anti-Stalinist Trilling lived, we will drown in “books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for taking progressive attitudes,” but we will lack “books that raise questions in our minds not only about the conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses.” He continues, in a passage worth quoting, as it were, liberally, “Moral indignation, which has been said to be the favorite emotion of the middle class, may be in itself an exquisite pleasure. To understand this does not invalidate moral indignation but only sets up the conditions on which it ought to be entertained.” In other words, we should be suspicious of artifacts that serve primarily to assure us of our own heroism.

    Trilling’s awareness of the pratfalls of moral self-con-gratulation drove him to criticize his own political allies more harshly and incisively than he criticized his opponents. Though he famously wrote, in 1950, that conservatives propound neither thoughts nor theories but “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” he is far more frequently critical of liberals than he is of their — and his own — rivals. He admires Forster precisely because the novelist “is at war with the liberal imagination,” and this despite the writer’s “long commitment to the doctrines of liberalism.” Trilling, too, was a champion of liberal causes, but he was also a lifelong adversary of the sententiousness to which liberalism often gives rise. He praises Forster for dashing the kind of liberal imagination according to which “good is good and bad is bad” and balks at dappled articles like “good-and-evil,” for which reason its representatives “have always moved in an aura of self-congratulation. They sustain themselves by flattering themselves with intentions and they dismiss as reactionary whoever questions them.” The liberals whom Trilling made a career of targeting “play the old intellectual game of antagonistic principles. It is an attractive game because it gives us the sensation of thinking, and its first rule is that if one of the two opposed principles is wrong, the other is necessarily right.”

    Now dissolve for a moment to the digitized present. The comfortable antinomies for which Trilling arraigned liberals have recently been given a new and frighteningly powerful technological foundation. As Christian Lorentzen pointed out in Harper’s a few years ago, the intellectual and aesthetic horizons of contemporary liberals and liberal-analogs are exhausted by the limited options afforded by social media — like or dislike, upvote or downvote. It is all Rotten Tomatoes. The contemporary liberal — and just as often, the contemporary progressive — is uncomfortable in that necessary wilderness called “the middle,” which Trilling once described as “the only honest place to be.”

    All this may come as a surprise to those anxious to cast Trilling as the liberal par excellence, or even as an early neoliberal, which is of course the ultimate smear. But when Trilling states at the beginning of The Liberal Imagination that liberalism “is not only the dominant but the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, he does not regard this as grounds for celebration so much as an occasion for vigilance: “a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time.” That was one of the most renowned sentences of its era, and deservedly so. Far from endorsing neoliberalism, Trilling does not understand “liberalism” to pick out any particular economic arrangement: instead, he sees it as “a large tendency rather than a concrete body of doctrine.” It must always be on guard against complacency, self-assurance, and the pre-reflective acceptance of a self-aggrandizing ideology that takes the place of a modest and discomfiting idea.

    That certain contemporary critics think of Trilling as something approaching a reactionary is further evidence of their mental poverty. For them, anyone who rejects any aspect of the standard leftist package must therefore be a reactionary. Dislike! Downvote! Own the Libs! “To the simple mind,” Trilling wrote premonitorily, “the mention of complication looks like a kind of malice, and to the mind under great stress the suggestion of something ‘behind’ the apparent fact looks like a call to quietism, like mere shilly-shallying.” But in reality uncertainty is not spinelessness, it is the first step on the bumpy path towards responsible conviction. It is not enough to want morality, “not even enough to work for it — we must want it and work for it with intelligence.” We are lost when a “‘cherished goal’ forbids that we stop to consider how we reach it, or if we may not destroy it in trying to reach it the wrong way.” To wit: Might the relentless production of hyper-commercialized novels that practically adapt themselves to the screen undermine a laudable anti-corporate agenda? Might inciting moral panics about the tech overlords on social media line the same coffers that we purport to want to empty? Might a novel that aspires to fight sexism fail if it is crammed with women who look for all the world like nothing more than blobs of doughy victimhood?

    Moral realism helps us see how our methods conflict with our motives. It is a vital antidote to the progressive who “thinks chiefly of his own good will and prefers not to know that the goodwill generated its own problems, that the love of humanity has its own vices and the love of truth own sensibilities. There is a morality of morality.” Moral realism is the morality of morality and is therefore a specifically ethical virtue, though a contemporary sensibility may struggle to recognize it as such, for it does not convey many readily legible principles, much less does it urge us to reduce our meat consumption or stop writing about the moon. Trilling’s New York Times obituary reported, in 1975, with a twinge of disappointment, that “as a critic he founded no school and left no group of disciples closely associated with his name.” But that is the measure of his accomplishment: instead of instructing us in which propositions to believe, Trilling’s criticism models the art of thinking without a mold and without a foregone conclusion. This is what makes him so invigorating to read: he was sympathetic to Marx, but he was not a Marxist; he was fascinated by Freud, but he was not a Freudian; he delighted in form, but he was not a formalist; he was a liberal, but he was suspicious of liberalism; he was a close student of society, but he was not convinced that the human element could be wholly reduced to its circumstances.

    “On the one hand,” he wrote, “class is character, soul, and destiny, and…on the other hand class is not finally determining.” In our unfortunate intellectual situation, such a pronouncement sounds almost incomprehensible. It is unlike “all the great absolutes,” which are “dull when discussed in themselves.” It does not fit neatly into the upvote/downvote dichotomy: we are genuinely unsure what will follow. And the very reason that Trilling is so interesting is also the reason that sanctimony literature is so boring: because absolutes are dead ends. We know at the outset of a sanctimony novel that good (the skinny leftists) will triumph over evil (the balding libertarians). We know what the canvas tote bags will look like and that the characters will all eat seitan. We know that a certain style of intellectual and emotional conformity will trouble neither the characters nor their creators.

    And worst of all, we also know exactly what goodness, in the circumscribed world of the novels in question, boils down to. What we are denied is the intellectual excitement of trying to answer the exceedingly complicated question of what a morally serious person should be like. It is because sanctimony literature eschews moral realism that it foregoes the sort of style that might at last confer substance. We already have enough politics; now it is time for us to find an ethics; and if we are demanding of our skills and our sensibilities, an aesthetics may follow. If we cannot have enough good people, we may still aspire to more good books.

    A Modest Utopia

    I.

    Every quixotic idea has its origins in books of chivalry. Mine began in reading about English political history in the eighteenth century. From Macaulay and Namier, I learned how the Whig Party governed England for seventy years on the basis of a parliamentary majority secured through a corrupt system and fraudulent elections. This strange situation was most memorably portrayed by Hogarth, with his scathing paintings and engravings of rotten boroughs where even the dead were allowed a vote. But then a set of sudden reforms, allied with the emergence of a free press, ushered in genuine competition between parties. The story ended well.

    Reading this in Mexico, reflecting on this saga of political progress, an obvious thought immediately occurred to me: if this happened in England two centuries ago, why not in Mexico now? The result was an essay called “For a Democracy Without Adjectives,” which I published in 1984 in Vuelta, an extraordinary journal founded in 1976 by Octavio Paz, where I worked as deputy editor. In left-wing circles, it was common to degrade democracy by adding adjectives such as “bourgeois” and “formal.” What we needed, in my view, was democracy, period. Without adjectives, without condescension, without the fantasy that there is something better. 

    No sooner had my essay appeared than the government instructed its hired writers to attack my proposal as both senseless and dangerous. The journalistic, academic, and political Left, still wedded to the paradigm of the socialist revolution, came out against me as well, trotting out the old Marxist cliches about the falsity and inadequacy of democracy. The National Action Party (PAN), which since 1939 had gradually sought to construct a citizenry that recognized the worth of free elections, was at that time a center-right presence in Mexican politics, but it was weak. Nobody, or almost nobody, saw that the democratic liberal alterna-tive proposed in 1910 by Francisco I. Madero to counteract the dictator Porfirio Díaz was the right and proper way out for Mexico. Madero led the first and very brief phase of the Mexican Revolution. In 1911, he was elected president in fair and free elections. He presided over a purely democratic regime for fifteen months and was overthrown and murdered in a coup backed by the American ambassador. This started the violent phase of the revolution that lasted until 1920 and left one million people dead, after which Mexico abandoned Madero’s democratic ideal. The PRI was founded in 1929 and held total power until the end of the century. 

    Liberal democracy, I argued, was also a solution for Latin America more generally, as it seemed to be indicated by the rejection of military governments in the 1980s in Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. These countries, each by degrees and all by the holding of elections, were moving in that direction. But liberal democracy was still not viewed positively by the region as a whole, with the notable exceptions of Venezuela and Costa Rica. In fact, in Colombia and Peru, as well as in Central America, the most viable means to power was still the one mapped out by the Cuban revolution, whose prestige remained intact in Latin American universities and among Latin American intellectuals. 

    The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, for example. In 1984, Vuelta published Gabriel Zaid’s “Nicaragua: The Enigma of the Elections,” in which Zaid declared that the Sandinistas had the perfect card to play in order to discredit American “aggression”: they could simply call elections, from which one of their number would undoubtedly emerge triumphant. They used liberal means for illiberal — more precisely, dictato-rial — ends. This anti-Sandinista heresy cost Zaid dear: in Mexico, and across Latin America, the left vilified him as an ally of Reagan. That same year, on being awarded the Frankfurt International Book Fair Prize, Octavio Paz called for exactly the same thing: democracy in Nicaragua. The response to his challenge was a symbolic lynching: outside his home on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, protestors burned posters bearing the image of his face.

    The next year, the front cover of Vuelta’s April issue was devoted to an essay by Octavio Paz called “PRI: Time’s Up.” Paz bravely argued that the PRI must open the way for profound political reform. The PRI was an ingenious kind of dictator ship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Elections were organized by the Interior Ministry, and the PRI won every legislative and executive position all over the country. This closed political structure, which had been in operation for six decades, struck Paz as unsustainable and wrong. And indeed it was. The power wielded by the president was not only excessive, it bordered on the imperial: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the Supreme Court of Justice, the governors and legislatures of all thirty-two states, answered directly to him. The so-called “Mexican Republic,” which on paper, in the Constitution, was “representative, democratic, and federal,” in practice verged on an absolute monarchy, a monarchy of a party, with the outgoing president choosing his successor at six-year intervals. The single lever of power in Mexico was the PRI, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, which properly speaking was not a party at all, but rather a machine geared for the winning of elections, as well as an efficient social mobility agency and patronage network in the way that it doled out public money and public positions. And there was yet another undemocratic feature to this alleged democracy: freedom of expression was limited to a few newspapers. (It was little more than a whimper on radio and it was non-existent on television.)

    The history of dissent is often best documented in journals, and so Vuelta again: in that same issue in April 1985, Zaid had a piece called “Scenarios For The End of The PRI,” among which he included a major earthquake — an actual earthquake, he was not speaking metaphorically — that would lead to the total discrediting of the political system. He was prophetic: the earthquake came to pass in September of that year, a terrible natural catastrophe. The incompetence of the government’s response exposed its failings to all, and many Mexicans in central and northern Mexico began to believe that democracy might be a possibility. Various other factors added to this new awareness, among them the PRI’s disastrous handling of Mexico’s oil revenues, which in 1982 led the country to default on its sovereign debt. 

    As the evidence of the PRI’s damage continued to mount, the left began to react to this demand for change by non-revolutionary means. Two years after I made my proposal for a democracy without adjectives, the distinguished Trotskyite historian Adolfo Gilly published an essay admitting that the idea might be worth taking seriously. The title of his piece was “A Modest Utopia.” It was a sign of the times. With the involvement of parties on the left and the right, of unions, students, the teaching class, intellectuals, journalists, businesspeople, and broad, plural movements all throughout civil society, Mexico was beginning its move to democracy. Significantly, electoral fraud started to be seen as a national embarrassment. In 1988, one such fraud snatched victory from the hands of the presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who could at that point have put out a call for a revolution but instead opted for the historic decision of creating the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which for the first time in Mexico’s history unified every leftist grouping. Elections took place again in 1994 and 2000, the latter organized and overseen by the Federal Electoral Institute, an independent body. Ernesto Zedillo, the twentieth century’s last PRI president, behaved in an exemplary fashion and facilitated an orderly and peaceful transition.

    Finally, at the turn of the century, the seemingly impossible happened: Mexico, the country of the Aztec tlatoani, of the Spanish viceroys, of the caudillos, of the imperial presidents, put an end to seven decades of PRI rule and elected Vicente Fox, a PAN candidate. A pluralistic Congress was also elected, with the three main parties represented. Perhaps for the first time since a distant experiment in the 1800s, there was full autonomy for the Supreme Court of Justice. Government at the state level enjoyed hitherto unknown independence. There was unfettered freedom of expression in the written press, and on radio and television too. “Democracy without adjectives” no longer seemed so quixotic.

    II.

    “Stick to my theory and you won’t go wrong,” my beloved teacher, the historian Richard M. Morse, once said to me. Over the course of a twenty-year friendship, he never took issue with my essays on behalf of liberal democracy in Mexico, nor with my critical history of paternalist and personalist rule in Mexico from 1810 to 1996. But Morse did not agree with my premises. His entire body of work on Ibero-America — as he preferred to call Latin America — emphasized the unlikelihood, the impossibility even, of liberal democracy ever fully taking root in these countries. And the strangest part about his theory was his insistence that the inappropriateness of liberal democracy to the region was not a reason for complaint. Who was this American historian who was disqualifying us from the moral and political order to which so many of us aspired, from the greatest political arrangements ever devised? 

    Though he was a distinguished and admired teacher at places such as Yale, Stanford and the Wilson Center in Washington (where he was director of the Latin American Center), Morse was not an ordinary academic, but rather a thinker in the mold of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, with a passion for Ibero-American culture. Born in New Jersey in 1922, he was the scion of one of New England’s oldest families, for generations deeply involved in commerce with Asia. One of his forebears was the inventor of the famous code. Morse began his academic career at Princeton, where he was a disciple of the critics Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur. There he edited The Nassau Literary Review, in whose pages he published reports, stories, and a play inspired by a series of trips in the early 1940s to Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. In Chile he met the Minister of Health, a young socialist who argued that the United States owed a historical debt to the South American countries. His name was Salvador Allende. In Mexico he interviewed Pablo Neruda (who was the Chilean ambassador) and the philosopher José Vasconcelos. Morse enlisted in the Army in 1943, seeing action in the Pacific, and on his return enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied under Américo Castro, the great historian of Spain’s blended Arabic, Christian, and Jewish past. From him Morse learned the rich possibilities of the comparative cultural method. 

    Perhaps his most significant mentor was Frank Tannenbaum. An anarchist in his younger days, Tannenbaum developed a peculiar sensibility trained on exposing the darker aspects of life in the United States. He wrote books on inhumane prison conditions, on slavery’s cultural legacy, on racism in the South, on social inequality. And this sensibility also put him in sympathy with the Mexican Revolution. Between 1929 and 1951, Tannenbaum wrote three important books on Mexico and several more on Latin America. From him Morse learned that Ibero-America is not a crooked branch on the Western trunk but a civilization in its own right, with values — such as the peaceful coexistence and free mixture of races and cultures — from which the United States had a great deal to learn. 

    On his travels through the continent, Morse had picked up on a feature of Latin American society that moved him deeply: “Not that Latin America was a racial paradise, but at least the differences in color did not eclipse the human presence.” This social blessing became personal when he met the woman who would turn out to be his interpreter of Latin American life. Her name was Emerante de Pradines. Born in 1918, a great-grand-daughter of the founder of Haiti, the daughter of a celebrated musician, and in her own right a classical dancer and a student of Martha Graham, Emy met Richard in New York, where, in 1954, they were married. This inter-racial union cost them socially, professionally, and within their own families. In a time of acute racial discrimination in the United States, the couple set up in Puerto Rico, where Dick (as he was known to us) took a teaching post at the university. They lived there between 1958 and 1961, and had two children. Emy was beautiful — she would often wear a headpiece with flowers in it, which can be seen on the cover of the LP Voodoo, her recording of Haitian songs. Enveloped in this magical sensibility, Morse returned from Ibero-America bewitched. His intellectual interest in “the other America” had become an existential choice. Hence his determination to get to the bottom of the “historical nature” of the two Americas, and to display to the world (and to himself) the riches of the path that he had chosen. 

    I understood none of this when I met him in 1981. One day, as I was going through proofs of Vuelta, I got a call from Morse asking me to join him for breakfast. I gladly agreed. Some years earlier I had read his essay “The Inheritance of New Spain” in Plural, which was the predecessor of Vuelta. In it Morse for the first time compared the Weberian idea of political patrimonialism with the Thomist Spanish state that for three centuries had ruled Spain’s overseas territories without its legitimacy ever being disputed. This was a novel and significant idea, which Octavio Paz went on to assimilate in his numerous essays on Mexican history. Paz was persuaded by Morse’s view of the persistence of that order (“Thomist” in Morse’s terms, “patrimonialist” according to Weber) in the Mexican regime in the run-up to the revolution. The quasi-monarchical PRI also functioned in effect as the heir of that old conception, in a body politic that was presided over by the presidential head — a Hispanic, corporatist, durable, and inclusive edifice in which there was room for all the supposedly antagonistic classes. Not a democracy, but not a tyranny either. What a surprise: the key to the political history of Mexico was to be found in Thomas Aquinas! How could I not want to meet the man who came up with such a notion?

    We went for coffee in Mexico City and talked for hours. I asked him where the idea of Thomism as a founding philosophy in Ibero-America had originated. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and I’m pulling it together in the book I’m about to finish.” This book was Prospero’s Mirror, a comparative study of the cultures of North and South America, for which he considered it necessary to go back to their shared historical basis, all the way to the medieval past. Only in this way, Morse believed, could the fundamental differences be grasped: the imperatives of the political unification of an island in the case of England, the imperatives of the incorporation of the new American world in the case of Spain. And then, without further ado, he embarked on a detailed narration of the “preparatory role” played by Peter Abelard, the twelfth-century scholastic, in the modern philosophical tradition. From that point onward, Morse claimed, by way of the embryonically experimental, tolerant, pluralist work of William of Ockham, a trajectory emerged that was to lead to the great scientific, philosophical, and religious revolutions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, culminating in two distinct “historical paths.”

    In the anglophone world, which was enthusiastic in its embrace of those revolutions, the path led to Hobbes and Locke, the founding fathers of English political culture in the seventeenth century. But a century earlier, Iberian thought had inaugurated another path when it adopted Thomas Aquinas as an authority. With the “architectural feat” (as Morse called it) of the Summa Theologica as their starting point, three generations of Spanish philosophers, jurists, and theologians had constructed the “cultural premises” of the Hispanic sphere: the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), his followers Domingo de Soto (1494-1560) and Melchor Cano (1509-1560), both also Dominicans, and the Jesuits Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). “They had the ascendancy,” Morse told me, and then came another surprise: “but they had a formidable adversary, who was not an Englishman but an Italian.” He was referring to Machiavelli. Needless to say, I came away dazzled by all this.

    These ideas were first published in Morse’s famous essay “A Theory of Spanish Government,” which appeared in 1954. It brought to the table the “Machiavellian” elements of late fifteenth- and early-sixteenth century Spanish rule. Ferdinand II of Aragon himself seemed to embody the prince imagined by Machiavelli (who in fact saw him as such, in The Prince as well the Discourses on Livy). Isabella I of Castile, by contrast, represented the “Thomist” vision of absolute monarchy. This dichotomy between Renaissance and medieval ideals had long ago been “a gut feeling,” Morse wrote, but over the years he discovered that his intuition had ample foundation in Spanish intellectual history of that era. Although in Spain the tension had been resolved in favor of Thomism, Morse maintained that the Machiavellian element — present, to a different degree, in the conquistadors Cortés and Pizarro — was to persist in a latent or “recessive” state for almost three centuries. 

    It emerged again, it exploded, in the form of the Ibero-American caudillos who arose out of the wars of independence in the nineteenth century. At the close of the eighteenth century, Spanish America, “hierarchical, multiform, pre-capitalist, was poorly prepared for enlightened absolutism, and far less for any sort of Lockean constitutionalism.” But a direction was open that would have been unthink-able three hundred years earlier: nothing less than the fusion of the two prototypes, the Thomist state and the Machiavellian caudillismo, leading to new varieties of legitimate rule. This was the final and most unexpected theme in Morse’s electrifying essay. Ten years later, in the essay “The Heritage of Latin America,” Morse charted this correlation between Thomist and Machiavellian ideas against the Weberian categories of patrimonial and charismatic rule.

    Prospero’s Mirror has never been published in English, but a year after our fateful meeting it was published in Spanish. Owing to that book, which I have read countless times, our friendship began. I had discovered Morse’s code.

    He began the section that he called “The Iberian Path” — the course taken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — with a quotation from The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno:

    I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution — learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul.

    Spain had indeed “passed through” those mutations, as well as the scientific revolutions of the Middle Ages, virtually untouched. And this resistance was not a question of religion alone. In this sense, the north-south religious axis — the great distinction between the Protestant north and the Catholic south — was neither unique nor essential. After all, Italy and France, both Catholic, had adopted the scientific and philosophical precursors to modernity. 

    The persistence of Spain’s “medieval soul” was owed to a variety of causes: the relative weakness of the feudal lords (versus the autonomy of their counterparts in England, France, and Italy); the power of the ancient Spanish cities at their peak; the growing power of the Castilian crown in the face of liberal Aragon; the centuries-long centralizing efforts of the Reconquista, the culmination of which coincided with the discovery of America. Combined with the early-sixteenth-century challenge of Lutheranism, which unified the Iberian Peninsula against it, the revelation of the New World turned out to be decisive. The imperative of integrating a Christian legal system into the indigenous societies was the determining cause in the Spanish taking up Thomism again. It was a philosophy particularly apt to the task. “The Spanish turn to Thomism,” Morse observed, “is explained… by the need to reconcile the rationale of a modern state with the assertions of an ecumenical world order […] and to adapt the requirements of Christian life to the task of making non-Christian peoples a part of European civilization.”

    This titanic task — inaugurated a full century before England’s first colonial ventures — would go a long way to explaining the concentration of Spanish intellectual efforts on theological, philosophical, juridical, and moral speculation from the sixteenth century onwards. Almost across the board, mathematics and natural sciences were overlooked. Nor were the Spanish universities centers of independent thought: they were institutions isolated from the outside world and designed to produce servants of the state. 

    Morse did not claim that the Thomist revival in Spain was the whole story; Prospero’s Mirror alludes also to Spanish humanism of the sixteenth century. But this atmosphere of relative pluralism and openness, which was characteristic of the reign of Carlos V, finally came down on the side of a “Thomist” consensus on “the nature of government: its sources of legitimacy, the proper reach of its power, its responsibility in guaranteeing justice and fairness, and its ‘civilizing’ mission with regards non-Christian people in its domain and overseas.” In short, it was the discovery, settlement, and conversion of Latin America that led to the Thomist turn in Spanish imperial policy. The ideas did not impose themselves on reality; the reality imposed itself on the ideas. 

    The accession of Philip II (1556-1598) definitively set the course against all “the heretics of our time”: humanists, Erasmians, followers of Luther, readers of Machiavelli. It was during Phillip’s reign, in Morse’s view, that the structure of imperial Spain assumed the form that would (in essence) prevail until 1810. This Thomist mold would have a bearing on all spheres of life: political, religious, juridical, economic, social, academic, intellectual. And nothing could have been further from the Thomist interpretation of power and its ecumenical Christian vocation than the ideas expounded in The Prince: the state as the art (artifice, occupation, practice; not moral theory) of governing. These were irreconcilable visions, and the conflict between them reached beyond the borders of Spain. Though Aquinas’ philosophy represented a new solution for the unprecedented circumstance of having discovered America, for various thinkers he was emblematic of the old way: thoroughly Christian, oriented towards the common good, inspired by faith as much as by reason, following the dictates of natural law inscribed by God in man’s conscience. Machiavelli, by contrast, represented the modern way: removed from religious inspiration, pessimistic (or realistic) when it came to the goodness of man, oriented to the exercise of power and the establishment of stable states inspired by the patriotic, republican ideals of the classical world, and all of this in line with the dictates of reason.

    In Morse’s account, it was not Machiavelli’s “absolutism” that made his Spanish critics uncomfortable (this was anyway shared by the Spanish state), but the threat of tyranny in a political order in which divine providence had been expelled from the workings of history. In 1559, three years into Phillip’s reign, and after an intense debate, Machiavel-li’s masterpiece was added to the list of banned books. Morse contended that the neo-scholastics succeeded in preventing the influx of Machiavellianism into Spain between the sixteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century. The theologian who elaborated the legal, religious, and moral foundations of the relations with the non-Christian peoples and territories of Latin America was Francisco de Vitoria. But the thinker who was responsible for what Morse called “the Spanish political choice,” that is, the philosophical foundation of the Spanish state as a legitimate structure of rule, was Francisco Suarez. 

    Suárez, who was born in Spain in 1548 and died in Portugal in 1617, was the author of thirty works on metaphysics, theology, law, and politics. In his system, mankind comes to the political by way of morality, metaphysics, and religion. For him, “the state is an ordered entity in which the wills of the collective and of the prince harmonize according to natural law and the interest of the felicitas civitatis, or common good.” The Suárezist state had certain fundamental features which, with slight differences between the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties, were in effect throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Paternalism, for a start: in Suárez’s design, the state is an “organic architecture,” an “edifice built to last,” a “mystical body,” at the head of which stands a father who fully exercises the “dominant legal authority” over his subjects. This constitutes an “absolutism tempered by ethics, by Natural Law… and maintaining the common good as a goal.” This paternalistic and tutelary concept of power presupposes the predominance of immutable natural law over fallible human laws: “Society and the body politic are conceived as though they were ordered by the objectives and external precepts of natural law, not by the dictates of individual consciences.” Moreover, sovereignty passes ineluctably from the people to the monarch. For Suárez, the people are the original depositories of sovereignty (which originates in God), but there is an underlying political pact (pactum translationis) whereby the people not only delegates this sovereignty to the prince or monarch, but actually disposes of it. The monarchs are not mere “mandatories,” as in the English tradition or even that of the French Revolution, custodians of a freely revocable power. In the Thomist tradition, power is total, undivided, and difficult to revoke: “The people have the same obligations as the king to the pact made with him, and cannot claim back the ceded authority so long as the prince abides by the conditions of the pact and the norms of justice.” 

    Suarez was careful to provide for a popular right to insurrection and even to tyrannicide; but in order to reach such an extreme measure (which was never put into practice in the history of the Spanish monarchy, unlike in England and France) the tyrant and the injustice had to be “public and manifest,” and in no case could revenge be the motive for revolt. The execution of a monarch was the correction of the monarchy, not the abolition of it. And finally Suarez’s state was characterized by a corporatist centralization. Medieval customs had deep roots in this political edifice: society was organized in strata and associations that related to each other not directly but through the monarch, from whom emanated all public initiatives, prebends, concessions, and mercies of the kingdom, and whose figure was the underlying source of the social energy. This state was a profoundly medieval entity. 

    Those are the premises that propped up the political edifice of Spanish monarchy and Spanish statehood until 1810, when the wars of independence broke out in Latin America. The legacy of this political culture, according to Morse, would remain active for the following two decades, with one very surprising component: the resurrection of Machiavelli, whose work was not so much read as embodied by caudillos from Mexico to Patagonia.

    III.

    In the glorious year 1810, the disappearance of the paternalist monarch, who was sanctioned by tradition and faith, discredited the existing Spanish bureaucracy. At this hinge point in Latin-American history, the most urgent challenge was to identify a substitute authority that would enjoy the approval of the populace. Thus it was that the intellectual and political elites of Latin America, trapped between the impossibility of a return to the imperial Spanish order and the immediate reality of the strongmen produced by the movement for independence, sought to adopt liberal constitutionalism.

    This dream — as Morse called it — did not last long. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the region had left behind that first moment of republican idealism. Other such moments would come, but they would prove just as fragile and fleeting. No less than Simón Bolívar himself experienced this disenchantment with what he called “the republics of the air,” which he considered legalist and removed from the complex social and racial actualities of the nascent South America. Morse suggests that Bolivar, in his search for an alternative, discerned a solution that had a clear imperial and “Thomist” thrust:

    Bolívar, South America’s most famous leader, was caught between the vision of an amphictyony or “league of neighbors” of the Hispano-American peoples and the clear awareness of the local, feudal oligarchies and the peasants tied to the land that could only give rise to purely phantasmal nations. It is reasonable to suppose that the term amphictyony, used by Bolívar and proper to the neoclassicism of the idea, deep down represented his instinct for Hispanic unity rooted in a heritage that had medieval overtones.

    Bolivar called his vision Great Colombia. Morse speculated that “if Bolívar had not feared being like Napoleon, and had abandoned the George Washington model, perhaps the destiny of the Great Colombia would have been saved.” 

    In other words, had Bolivar embraced (with modern overtones, in a somewhat republican or, even better, monarchical form) the Thomist concept of the “built-to-last” corporatist order, Bolívar would have found the legitimating formula that was required to unify the new nations. This did not happen. The Congress of Panama organized by Bolívar in 1826 offered the first hint of an Ibero-American project, but that was as far as it went. Any attempt to regulate the region’s internal issues at a continental level was abandoned. Bolívar, as they say of futile endeavors, was ploughing the sea.

    Beyond the world of ideas and plans, in the void of legitimacy left behind by the collapse of the Spanish edifice, the people followed the surviving captains of the wars of independence. They were akin to the Italian condottieri of the Renaissance era. Machiavelli’s mark was reborn in these men of daggers and pitchforks, these new conquistadors: the caudillos. “On almost every page of his Discourses and even in The Prince,” Morse explains, “Machiavelli’s advice could almost be based on the exploits of the caudillos.” It was hugely important, for example, in establishing the rule of charisma. “There is nothing more certain nor more necessary in the halting of an enraged crowd,” Machiavelli instructed in his Discourses, “than the presence of a man worthy of veneration and who projects this image.” Another requirement for personalist rule was an intimate knowledge of “the nature of the rivers and the lakes, [to be able to] measure the expanses of the lakes and the mountains, the land, the depths of the valleys,” which was prescribed in The Prince. These prescriptions were met to an astonishing degree in what we know from the memoirs of José Antonio Páez, both a companion to and an adversary of Bolívar, the “great lancer” of the Venezuelan plains. And, Morse continued, the same went for the likes of Facundo Quiroga in Argentina, José Gervasio Artigas in Uruguay, and Andrés de Santa Cruz in Bolivia. 

    The problem is that legitimacy based purely on charisma cannot hold. Machiavelli himself recognized the need for the prince to govern according to “laws that provide security for the people as a whole.” The prince’s command “cannot last if the administration of the kingdom lies with the men of one sole individual; it is advisable therefore that the government should in the end be the work of many and be upheld by many.” This transition from the leadership of a homegrown caudillo to a “republic” (nominal but at least stable) required that the government be established on the basis of certain “original principles.” Translated to Ibero-America, these ideas meant laying the foundations for a “paternalism oriented towards the public good.” Should this fail to be achieved, the social groupings — some of them predominantly indigenous — would go back to being as scattered as they always had been. With the Thomist foundation lost, and the threat of a pure but unsustainable leadership system under charismatic caudillos, Ibero- America’s early days were marked by attempts to avoid being engulfed by violence and anarchy, and to build relatively stable and legitimate governments.

    The solution devised by the countries of Latin America was a compromise between Thomism and Machiavellianism, with an added veneer of Lockean constitutionalism. These sources of legitimacy corresponded to Weber’s famous classification: charismatic, traditional, legal-rational. (Morse, like Weber, was careful to emphasize the “ideal” nature of these types, which never exist in their “pure” state.) Morse concluded that over the course of a century, from the end of the era of independence to the early decades of the twentieth century, three “modes of stability” emerged.

    The first “mode of stability” had at its core a charismatic leader who was associated with a project symbolically greater than himself but actually centered on his person: Bolívar’s Andean federation, Francisco Morazán’s Central American union, the constitutionalism of Benito Juárez in Mexico, and even Gabriel García Moreno’s theocratic state in Ecuador. Another variety of this type is represented by the military caudillos who imposed themselves on society by seduction and by force: Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Antonio López de Santa Anna in Mexico, and Doctor Francia (known as el Supremo) in Paraguay. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the presence of European capital in Ibero-America favored a third kind of individual leadership: the caudillo-presidents who made a formal show of respect for constitutionalism, most notably Porfirio Díaz.

    The second attempt at stability adhered to patrimonialism, the traditional kind of legitimacy put forward by Weber, which in Ibero-America had Thomism as its origin. This was no longer a matter of reinstating the absolute monarchy of the Hapsburgs, or of literally applying Francisco Suárez’s doctrine. Instead it involved the creation of a new order inspired by the paradigm that had demonstrated its effectiveness over the course of three hundred years. Chile was an example. In Morse’s account: “A businessman from Valparaíso, Diego Portales… [came up with] a document with a considerable aura of legitimacy. The constitution of 1833 created a strong executive without stripping Congress or the Courts of their counterbalancing powers. The first president, General Prieto, had the aristocratic bearing that Portales lacked: a steadfast Catholic, Prieto was unswerving in spite of the various political factions. The first presidents discharged their duties in double periods: the winning candidate  was chosen by his predecessor. Thus, the paternal structure of the Spanish state was preserved, with the concessions to Anglo-French constitutionalism necessary to maintain the image of a republic that had impugned the monarchic regime.” 

    Yet the most complete application of the traditional or “Thomist” model in the twentieth century was undoubtedly the case of post-revolutionary Mexico. Most notable here was the survival of the old Spanish mold in society, politics, culture, and economy — Suárezism in a Mexican setting. After an insurrection against a tyrant, the Revolution went back to the origin: once again, all the riches that lay beneath the earth became the property of the state, as they had under the Spanish crown. The cooperative system of ejidos, through which land was distributed among the peasants, was named in commemoration of the communal lots in old municipal Spain. The indigenous once more enjoyed a special protection; rural and industrial workers alike sheltered under the paternalism of the state. The capitalists, administrators, and businesspeople, along with the labor unions among professionals and teachers, were drawn towards the politico-administrative nucleus of the government and then, only secondarily, towards competitive interaction.

    And then there was the third route, the “rational” route, to stability: a competent bureaucracy and public respect for the law. The example cited by Morse for this model was Argentina, which between 1860 and 1946 attempted “a modified version of liberal democracy.” On the basis of new affluence linked to the export of grain and livestock, and in spite of the marked concentration of wealth and power in the rural oligarchy, Argentina succeeded in integrating the great influx of immigrants and generating a middle class. With this foundation, and assisted by ethnic homogeneity and technological advances, “a series of statesman-presidents were able to promote and guide the development of Argentina, conforming to a reasonable degree with the Lockean constitution of 1853.” The power struggles of that time did not pave the way to tyrannical rule, but to the advent in 1890 of a liberal party of the middle classes, the Radical Party, which rode a number of important electoral reforms (free suffrage, the right for votes to be secret) to take the presidency in 1916. And yet, in Morse’s judgement, the Radical Party put a brake on the social and economic progress, on the advancement of workers and the urban middle classes, and it was weak in the face of the landowning oligarchy. The price was high: “Only in this context would the frustrated middle classes succumb to the lowest sort of demagoguery, and to Juan Domingo Perón.”

    For Morse, the experience of the twentieth century showed the durability of Thomism allied with the charismatic legitimacy of the Machiavellian kind, whose liberal-democratic constitutionalism was mainly for show. Not only that: Morse would declare that only on this basis could Latin American nations, and stable and legitimate governments,  be constructed. (Morse had no interest in analyzing the military dictatorships of the southern cone, such as those of Argentina and Chile, because they were merely tyrannies without any legitimacy.) 

    In 1989, a collection of Morse’s essays, called New World Soundings, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Six years later, in homage to his work, we put out a translation of the book at the small press that we had founded at Vuelta. At the end of his long and winding journey — forty years of scholarship and reflection on Latin America — Morse enumerated his “premises” for the construction of Latin American governments. They may be summarized in a “ten commandments” of political rule in Ibero-America:

    • The lived world is natural, it is not a human project. “In these countries, the feeling that man constructs his world and is responsible for it is less deep and less widespread than in other places.”
    • Disdain for written law. “This innate feeling for natural law is accompanied by a less formal attitude towards the laws formulated by man.”
    • Indifference to electoral processes. “It is difficult for free elections to summon the mystique conferred on them in Protestant countries.”
    • Disdain for parties and for democratic practice, including legislative procedure and voluntary, rationalized political participation.
    • Tolerance for illegality. The primacy of natural law over written law means a tolerance for even criminal practices and customs which in other societies go punished, but in these societies are seen as “natural.”
    • An absolute handover of power to the ruler. The sover-eign people surrenders power to the ruler; it does not merely delegate it. That is, in Latin America the old, original pact between the people and the monarch remains intact.
    • The right to insurrection. The people conserve “a keen sense of fair treatment and of natural justice” and “are not indifferent to abuses of the power they have given away.” This is why uprisings and revolutions — so commonplace in Latin America — tend to be born out of grievances against an authority that has become illegitimate. The insurrection needs no elaborate program: it is enough for it to seek to reclaim a sovereignty that has been tyrannically abused.
    • Non-ideological charisma. A legitimate government needs neither a defined ideology, nor a plan to bring about an immediate and effective redistribution of wealth, nor a majority of the vote. A legitimate government requires only “a profound sense of the moral urgency” often embodied in “charismatic leaders with a special psycho-cultural appeal.” Tyrants cannot enjoy legitimacy.
    • Formal appeal to the constitutional order. Once in power, to overcome personalism — or in Weber’s terms, to routinize the charisma — the leader must stress the importance of the literal application of the law as a means for the institutionalization of the government.
    • The personal ruler is the head and the center of the nation. Like the Spanish monarch, “the national government […] functions as the source of energy, coordination and leadership for the unions, corporate entities, institutions, various social strata and geographic regions.”

    Morse, then, was not exactly an enemy of liberal constitutionalism in Ibero-America, but neither was he its friend. He settled on an understanding of the region’s political prospects that was deeply cultural and deeply pessimistic about the possibilities of liberal democracy.

    IV.

    Richard Morse died in Haiti in 2001, when the turn-of-the-century democratic euphoria was at its peak. At that bright moment in history there was nothing to suggest that I needed to reconsider his illiberal theory of the “cultural premises” of Ibero-American politics. I had moved away from it in a more optimistic direction, to the cause of democratic liberalism, and I felt certain that I was right to have done so. History seemed to be justifying my hope.

    And then Hugo Chávez appeared. I was sufficiently interested in his case that I decided to travel to Venezuela to write a book about him. Power and Delirium, I called it. Every single one of Morse’s ten commandments was evident in Chavez, with an additional element: as well as the charismatic legitimacy of the president and the traditional legitimacy of the paternalist corporate state, there was the legitimacy of the ballot box. Chávez realized that the armed forces were not necessary for the establishment of a dictatorship: he could instead monopolize public truth, and rewrite history, and close down freedom of expression, and keep his electoral base in a condition of permanent mobilization, and invent enemies within and without, and distribute money, and call elections that he would almost always win. Encouraged by Fidel Castro, Chavez’s inspiration and spiritual father, his model was also taken up in Bolivia and Ecuador. There was no need for Argentina to adopt it because Chavismo was, in essence, the mode of domination exercised by Perón and Evita, which, with astonishing continuity, has remained in force for over seventy years.

    In parallel with Chávez’s rise, a charismatic leader the same age and with very similar attributes emerged in my own country, in the shape of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, widely known as AMLO. He fought and lost the presidential elections of 2006 and 2012 but, undeterred, he ran again in 2018. All of Morse’s ten commandments were evident in him too, but he added a new spirit: the spirit of messianism. Lopez Obrador genuinely feels himself to be Mexico’s redeemer. AMLO is not just another populist; he is a populist who wears the nimbus of holy anger. He has compared himself to Jesus, feeling equally crucified by his opponents. And now he is both Jesus and Caesar. 

    AMLO sees himself — and many Mexicans share his view — as a political redeemer. He is the way, the truth, and the light of the people. And in such a salvific framework, everything about his rule falls into place. Redeemers, after all, do not lose; or if they do, the world also loses. In AMLO’s view, his doom would be Mexico’s doom. Redeemers, moreover, will spend their entire lifetime in the struggle for power. Once it is attained, always in the name of the people, always in communion with the people, these redeemers want it all, without divisions, deviations, or dissents. And they seek to retain power in perpetuity, until their last breath. 

    In my attempt to understand the phenomenon of Lopez Obrador, I wrote a book in the run-up to the 2018 elections, already convinced that he was going to win. It was called El pueblo soy yo, or I Am The People, and it is an anatomy of Latin American populism. In writing it I went back to Morse’s theory of Latin American history. My book became, in fact, a dialogue with Morse. He was no longer nearby, in his George-town home where we shared so much, so our debate took place entirely in my head. I certainly needed to revisit his arguments in order to try to refute them. Was he correct to warn  me that liberal democracy in these countries, in my country, is a chimera?

    I chose to write him a long letter in which I sought to rehabilitate the liberal tradition of Ibero-America in the twentieth century. In part, it read:

    In your work you pay little attention to the Ibero-American countries which, well into the twentieth century, succeeded in building precisely that liberal legitimacy, those Lockean arrangements, that seemed inauthentic to you. At the same time, you overlook various political figures and intellectuals from the nineteenth century who sought to consolidate a reasonably democratic liberal order. Above all I think of Andrés Bello, the early mentor of Simón Bolívar and the father of the Chilean Constitution. An unforgivable omission. What would have become of Diego Portales without Bello? It was fortunate that the authoritarian Portales placed his trust in the eminent humanist, philologist, poet, philosopher and legislator Bello, educated in England and with a deep knowledge of its political philosophies, the creator of the Chilean Civil Code. Bello’s permanent exile from Venezuela since the eve of the Revolution of Independence in 1810 — he represented his newborn republic in England and stayed there for two decades — was an irreparable loss for his native country and an abiding blessing for Chile, where he established himself in 1829. It wasn’t the Thomist model that saved Chile; it was Bello, the most learned man of his time. You don’t so much as mention him. 

    And what would have become of Mexico without the separation of the church and state, and that modicum of institutional structure that we owe to the liberals of the generation of la Reforma, the founding fathers of Mexican liberal thought, laws, and institutions in the mid-nineteenth century. You do mention Juárez — but he was not, as you suggest, a Machiavellian caudillo who used the Constitution of 1857 as a trick to consolidate power. He was a reader of Benjamin Constant, a liberal of the kind you have little time for. And the Constitution was not a trick. His was a government that respected the division of power, the law, and the institutions, and also individual liberty and individual security. 

    You were quite right to leave aside the tyrants that populate our history: Juan Vicente Gómez, Trujillo, Somoza, Stroessner, Pinochet, Argentina’s military juntas, and so many more. They had force without legitimacy, and your work was looking for sources and forms of legitimacy. But these nineteenth- and twentieth-century tyrants and the “legitimate” dictators you adduce (such as Perón and Castro) had something significant in common: a disdain for democracy, for liberalism, and for freedom of expression. These liberal qualities, along with almost all the elements constitutive of “Lockean” liberalism, did not merit your attention. 

    Yet a modest page in the press, with its ferocious caricatures and satirical verses, its incendiary articles and its great prose writers, was always raised against all of the dictators. Journalists and writers such as Juan Montalvo, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José María Luis Mora, Francisco Zarco, Manuel González Prada, and José Martí. And many more. All would have joined the republican Martí in saying: “About the tyrant? 

    About the tyrant say everything, say more!” Many went to jail, many were cast out, some were killed. But however precariously, and against terrible risks, they persisted in their vocation of liberty. With the arrival of the twentieth century, freedom of expression was consolidated in the countries with the deepest democratic vocation, such as Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Colombia. There are newspapers still in print today that have been in circulation without a break for a century and a half. These historical newspapers are living monuments to liberty. They have been bastions in times of confusion, manipulation, and lies. And you ignored them.

    What would Morse have made of Latin American populism in the twenty-first century, of this populist golden age? Combining elements of his theory, I can imagine his collective portrait of various Ibero-American leaders on the left and the right. A charismatic leader with “a special psycho-cultural appeal” comes to power by means of the ballot box and, with all the excitement of the demagogues of old, promises to establish again the traditional order, the arcadia of the past. A utopia is just around the corner. But since the reality of things does not comply with such reactionary plans, and since the leader harbors ambitions of retaining power in perpetuity, and since democracy and liberty are for him — a Machiavellian, when all is said and done — only the means for securing absolute power, he will go on to undermine, slowly or at breakneck speed, the freedoms, the laws, and the institutions of democracy, until they have all been stifled or destroyed. 

    We may recognize this dark portrait in every day’s headlines. It describes the political decline of our own times. And what would Morse have made of the ominous replication of this Ibero-American archetype in the United States, in the person of Donald Trump? I am sure that, being a believer in democracy, he would have condemned it, but to my mind his advice would have remained the same: “Stick to my theory and you won’t go wrong.” I did stick to it, inasmuch as it explains a great deal about Ibero-American political history — or rather, I stuck only to a part of it, because its erudite portraiture is incomplete. It egregiously omits the liberal tradition, which has fitfully accomplished a great deal in various Latin American countries, and which is still alive. And so in the end I abandoned my friend’s teachings on historical grounds, because of what it omits, and on moral grounds, because I do not wish to give up hope. 

    I am quite certain that there is no charismatic, populist, patrimonialist, culturally reactionary, corporatist, paternalist, Thomist-Machiavellian solution to the weaknesses and inequalities of Latin America. Only the decency and the rationality and the patience of a liberal order offer us a chance. We must remember and honor those ideas, because ideas are the seeds of political possibilities: without the idea of freedom there will be no freedom. It is true that such liberalism is not exactly the bulk of our cultural inheritance, but neither is it without precedent at this late date in the history of Latin American societies. There are times in the lives of individuals and nations, moreover, when we must modify and even reject some of what we inherited. For injustice is also a significant part of what was bequeathed to us. 

     Perhaps my quixotic idea is not so quixotic after all. Perhaps Macaulay and Namier are indeed relevant to the future of Latin America. Perhaps it is still possible to rescue “democracy without adjectives” for Mexico, and even for Venezuela and Cuba. After all, our inheritance is manifold and multivocal: it contains two political traditions, two theories of legitimacy, two visions of how and why we should live peaceably and fairly together. Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francisco Suárez are still alive. But so, too, are Andrés Bello, and all those brave journalists and liberal politicians of the nineteenth century, and all our democrats of the twentieth century, such as Francisco I. Madero, Rómulo Betancourt, Daniel Cosío Villegas, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa. My master Morse and I will go on debating forever. I pray that he is wrong.

    The Individual Nuisance

    A single sentence sufficed to seal my veneration for Harold Rosenberg. It comes in the midst of the bravura conclusion of “The Intellectual and His Future,” an essay from 1965. “One does not possess mental freedom and detachment,” it reads, “one participates in them.” Here was a dictum worthy of adoption as a creed. “Intellectual” is not a title, an honorific, or a job description. It is a daily aspiration.

    Rosenberg is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as one of the leading American art critics of the twentieth century, the coiner of the term “action painting” to describe the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists, and it was for that reason, several years ago, that I turned to his work. What I discovered was not an art critic but a full-spectrum intellectual who thought about art. He also thought about poetry, politics, theater, fiction, society, sociology, Marx, Marxism, Judaism, the media, and the nature of the intellectual himself. 

    And he did it all better than just about anyone I had ever encountered. He was Trilling without the solemnity, Kazin with a wider, more ironic mind (to name two earlier infatuations among the New York intellectuals). His point of view was comic in the deepest sense. An outsider by temperament as well as conviction, he looked at everything from the outside, accepting nothing — no movement, no figure, no social fiction, no educated formula — at its own estimation. His most potent rhetorical weapon was satire — the whiff of caricature, the gust of common sense. “Far from being goaded to their parts by police agents hidden in the wings”—this in reference to the vogue of self-confession among postwar ex-radicals — “the guilty here had to force their way onto the stage. [Whitaker] Chambers himself, that witness of witnesses…describes how close he came to breaking under the ordeal of getting the notice of people whose vital interests he was determined to defend.” But Rosenberg wasn’t merely a debunker. He believed in things: in art, in the struggle to come to terms with reality, in the individual. He was skeptical of “thought,” but he believed in thinking. 

    Other intellectuals saw through collective illusions. Rosenberg saw through the illusions of other intellectuals. The criticism of kitsch art or popular culture, a highbrow hobby in the new age of mass entertainment, was nothing, he wrote, but another form of kitsch — kitsch ideas. “There is only one way to quarantine kitsch: by being too busy with art.” Notions of the “other-directed” “organization man,” promulgated in the 1950s as descriptions of the new American type (and clichés of thought to this day), were in reality projections, he explains, on the part of the new caste of intellectual placemen who were swarming the postwar bureaucracies. “Today Orgmen reproduce themselves like fruit flies in whatever is organized, whether it be a political party or a museum of advanced art.” As for “alienation,” that great midcentury bugaboo and talking point, not only does Rosenberg not deplore it, he sees it as a virtue, a failure “to participate emotionally and intellectually in the fictions and conventions of mass culture.”

    He was fearless in the face of reputation. T.S. Eliot (then at his zenith), having made an idol of “tradition,” had led American poetry into a cul-de-sac of academicism. 1984, all but sacred at the time, was marked by “frigid rationality and paranoiacally lifeless prose.” Auden and Spender, darlings of the cultural left for their politically “responsible” poetry, avoided responsibility for individual experience and social reflection alike. “When I first encountered the gravity of Lionel Trilling,” Rosenberg writes, “I did not get the joke; it took some time to realize that there wasn’t any.”

    Upon his death in 1978, Hilton Kramer, the chief art critic of the New York Times and himself a prominent figure in intellectual New York, eulogized him as “the quintessential New York intellectual.” For the essayist Seymour Krim, reflecting on the same occasion, Rosenberg had been the most intelligent critic writing in English. As for his physical presence, Krim reported, “Harold looked and shone like the Lion of Judah. He was about 6’4,” a really heroic-looking prince among the bookish intellectuals…a sort of matinee idol of the intellectual underground” who had passed “a lot of lean years bucking all the Establishments.” His passing, Krim observed, “sweeps a period with it.”

    Harold Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn in 1906. He spent a year at City College, then three at Brooklyn Law School, but he would later say that he’d received his education on the steps of the New York Public Library. After graduation, he plunged into Village bohemia, befriending artists (de Kooning was an early and crucial encounter) and inheriting the twin legacies of the New York intellectuals: Marxism and modernism. He joined the League of American Writers, a radical organization, wrote for New Masses and Art Front, and dreamed of becoming a poet. (A small volume, Trance Above the Streets, appeared in 1942.) During the Depression, he kept himself afloat by writing for the WPA, moving to Washington in 1938 to become the art editor of its American Guide Series, then staying after Pearl Harbor to work for the Office of War Information.

    After the war, and back in New York, Rosenberg became a stalwart of the little magazines: Commentary, Encounter, Dissent, and, of course, Partisan Review. He found an apartment on Tenth Street, a rotting Village block that sheltered tramps, a poolroom, and a collection of obscure American painters who were in the process of transforming art. “The Herd of Independent Minds,” an essay whose title became a catchphrase, appeared in 1948; “The American Action Painters,” which birthed another, in 1952. His first collection, The Tradition of the New (its title soon a third), appeared in 1959. Within a few years, he was lecturing at Princeton and writing for Esquire, Vogue, and the New Yorker. “The beggarly Jewish radicals of the 30s,” Kazin wrote in 1963, “are now the ruling cultural pundits of American society.” 

    Eight more collections would follow in the space of fourteen years (the most important is Discovering the Present, which, with The Tradition of the New, contains his finest work). In 1966 (he was already sixty), Rosenberg became a member of the University of Chicago’s exalted Committee on Social Thought, and, the following year, art critic for the New Yorker, positions that he held until his death. (Most of the later collections consist of pieces from the magazine.) The bucker of Establishments had stormed them, but he never relinquished his outsider stance. American society, he wrote in “The Intellectual and His Future,” is replete with obstacles to independent thought, including institutional ones. “The intellectual, however, is adept at finding the cracks in society through which to crawl around the obstacles, whether he eludes them in the university, on a park bench, or in an insurance office.”

    Marxism and modernism. From Marx, Rosenberg acquired a sensitivity to history — above all, to historical action, or more precisely, historical acting. A touchstone was The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the work in which Marx famously declares that everything in history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Louis Bonaparte assumes the costume of Napoleon and dubs himself Napoleon III. “Luther donned the mask,” Marx writes, “of the Apostle Paul.” Rosenberg develops the idea: those who wish to seize control of history — political figures, revolutionaries — invariably cast themselves as reenactors of a prior revolution. History becomes a play, with roles, scripts, sets, and above all, a plot — a predetermined outcome, guided by a self-appointed hero.

    For Marx, the final hero would be a collective one, the proletariat, who would free humanity from history, its nightmare repetitions, by dispensing with historical make-believe and acting in the sober consciousness of actual conditions. But “one hundred years after…the publication of The Communist Manifesto,” Rosenberg writes in 1948, “the simplification of history has not been brought about.” Instead, the players of the nineteenth century have been replaced by a new and more malevolent form of farceur:

    The heroes of our time [Hitler, Stalin, de Gaulle] belong to contrived rather than spontaneous myths — on that account often evoking even more fanaticism than formerly as a psychological protection against disbelief…

    The comic nature of the twentieth-century hero is instinctively recognized the moment he makes his entrance upon the stage: in the popular phrase, “At first nobody took him seriously.” The clown-hero retaliates to the ridicule of the world by exposing the lack of seriousness of the rest of the cast, of all the existing historical actors. The leader without a program challenges all opposing classes, parties, governments, individuals, to live up to their programs. And since all are playing a comedy of pretense, “the adventurer who took the comedy as plain comedy was bound to win.”

    The notion of politics as theater remained salient for Rosenberg throughout his career — more and more so, indeed, as the media tightened its grip and political events became performances contrived to hold its interest. For the most part, however, he turned the metaphors of drama — role, action, mask — in a different direction. For it was not only the statesman or revolutionary who aspired to play a part, in his conception; it was, of necessity, every modern person. To be modern is to be cut off from the past, from the traditions that told you who you are and where you belong. “Since he is not bound to anything given,” Rosenberg writes, modern man “is capable of playing countless roles” — the many roles that society offers him — “but only as an actor,” aware of his disguise. Not content to be an actor, though, “he takes up the slack between himself and social reality,” between ego and role — who he feels himself to be and who he appears as to others — “by creating illusory selves,” fantasy projections of (as we would say today) a “real me.” But, like Louis Bonaparte, he copies those selves from available models: “Socrates, for example, or Christ, or some revolutionist clothed in the glamour of the times” (one thinks of Che Guevara, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, each with their legions of imitators). “Members of every class surrender themselves to artificially constructed mass egos.”

    But modernism demonstrated an alternative. Social roles, prefabricated selves, conformity, illusion: all these could be resisted. The problem of the modern self — the problem of identity — remained. The solution was to treat it as a problem. Rosenberg’s artistic heroes made the search for self — the effort to create a self — the content of their practice and the subject of their art. Before they were painters, however, those heroes were poets (poetry, remember, was his youthful aspiration): Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Valéry, the leading French Symbolists, together with their predecessors, Poe and Baudelaire. “I is another,” said Rimbaud, and, as Rosenberg explains the process in an early essay, those figures sought, through programs of spiritual experimentation enacted in verse, to conjure up that other.

    “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself,” Rosenberg would later write, and he found his greatest self-creators in the artists whom he dubbed the action painters: Pollock, de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, with Hans Hoffman and Arshile Gorky as important precursors. Rosenberg did not evince much interest in what he referred to as “formal modernism, or modernist formalism,” the run of work from the Impressionists through the early twentieth century (Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse). Formal exploration never engaged him as such. Rosenberg tunes in when art confronts the modern crisis, when art itself becomes a crisis. That is to say, with World War I, with Dada and Surrealism. By 1914, he writes, the formal tradition was moribund. The art that followed, which he called “modern modern art,” “arises from the conviction that the forms of Western culture…have permanently collapsed.” Dada declared “that anything can be art”; Surrealism, that “poetry is the substance of painting.” Both were forms of anti-art, and both turned art in the direction of philosophy, psychology, politics, and metaphysics. 

    Those developments were slow to register on this side of the Atlantic. The 1930s were, in any case, a time when art was flattened underneath the dictates of leftist political orthodoxy. But in the 1940s painting started over, as it were, in the United States. In “Parable of American Painting,” the piece with which he chose to start his first collection, Rosenberg, thinking of the War of Independence — when files of British infantry were picked off from behind the trees by scruffy colonials — distinguishes between “Redcoats” and “Coonskins.” The Redcoats fall because they think they’re still in England, fighting on the rolling greenswards, instead of looking at the landscape that is actually in front of them. They are victims of style: they see what they’ve been taught to see. The Coonskin starts with where he is and tries to act accordingly. “Coonskinism is the search for the principle that applies, even if it applies only once.” Whitman was a Coonskin. “What have I?” he said. “I have all to make.”

    Until the 1940s, Rosenberg explains, the great majority of American painters were Redcoats, projecting European styles onto American landscapes and streets. But the action painters 

    had absorbed the “modern modern” point: there were no styles anymore — none with any force or claim. They needed to begin from the beginning. At the same time, though, they “shared…the intuition that there is nothing worth painting. No object, but also no idea.” All that was left was the self, which they couldn’t so much paint as paint into existence. Action, says Rosenberg, of any kind, “embodies decisions in which one comes to recognize oneself.” The action painter starts with no design or expectation, no subject or thought. He makes a mark — a stroke, a drip — and the action begins. Each mark begets the next within a kind of dance. The artist thinks in paint, with his eyes and his hand. The canvas talks back, “to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue. Each stroke ha[s] to be a decision and [i]s answered by a new question.”

    Rosenberg was fond of pointing out that many of the action painters were immigrants, people for whom the question of identity was especially urgent. (Pollock was an immigrant from Wyoming.) Nor was it an accident, he thought, that the movement arose in America, that land of immigrants, transients, and strangers, and in “a century of displaced persons, of people moving from one class into another, from one national context into another.” Still, while the action painter lands upon the shore of each new canvas free of preconceptions or intentions, like the immigrant he does not land there free of the past. That past consists of everything he has seen, especially art. The modern modern artist “picks his way among the bits and pieces of the cultural heritage and puts together whatever seems capable of carrying a meaning.” The action painter, in particular, “starts an action and observes what kind of image it will magnetize out of the formal accretions piled up in his mind.” Tradition, like paint, becomes something to think with.

    A painting so produced, says Rosenberg, is not an object but an event. It is a “fragment,” a “sketch,” not a whole so much as “a succession of wholes” (de Kooning’s famous Woman I, he tells us, was “repainted daily for almost two years”), one whose end, the point at which the artist steps away for good, is as arbitrary as its beginning. “And after an interval,” in “a civilization in which the cultures of all times and places are being blended and destroyed,” these wholes perforce disintegrate. In modernity, says Rosenberg, there are no masterpieces, objects that endure — not for any dearth of creative energy, but because the conditions, the stable traditions, no longer exist. Indeed, as they circulate through reproductions in books and magazines, in the discourse of critics, journalists, and art historians, as they are taken up and set aside by curators, spectators, and artists themselves, as they lose or pick up speed and spin in their “passage through the social orbit,” the masterpieces of the past are also now events. “The Mona Lisa arrives from Paris and is greeted at the dock like a movie star.” “All that is solid melts into air,” wrote Marx. “All that is holy is profaned.”

    “To be a new man,” says Rosenberg, “is not a condition but an effort.” (“One does not possess mental freedom and detachment, one participates in them.”) Coonskins can turn into Redcoats, if they let themselves become a style — in fact, it happens more often than not. Just the initial breakthrough into newness can require an endeavor of years. “The American…who searched for genuine art has been fated to spend half his life in blind alleys,” Rosenberg writes. “Often it required a second ‘birth’ to get him out of them. One thinks of the radical break in the careers of Rothko, Guston, Gottlieb, Kline” — or of that archetypal Coonskin, Whitman. The artists whom Rosenberg most esteemed were two for whom no question was ever settled, no label was ever sufficient, one-man avant-gardes who sustained their radicalism across a span of decades: his old friend de Kooning, “the foremost painter of the postwar world,” and Saul Steinberg, a figure about whom the art world could never decide if he even counted as an artist.

    They and other artists are the model individuals, in Rosenberg’s conception; they show us what it means and what it takes to be one. And the individual, even more than art, was for Rosenberg the highest value. Not individualism, in the sense of libertarian conservatism, or of thinking that people are not conditioned by their social context — he took leave of Marxism, but he didn’t take leave of his senses — but the individual: the person who thinks for himself, who acts on his own responsibility, who stubbornly insists upon his separate-ness and independence.

    That figure, he believed, was everywhere under assault. First, in his early years, by Marxism, or by what it had turned into, Leninism. In Leninism, the Party supplants the proletariat as the hero of history. And the Party, with the omniscience granted it by the infallible methods of dialectical materialism and the sacred texts of Marx and Lenin, is in absolute possession of the truth. The Communist, says Rosenberg, is thus “an intellectual who need not think.” The rest of society, as in other orthodoxies, is divided into two groups: the sheep and the wolves, the simple folk who know not and the evil ones who know incorrectly. To the sheep, the uninitiated, the Communist adopts a benignly pedagogical stance, one composed in equal parts of tolerance and smugness. In Lenin’s words, he patiently explains. But to the wolf, the independent intellectual, the individual who dares to challenge the Party’s monopoly on understanding, the Communist is ruthless. Such a person must be canceled, and since at stake is nothing less than the salvation of humanity, any means to do so is acceptable.

    After the war, the assault on the individual came from other directions. In one lay not Communists but ex-Communists, ex-radicals and former fellow travelers. Here began that vogue for self-confession — “Couch Liberalism,” Rosenberg called it, meaning the analyst’s couch — of which Whittaker Chambers (“St. John of the Couch”) was the great exemplar. In The End of Innocence, the critic Leslie Fiedler went so far, to Rosenberg’s disgust, as to indict the anti-Communist intellectual, to indict all intellectuals, for the sin of merely being intellectuals, for thinking and sounding like intellectuals and thereby separating themselves from “the Community,” that idol of the 1950s. Rosenberg viewed with dismay (and sardonic amusement) the new generational style — “The Solid Look,” the Brooks Brothers suit, the ideology of “babies, God, and job” — especially as it was taking hold among the younger intellectuals. For society had discovered that intellectuals were useful — in government, in universities, in public relations and advertising firms — provided they agreed to stop being intellectuals. Which most of them happily did. Having donned the mask of the Organization Man, “the gentlemen of the Left” became “hysterically antipathetic to whatever possessed its own physiognomy. The outstanding figures in modern art and literature were abused as ‘mere individualists’ unable to ‘solve the problem of our time,’” and in the Cold War context, “’the end of innocence’ meant, basically, an abusive goodbye to Karl Marx by shivering jobholders.”

    What bothered Rosenberg as much as anything about this trahison des clercs was its insistence on using the first-person plural. Fiedler was pointing his finger not at himself but at “us.” Already by the late 1940s, writers such as Trilling and Edmund Wilson were stepping forward to interpret the “Communist experience” of the 1930s — to speak, that is, for Rosenberg’s entire generation. Rosenberg, who never spoke for anybody but himself, refused to be enlisted. There are common situations, he said, but there is no common experience. Every person’s is their own. His, for example, besides “’the thirties,’” contained “all sorts of anachronisms and cultural fragments: the Old Testament and the Gospels, Plato, eighteenth-century music, the notion of freedom as taught in the New York City school system, the fantastic emotional residues of the Jewish family.” For individual experience, he said, “it is necessary to begin with the individual…one will not arrive at it by reflecting oneself in a ‘we.’”

    The argument occurs in “The Herd of Independent Minds,” his great essay from 1948. The point of the title is not that the liberal elite is afflicted by groupthink (which is not to say that it isn’t) but that it thinks of itself as a group. Mass culture, Rosenberg says, is predicated on the idea that everyone is alike, and it makes us over in its image, so that we come to see ourselves as alike. But there is also such a thing, he says, as “anti-mass-culture mass culture,” the mass culture of the elite: “’significant’ novels,” “’highbrow’ radio programs,” “magazines designed for college professors” — the culture of “seriousness” and “social relevance.” Characteristic of all mass culture is “the conviction that the artist ought to communicate the common experience of his audience.” But since there is no common experience, the result is “contrived and unseeing art,” rendered through a set of formulas, “by which the member of the audience learns from the author what he already knows” — “that together with others he is an ex-radical, or a Jew, or feels frustrated, or lives in a postwar world, or prefers freedom to tyranny.” 

    By the same token, mass culture, including the anti-mass-culture of the educated herd, “must deny the validity of a single human being’s effort to arrive at a consciousness of himself and of his situation” — must be hostile, that is, to genuine art. For “the genuine work of art…takes away from its audience its sense of knowing where it stands in relation to what has happened to it” — takes away, that is, the accepted versions of history, the official accounts of identity. It “suggests to the audience that its situation might be quite different than it had suspected.” It brings us into a truer relationship to reality, but it brings us there, perforce, as individuals. “Along this rocky road to the actual it is only possible to go Indian file, one at a time, so that ‘art’ means ‘breaking up the crowd’ — not ‘reflecting’ its experience.”

    But above all, Rosenberg discerned the impulse to negate the individual in the art world itself. The heyday of Abstract Expressionism — the action painters, plus figures such as Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman, the movement’s mystical wing, who sought to purify their art into an ultimate transcendent sign — did not outlast the 1950s. AbEx was deposed by Pop art —Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg — succeeded, or joined, as the 1960s wore on, by Op (“optical”) art, kinetic art, and minimalism and other varieties of formal-ism. All involved for Rosenberg a retreat from the things that he most valued in art. With Pop, he believed, art surrendered to the media; with Op art and kinetic art, to science. Formal-ism — which settled in as art-world orthodoxy, thanks in part to the dictatorial dogmatism of Clement Greenberg, Rosen-berg’s great rival among the midcentury critics — represented a rejection of content as such: of art’s involvement with social, psychological, or spiritual questions, with anything outside itself. Gone in all these trends were the hand and the medium as instruments of discovery, the engagement of the self in the process of creation, the oppositionality and will to social trans-formation of the avant-garde.

    Rosenberg viewed these developments — and this was characteristic of his thought across all its dimensions, part of what made him an intellectual who wrote about art rather than merely an art critic — in their historical and social context. After the war, the media itself had elevated both the profile and prestige of modern art. The result was the creation of what Rosenberg referred to as the “Vanguard Audience” — a mass audience for new art (an anti-mass mass, of course) that, priding itself on its sophistication, “could accept the new in its entirety, with all its conflicting assumptions or without any assumptions.” The Vanguard Audience could not be shocked; it enjoyed affront and understood incomprehension. It did not embrace Cubism, or Surrealism, or Abstract Expressionism: it embraced them all indiscriminately. The new itself, in other words, became the highest value, became the only value. The new became a tradition: the tradition of the new, in Rosenberg’s famous phrase, one that was “capable of evoking the automatic responses typical of a handed-down body of beliefs.”

    The artists who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s were happy to play to that audience. “Putting on a show developed a stronger appeal than the act of painting carried to a hesitant pause in the privacy of the studio.” As for the audience itself, “after the strain of trying to respond to the riddles of Abstract Expressionism,” “it preferred images taken in at a glance and ‘glamorous’ colors translatable into dress patterns.” Warhol grasped that art, for them, was something not to scrutinize but be “aware of.” Like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (artists for whom Rosenberg had little use), he understood that people liked to see things they already knew: Brillo boxes, American flags, the collages of everyday objects that Rauschenberg rebranded as “combines.” 

    Tending to the Vanguard Audience, as both a cause and a beneficiary of art’s new visibility, was a vastly expanded institutional apparatus: galleries by the hundreds, collectors large and small, arts councils, traveling exhibitions, university departments and museums, “editors, curators, art historians, archivists, biographers, publishers, columnists, TV and radio programmers, photographers, catalogue writers.” The market, newly flush, turned art into a commodity, but the academics and museums turned it into something more insidious: a form of knowledge. A crowd of words surrounded the work: wall texts, exhibition catalogs, monographs, interviews. Never mind trying to feel your way, in silence and stillness, into a spontaneous aesthetic response. Artist, date, “period,” style, authorized interpretation: now you knew. Art was recruited for programs of public education, as the curator displaced the artist at the center of the enterprise. Shows turned into theses that you walk through, with paintings “function[ing] as illustrations to bring out the critical or cultural concept” (for example, “The Nude Through the Ages”). Exhibitions “more and more take on the character of art books, presenting wall-scale duplicates of the publications that will result from them.” Art turned into “culture” — a form of living death.

    As art became institutionalized, the artist became a creature of institutions: that is, a professional — respectable, well groomed, a solid citizen. The Abstract Expressionists, the painters of Tenth Street — cranky, alienated, socially marginal, down at the heels — were the last in the line of artistic bohemians that stretched back to the Impressionists. Training in a studio gave way to training at a university, the half-a-life-time’s search in blind alleys to the smoothly ascendant career. The artist “abandon[ed] his shamanistic role, and the rites required to realize it” — Cézanne’s anxiety, Surrealist self-estrangement, de Kooning’s “failure” — all of which posed “an impediment to the good life of professionals,” and to the characteristic goal of professionals, success. As art was drawn into the orbit of the university, its values drifted toward the academic, toward art conceived of as a set of problems and solutions, things you could rationalize, train, and explain — line, plane, form, color. Hence the reign of formalism, and the emergence of the artist “who conceives picture making in terms of technical recipes, but who is entirely ignorant of the role of art in the struggles of the modern spirit.” The avant-garde lived on, but only as a simulacrum of itself, a “socially reconciled avant-garde,” sponsored by the NEA and sustained by “the myth of rebellion.” Revolution, like the new, had become a tradition, and overturned nothing.

    To the effacement of the individual in all its forms, Rosen-berg offered no solutions, certainly no systemic ones. His only solution was to be an individual—or rather (“one does not possess…”) to try. This, he believed, is always in our power. “For the individual,” he said, “the last voice in the issue of being or not being himself is still his own.” And to help us, there is art. One of the reasons he deplored the conversion of art into knowledge, of paintings into pictures in books, images on television, and slides in the classroom, is that “the direct experience of art” — up close, in person, just you and the work — “contributes a lively sensation of ignorance.” Before a genuine work of art, one is left with questions, not answers. Which is to say, one starts to think. 

    There is art, and, for us, there is the work of Harold Rosenberg. It should be obvious by now that my attraction to this man derives not only from his iridescent mind, his swooping prose, but from the relevance of his ideas to the present moment. I won’t insult the reader’s intelligence by drawing out the application of his picture of the “clown-hero” who “retaliates to the ridicule of the world,” the “leader without a program” whose self-contrived myth “evoke[s] even more fanaticism than formerly as a psychological protection against disbelief.” I will only note that we live in an age when the self-contrived myth has become a universal — as it were, a democratic — possession. Rosenberg wrote of the construction of illusory selves, devices to bridge the abyss between ego and role. Now, thanks to the wonders of social media and the miracles of the Instagram filter (not to mention of the plastic surgeon’s office), that construction is literal. Yet it remains, overwhelmingly, an act not of creation but of imitation: of celebrities, “influencers,” fictional heroes and superheroes, themselves copied one from another. We are everywhere invited to bullshit ourselves, and we everywhere comply. The clown-hero, in full theatrical makeup, calls his army of fanatics to the capital, and they arrive arrayed for cosplay. In seeking to understand our current malaise, our great contemporary deficit of being, we could do worse than start there.

    Remember also that the artificially constructed egos that Rosenberg spoke of were mass ones, the self submerged within the herd. And the crisis of the individual, as he described it, has only deepened in the decades since his diagnosis. We need only think about the transformation, since the post-war years, of the meaning of the word “identity.” Having once referred to a unique and hard-won self-conception wrested from experience — that which made you you and no one else — it now denotes the reverse. Your identity today is that which assigns you, at birth, to your group. Rosenberg said that there are common situations but only individual experiences. The identity-mongers also invoke experience (or “lived experience,” as if there were another kind), but only to align it with collective scripts. Today we say “me too.” To say “not me” is to invite anathematization.

    The Party may be dead, but its functions live anew. Again today we have the orthodoxy of the Left as Rosenberg described it: sacred texts and prophets (Foucault, Butler, Kendi), omniscience conferred by a set of infallible formulas (“cultural appropriation,” “white fragility”), pedantic smugness, messianic intolerance, consensus enforced by the standing threat of professional or social death. We certainly have no shortage of intellectuals who need not think, pundits and critics whose minds appear incapable of containing a thought that wasn’t put there by the zeitgeist. If our public discourse has become so numbingly predictable, especially on the left, that is largely because it is dominated by individuals who can tell you their opinion of a thing before they’ve even heard of it.

    In art we are back to the 1930s. Art must toe the ideological line. As for the mass audience, the herd, its demands are now explicit and belligerent. The artist must speak for the group (the one to which she’s willy-nilly been assigned), never for herself as an individual, “a single human being.” Which is to say, she must allow the group—or rather, its self-appointed ideological commissars—to speak through her. The word today is not “reflect” but “represent”: affirm rather than disrupt, as Rosenberg put it, the audience’s “sense of knowing where it stands in relation to what has happened to it.” Woe be unto those who dare to shock instead of pander, or who refuse the injunction to “stay in your lane.” Anti-mass mass culture is also still with us, the culture of the educated elite, with its fake rebellions and its moral self-flattery: NPR, the New York Times, the New Yorker, et al., together with the cultural products — always scrupulously woke — to which they give assent. One thing, though, has changed since Rosenberg’s day. Elite mass culture hardly even pretends anymore to be interested in art — in art, that is, as opposed to entertainment, high art as opposed to kitsch. Art is too hard, too subtle, too complex, too time-consuming, altogether too recalcitrant. The professional would rather watch Netflix; the “cultural critic” would rather pontificate about the TikTok trend. Rosenberg didn’t think that kitsch was even worth bothering to attack. Now it rules the world.

    As for me, it is Rosenberg’s example, even more than his ideas, that is bracing. He was a thinker who maintained the stance, with respect not only to society but also to his fellow intellectuals, of the artist — of the rare artist, such as de Kooning or Steinberg, who never ceases to be a true one. Even bohemias, he wrote, become conformities. “The artist thus finds it necessary to exist on the edge of the edge,” and that is exactly what he did. He kept faith with his estrangement. He was the greatest of the New York intellectuals, and also the least characteristic. He ran with no packs and subscribed to no schools — nor did he attempt to found any. And he stayed in the stream. He knew that culture — art, thought — must always, if it is to live, be enacted: daily, continually, like de Kooning repainting a canvas. He faced the modern crisis, the disorientation of perpetual change, without swerving right or left, toward nostalgia for what was or utopian expectations of what will be. His only direction was forward: through problems, through questions, through doubt.

    Late in life, Rosenberg composed the introduction to a volume of de Kooning’s work. Its peroration, with a few adjustments, applies to its author himself:

    De Kooning has never attempted to attribute political meaning to his work…Yet under the conditions of the ideological pressure characteristic of the past forty years, unbending adherence to individual spontaneity and independence is itself a quasi-political position… Impro-vised unities such as de Kooning’s are the only alternative to modern philosophies of social salvation which, while they appeal for recruits in the name of a richer life for the individual, consistently shove him aside in practice. De Kooning’s art testifies to a refusal to be either recruited or pushed aside… He is the nuisance of the individual “I am” in an age of collective credos and styles.

    Hals at Nightfall

    The “war against water,” the Dutch struggle to wrest their country from the sea, is strangely invisible now. Concerns about global warming are just that, global. The little local struggles — the rush to get the livestock to higher ground, the nervous pacing along the village dam — belong to dangers from olden days, like getting shipped off to suppress a tribal uprising in Sumatra, or contracting cholera from shit in the canal. Only the very old recall the last time things went wrong. The North Sea Flood of 1953 occasionally resurfaces in black-and-white photographs and television documentaries. Every Dutch person has seen these images, but they look as remote as the folk costumes that the people in them are wearing. Almost nobody has experienced the old ancestral terror: that water, looming, lapping, leaping, waiting to whisk you away.

    This is because the flood of 1953 was the last of its kind. In its wake, the government embarked on one of the most elaborate engineering projects in history, the Delta Works; but the challenges for which they were designed are not the challenges, barely envisioned, of global warming. To ask whether those enormous barriers can withstand the new age of weather is to wonder how long the Netherlands can survive. With every freak hurricane and unexpected drought, we find ourselves, like every generation past, dwelling on eschatology. And when we imagine the collapse of dune and dike, among the many dark things that we imagine are the cultural losses such a cataclysm would bring. If the western Netherlands — all those cities, with all those museums and libraries — were swept into the sea, which treasures would we miss the most? It is a question that people in other increasingly vulnerable cities should increasingly be asking themselves.

    The extraordinary artistic riches of the Netherlands notwithstanding, the answer to that chilling question, to this awful cultural triage, is surprisingly easy for me. It is to be found along a quiet street in Haarlem. There are many reasons for the art pilgrim to come to this city, halfway between Amsterdam and the ocean. Today virtually a suburb of Amsterdam, a few minutes from its central station, few cities have as distinguished a cultural tradition as Haarlem, a tradition honored in the museum that bears the name of its greatest painter. To see Frans Hals in his own place is to realize that not every artist travels well. Some can be seen anywhere: you can appreciate Titian better in Madrid, Paris, or Washington than in his hometown of Venice, where his works blend too seamlessly into the ambient splendor. Yet you will never understand the point of Carpaccio outside his own ghostly city, where his bizarre mythological tableaux glow with Egyptian mystery.

    The Dutch, for the most part, are transportable. Most of them painted for living-room walls, and those can be found anywhere: one reason that, since medieval times, their works have been exported by the tens of thousands. If Holland disappeared, the achievement of its painters would still be visible all over the world, and we would know their Golden Age as we know those of Greece and Rome — from noble fragments. Enough Rembrandts and Vermeers would survive, even if The Jewish Bride and The View of Delft were not among them. But though many of Hals’ greatest works are in foreign collections, you still have to come to Haarlem to see him. There, in eight gigantic paintings — placed end-to-end, they are twenty-three meters long — the Dutch Golden Age unfurls in portraits of members of Haarlem’s charitable and military institutions. They show eighty-four people in all, painted over half a century.

    In June 1902, to escape construction noise next door to his house in London, the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler fled across the North Sea. In The Hague, he met the German painter Georg Sauter, who was dismayed to see the state of Whistler’s health. A drive to the beach at Scheveningen sufficed to exhaust him; and when Whistler spoke of going to nearby Haarlem, Sauter thought he was too frail.

    The next day, he was amazed to find Whistler in Haarlem. They strolled past the pictures, from the earliest, painted in 1616, when Frans Hals was young, to the Regentesses, painted in 1664, when Hals was nearly as close to death as Whistler was now. Sauter’s notes from the trip report, “Certainly no collection would give stronger support to Whistler’s theory that a master grows in his art, from picture to picture, to the end, than that at Haarlem.” The elderly painter warmed to the subject, and slid under the railing in order to view the pictures from closer by. The guard forced him to take a step back, and Whistler determined to wait until the other visitors were gone.

    At last, wrote Sauter, “We were indeed alone with Franz Hals. Now nothing could keep him away from the canvases; particularly the groups of old men and women got their full share of appreciation.” Whistler clambered onto a chair, “absolutely into raptures over the old women, admiring everything; his exclamation of joy came out now at the top of his voice, now in the most tender, almost caressing whisper: ‘Look at it — just look; look at the beautiful colour — the flesh — look at the white — that black — look how those ribbons are put in. Oh, what a swell he was — can you see it all? — and the character — how he realized it.’”

    And then: “Moving with his hand so near the picture as if he wanted to caress it in every detail, he screamed with joy: ‘Oh, I must touch it — just for the fun of it,’ and he moved tenderly with his fingers over the face of one of the old women.” The guards indulged the sick painter — who miraculously managed to make it back to London. He hardly left his house again. The construction banged on. Soon he was dead.

    The care lavished on the building that now houses the Frans Hals Museum seems at odds with its original purpose, a nursing home. Such buildings amazed foreign visitors, who were more used to seeing such outlays reserved for princes or bishops. The Old Men’s House was an expression of dedication to the infirm, and before it became a museum it served as an orphan-age, a further advertisement, in mortar and brick, for Dutch moral excellence.

    Hals was young when construction began, in 1607. With its spacious rooms and tranquil garden, the Old Men’s House speaks of wealth sagely deployed, of a well-ordered civilization. So does the collection’s centerpiece, Hals’ group portraits. Swooshing with silk, dripping with lace, they nonetheless convey a dignity that, even at its most celebratory, is never ostentatious: these are people who deserved their golden age.

    Yet the life of the artist who created the pictures — the person for whom the building is named — speaks of a poverty so extreme that the modern mind struggles to fathom it. Rembrandt died poor, but enjoyed long periods of affluence, even magnificence; Hals, from before his birth till after his death, was trailed by such destitution that most of what we know of his life comes from the annals of the small-claims court. When he was born, his father was involved in a lawsuit arising from his brother’s estate. The question, which dragged on for nearly a year, involved a rapier, a doublet (a men’s jacket), six shirts, and a pair of stockings. The records of this dispute survived. The record of Frans’ birth has not. Though we do not know the exact date, we know he came into the world in Antwerp toward the end of 1582 — which is to say, in the middle of an atrocity.

    The Dutch Revolt began as a reaction of the Nether-lands — attached by inheritance to the crown of Spain — to punitive taxation, tyrannical government, and brutal religious repression. The revolt was centered in Antwerp, the mercantile and banking capital of Europe, which was being reduced to a colonial tributary, its preachers tortured, its treasury milked to finance wars in faraway lands. By the time of Hals’ birth, the city had been reduced by wave after wave of destruction. In 1566, the Protestants purged the churches of what they saw as idols, an act of defiance against king and church that was answered, ten years later, by a sack of the city: eighteen thousand people were killed in three days. In historical terms, the “Spanish Fury” meant the end of Antwerp as the entrepôt of the North.

    In personal terms, for the survivors, it meant nothing good, especially if they, like Hals’ parents, were poor to begin with. His father was a shearer — a man who cut wool from sheep — one of the many artisans in a cloth-making industry that never recovered from the attacks. In an economic and military context that made six shirts and a pair of stockings a treasure worth fighting over, more violence was to come. Around the time of Frans Hals’ birth, another fury broke out. The Prince of Orange invited the brother of the King of France to lead the liberated provinces; but the Duke, unwilling to be a constitutional monarch, attacked his own city of Antwerp. The coup resulted in a humiliating defeat, hundreds of troops hacked to death by the outraged citizenry. But the “French Fury” weakened Antwerp still further. And the next summer, the Spanish returned. After a year of starvation and horror, the city fell. From then on, the northern and the southern Netherlands were severed. The Dutch blockaded Antwerp for two centuries. Over half its population fled, among them the Hals family. They settled in Haarlem—also besieged and plundered by the Spanish. But the Spanish left Haarlem in 1577, and never returned.

    By the time these thousands of Flemish immigrants arrived, Haarlem was being rebuilt. The skills that these sophisticated people brought revitalized the city’s trade, including the cloth trade that employed Hals’ father, Franchois. The city prospered. The Hals family did not. In 1599, to make good a debt incurred by purchasing half a cow, Franchois was forced to cede the entirety of his household goods.

    A pair of stockings, half a cow: the tone was set. Frans Hals would be sued, in 1624, for payment for a jacket (three guilders and six stuivers). In 1627, he would be sued for seven guilders for a delivery of butter and cheese. In 1629, a baker sued him for five guilders and seventeen stuivers. In 1631, he was sued over his failure to pay for some meat for which he had agreed to pay 42 guilders; thirteen were still outstanding. In 1634, he was sued for twenty-three guilders for bread. (He had exchanged a painting for the bread, not enough to cover the debt.) In 1636, another baker sued him. In 1640, he was sued for thirty-three guilders for rent. In 1642, he was sued for five guilders for a bed. In 1644, he was sued for five guilders and two stuivers for the purchase of canvas. In 1647, he owed his shoemaker fifty-nine guilders and eight stuivers. In 1649, two of his grandchildren were admitted to the orphanage, their parents deceased and he and his wife unable to care for them. The next year, a local bartender sued him. The year after that, his wife was sued for four guilders for not paying for a box. When his ailing son Claes made a will in 1656, he allowed his parents to choose among his gray coat, his “worst outfit,” or one Flemish pound (six guilders).

    So it went. If one knew Frans Hals only through the scarce documents that chronicle his life, one would be utterly unprepared for the sumptuous paintings that deck the halls of the museum that bears his name. If his life was petty, his work was lavish. Perhaps more than any other Dutch painter of his time, his impulse was celebratory, and as notable for everything it omits as for everything it includes.

    There are no still lifes. There are no landscapes or seascapes or cityscapes or — surprisingly, for a man with something like fourteen children — nudes. Notwithstanding the odd skull, his pictures are bereft of allusive symbols; we vainly comb them for mementi mori. And though a pair of evangelists turned up in the basement of a Ukrainian museum in the 1950s, they bear not the slightest whiff of religion. Frans Hals’ subject was people, specifically the people of Haarlem.

    His first known portrait — still in his museum — shows Jacobus Zaffius, a Catholic who, in 1578, witnessed the destruction of Haarlem’s holy images, and was imprisoned for protesting. In 1611, when this picture was painted, Zaffius was a figure who looked to the wars of religion and independence — to Haarlem’s past. The man who painted him pointed to the future. Hals was not quite young — almost thirty — when he painted Zaffius. It was a late start. At that age, Paulus Potter was dead; Carl Fabritius had two years to live. Despite the many hurdles that he faced in his life, Hals would live far longer than any prominent Dutch painter. He died in 1666, age eighty-four, fully twenty years older than Rembrandt was when he died — and Rembrandt was considered old, and had outlived most of his colleagues.

    The vitality that propelled Hals through a long life is visible, already, in this early picture. The paint is laid on in liberal scrapes. Though the colors are few — black and brown for Zaffius’ clothing, yellows and reds and whites for his face and beard — Hals wrings every nuance out of them. “He doesn’t have a single black, but twenty-seven different blacks,” wrote another painter, who thought he was Rembrandt’s equal. That painter — Vincent van Gogh — was one of many moderns who found a model in Hals. Whistler called his painting of his mother “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” a title that could have served for any number of Hals’ paintings. Only Rembrandt and Hals placed such unembarrassed emphasis on the artifice of their art, a break with tradition that would not be taken up again until the nineteenth century.

    Yet all these whorls and scratches inevitably resolve into Haarlemers who, though centuries dead, illustrate the paradox that makes Hals’ work so fascinating. Blatantly artificial — yet so alive that his subjects always seem to have been snapped in flagrante, as if by a canny street photographer. Roman Vishniac’s Warsaw, Vivian Maier’s Chicago, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Paris: they all descend from Frans Hals’ Haarlem.

    In Hals’ technique, the moderns found a lineage — and in his subjects, too. After a visit to Haarlem, Manet made up his mind to become a painter of his own time. Hals had discovered the range of humanity even in a small city, and alongside the grandees and the flush merchants he showed the common folk: a bartender tallying her customers’ drinks on the wall; a series of fishermen’s children; a sly hooker.

    The city was small, but its citizens reflected the Dutch Republic’s worldliness and ambition. Isaac Massa — a fluent Russian-speaker who was ennobled in Sweden, became the first Westerner to publish maps of Siberia, and wrote an account of the False Dimitri — puts in an appearance; and so does a man attired in one of the rare kimonos that the Dutch were allowed to export from Japan. The first person to paint the landscape of Brazil, Frans Post, sat for Hals. So did a man who, though born in France, became as much a symbol of Dutch cultural achievement as Hals himself: René Descartes, who spent his adult life in Amsterdam, where, in a climate of intellectual freedom that had no equal anywhere in Europe, he composed his philosophical works, and was painted by Hals shortly before his death.

    Alongside these eminences are people one would cross the street to avoid: a man who played an instrument that squawked so obnoxiously that neighbors would bribe him, with a coin, to get him to move along; and Malle Babbe, “Crazy Babs,” known in local legend as the sorceress of Haarlem. Malle Babbe clutches a pewter mug of beer while an owl — a symbol of drunkenness, of the night-side — perches on her shoulder. Is she laughing? Grimacing? She is one of Hals’ most ambiguous characters. Some find her gezellig — an overused word that means fun, sociable — the type of kind-hearted drunk you might spend a memorable evening with at the bar. Popular songs have been written that portray her as a prostitute, which seems unlikely. Others  see a terrifying madwoman in the grip of alcoholism and mental illness.

    She was a real person, named Barbara Claes, who has been traced in the records of the same asylum to which Hals’ own son Pieter was committed. (Another of the tragedies that filled his life, recorded in the dry prose of bureaucracy.) In an age without euphemism, this institution was known as Het Dolhuys, “the madhouse.” In an age without specific diagnosis of mental disabilities, it is hard to know what ailed her. Whatever her story, she surely never dreamed that she would remain a symbol of Haarlem centuries after her death, or that the city would honor her with a statue, complete with the owl on her shoulder. Her name and face are still known thanks to Hals’ portrait, which — in our image-soaked world, in our dutiful trudges through “encyclopedic” museums — is that rare picture that, once it has been seen, can never be forgotten. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, Goya famously wrote on an etching: the sleep of reason produces monsters. Owls descend on a dozing man, landing on his shoulder as they did, a hundred and fifty years before, on Hals’ ominous woman, on Malle Babbe. Amid all the attainments of civilization — Goya showed the man respectably dressed — it is enough to close one’s eyes to see the madhouse, the bailiff, the orphan, the drunk. (Enough, too, to open them.)

    You enter the Frans Hals Museum through a monumental gate, take a right, buy your ticket in the bookstore, and then walk, counterclockwise, around the courtyard. The great Haarlem artists before Hals file past on the right side of the quadrilateral — and then, in the wing opposite the entrance, the first of the works that have attracted generations of artists to this city, the eight heroic group portraits, appear. No matter how many other pictures by Hals you have seen in real life — no matter how many times you have seen these particular pictures reproduced in books or on screen — you will not be prepared for their size and their impact.

    The woozy idea of inspiration, of the artist’s pleasure in his work, springs to life here. To see Hals paint — and his pictures give you the feeling that you are watching him paint — is to see a graceful young animal bouncing and jumping, delighting in everything he sees. A fork! A hat! A moustache! The artist never gets bored, or reverts to routine. Everything is a burst, a climax. The flash of the feasting militiamen, seated at their richly laden tables, clad in their fabulous garments, is rendered by a man who wields brushes as they wield swords, and whose technique matches his subjects so perfectly that it is impossible to separate one from the other. The militiamen flaunt their pride, and so does the painter.

    The earliest, The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard, dates to 1616, the beginning of Hals’ career. Its colors are bright and cheerful, showing young men — many younger even than Hals — the flower of a triumphant nation at the height of its opulence. For them, the iconoclasms and the religious wars, the sieges and the massacres, would have been thrilling stories they had heard, as children, from the greatest generation.

    Twenty-five years — another generation — later, Hals, now middle-aged, painted the regents of the St. Elizabeth Hospital, housed directly across from the museum. The colors have sobered, and the subject is different: the directors of a charitable foundation, the first such group painted in Haarlem. Gone is the sparkling silverware; the only metal visible is a clutch of coins dedicated to the care of the infirm. Here are people scratched together in paint — those twenty-seven blacks — who seem far more real than the smoother creations of other artists: life-like and life-sized. The man closest to the viewer is seen in profile, cocking an ear toward some invisible interloper who has walked in on their gathering. Through that gesture, the group acknowledges the viewer, and through their gestures they acknowledge each another.

    Like a pianist whose fingers never allude to the deprivation that preceded his performance, or like a pirouetting ballerina whose dainty smile gives no hint of the blood in her shoes, his travails — his quibbles with the tailor, his dead children — have been pushed offstage. Hals is entirely at the service of an art that does not show daily life but that, by rising above it, elevates it. All the spectator sees is the sprezzatura of the prodigy. His light touch disguises something only his fellow painters can fully appreciate: nobody else can do this. His works are all of a piece, so much so that they seem to have been dashed onto canvas in a single inspired explosion. Technical research shows that these works took years. But the appearance of effortlessness — of a balance so refined that it seems inevitable — is the miraculous illusion of the virtuoso.

    Yet the great virtuosi are not always the great artists. These are often those who, alongside their mastery, have that creepiness, that slightly-off-ness, that getting-under-your-skin-ness, which Freud called das Unheimlische. One feels the tension between spontaneity and obsession even in Hals’ earliest works, but only as one is nearing the exit of the museum does “the uncanny” burst into full funereal flower. Here we find the regents and the regentesses of this very building, the Old Men’s House, staring at us from across the ages: five women and six men, gathered in two very gloomy paintings. These are the works to which the dying Whistler paid homage, and they are so strikingly weird that it is no surprise he dragged himself here to touch them, or that a legend grew up around them. These pictures demand explanation.

    The man with the floppy hat and the hangdog face is drunk, for example; and the crones, whose portrayal, it is said, was Hals’ revenge for their forcing him to spend his last years in this institution. But the stories, however charming, are myths. An inebriated regent was unthinkable in a formal portrait — and Hals never lived in this building. But they thrive because we know there is more to these pictures than a meeting of the board. We know, for example, that these pictures were created by an octogenarian. We know that, if eighty is elderly now, it was nothing short of ancient then: given the life expectancy at the time, most residents of the Old Men’s House were presumably much younger. We know that these were the last pictures that Hals made. And we know that another twenty-five years — another generation — have passed since the St. Elizabeth’s portrait.

    Something has changed. If the earlier portraits are cohesive internally (the figures in their relation to each other) and externally (the figures in relation to the viewer), the regents and regentesses interact with nobody. As if sliced from other paintings and pasted into an amateuristic photomontage, they stand uncomfortably, pinned to a background, looking right and left, and above, and below — never at each other, and never at us.

    In a traditional novel, one sentence leads to the next, one thought to another; in a sonata, an initial theme is coaxed into a more elaborate development, then brought back to a recapitulating conclusion. To see Hals’ final, fragmented pictures is to understand that the earlier portraits were akin to well-con-structed fictions, in which the chaos of experience has been pressed into a readable narrative, an artificial form. No matter how wild Hals’ pictures seemed, they respected the classical order. Eye met eye; hand led to sleeve that led to elbow; one color led harmoniously to the next. Yet here, in these late masterpieces, the colors seem to have been frightened off. All that remains are the twenty-seven blacks, and an equal number of whites. Hands and heads emerge from darkness; and the people, especially taken together, look disembodied, ghostly.

    “A lonely prince of a realm of spirits, from whom now only a chilling breath issued to terrify his most willing contemporaries, standing as they did aghast at these communications of which only at moments, only by exception, they could understand anything at all”: thus Thomas Mann imagined Beethoven at the end of his life. Abandoning his audience, the artist created a style that was half breakdown, half liberation. Adorno was obsessed with this notion of a late style, and for decades plotted a book about it. (Of this book, appropriately, only fragments remain.) Late Beethoven did not show fullness or resolution; he showed, instead, the preposterousness of the very idea of unity, totality, narrative. The works that he created at the end showed him in the face of the dissolution of death, their broken nature suiting an artist who had outlived his time.

    Such late works do not display a failure of unity or narrative. They display a willingness to transcend it. “Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which — alone — it glows into life,” Adorno wrote. “He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” The shattered illusion of totality is the catastrophe that we see in the Black Paintings of Goya or the last plays of Ibsen. Our perplexity and discomfort in the face of such works shows that aesthetic needs (for narrative, for visual unity) are grounded in emotion, and show that, as with incorrect punctuation, untuned instruments, or clashing colors, disjointedness and dissonance upsets us — physically, emotionally — more than we realize.

    When we do realize it, still another displeasure arrives. It feels pathetic to be so troubled by a lack of harmony or synthesis, so dependent on the illusion of unity. We know that our own lives don’t add up, and that such totalities are artificial. We know that the fractured landscape is the objective one; but that may be precisely the reason we expect art to provide that neatness and consolation. Looked at head-on, the fracture is unbearable. “The maturity of the late works does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit,” Adorno wrote of Beethoven. “They are … not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.”

    These were the fruits Hals painted; and when we try to taste them, we discover how prepared we are for delectation, how uncomfortable in the absence of sweetness. And this discovery opens the door to a more accurate appraisal of the world and our place within it. Such knowledge dispenses with devices that link one thought, one person, one figure, to the next, and that understand one phase of life as a positive evolution toward another. As in the Kabbalah, this view understands us as fragments of shattered vessels; but this most secular of painters withholds the prospect of redemption. All this, in these citizens of seventeenth-century Haarlem.

    The regents and the regentesses are thrice late. They are painted by a man who has outlived his generation and buried his children. They show older people: not as old as the painter, but none quite young, and one of whom — the man rumored to be a drunk — seems to be disintegrating. And these people, painted by an old person, are in charge of a home for old people — the building where these pictures still hang. They are avatars of aging, of time, of decline, of mortality; ambassadors of what awaits us.

    In the wilting flower, the fleeting days, the sunset, thousands of works of art ponder decline. They are melancholy, but they can be produced by young artists; and even when produced by older artists, they do not necessarily need to be composed in the fractured or anti-harmonious manner suggested by Adorno with the term “late style.” Not every elderly artist develops — like Beethoven, Ibsen, or Goya—a distinctive late style. “His late works,” Adorno wrote of Beethoven, “constitute a form of exile.” In that word, exile, lies a possible key to Hals’ monumental late paintings: not the exile that we usually imagine, an expulsion from city or country. One might always—at least theoretically—return to a place. These paintings show something more irrevocable. There is no going back for one who has outlived his own time.

    Hals, the man who painted these pictures, was an exile from time itself. A home for the aged is a home for people alienated forever from whomever and wherever they once were. In temporality, no repatriation is possible. Its residents could once feed and wash by themselves, walk without effort, sleep without soiling the bed. Now they find themselves in a building that, no matter how lavishly appointed or caringly staffed, is the antechamber of death; and Frans Hals, no matter whether he lived in this building or a few streets away, inhabited the same room.

    This is the institution over which the regents presided. In their spookiness, they resemble other representations of guardians of the crossroads. These are lords of the threshold, at the junction of this world and the next: liminal deities like Janus, who looks in two directions; Saint Peter, who keeps the keys to the Christian heaven; Papa Legba, who watches over the gates to the Vodou underworld, Guinee.

    Malle Babbe shows the proximity of sanity to madness. The regents and the regentesses show a more unbridgeable distance. No landscape is more fractured than the region between life and death. “Touched by death,” Adorno wrote, “the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work.”

    Beethoven’s late works resolved into trills; Hals’, into the tears and fissures of brushstrokes alone. The portraits of these eleven people add up to a portrait of a single man standing between this world and the next. These paintings loom at the junction between religion and art, and in their profanity they evoke a response that more explicit religious art seeks, but often fails to elicit. Their very indirectness lends them a mystic electricity. Perhaps the reason that I would save these works first when the flood comes, and the reason that they appealed to so many modern artists, is that they show how, in a churchless age, we might yet evoke the oceanic feeling, the sensation of infinity, that courses through our world. We are not really looking for answers. It may be that truth can only be glimpsed in pieces, in fragments, in the details whose whole escapes our purview. In certain moods, we feel defrauded by fiction, by harmony, and want to taste those bitter, spiny, darkening fruits.

    At the Bookcase

    Accept my greetings, ancient scrolls,
    and favor my kiss in your dusty slumber.
    From sailing to foreign isles my soul has returned,
    and like a wandering dove, trembling and with weary wings,
    once more it knocks at the entrance to its childhood nest.
    Do you recognize me? I am he!
    Your bosom-child from way back, the abstinent one.
    Of all the divine delights in the wide world
    my early years knew only yours,
    you were my garden on a hot summer’s day
    and on winter nights my pillow.
    I learned to bundle my soul into your scrolls for safekeeping,
    and to fold into your columns my holy dreams.
    Do you still remember? — I have not forgotten —
    In an alcove in a desolate house of study
    I was the last of the last,
    on my lips the fathers’ prayers fluttered and died,
    and in a hidden corner there, by your shelves,
    the eternal flame flickered before my eyes and was gone.
    In those days I was still young,
    no bud had yet blossomed on my cheeks,
    and wintry nights, tumultuous nights,
    found me over an old book, its pages torn,
    alone with the fears and the fantasies of my soul.
    A darkening wick still heaved
    as the oil in the lamp on the table was consumed;
    in the bowels of the bookcase a mouse was scratching;
    a coal in the fireplace released a final whisper —
    and the fear of God made my flesh crawl
    and my teeth chatter in terror.
    It was a ghastly night, the most cursed of nights.
    Outside, behind the clouded window,
    a raging storm howled wildly,
    the shutters broke, iron bolts and all,
    the demons of destruction tore down the walls.
    I saw my fortress exploded,
    and I watched God’s presence leave its place
    as it stole out from under the curtain of the ark,
    and the image of my grandfather’s countenance,
    my shelter and my support,
    the mute witness and judge of my heart’s nature —
    it too disappeared from my sight and slipped away.
    Only the flame in my lamp was still gasping for air,
    twisting this way and that, leaping to its death,
    when suddenly the window shattered
    and everything was extinguished,
    leaving me, a tender fledgling banished from its nest,
    in the custody of the night and its dark spaces…..

     

    And now, after times have passed,
    the wheel of my life has returned me here
    with my wrinkled brow and my wrinkled soul
    and stationed me again before you, occulted ones,
    scions of Lvov, Slavita, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt.
    Once more my hand turns your pages
    and my tired eyes grope between your lines,
    quietly scouring the ornamented letters
    to wrest from them the traces of my soul
    and find the trails of its first stirrings
    in the place of its birth and the house of its life.
    You brought contentment to my youth — but behold,
    my heart says nothing, and no teardrop quivers on my eyelid.
    I look at you, I see you, elders, but I do not recognize you.
    No penetrating eyes —
    the doleful eyes of the venerable ancients —
    any longer peer from your letters into the depths of my soul,
    and no more do I hear their voices whispering
    from a forgotten and unvisited grave.
    Your columns of print are to me
    like a broken strand of black pearls;
    your pages have been widowed
    and your every letter has been orphaned —
    have my eyes dimmed and my ears grown heavy,
    or is it you who have decayed, the eternal dead,
    so that nothing remains of you in the land of the living?
    And I, in vain, like a thief with a spade
    tunneling underground without a lantern or a torch,
    scraping through earthen caverns and tenebrous places,
    digging day and night into your graves, deeper and deeper,
    to seek hidden signs of life beyond the roots and below them —
    while at that very moment they are above me,
    in cities of men, they sound from hills and mountains,
    their fruits clamor beneath the sun, the moon, and the stars,
    they dance and seven times repeat their dance,
    their roar crosses to the far ends of the sea —
    and not even an echo reaches my ears.

     

    Who knows,
    if when I emerge back into the domain of the night
    after hacking through tombs and ruins of the spirit
    with nothing to show for it, nothing recovered,
    except this spade that clings to my hand
    and the dust of the ancestors on my fingers,
    poorer and emptier than I was —
    I will prostrate myself before the splendor of the night
    and seek out a path to the mysteries that it holds
    and a soft shelter in the folds of its black mantle,
    and tired unto death I will summon it, and call out:
    come, night,
    gather me up, magnificent night, cover me,
    do not deny me, the fugitive from the graves —
    my soul asks for rest, and infinite serenity.
    And you, divine stars,
    allies of my spirit and interpreters of my heart,
    why are you silent, wherefore are you silent?
    Does your shimmer and gleam have nothing to tell me,
    not even a clue to reveal to my heart?
    Or perhaps you do, you do — but I have forgotten
    your language
    and no longer hear your speech, the secret tongue?
    Answer me, divine stars, for I am saddened.

    Translated by Leon Wieseltier

    Gods and Pathogens

    What does piety have to do with public health? In several recent rulings concerning restrictions on in-person religious services during the pandemic, the Supreme Court has repeatedly confronted the question, but it is hardly a new one. Humans have probably been asking similar questions for as long as they have clustered together in sufficient densities to sustain the spread of pandemic pathogens: which is to say, for as long as they have been recording their history.

    Pandemics and piety are sometimes opposed protagonists in well-known artifacts of that history. Homer’s Iliad opens with the god Apollo, angered by the Greek king Agamemnon’s mistreatment of his priest, driving “the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished.” Until the prophets were consulted and the god appeased, “the corpse fires burned everywhere.” And in the Hebrew Bible it is not only the Egyptians who are punished by plagues. When the Israelites “lost patience” in Numbers 21 and “spoke against God and against Moses,” “God sent fiery serpents among the people; their bite brought death to many in Israel.” Only when the sinners confessed their errors did God teach Moses the cure.

    We cannot call either of these two examples from roughly three millennia ago “historical,” since we cannot be sure that either of these events actually occurred. But they certainly teach us something about the long history of human reaction to pandemic. In both we see theodicy at work: that is, an attempt to understand and to justify an epidemiological catastrophe in terms of the intentional action of gods or God — in these instances punitively, a plague as punishment for some error or sin in the people or the polity. As King Edward III of England put it in 1348, when the pandemic known as the bubonic plague or Black Death was devastating Asia, Europe, and North Africa: “Terrible is God towards the sons of men, and… those whom he loves he censures and chastises; that is, he punishes their shameful deeds in various ways during this mortal life so that they might not be condemned eternally.” It was in order to do penance for those sins and appease the punishing deity that the king called for collective prayer in churches across his realms.

    Older than the hills, but fresher than the grass. In March 2020, the month that the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 a pandemic, the share of internet searches for prayer surged across the globe, among adherents of every faith, to the highest level ever recorded in the (short) history of Google Trends. And in early May last year, with much of the United States in “lockdown,” Kraig Beyerlein, Kathryn Lofton, Geneviève Zubrzycki, and I administered a survey on COVID and religion in collaboration with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs that found plenty of evidence for contemporary covid-19 theodicy. When asked about the coronavirus, sixty-three percent of Americans agreed that through it “God is telling humanity to change the way we are living.” And fifty-five percent thought that God would protect them from infection. Both these views are characteristic of classical theodicy, though there are also important differences between them. For example, white evangelical Christians proved much more likely (sixty-seven percent) to think that God will protect them from infection, whereas black (seventy-eight percent) and Hispanic (sixty-five percent) Americans are much more likely to think God is demanding change. Perhaps we should speak of at least two pandemic theodicies in contemporary America, one more satisfied with the moral and social status quo, the other more critical.

    In short, arguments about the relationship between piety, politics, and pandemics have a long and potentially instructive history. We find ourselves in need of that instruction, now that covid-19 has put similar arguments at the center of strident debate. In the United States, the pandemic has brought to the surface of public discourse a sharp divide between those who advocated public health measures to slow the spread of the disease, such as prohibitions on gatherings of large numbers of people in places of worship, and others who argue that such measures unconstitutionally restrict the exercise of religion. The divide may be more political than popular. In early May last year, a US District Court Judge granted Tabernacle Baptist Church of Nicholasville, Kentucky temporary restraint against Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s executive order prohibiting mass gatherings, and Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting local governments in the state from closing houses of worship. At that time, according to our poll, only 9 percent of Americans agreed that in-person religious services should be allowed without restrictions.

    But regardless of their popularity, arguments about the relationship between religious liberties and public health are clearly shaping the response to the current pandemic in the United States, just as similar arguments did in the distant past. The draft guidance for re-opening the country put forward by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last spring included instructions on topics as varied as the use of dishes and utensils at restaurants and seating arrangements on buses and trains. It also included recommendations for houses of worship, such as warnings against sharing prayer books if in-person services were conducted. Objecting to the latter, the Trump administration rejected the CDC’s draft. According to Roger Severino, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, “governments have a duty to instruct the public on how to stay safe during this crisis and can absolutely do so without dictating to people how they should worship God.”

    Severino, previously chief operations officer of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, is a Harvard-trained lawyer, but he may be unaware that the word “crisis,” with which he chose to describe our current predicament, is itself the result of a previous pandemic that produced very similar debates. Though the Greek word is very ancient (the philosopher Parmenides used krisis in the fifth century BC to denote the decision between being and not-being, truth and mere opinion), it took some two thousand years to enter English. It did so in the fifteenth-century translation of a fourteenth-century Latin treatise by Guy de Chauliac, who contracted the bubonic plague during its so-called second pandemic in 1348, while he was physician to the Pope in Avignon. He survived, and he left an account of the symptoms and the etiology of that dread disease. Chauliac’s translator appropriated the word into English in a narrow medical sense: crisis is the moment of “determination,” the point in the progress of a disease at which it becomes clear if you will get better or not. In the case of the bubonic plague, with an infection fatality rate above fifty percent, the answer was most often not.

    Today the word “crisis” means a time of high uncertainty or emergency, and we can use it to speak, as Severino does, not only of health but also of economic, political, psychological, and spiritual crises caused by the pandemic. Perhaps we should speak too, as Parmenides might have, of a pandemic-induced intellectual crisis, a moment in which we feel the foundations of our knowledge tremble, and our habits for acting in and making sense of the cosmos suddenly seem insecure. How a society reacts in such moments is a matter of vital importance, not only because it affects who lives or dies but also because it shapes that society’s future capacities for interpreting the world.

    We were living in such a moment during the first months of the pandemic, bombarded by constantly changing observations about a virus whose symptoms, infectiousness, modes of spread, possible prevention and treatment, were not well understood. Even its lethality was widely disputed. Was its Infection Fatality Rate less than 1 percent, as the World Health Organization maintained? Or was it above a terrifying 10 percent, as early data from Italy, Spain, and some other countries suggested? Did asthma increase risk, or perhaps (as my doctor told me) decrease it? What about blood type? Did masks work, and if so, who should wear them? What amount of “social distancing” is sufficient? If my partner has a cough, should I move into a different bedroom? Can I hug my children? Can I visit my parents? All of us remember wanting answers to such questions as the disease spread.

    Many called the situation “unprecedented,” by which they could only mean either something as trivial as the observation that every historical moment is unique, or more substantively that this experience is without precedent in our privileged experience as inhabitants of a world with well-trained epidemiologists, widespread vaccination, and effective anti-biotics (none of which we should be taking for granted). Yet we are certainly not the first humans to experience a pandemic-induced intellectual crisis, and our reactions are in some ways similar to those who have come before us, not least in the potential of those reactions to produce conflicts between different systems of knowledge and value, such as religion and medicine, piety and public health. Since those conflicts clearly affect our possibilities for life (and death) in the present, we should want to ask: what can we learn from differences and similarities between present and past?

    The most massive pandemic in human history was also the most recent. When the smallpox virus booked trans-oceanic passage with European explorers, it wiped out approximately ninety percent of the many millions of antibody-less inhabitants in each of the worlds Columbus and his successors “discovered.” How did the Aztecs and the Incas, the Polynesians and the indigenous Australians, make sense of such a scale of disaster? Did they observe the progress of the disease, the torments of the afflicted, and design measures in an attempt to counter its spread? Did they turn to their gods with renewed fervor, or abandon them as vain? Some of these deadly “first-contacts” between pox and indigenous peoples took place as recently as two centuries ago, but we cannot turn to them for action-able intelligence. It is a symptom of the appalling blindness of history that we know almost nothing about the crises that the pandemics of an earlier globalization produced in the societies that they destroyed.

    Still, we do know a great deal about the cultural effects of a microbe whose earlier migrations produced the first, second, and third pandemics of the disease known generally as “the plague.” The arrival of yersinia pestis antiqua in the sixth century brought the Byzantine empire of Justinian to its knees, and paved the way for the Islamic conquests of the Mediterranean and the Middle East a generation later. (Readers wanting more can turn to William Rosen’s Justinian’s Flea.) It was around 1345 that yersinia pestis medievalis began its journey, probably from central Asia, and in a little over five years had eliminated virtually half of the population of the Asian, European, and African land-masses that it reached. (To put the numbers in perspective, imagine that covid-19 had just killed ninety-nine million Americans.) The plague’s third pandemic, yersinia pestis orientalis, reached San Francisco in 1902. Though much less deadly, it too had consequences, among them inducing Congress to make permanent the Chinese Exclusion Act as a law of these United States. Permanent, that is, until it was replaced by other immigration legislation nearly half a century later.

    In the 1990s I spent a year as a graduate student in a beautiful late-medieval building in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, called the Palace of the King’s Lieutenant. Back then it housed the medieval archives of the Crown of Aragon, where I was researching the effects of the Black Death on violence against minorities. This past year, as I binged on coronavirus headlines and advice, I suddenly felt as if I understood for the first time what the king of Aragon in those terrible years, Peter the Ceremonious, must have felt as he waited for the plague to reach his lands, while reading the reports sent by his spies, agents, and ambassadors from more eastern locales where the plague had already struck. One of his informants observed that many people sit or lie down before becoming deathly ill. Perhaps, he deduced, the plague was spread by a poison “sprinkled on benches on which men sit and put up their feet.” He strongly urged the king to avoid sitting down.

    I read many letters like these that year, and I hope I did not smile with condescension at the desperate attempts of King Peter’s people to turn observation into life-saving advice. Today I feel that they were engaged, as we are, in what the historian of science Lorraine Daston calls “ground-zero empiricism.” “At moments of extreme scientific uncertainty,” she writes, empirical “observation, usually treated as the poor relation of experiment and statistics in science, comes into its own. Suggestive single cases, striking anomalies, partial patterns, correlations as yet too faint to withstand statistical scrutiny, what works and what doesn’t….” And she continues, speaking of covid, that “we are back in the age of ground-zero empiricism, and observing as if our lives depended on it.”

    The arrival of the Black Death to the Islamic and Christian world of the Middle Ages was also an age of ground-zero empiricism, as we can already see in the very earliest European reports of the plague, such as this one from Michele da Piazza, writing from Sicily in 1347: “It so happened that in the month of October in the year of our Lord 1347, around the first of that month, twelve Genoese galleys, fleeing our Lord’s wrath which came down upon them for their misdeeds, put in at the port of the city of Messina. They brought with them a plague that they carried down to the very marrow of their bones, so that if anyone so much as spoke to them, he was infected with a mortal sickness which brought on an immediate death that he could in no way avoid.” In this record of “first contact” between Western Christians and the plague, we can already see two explanatory frameworks simultaneously deployed: theodicy — the Lord’s wrath — and empiricism. The chronicler’s observations may even have succeeded in distinguishing between the pneumonic and the bubonic variants of the plague. (The former is transmitted person to person by droplets coughed by the infected and is almost always fatal, while the latter, transmitted by the bites of infected fleas, had a mortality rate closer to fifty percent.) Other early observers, most famously Boccaccio in his Decameron, quickly and empirically observed that the clothing of the sick transmitted the disease to those who might wear it or touch it, presumably because of the fleas within it.

    Governments seven hundred years ago were quick to respond to the Black Death in ways that today seem quite familiar. On May 2, 1348, for example, the town council of Pistoia ordered all borders closed, prohibited trade in goods believed to carry infection, and forbade gatherings of ten people or more, including funerals. These were just a few of the many public health measures listed in the ordinance, which ended with a coda: “Saving that anything in them which is contrary to the liberty of the church shall be null and void, and of no effect.” Reading those ordinances today, it is easy enough to feel an empathetic shudder. We can feel the Pistoians weighing important values against one another: the demands of public health against the needs of trade, of politics, of ritual, of family. And we can follow them struggling with where to draw the line. The prohibition on gathering for funerals, for example, “shall not apply to the sons and daughters of the deceased, his blood brothers and sisters and their children, or to his grandchildren.” (I could not help thinking of this particular exception as my wife’s aunt lay dying of covid-19 in a locked-down Madrid, with no possibility of visits or of mourning.) “These ordinances are to be observed until 1 September, or until 1 November at the discretion of the elders and the gonfalonier.” Even the shifting deadlines articulated for “re-opening” seem eerily familiar, as we debate endlessly what and when to shut down, when and what to reopen.

    And what of that exceedingly unempirical coda? “Saving that anything in them which is contrary to the liberty of the church shall be null and void, and of no effect.” Surely we differ here. We are the heirs of Enlightenment, and so we assume that we are utterly unlike denizens of the Middle Ages who lived long before the sciences and secularizing tendencies of modernity. We might imagine that the “Dark Ages” were incapable of perceiving potential conflicts between different explanatory frameworks such as theodicy and empirical medicine. Or that if they did perceive them, they would nevertheless wager entirely for God.

    But even without public-opinion surveys, we may be confident that the vast majority of medieval people living through the advent of the plague would have agreed with the Americans today who have concluded from our tribulations that “God is telling humanity to change the way we are living.” The Black Death provoked many a theodicy, in thought and in art, and many new devotional practices, some of which (such as the flagellants) are still notorious. But if many contemporary Americans in this time of plague seem “medieval” in their interpretation of it, the opposite irony also is the case: medieval people were also and simultaneously capable of noticing the dangers of gathering for worship and ritual, thinking through conflicts between their religious inheritance and their “ground-zero empiricism,” and insisting on prioritizing public health.

    Consider just one treatise, entitled Convincing the Inquirer about the Terrible Disease, composed around 1349 by a Muslim physician living in the Islamic kingdom of Granada named Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatīb. The author’s position on the relationship between piety and empiricism is unambiguous: “One principle that cannot be ignored is that if the senses and observation oppose traditional evidence, the latter needs to be interpreted.” In a pandemic, in other words, observation should be preferred over dogma.

    Many Muslim scholars frowned on theories of contagion because they seemed to diminish the power of God by assigning agency to pathogens. But based on all observations, the author argued, “the correct course in this case [of the bubonic plague] is to interpret it according to what a group of those who affirm contagion say.” Once you accept the theory of contagion and the observed patterns of infection, the need for quarantine is evident. “There are many texts that support this, such as [the Prophet’s] saying, may God pray for Him and grant him peace: ‘The sick should not be watered with the healthy.’” In fact, to ignore the empirical evidence of contagion and continue to allow gatherings or compel attendance at mosques “is blasphemy against God, and holding the lives of Muslims to be cheap.” Tantamount to suicide, it violates the Qur’an admonition “not to contribute to your destruction with your own hands.”

    Ibn al-Khatīb was not some obscure physician without influence or power. He was chancellor and chief minister of Granada, one of the most influential statesmen and historians of Islamic Spain and North Africa. He was credited with saving his sovereign from the plague by completely isolating him in the palace of the Alhambra for a year. (The Granadans noted with satisfaction that the Christian king of neighboring Castile, their greatest enemy, died of the disease.) However that may be, his explanations for the plague’s spread do not seem significantly different from those one might expect from a public health expert advising governments today: “repeated contact with the infected at funerals, exposure to their clothing and items, living in close quarters, and overcrowding” as well as “mismanagement, carelessness and lack of awareness due to widespread ignorance and the absence of knowledge about these matters among the masses.”

    One wishes for ibn al-Khatīb’s bluntness from all public health officials in the United States. If that wish is not fulfilled, it is at least in part because of ongoing struggles in this country over the relationship between public health and piety. Again, those struggles may not be as widespread as their prominence in political and legal discourse suggests. In our survey, we asked respondents, whether, during the coronavirus outbreak, each of the following should be allowed without any restrictions, allowed but with restrictions on crowd size or physical distancing, or not allowed at all in the United States. The results showed widespread support for restrictions on constitutionally protected activities in the context of this pandemic. A meager nine percent of Americans thought at that time that in-person religious services should be allowed without restriction. Roughly the same number favored restrictions on freedom of political assembly. Moreover, the willing-ness to support restrictions on liberties seems to correspond to an evaluation of danger. There was much more support for drive-through religious services, and for allowing visits to parks (with restrictions), presumably because the public believed these to pose a lower risk of infection.

    All this is hardly because Americans think that religious freedom is not important. In a survey on religious freedom that we conducted in February 2020, before the pandemic had reached the United States, the vast majority of respondents identified religious freedom as somewhat, very, or extremely important to them. In the May poll, respondents — especially white evangelical Christians — did express concern that the prohibition on in-person religious services might violate freedom of religion. Yet at the onset of the pandemic, before restrictions on worship had been hammered into a wedge issue for the presidential campaign, they overwhelmingly favored those restrictions. Here too, the responses seem to demonstrate some weighing of risks and freedoms against each other.

    From these results we could conclude that Americans — like medieval Christians and Muslims — value religion and religious freedom, but that absent massive political effort, they do not necessarily think of these as a value independent of or absolute over others, such as public health. In our survey on religious freedom, we explicitly tested this assumption. We asked for respondents’ views on children’s vaccination exemptions based on religion. This religious exemption is allowed in many states in America, and is probably the vaccination exemption claimed with greatest frequency. We offered the following scenario: “A parent does not vaccinate their children because of religious beliefs against this practice, and the children are denied enrollment in public school because of its policy that all students must be vaccinated.” Nearly three quarters replied that un-vaccinated children should indeed be denied enrollment, and that this denial does not constitute a violation of the child or parent’s religious freedom.

    These results may seem surprising, given the high visibility of religious freedom arguments in recent anti-vaccination movements and in politics and the courts during the current pandemic. That high visibility suggests that the public’s ability to weigh competing claims of piety and public health will continue to be put to the test. The same is true of the abilities of our politicians and our courts. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco put the stakes clearly in its 2-1 ruling in South Bay United Pentecostal Church, et al. v. Gavin Newsom, Governor Of California, et al., upholding the Governor’s restrictions on religious services. “We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,” the majority wrote, before quoting the famous dissent in a free-speech case by Justice Robert Jackson in 1949: “There is a danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Last spring a more divided Supreme Court (5-4) upheld the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, citing a different precedent Marshall v. United States, from 1974: when officials “‘undertake…to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,’ their latitude ‘must be especially broad.’” By late November Amy Coney Barret had replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and any such deference to officials acting in a crisis was a memory. Responding to an application from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and another from two synagogues, the Court ruled 5-4 that the restrictions violated the First Amendment’s protection for the free exercise of religion.

    In times of pestilential danger, facts and meanings will both be desperately sought. But the searches sometimes interfere with one another. Suicide pacts and latitude for ground-zero empiricism: I cannot help noting how similar (for now) the majority reasoning of our highest courts is to that of Ibn al-Khatīb, the medieval chief minister of Muslim Granada, as he advocated anti-contagion measures such as the closure of mosques in the face of horrors hitherto unknown. When it comes to “medical and scientific uncertainties,” the present day is much advanced from the Middle Ages. But when it comes to the capacity for suicide pacts between ideals, values, and liberties, perhaps not so much.

    Romance Without Love, Love Without Romance

    THE ETHICS OF BREAKUP

    I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once we painted a giant fireplace onto the wall of her apartment as decoration for a dinner party we were hosting — and then, at the end of the party, she led our guests up the stairs onto the roof of the build-ing, bringing with her a boombox playing Strauss. I climbed up the fire escape in a ballgown. I held out my hand. We waltzed with speed and gusto. Our friends and professors looked on, terrified: there was no railing. Another time she planned a scavenger hunt through San Francisco, and I found myself in a store selling sex toys, forced to examine each device meticulously to find the next clue. The finale of the scavenger hunt was at a disco, and she danced with me there, too, even though I had to cover my ears — I am very sensitive to sound — and there is nothing in the world dorkier than someone dancing with her hands over her ears.

    I haven’t done as much dancing in the seventeen years since I ended that relationship. The breakup happened like this: we had planned an elaborate outing in Sonoma County for her birthday. The picnic supplies alone took days to gather. We left early, and got home late, and, as she told me when she hugged me goodnight, everything in between had been perfect. It had been a perfect day. The next morning, I wrote her a letter telling her that I did not want to be friends with her anymore.

    I had my reasons, of course. As I say, she is crazy. I am, too, but in a very different way. The immense effort it took for me to spend a whole day with her and ensure that it was “perfect” — that I did nothing that would offend, upset, or bother her — proved to me that we just didn’t work. And I thought: when a relationship does not work, each party has the right to exit. It will hurt, but we will get over it, and we will both be better off in the end. The thing is: the pain hasn’t gone away. I still miss her. I still dream about her. And lately I have come to think that part of the problem lies in how I broke things off: unilaterally. I took matters into my own hands, as though there were no rules governing how you break up with someone.

    “All’s fair in love and war” dates to 1850, when the ethics of warfare were very different than they are today. Two world wars generated explicit international agreements as to behaviors prohibited in wartime; we now reject wars of conquest and plunder; we harbor deep suspicions about the glorification of military violence. Have we made similarly substantive revisions in the ethics of love? 

    “All’s fair…” made its debut in the then popular but now obscure British novel Frank Fairlegh: Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil, by a certain Frank E. Smedley. The scene runs as follows. Frank, on the brink of unilaterally breaking off relations with his love-interest, recoils at opening the seal on a stolen letter — “I cannot avail myself of information obtained in such a manner!” His more pragmatic interlocutor is the one who has the “All’s fair…” approach: since the letter promises to reveal her virtue and innocence, he insists that Frank should open it. It is notable that Frank’s high-mindedness about invasions of privacy at no point extends to questioning his own breakup plan. He apprehends no moral duty to talk the issue through with the girl.

    Today, as in 1850, high-minded people feel free to condone unilateral breakup — in romantic as well as non-romantic love. When people act as I did, exiting a friendship perceived as, on balance, detrimental, we tend to view the decision as sad but not immoral. The reason is clear: we see love as having a certain kind of autonomy from the space of moral judgment. Even the arch-moralizer Kant agreed that you cannot be “morally obligated” to have feelings for someone; and it was for that reason that he interpreted the biblical command to “love thy neighbor” in terms of the rules governing your voluntary treatment of your neighbor. You do not actually have to feel love for them. You cannot legislate yourself into experiencing passion, empathy, or lust.

    And this is part of what we love about love: that it affords us an opportunity to lose control, to go a little crazy. But does it really follow from this that a free and clean exit is available? I don’t think so: even if it is impossible to moralize one’s way into passion, it remains open to us to moralize about passions that are already in place. There are more regulations governing exiting relationships than entering them.

    These regulations exist not in spite of but because of the fact that the connections between people are idiosyncratic and passionate. It is precisely because such connections are real and irreplaceable that disconnection is not a trivial matter. Over time, people’s lives grow together, such that what happens to one person affects another. When I come to care deeply about you, I can actually feel your pain. And that lateral growth also makes vertical growth possible: with your hand in mine, I become someone who waltzes, paints walls, and drinks Japanese tea that looks and tastes like the forest floor. (Having spent a year abroad in Osaka, she introduced me to tea ceremonies of various kinds.) 

    You can’t waltz by yourself. When I lose you, I also lose the me I became for you. And vice versa. Which is why cutting you off, once we have grown together, is an act of violence. I am not “cutting” anything visible, like your arm or leg, but I am nonetheless cutting away something that is a part of you — me. It is still an amputation. And I am amputating — acting on your life — without your consent. As I see it, cheating on someone is not in any obvious way more wrong than unilaterally cutting off relations from them. These are both ways of taking into your own hands the agreements that bind your life to another person’s life; they are acts of psychological violence.

    A decade after that breakup, I faced the prospect of divorce. I consulted with friends and family, many of whom advised me not even to discuss our problems with my husband, but simply to quash my concerns until the children were grown. The consensus was that I was morally obligated to stay married for the sake of my children. But even if I could have kept my discontent secret, which was doubtful, I felt that doing so would have been a deep betrayal of the life that I shared with my husband. And once I did, he agreed that divorce was the only option.

    The strange thing — or so it seemed to me — was that once we did divorce, those same friends and family pushed me towards “a clean break.” I should stop having regular meals with my ex; we should separate our bank accounts; we should reduce our connection to the minimum required for co-parenting our children. One person recounted, somewhat proudly, how he hadn’t spoken to his ex since their children graduated from college, decades earlier. Now, a decade after the divorce, the fact that I still share close friendship and many everyday matters of life with my ex is perceived by many as peculiar and in some way wrong, and forgivable only to the extent that it is beneficial for the children.

    The parent-child bond is the most striking exception to a blanket “all’s fair” permissivism about love. It would take extraordinary circumstances for someone to feel justified in disowning their child, and this makes sense: children depend profoundly on their parents, and moreover they did not consent to enter into this dependence. My view is that a relationship with a friend or a spouse differs from a relation-ship with one’s child in degree, not in kind. My husband and I had come to depend on one another in many ways over seven years of marriage, and those forms of dependence could not simply be ignored or wished or decided away. 

    As for consent, it is not an alternative to dependence but a mechanism for generating dependence — mostly by way of tacit and gradual and small-scale agreements, but occasion-ally, as in the case of marriage vows, by way of sudden and large-scale agreements. We don’t simply inflict our lives on others; rather, we learn, over time, to coordinate, to synchronize, to co-deliberate. We grow together, bit by bit, by way of agreement and experience: the end result is something too real to be annulled by one party’s simply deciding to opt out.

    When it comes to moralizing, people tend to take an all-or-nothing approach: either a bond is sacrosanct, entailing a demand of total sacrifice, or everyone is free to “just walk away.” When I got divorced, I drank the kool-aid that said I was scarring my children for life. That turned out to be false — they are fine, more than fine, really — but let the record show that I believed it, and went ahead anyway: I was not prepared to completely sacrifice my own happiness for theirs. Nor was it only for their sake that I was reluctant to completely sacrifice the relationship I had with their father. Even if I could have done so, I did not want to just walk away from him. I care about him. I do not want to lose the me I am for him. And I owe him things. No break between us could or should be “clean.”

    The extremes of total bondage and total freedom strike me as being, somehow, on the wrong scale for human relation-ships. They are appropriate for creatures much larger than us — or much smaller, perhaps. We humans need to do our living, and our moralizing, in the middle. Often a relation-ship that doesn’t work in one form might work in another form, a renegotiated one. And even if no livable arrangement can be arrived at, such an ending should be the product of the reasoning of all parties involved. 

    Consider how far we have come from the ethics of The Iliad, in which Diomedes is glorified for choking a river with the blood of his enemies. We now understand that moral excellence lies less in using, and more in knowing how not to use, physical force. Humanity has been slower to acknowledge the reality of psychological injury and trauma, and correspondingly slower to see the rules governing violence in that domain. I propose that one of those rules is that you are not allowed to “just walk away.” 

    Obviously I am not saying you can never break up, or get divorced. What I am saying is that all is not fair when it comes to these endings; you cannot simply cut people off; you are not free to leave at any time. If your life is entwined with someone, then a new arrangement between the two of you must be the product of an agreement you can both live with. Also, you must be open, forever, to revising that agreement if and when the other person offers reasons for doing so. 

    Those requirements are robustly ethical. In my break-up letter to my friend, I made the usual excuses, arguing that the relationship was in some way “toxic”; that this was the best course for both of us; that the break “had to” happen. Whether or not those claims are true, enforcing them on her without her consent was wrong. It was like shoving words in her mouth and forcing her to say them. Instead of deliberating together with her about how to move forwards, I took matters into my own hands: I tore out a part of her life, and a part of mine, violently, just because that violence seemed to me to be in my interest. If that kind of behavior is not wrong, what is?

    Which is not to say that it is wrong in absolutely every instance. Just as there are extraordinary cases in which physical violence is called for, so, too, with psychological violence. Some relationships really are toxic; sometimes a unilateral break is the only form of self-defense available to a person subjected to the predations of another. But if you think about how often people call their exes “jerks” or “bad people” or “evil” and how infrequently we otherwise accept this as a characterization of adults we personally know, you will see that we have reason to be suspicious of our own breakup behaviors. We vilify the other to vindicate the shortcut of force.

    And yet the tendency to cheat our way into justification — to make all seem fair when all is not fair — is really a cause for optimism. It is women, more than men, who see the need to vilify, and that makes us some sort of moral vanguard. If you think of your exes as a string of losers and villains, you are, in effect, conceding that that is what they would have to be in order for you to have been permitted to treat them as you have treated them. (But think about your friends’ exes, and those of your friends’ friends: how many losers and villains can there be?)

    It is important to remember that the scope and the stringency of breakup rules are proportional to the depth of connection achieved. If we ignore this, we are apt to caricature the ethics of breakup as mandating contractual arrangements for turning down a second date. If there is nothing there yet — no bond, connection, no fund of shared experience, no grown-togetherness — then moralism is indeed misplaced. There is no symmetry between entry and exit.

    THE ROMANTIC EMPIRICIST

    Aristotle is likely to strike you as unromantic, especially if you come to him after Plato. In dialogue after dialogue, Plato confronts us with the bottomlessly destructive but trans-formative power of erotic attachment. Plato is familiar with what a person is capable of doing for the merest glimpse of his beloved, and it terrifies him, and he is riveted by his own terror. By contrast, “tame” is not a tame enough word for Aristotle’s discussion of love in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is a long discussion — two whole books, a fifth of the entire work — and some of the topics discussed are: what beneficiaries feel for their benefactors, how lifelong friends share thoughts and speeches, the affection of business partnerships. No sex. No passion. No motorcycle rides in the rain. It’s true that there are no motorcycles in Plato either, but that is only because they weren’t invented yet. Nicomachean Ethics rewritten for the third millennium would still be decidedly free of walks on the wild side. 

    So Aristotle is not a romantic about interpersonal attachments — but that is not the only place romanticism can take root. What about other areas? Poetry is a classic one. Aristotle’s aesthetic theory inaugurated a whole tradition of detached, icy-cold, arm’s-length analysis. Maybe he is right that tragedies give rise to cathartic experiences, but I doubt anyone has ever had one of those while reading the Poetics. Religion? Aristotle’s god is Thought Thinking Itself, a god who didn’t make the universe and doesn’t care whether we live or die. Social Justice? Aristotle is no utopian, and he is unmoved by the plight of the worst off. Aristotle does not romanticize nature either, or wax poetic about ecosystems or sunsets. Unlike other scientists, he does not see the totality of the natural world as a “thing” to be appreciated or even theorized. When he does speak of it, he does so in a maximally unromantic way, as providing a set of tools for humans or environments for animals. 

    In fact Aristotle rarely uses the word “nature” the way we do: instead of speaking of “nature” as the sub-lunar totality inhabited by lions, caterpillars, dolphins, and the like, he uses the word to refer to each of those inhabitants, severally rather than jointly. He calls them “natural things” or describes each one as having its own proprietary “nature.” With this observation, we draw nearer to the fire of the passion that burns in Aristotle. There is one subject that quickens his heart: animals, more specifically body parts. It is not in his Politics, Ethics, Poetics, Physics, or Metaphysics that we find Starry-Eyed Aristotle. If you want a lyrical Aristotle, you have to read his Parts of Animals.

    Where else in the corpus do you find him talking about glimpses of beloveds:

    Just as the briefest glimpse of someone we love is more enjoyable than a precise and steady vision of other things, even great ones, so too the most glancing contact with celestial bodies yields more pleasure than we can get from all this earthly stuff around us. For the planets are the noblest of all. 

    Now this passage demotes animals (“all this earthly stuff around us”) by contrast with stars and planets. But if you have read your share of romance novels, you will recognize the trope of the contrastive set-up: “Her face was plain, nothing to remark upon…” Aristotle goes on to say that animals may not be lofty, but they have the inner beauty of what is both near and knowable: 

    Even when it comes to those organisms bereft of sensible charms, the nature in them is a kind of artisan who delivers incredible pleasures of the mind to those who, because of their philosophical nature, are able to discern the causes of things.

    The word “nature” shows up twice in the Greek of this passage, as in my translation. First, the nature of the thing to be known, for instance a species of tiny crab whose back feet are flattened — almost as if by some artisan! — into the shape of oars to aid them swimming. That “nature” finds its twin in the nature of the knower: a philosopher, on the lookout for the causes of things. Aristotle’s famous four causes — formal, final, efficient, material — are the pillars of his scientific worldview, a worldview that stands firmly opposed to Plato’s disdain for (what he took to be) the unknowability of the sensible world. 

    Plato was disturbed by the fact that nothing in the sublunar world stays the same: every object in the office I’m sitting in — the papers, books, desk, carpet — is slowly falling apart, becoming not-itself, transitioning between being and not being. Even a beautiful boy does not stay beautiful for long. Nothing does — except the Form of the Beautiful! And so, just as in Raphael’s painting, Plato redirected our attention away from this muddy mess, upward, to the Forms that are always what they are. Relatedly, the forms are simple — unlike someone who is both beautiful and human and seventeen years old and brown-haired. The boy can lose his beauty and stay a boy, whereas the form of the beautiful does not dissolve into a puddle of unrelated qualities. It is beautiful, period. And forever.

    Aristotle’s big move was to notice a method in what struck Plato as madness. While granting that destruction is one kind of change to which the sublunar realm is subject, Aristotle denied that all changes should be understood on the model of destruction. When animals are generated, alter, grow, and locomote, they change in such a way as to hold themselves together. Their changes exhibit a pattern, an internal logic. The logic is complex: there are patterns that hold across all multiple animals (organs for reproduction, nutrition, locomotion, perception) and then patterns that are specific to a given class of animals (swimming vs. flying) or just one species (see paddle-feet of tiny crabs, above). Each species gives our minds a foothold in the empirical world; they pair the logical nature of our minds with a natural logic of self-transformation.

    How do they do this? By being divided into organic parts! “Organic,” organikos, in Greek means “tool-like”: the parts of an animal, like the “oar-feet” of the crab, are the tools that it uses for performing its various functions. The methodology of Aristotle’s Parts of Animals is to read the diachronic logic of how an animal changes over time into a synchronic logic of organ-parts: the parts of an animal are tools for self-changing. Unlike the (random) set of attributes that any physical object might have, the parts of an animal are “bound together”: they are not only undetached, but in fact undetachable. Aristotle explains this special rule for understanding body parts — his famous “homonymy principle” — in yet another poetic passage in the introductory portion of the Parts of Animals. He says that a body part — an eye or a hand — cannot be separated from the whole, living body. A severed hand, he says, is no more a hand than the marble hand of a sculpture. It may look like a hand, but part of what it is to be a hand is to be the sort of thing that is used for grasping and pointing. What goes for the hand goes for the body as a whole: a dead body is a body in name only. (Hence the word “body” or “hand” is a mere homonym when used to describe a dead body or a severed hand.)

    Aristotle makes life an essential rather than an accidental property of the matter that it permeates. The dead body, that is, the non-body, is something that decomposes — it merits Platonic change-cynicism; but a living body is something different altogether, undergoing a very different set of changes. Unlike a Form, an animal is not unified by being simple. Yet it isn’t a puddle of properties, either. By virtue of having organic parts that depend both on one another and the presence of life for being what they are, the animal is a unified multiplicity. And this, insists Aristotle, is a thing of beauty that Plato totally missed out on.

    Empiricism after Aristotle becomes something “hard-nosed,” something to contrast with idealism. The no-nonsense empiricist sees the world as a check on theories concocted in the armchair; his project is that of bringing the high-flying mind down to earth. Aristotle’s is not the empiricism of the test but of the quest. Unlike later scientists, Aristotle did not understand the natural world as a testing stone for the “laws” that we try to produce to render it intelligible as a whole. Rather, he saw it as a hunting ground populated by living nuggets of intelligibility. These unified multiplicities are the mind’s quarry, which can be sniffed out by the one who discerns causes. Aristotle, you might say, is an Obama-style romantic: animals are the changes we can believe in. 

    Aristotle anticipates the distaste — he calls it the “childish aversion” — that most people feel for lower animals (bugs, worms, etc.), and tries to win them over to his point of view with an anecdote. He tells the story about the time the philosopher Heraclitus was warming himself in his kitchen. Guests arrived unexpectedly and they were hesitant to join him there. It seemed uncouth to step into such a lowly space as a kitchen. Heraclitus bade them enter by saying: “There are gods here, too.” Aristotle presents this as a lesson for how to think about the sublunar world: “in every class of animals there is something to behold in wonder.” The animals and animal-parts that disgusted you are, in fact, things of wonder. They are not wonderful because God made them. (He didn’t.) Animals have internal principles of change and rest, which is to say: they make themselves, continuously, over and over again. They author their own being. They are not divinely generated. They are, simply, divine. 

    Like his contemporaries, Aristotle was impressed enough by the regular motions of the planets to classify them as divine. He saw the planets as wonderful, and lofty, and noble. But they are too far away to really love, especially given the possibility of loving the one you’re with: Parts of Animals adopts the “girl next door” approach, pointing, over and over again, to these whirlwinds of intelligibility, held together through constant change by a pattern all their own: logical blood; systematic skull-sutures; distinctive dung. Slugs, mice, sea-urchins, goats. These things, and their parts, might look ordinary, or boring, or gross, but they are tiny self-creating demiurges, islands of logic, gloriously gory. Is there a heart so hard as to remain unmoved? 

    ROMANCE

    On Wikipedia I never skip past the “personal life” section. So I know that Tove Jansson met her lover using a secret attic passageway, and that they summered together on an island off the coast of Finland. I know that Ingmar Bergman’s many marriages included all the mothers of his children — except Liv Ullmann, who might have been his true soulmate. I know that Vladimir Mayakovsky dedicated many of his poems to a woman whose husband sanctioned their love. The Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy is low on amorous content, except in the case of the John Stuart Mill-Harriet Taylor Mill saga, which it covers in satisfying detail. 

    I know these things because I care. And I am not alone. The English word “romance” is literally synonymous with the words “excitement,” “fascination,” and “allure.” The sales of romance novels total more than a billion dollars a year, and many non-“romance” novels nonetheless leverage romance as a key plot device; as do a great plurality of pop songs, poems, movies, and so on. It’s not hard to guess why: as soon as the slightest suggestion of the possibility of romance surfaces in a narrative, I start willing the characters to get together with a passion that belies the fact that not only I do not know these people, they are not even real. And yet if I could push them into one another’s arms, I would. 

    For all our interest in romance, we don’t seem to theorize about it very much. Friendship, attachment, relationships, commitment, all those put-you-to-sleep topics are well-covered in analytic philosophy, but there is no philosophical account of the agonizing process by which lovers reveal themselves to one another and learn that they belong — or do not belong — together. There is no philosophy of all the topics covered in the pop songs: the longing for a soulmate, the heartbreak of rejection, the insecurity of the getting-to-know you phase, the joy of romantic union, the pain of missing one’s beloved. My sense is that philosophers view the word “romance” with some embarrassment, and the result is that we lack a theory of it.

    Nor can we claim to have mastered the practice: for all the books written on how to get someone to marry or sleep with you, I don’t think anyone would even pretend to write a how-to guide on falling in love. There are online lists of tips on how to keep passion in your marriage, to be sure, but following them is about as romantic as online dating. Romance commands our rapt attention and draws our interest magnet-ically, but we do not have, or even seem to seek, the most basic understanding of how it works, or how to bring it about. We are obsessively inept at romance. 

    A friend once told me of a girl she grew up with in Russia who, as a child, was terrified at the prospect of falling in love: she thought that after falling in love you die. Raised on a steady diet of fairy tales, this insightful girl saw past the “happily ever after” tagline to the fact that in story after story, after the prince and the princess finally overcome all their trials to be united in marriage, the next thing that happens is: nothing. After you fall in love, the story of your life is over.

    Growing up means learning all the ways people rebel against “happily ever after.” Affairs, for instance. And yet that is but a new way to fall off the cliff of romance: whether the unfaithful husband opts, in the end, to stay with his wife, or leave her for the new woman, as soon as he resolves this dilemma, the romance is once again completed.

    And there is this question: Instead of having an affair, why not pursue romance within your marriage? The answer to it lies in the moralistic tone with which it is usually posed. If something as wholesomely innocuous as marital affection lent itself easily to romance, well, a sign of that would be that those lists of tips would be actually useful for some of us, and unnecessary for most of us. Marital romance is close to a contra-diction in terms, which is why it is often a response to external obstacles: children, challenges, tragedies — even affairs.

    One cannot avoid sympathy for the rage of the long-suffering wife whose quest for more connection with her ever distant husband ends in the discovery that he sought this connection in the arms of another. And yet her husband’s unavailability may have been precisely what made him a possible object of romantic striving for her in the first place. Romance is a tricky thing to want. And this cannot be written off as a problem only for “bad marriages.”

    Even fans of marriage such as myself — I’ve done it twice — must acknowledge that it has a world-class PR team. Think about what a coup it was for marriage to win over the gays, rather than allowing them to build a competing institution to which many of the straights might eventually defect. And then to spin this as a victory for gays rather than for marriage — “ok, fine, if you absolutely insist, we’ll let you in” — is the mark of master manipulators.

    And so when someone claims that lifelong romance is simply a matter of being willing to work at it — as though anyone has ever been unwilling to do this kind of “work”! — I am inclined to dismiss this as moralistic scolding; and I am equally suspicious of the reassurance that time somehow automatically, quietly, imperceptibly deepens the marital connection. I am struck by the contrast between how much pressure one is under to claim to love their spouse more deeply with each passing year, and how little clarity there is about what “deepening” even means in this context. (“Imperceptibly,” indeed.) 

    The fact that romantic yearnings stubbornly resist incorporation leads some to simply dismiss their validity: “all anyone can really want, at the end of the day, is a partner who provides solid, reliable, warm, affectionate companion-ship.” Sorry, Team Marriage. I cannot agree, all the beauties of conjugal life notwithstanding. The simple truth is that many people evidently want more romance than a marriage, even a good one, can offer them. And no one seems to know why.

    When we were falling in love, I introduced my (not yet) husband to this Magnetic Fields song, and he explained its meaning to me:

    You are a splendid butterfly
    It is your wings that make you beautiful
    And I could make you fly away
    But I could never make you stay
    You said you were in love with me
    Both of us know that that’s impossible
    And I could make you rue the day
    But I could never make you stay
    Not for all the tea in China
    Not if I could sing like a bird
    Not for all North Carolina
    Not for all my little words
    Not if I could write for you
    The sweetest song you ever heard
    It doesn’t matter what I’ll do
    Not for all my little words
    Now that you’ve made me want to die
    You tell me that you’re unboyfriendable
    And I could make you pay and pay
    But I could never make you stay

    He said the message of this song is that you cannot make anyone love you and you cannot make yourself love anyone. No words, no theories, no commands, no machinations afford a person romantic control, because there is no such thing as romantic control.

    One thing I have noticed about times of heightened romance is that life seems to become story-like: little details, such as discussing the song in the car, stand out, and other details, such as where we were driving to, fade into the background. Events take on symbolic meaning, and some of them become pivotal or climactic. Even those who had the (romantic) misfortune of meeting by means of online dating will find ways to tell that story in such a way that makes its result a surprise. Romance, like humor, must always be surprising. Just as everyone is a comedian to their own baby, everyone is a novelist of their own romances. 

    If romance lends to real life the shape and feel of a narrative, it is also true that fictional narratives become more lifelike when romance enters the picture. In a book or a movie, the emergence of a romantic storyline corresponds to an awakening of attention and interest in the audience — as though, finally, the events were somehow happening to us. Just about every genre of serialized TV show — from comedic sitcoms to detective shows to soap operas — uses the prospect of romantic union between the characters to keep us interested. 

    There is a connection between the fact that the romance of others can seem so intimately relevant to us, and the fact that we approach our own romances through a kind of aesthetic haze. If something very important and earth-shatteringly good can be happening to me, even though I am not in charge of it, and do not even understand it, then the significance of events is not a matter of my controlling them. Romance does not address me as a knower, or as a doer, but as a powerless appreciator waiting breathlessly to see what the butterfly does next. And once I have been relegated to the position of spectator with respect to my own life, I can take that same approach to the lives of others. If I can see myself as a character in a story and still care, why should I not be able to care about other characters in stories?

    Romance fictionalizes life; romance vivifies fiction.

    ETHICAL SELF-BLINDNESS

    When you get what you wanted, that doesn’t necessarily satisfy you. Sometimes we don’t know what will make us happy; sometimes we don’t want the right things. Call this condition “ethical self-blindness.”

    I borrow the term “self-blind” from the philosopher Sydney Shoemaker, who introduced it to describe a hypothetical condition of introspective failure. A self-blind person in Shoemaker’s sense is someone who cannot “look within” to discover what she believes or desires, though she can make inferences about her mental states by observing what she is inclined to say or do. Such a person has the same access to her own beliefs and desires as she has to those of other people. Shoemaker raises this possibility only to dismiss it: he thinks that we cannot actually imagine a human being who constitutionally lacks inner sense.

    Unlike Schoemaker’s self-blindness, ethical self-blindness is a term meant to refer to a condition that is not only possible, but actual and commonplace. It is all around us. Someone with ethical self-blindness lacks a certain kind of first-personal expertise—not that which pertains to identifying the psycho-logical contents of her own mind, but that which pertains to picking out the items that conduce to her welfare, her happiness, her good. 

    Ethical self-blindness is, in fact, our original condition: children need parenting because they do not know what is good for them. Children are not self-blind in Shoemaker’s sense, of course—quite the contrary—their sense of what they want is often especially powerful and intense. When I was about eleven years old, what I wanted more than anything was a small rubbery doll, shaped like a worm, that glowed in the dark. It was called a “glow worm.” My mother spent a long time—in my memory it was eons—resisting my pleas. She couldn’t understand why I would want such a stupid toy, especially since I never played with dolls. Eventually, however, she gave in and bought me one; they only cost a few dollars. 

    As soon as I got it, I took a pair of scissors and cut it into about ten pieces. My mother looked on, horrified. (I was after the magic of the glow-in-the-dark material, and the fact that it took the shape of a cutesy worm was incidental to my purposes. I knew that if I revealed my plan from the outset, I would never get one.) My objective was to put a piece of glow into each of the pockets of my dresses, and then I would never be in total darkness. This did not pan out—the material glowed much less than I thought it would, and it had to be “charged” by being held up to the light before it would glow for even a short time. The reality of owning a dismembered worm doll came did not measure up to my dream of having pockets filled with light.

    And why did I dream of this in the first place? I wasn’t even afraid of the dark! Every parent is familiar with the phenomenon of handing a child the gift he has been begging for and seeing it neglected in minutes. The dreams of children are wild, passionate, and misguided. And so we need our parents to make decisions for us—about what to eat, when to sleep, how to spend our time (“I’m bored!”). At a certain point this rankles, and we begin to rebelliously insist on choosing for ourselves. 

    Unfortunately, however, the leap from the orbit of parental authority does not itself cure one’s ethical self-blind-ness. Peer pressure enters as a stopgap, and replacing the authority of parents with that of friends does not always represent much progress. How does a person learn to want the things that really do make her happy? My suggestion is that she does it by learning to induce self-blindness in the other sense—not the ethical one, but the kind that Shoemaker dismissed as a philosophical fiction.  

    One thing that filled me with frustration as a child was the fairy-tale trope of wishing oneself into misery. Over and over again, we find the same slip twixt the cup and the lip — you get to marry the princess, but she’s a jerk; you get to live forever, but as a grasshopper; everything you touch turns to gold, including your relatives. I hated these stories, and felt sure that I would not make the same mistakes as the idiotic fairy tale people all those wishes were wasted on. It might appear that wishes inevitably conduce to happiness: the wisher has no aim but to benefit herself, and the wish gives her unlimited resources for doing so. What could go wrong? The answer is: ethical self-blindness. Stories about wishing gone awry are trying to inform children that they do not know what is good for them, and it is almost definitive of childhood to want to shut one’s ears to this particular message. 

    The alternative to wish is work: exercising agency in guiding your goal to realization, thereby steering it out of the way of countless bad options, transforming it in ways that are responsive to what the world has to offer, and thus ending up with something you are actually happy with. Consider the trope of the evil genie who will give you the hamburger you so fervently desire…but he will sadistically make sure that it is encased in a block of lucite, or made from human flesh, or the size of a grain of sand. Since wishing means delegating the filling out of the details to another, there are always loopholes for the genie to exploit. Wishes have a schematic, underspecified, almost cartoonlike character, and this is what makes the mental images associated with wishes so vividly introspectively accessible. Since I am content to leave out most of the details in my wishes, it is easy for me generate the mental image that represents exactly what I want. For example: pockets filled with light. The wishing mind has perfect Shoemakerian self-insight.

    The working mind, by contrast, must itself chart the path between the goal and whatever concrete option out in the world comes closest to satisfying it. Over the course of this journey, its conception of what is wanted is never fixed, but always shifting. The working mind is a mind in motion, learning to accommodate to reality: hunger, some specific food, ending up at the grocery store, cooking, eating; or choosing a paper topic, finding a thesis, outline, writing, revising, rewriting. 

    When we go to a restaurant, we short-circuit the food acquisition process along wish-like lines: hunger to plate. The same happens when we buy a term paper online: topic to paper. The difference, of course, is that in the first case the cooking was merely instrumental, whereas the thinking that was supposed to take one from topic to paper was the entire point of the exercise. I have found, over many years assigning papers, that even when they are honestly produced, shortcuts of one kind or another abound in them: summary in place of analysis; a profusion of weak arguments instead of developing one strong one; failure to proof-read. My pet peeve is when students treat a literary text as a source to be mined for examples of one’s independently chosen thesis, rather than allowing the thesis to emerge organically from careful reading. The student’s aim is, first and foremost, to get the paper done; she will do almost anything to avoid thinking.

    Why do people find thinking so unpleasant? My proposal is this: thinking (up new things) entails alienating yourself from the thoughts that (already) occupy your mind. Thinking puts a damper on introspection. 

    A lot of what we call “distraction” is simply having a fixed, immediately available mental content stand as alternative to the vague, fuzzy, provisional, work-in-progress character of whatever the working mind was working on. Distractions are in the wish family, as are cravings, which likewise involve an insistent introspective attention to schematically defined object of desire. 

    The working mind is bereft of such vivid, perfect access to its own contents. We speak of focusing on goals, but this does not mean holding some fixed, wish-like conception of the goal—rather we mean constantly playing with the interface between goal and world. The malleability of such thinking prevents me from ever being able to say, “this is precisely what I want.” 

    The struggles we face to achieve self-control and resist immediate gratification are struggles to endure alienation from the contents of our own minds. It is not an accident that the children who prevailed in the marshmallow test were prone to close their eyes, or to turn their backs to the marshmallow, or to say our loud, “there is no marshmallow.” Strength of will involves inducing a kind of self-blindness—not the ethical kind, but the Shoemakerian kind. Shoemaker is right that introspective failure cannot be the natural default for any human mind, but it can become second nature. It is desirable to cultivate some degree of self-blindness in oneself, because thought is the enemy of thinking.

    When we find ourselves succumbing to distraction or the cravings of the moment; when we choose wishful fantasizing over meaningful work; when we take shortcuts that leave us disappointed in ourselves, we are inclined to think of this behavior as childish. Adults are continuously engaged in an effort to sideline our idées fixes, so as to be open to re-alignment with reality. I watch my child, immersed in imeginative play, and I see him “open a door” where I know there is none. He sees what he wants to see, I see what is there. His mind is sharply introspectively available to him; I hold mine at a distance from myself, the better to employ it for thinking. Or at least: much of the time, I do this. It is easy to forget that adults, too, are capable of dreams that are wild, passionate, and misguided. 

    In the domain of love, romance, and eros, we encounter a characteristically adult form of unrealism: hyper-attunement to the contents of our own minds and desires, and a corresponding inclination to privilege fantasy over reality. If we say that love is “blind,” we may use the term in the ethical sense—love drives us into the arms of our own misery and not the Shoemakerian one. Nothing could be more introspectively available to someone than her feelings of heartbreak  or lust or jealousy. It is when their contents are most adult  that the operations of our minds most perfectly resemble those of children.

    Why does romantic rejection hurt and sting as much as it does? Because we have some image of ourselves, some beautiful picture of how happy we could be if only we could have that one thing—which is to say, that one person—that we want. And then that very person snatches away our dream of pockets filled with light, and leaves us with nothing but a dismembered worm doll.