October 7: The Tragedy of the “Debate”

    Three months after its barbaric attack on southern Israel, Hamas published a memorandum explaining its actions. “The events of October 7 must be put in their broader context,” it said. That broader context, according to Hamas, is “all cases of struggle against colonialism.” Zionism is a “colonial project,” according to the memorandum, and Israel is therefore an “illegal entity.” These days this is not an uncommon analysis. In the West, Zionism’s relation to colonialism has become a political shibboleth, shouted from the streets and the campuses. According to the rules of the present discussion,  tell me whether you think that Zionism is colonialism and  I will tell you whether you are a Zionist apologist or an  antisemitic bigot. 

    The confusion here is not only political but also intellectual.  The primary task of theoretical terms such as colonialism  and imperialism is to elucidate the facts, and to offer an explanation of the facts that may be critically examined. They are not meant to serve as badges of ideological loyalty. These abstract terms must be judged as concepts before they are admitted as slogans. The first question, then, is whether the post-colonial framework is helpful for making sense of the situation. Is it useful for understanding the unrelenting crisis tormenting Palestinians and Israelis? More urgently, is it helpful for resolving it? 

    Let us begin at the beginning. Like other colonial efforts, Zionism was a European movement that aimed to transpose Europeans (and, later, non-Europeans) to a land populated by non-Europeans. It strove to create a European state, or state-like, entity in the Levant. Prima facie, this sounds like colonialism. But it is hardly the whole story. Zionists never saw themselves as shouldering “the white man’s burden,” as Kipling infamously put it. Jews took to Palestine to escape persecution and squalor, not to partake in la mission civilisatrice or to promote imperial powers. Their objective was to leave Europe, where Jews were themselves the domestic victims of the imperial states, not to carry Europe’s flag to Palestine. If anything, early Zionists wished to sever ties with their places of birth. Their descendants certainly do not see themselves as ambassadors of Polish, German, Russian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Yemeni or other metropoles. 

    Colonial imperialism provided the context in which Zionism took shape — how could it not in a world dominated by colonial powers? In his attempt to lay the foundations for a national home for Jews, Herzl wooed the Ottoman Sultan and the German Kaiser. His successor in the Zionist leadership, Chaim Weizmann, secured the Balfour Declaration from the British after they seized Palestine from the Ottomans. (Many decades later Yasser Arafat courted first the Soviets and then the Americans.) But Zionists did not seek to impose their culture or their religion on the Arab population of Palestine, nor did they exploit the land’s natural resources for the benefit of their European motherlands. Jewish émigrés to Palestine — before the war and certainly after it — were more refugees than colonial settlers. 

    Then there is the idea of “settler-colonialism,” defined by the sociologist Gershon Shafir as “the active repossession  of land and its repopulation, most commonly by white immigrants from Europe, through the exclusion, expulsion, or elimination of native peoples.” He added that the Zionist program undeniably involved “the creation of new settlements, over and against the wishes of native peoples.” But these empirical characteristics, these facts, do not explain what happened, and why. Was the pre-Zionist Jewish minority in Palestine less entitled to expand its population and ownership of land than the Arab majority? Did it aim to “destroy and replace” the indigenous population? 

    To fit Zionism into the settler-colonial mold, it is useful to ignore the fact that Jews were indigenous in Palestine, albeit a minority, and that they had been forcibly exiled from their land without ever having renounced their loyalty to it. It is also useful to forget that alongside the great displacement of Palestinians within the mandate of Palestine in 1948, there was a parallel displacement of Jews. In every area conquered by Arab forces, Jews were evicted or killed, and their dwellings were demolished. In fact, Arabs remained in areas conquered by Jewish forces in 1948, whereas not a single Jew remained in Jerusalem’s Old City, Mount Scopus, and Atarot to its north, Gush Etzion to the south, or any of the other territories that came under Arab control. It is not unreasonable to argue that the asymmetry in death and displacement is merely a consequence of the imbalance of military success. 

    Zionism moved Jews into historic Palestine and pushed Arabs out. That much is undeniable. Whether this was Zionism’s “logic of elimination,” in the ominous words of Patrick Wolfe, whose book popularized the term “settler colonialism,” or a consequence of the violent Arab reaction to Jewish settlement, will continue to be endlessly debated. If the “elimination” of Palestinians had been the Zionists’ objective, we must acknowledge that it was among the least effective of ethnic cleansings, as the Arab population “between the river and sea” has increased tenfold since Zionists arrived there.

    An American newspaper recently interviewed two of Israel’s most prominent revisionist historians. Both trace the roots of October 7 to the mass uprooting of Palestinians in 1948. Avi Shlaim frames “the essence of the conflict as being the Zionist settler colonial movement.” Benny Morris blames it on Palestinian refusal to accept that “if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them,” referring to the Arab rejection of the UN partition plan of 1947. Slapping the label of colonialism on the situation does nothing to settle the issue. “It really started with the arrival of the British in 1917,” Rashid Khalidi said in a recent interview, subsuming Zionism under British colonialism. Zionists became anti-imperialist only when colonialism fell out of fashion after the Second World War, according to the foremost Palestinian historian of the era. But this is false. In fact, Jewish immigration and Arab hostility toward it long preceded the colonial British Mandate, and Zionist opposition to the British began before the war (and certainly no later than the White Paper of May 1939). 

    These arguments and counter-arguments are rehearsed ad nauseam in the cacophony that is the present debate on Israel-Palestine. For one side, it is belligerent Zionist expansionism that is at fault; for the other side, it is Arab intransigence and perpetual — though consistently counter-productive — violence. The rhetorical war over labels is as obfuscating as it is inflammatory. There is no answer to the question “Was Zionism a colonial enterprise or an in-gathering of exiles?” because the question itself is misleading. Zionism was a movement to settle one population in a land largely occupied by another, but it was also an anti-colonialist nationalist movement for the liberation of an oppressed people with ancient ties to the land. It involved dispossession of indigenous populations, but also created a refuge for the perennial pariah. Making sense of this convoluted mess is better served by sticking to facts than by fighting over labels.

    In the nuance-free battlegrounds of the campuses, however, facts are a nuisance and coherence is not a concern. The tale of white colonialist settlers wielding power and privilege to displace indigenous non-whites is too good to be false. And if the facts don’t fit the tale, so much the worse for the facts. The effort to squeeze the Palestinian issue into the colonialist mold is driven less by the desire to understand than by the urge to condemn. And there is much to condemn in Israel’s conduct, above all its unrelenting oppression and dispossession of the rightless Palestinians whom it has occupied since 1967. But the advocates of the colonization narrative are not interested only in condemning Israel’s actions. They wish also to rebuke its very essence. For them, Israel is not a consequence of colonialism, like Australia, South Africa, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. Israel is colonialism. 

    This might have made some sense had the analysis been limited to Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza, but this is precisely what the evangelists of decolonization deny. Exactly like the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, they hold that there is no distinction to be made between the occupied territories and Israel. Their history is sloppy and their politics irresponsible. Under the vague rubric of colonialism, the historical imperialist conditions associated with the creation of Israel (and many other countries) in the era of postwar decolonization are conflated with the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and never mind the fact that the first was a British affair while the second is perpetrated by Israel over the opposition of the United States, England, France, and virtually every other country. In left-wing circles, calls for ending the occupation or for equal rights for Palestinians have been replaced with calls for the decolonization of Palestine. If colonialism is the diagnosis, then decolonization must be the remedy. 

    But what exactly does decolonization mean? The rare attempts to unpack the term in the context of Palestine turn to the so-called “one-state solution.” Lacking all detail concerning political arrangements and offering no path for attaining them, this is yet another slogan cosplaying as policy. The notion that a century-old blood feud can be dissolved by political fiat has always been ludicrous. After October 7, the idea of democratic coexistence in a single state is not even wishful thinking. Frivolous assurances along the lines of Judith Butler’s recent assertion that, done right, “decolonization will more likely produce … emancipatory joy, a sense of freedom, the release from shackles” rather than vengeance, do not deserve serious consideration. Where, exactly, does “decolonization” leave seven million Israeli Jews? Will leaving them anywhere “from the river to the sea” satisfy the jihadists? 

    One wonders whether the advocates of decolonization witlessly misunderstand or deliberately ignore the fact that the Islamists emphatically do not want peace and reconciliation. They want to eliminate Israel. They are extremely candid about this. Or are we to believe that they are oblivious that their playful rhyme about the river and the sea, taken straight out of the Hamas charter, is nothing but a euphemism for ethnic cleansing? Some were at least honest enough to indicate what “emancipatory joy” really means. Let us remember the notorious tweet on October 7 that triumphantly declared “what did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes?” (Recall, too, that the tweet was in response to one of a photo of a grandmother kissing her granddaughter and explaining that Hamas terrorists had broken into the pictured grandmother’s home in Nir Oz, recorded a video of murdering her, and then uploaded that video to her Facebook page, “which is how her granddaughter found out.”) 

    So “decolonization” offers little insight and even less foresight. But again, the point of attaching the label “colonialism” is not to analyze but to criminalize. Rather than a critical concept, it is a weapon of criticism. Or rather, of delegitimization. The distance from that analysis to the justification of violence is traversed, it turns out, in a swift Fanonian leap. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” the militant psychiatrist wrote. Hence the mind-boggling spectacle of “progressive” academics gleeful about October 7. Violence cleanses the land of its colonizers and the colonized of their subjugation, preached Fanon (at least in his extreme moods, which were his most influential ones). So let anti-imperialists of the world rejoice at the rape, torture, and massacre of colonial women and children. Which is also to say, of Jews.

    The sympathy of some Western intellectuals with pogromists is not the fruit of rigorous analysis of either history or the current political environment. Rather, it reflects a knee-jerk radicalism that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed and sides with the latter no matter what they do. It regards victimhood as a sign of righteousness and replaces politics with an international solidarity with underdogs. In this Manichaean moral universe, empathy is reserved for one side only, and so is context. The massacre of Israeli civilians is the sole responsibility of “the apartheid regime,” as Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee declared and as post-colonial theorists suggest. Israel’s actions, on the other hand, have no context — not in 1948, not in 1967 and not in 2024. The oppressed are always and only one thing — victims, defined by their circumstances. Their actions are intrinsically reactive — a response to and an outcome of their oppression, over which they exercise no agency. Whether they  react or overreact, responsibility ultimately resides with  the oppressors.

    The post-colonial framework easily lends itself to this bi-valent moral metaphysics, dividing the world between colonizer and colonized. Anything done by one is ipso facto an act of oppression and anything done by the other is ipso facto a struggle for liberation. Did they not hear Ismail Haniyeh’s injunction to Jews on Oct 7? “Get out of our land. Get out of our sight. Get out of our city of Al-Quds and our Al-Aqsa Mosque. We no longer wish to see you on this land. This land is ours, Al-Quds is ours, everything is ours. You are strangers in this pure and blessed land. There is no place or safety for  you.” Or do they simply not care? This moral bankruptcy is responsible for the absurdity of post-colonialist intellectuals  who, in the name of liberation and equality, support tyrants and terrorists. So long as they are on the opposite side of “Western imperialism” it doesn’t matter that they wish to impose Sharia law, beat women, hang homosexuals, or incinerate babies. (Let us not forget the fascination of many on the left with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.) Their actions might be excessive, but they are, by definition, “on the right side of history.” 

    Ironically, historical determinism — in the form of a divine plan — is also the ideology of the zealous settler Israelis who man the front lines of the occupation. According to them, Jews are the eternal victim, and, consequently incapable of evil. Any critique directed at them or their state is, by definition, anti-Semitic. I have no doubt that the criticism leveled here will be similarly brushed off as Zionist apologetics. But this is merely another iteration of the lazy moral bi-valence, whereby any criticism of one side must entail unreserved support of the other. If you are not on the side of the light, you are on the side of darkness, for there are no other sides.

    That irreverent old radical Ellen Willis once wrote that she was not against peace but “against peace as a mantra — anti-imperialism being another.” When it comes to Israel-Palestine, colonization and decolonization have also become mantras — magical words that ward off thought rather than advance it. The neat separation into colonizers and colonized relieves one of the intellectual challenge of having to reconcile the rights of indigenous Palestinians with the just claims of persecuted Jews. If the root cause of all violence is Zionist colonialism, then there is no room, and no reason, for investigating the responsibility of the Arab leadership for its reaction to it. The pronounced antisemitism of militant fundamentalist groups such as Hamas and their stated commitment to eradicate  the Jewish state is trivialized as symptomatic of colonial oppression. That explanation is also an excuse. 

    And since Jews are colonizers, it is perfectly legitimate and proper that exiled Palestinians have a right to return but exiled Jews do not. How neat, how simplifying. It is much easier to rail against Israel’s war on Gaza than to offer any reasonable alternative to this bloody war that could still permit Israel to defend itself against savage jihadis who reject “initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions” because they “are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” as Hamas’s charter states. 

    As explained, the point of invoking colonialism is to achieve neither clarity nor progress but moral positioning. It is elevation by condemnation. And the harsher the condemnation, the higher the elevation. In this regard, Zionism’s fiercest detractors are the mirror-image of its apologists who whitewash all of Israel’s crimes by citing the justice of its birth or the offenses of its rivals. The problem is not taking sides, but the narcissism of moral positioning at the expense of both sides. In the age of virtue signaling, this vice characterizes most discourse. But when it comes to Zionism, it is particularly vicious. 

    The Arab-Israeli conflict has been moralized like no other. The Yugoslav wars did not trigger a reckoning with the imperial past that created Yugoslavia. The conflict in Northern Ireland involved many moral and historical disputes, but the primary concern was to end hostilities. The recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia evoked little discussion of historical justice. The main issue on the agenda, and rightly, is how to stop Russian aggression and forge a stable peace, not the history of ancient Rus, the merits of Ukrainian nationalism, or how to “decolonize” Ukraine. When it comes to the Arab- Israeli conflict, however, bloody events become an occasion for investigating historical justice. With every flare-up, academics, journalists and activists of all stripes rush to peer through the region’s history and pronounce moral verdicts. Leading newspapers and institutions bring together experts to debate history rather than solutions. Every bomb that goes off in Jerusalem or is dropped on Jabaliya becomes an argument for the historical justice or injustice of Zionism. The deaths of children are collected as talking points, or rather shouting points, in the indefatigable contest of righteousness, where victimhood is the mark of virtue. 

    The conflict has been moralized right out of politics. This is tragic because politics remains the only domain in which it can be resolved. The historical verdict regarding Jewish nationalism  at the turn of the century is of little consequence for the political question: what is to be done? Yet this is where much of the conversation seems to be focused, partly, no doubt, due to fatigue following decades of impasse. But darker suspicions are provoked by the crude tenor of the debate. It is hard to resist wondering if age-old tendencies to treat anything Jewish in symbolic terms — something mythical, having to do with divine good or diabolical evil, but never mundanely political — have not creeped in, particularly amongst intellectuals and activists, where the colonialism narrative looms large. 

    Not every critique of Israel is anti-Semitic and anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism (just as criticism of Hamas’s barbarism is not an extenuation of Israel’s misdeeds). And yet, can it be denied with a straight face that the Jewish state receives special treatment by the left? The left did not march for Syrians or for Bosnians or for Uyghurs or for Ukrainians or for Rohynga, but they march for Palestinians.  Does this have something to do with who the Palestinians  are fighting? Lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to add: march they should. I have done my own share of marching (and not just marching) for Palestinian emancipation. But it is hard to shake off the feeling that many march not to end Israel’s oppression of Palestinians but to end Israel. After all, it was 1969 when Jean Améry wrote that “for the New Left, Zionism is roughly what, in Germany, some thirty years ago was called ‘World Jewry’.” As a purported offspring of colonialism, Israel has many siblings, yet it is the only one whose legitimacy is questioned on account of this pedigree. Does this not imply that, unlike other peoples, Jews are not entitled to  self-determination? Reading “post-colonial” analyses, I feel a need to remind myself that Israel is a country that already exists  and that it was created with as much legitimacy under international law as any other country. 

    But setting aside the injustice to Jews, is any of this helping Palestinians? Is the cause of Palestinian liberation advanced by tying it to the eradication of Israel? Are the lives and well-being of Palestinians secured by bolstering fundamentalists devoted to holy jihad against an exponentially stronger power?  And how much Palestinian blood will be spilled in the Balkanization that is likely to ensue after the dreamed-of dismantlement of the Jewish state? The truly unnerving thing about these questions is not their answers, which are painfully obvious, but the fact that so many on the left are unbothered by them. In their haste to pronounce the most extreme condemnation of Zionists, and thereby bolster their own moral credentials, they are condemning Palestinians to permanent conflict (for between the children of light and the children of darkness there can only be perpetual and total war),  a conflict in which Palestinians have been paying a disproportional price. 

    The real tragedy — the real outrage — of all this is not the absence of intellectual integrity, but the disregard for real-world consequences. Ask the shepherds in the Jordan Valley about the “liberation” that they won following “the victories of the resistance,” as one Columbia University professor called the pogrom, or the farming communities of Mount Hebron expelled from their villages by terrorist settlers about Hamas’s success at “decolonization,” or the homeless and starving refugees in Rafah if their heads are raised “so high that they touch the sky,” as Haniyeh declared on their behalf. As one Gazan wrote in December, Western apologists for Hamas “marginalized me, an actual Gazan, inexplicably demanding that I conform to the opinions and beliefs of privileged Western activists detached from what people in Gaza actually feel about Hamas and other Palestinian groups and leaders.” Moral kudos in the West are won through suffering in the East. A post-colonialist might have detected a whiff of imperialist  exploitation.

    The main problem is not the distortion of history, but the futility of narcissistic moralism. Shouting “Justice for Palestine!” may be cathartic in Berkeley or Berlin, but if it means undoing the alleged colonialism and getting even with its perpetrators, it portends nothing but more blood-letting. This is the kind of justice that leaves everyone blind to the plight — and the legitimate claims — of the other side. The warriors of justice, on both sides, are prepared to fight to the last Israeli soldier and the last Palestinian child. It is not surprising that many of them live elsewhere.

    For us, the flesh-and-blood Arabs and Jews living on this tormented land, the Olympics of victimhood is not a spectator sport. What we need are allies for a political settlement, not cheerleaders for the fanatics currently calling the shots. Anyone genuinely interested in the well-being of Palestinians must yearn for the toppling of Hamas no less than of Netanyahu’s  government. Ending land grabs, settler terrorism, house demolitions, targeted killings, random killings, and the rest of the occupation’s horrors will not be achieved through “decolonization,” just as Palestinian resistance and national aspirations will not be extinguished by “more force,” as Israel’s ministers promise. Both can only be achieved by a political settlement — the kind of settlement that Netanyahu and Hamas have been sabotaging for decades. 

    Upon the publication of the Hamas post-October 7 memorandum last fall, the Lebanese journalist Hisham Debsi noted that it included not “a single reference to a political solution, national reconciliation, or joint action.” And Netanyahu’s government has been prosecuting Israel’s longest war since the founding of the state, but refuses even to discuss political objectives, let alone solutions. “In the face of this harsh reality,” Debsi wrote, “we are regrettably forced to ask: Is this why Palestinian blood is shed every day?” And we are similarly forced to ask: what is Israeli blood being shed for? 

    When it comes to the tribal blood-feud between Israelis and Palestinians, it often seems that those with the loudest voices are the least concerned with ending it. Unless they are silly enough to suppose that encouraging Israel’s abhorrent occupation is a recipe for peace, or deluded enough to regard “from the river to the sea” as a political program, the vociferous cheerleaders on either side contribute nothing to alleviating the situation. They can live with the savagery. Their zero-sum morality of villains and victims only entrenches the conflict, removing it from the realm of interests and solutions. Placing it back in that realm does not mean adopting a cynical realism whereby might determines right. It means rejecting myths and stereotypes and prejudices and dogmas, and resisting the moralistic urge to engage in a frivolous politics of condemnation. 

    Happy Birthday, Harmonium

    Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium recently turned a hundred. When Knopf published this brashly youthful and original first book of poems in September 1923, the poet himself was hardly youthful, and he was known only to a few modernist cognoscenti from his poems in little magazines such as Poetry, Others, and The Little Review. Nor did Stevens look like a poet. A firebrand on the page, in person Wallace Stevens in 1923 was a portly, clean-shaven, forty-four-year old executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, working hard to support his wife in a comfortable house in Hartford. “I am far from being a genius — and must rely on hard and faithful work,” he had explained to her, referring not to his poetry, in which she had little interest, but to his legal labors with bonds and surety claims.

    Stevens, the unlikely modernist, had not sprung out of nowhere. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1878, to modest parents, both teachers. His father, from a farming family, had scrabbled a law degree for himself and practiced law, so he was able to send his son to a local private school and then to Harvard, where young Stevens met poets, wrote poetry, and became president of the Harvard Advocate. While knocking around New York City in low-level jobs in journalism and earning a law degree, he began making friends in avant-garde circles, and by 1914 he was getting to know William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. And so began the double life, even more doubled because of his marriage to Elsie Moll, a young woman from Reading who played the piano and sold sheet music at the local department store. Elsie was classically beautiful — her profile appears on the Mercury dime — but she was ill-educated, anti-social, and increasingly reclusive. At home and in the office, Stevens was the dependable, jowly, suited paterfamilias and man of business. In his poetry, he was a wild man. And with the publication of Harmonium, he went head to head with the younger, reigning Modernists, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore.

    One way to read the whole arc of Stevens’s poetry would be to trace it from the Baroque profusion of Harmonium in 1923 to the austerities of The Rock in 1954, from the Keatsian splendor of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (“This luscious and impeccable fruit of life”) and the razzle-dazzle of “Bantams in Pine-Woods” (“Chieftain Iffucan of Axcan in caftan”) to “The Plain Sense of Things”: “After the leaves have fallen, we return/ To a plain sense of things…” And one way to tell that story would be to see it as a Modernist redemption of the pentameter line, a way Stevens found, in a century of adventurous vers libre, to re-engineer the traditional cadence to serve radical and abstract purposes.

    But that isn’t the story I want to tell. Harmonium, in 1923, already contained those contrary forces, the extravagances and the ascetic refusals, and set them into a dizzying counterpoint. It is true — it would have to be true in a first book — that notes are sounded which will be elaborated and revised in later work. “The Snow Man”’s “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” will reverberate throughout the later books — say, in “Man Carrying Thing” from Transport to Summer (1947), where “We must endure our thoughts all night, until/ The bright obvious stands motionless in cold” ; or in “The Man on the Dump” from Parts of a World (1942): “Where was it we first heard of the truth? The the.” And the hymns of “Forms, flames, and flakes of flames” from Harmonium’s “Nomad Exquisite” will echo in all kinds of later prodigalities and jubilas, like “The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window” in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (Transport to Summer). The fascination of Harmonium, for me, is listening to the new poet testing his enormous acoustic range, adjusting inherited magnificence to a harsh new century. “What manner of building shall we build?” he asks in “Architecture.” “In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?”

    Keats echoes through Stevens in ways we don’t hear in other modernists. For Stevens’s contemporaries Eliot and Pound, Keats did not loom as a problem: they were more threatened by Victorian grandparents, by Swinburne, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson. But in Stevens I constantly hear a Keatsian pulse, the sensuous pentameters, the luxuriant sonorities, versions of “With plume, tiara, and all rich array” and “With jellies soother than the creamy curds,/ And lucent syrup, tinct with cinnamon” (from “The Eve of Saint Agnes”). All through Harmonium, from the firecat at the beginning to the roaring wind at the end, Stevens is sorting out what music he is willing to make his own, and what he will disown. 

    But let’s go back to the beginning. Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” had come out in 1920, Eliot’s The Waste Land in December 1922. Stevens, who had been publishing his poems in little magazines since 1914, was older than both of these rivals. In Harmonium, coming in September 1923 right on the heels of The Waste Land, he plotted an entirely independent mode of being “modern.” The book opens with “Earthy Anecdote”: its belligerent free verse asserts its allegiance to the aesthetics of the new century. In a drama generated more by assonance and alliteration than by logic — “bucks,” “cat,” “clattering,” “Oklahoma” — the firecat keeps blocking the old “lines” (of verse?) clattered by the bucks:,

    Every time the bucks went clattering

    Over Oklahoma

    A firecat bristled in the way.

    Wherever they went,

    They went clattering,

    Until they swervedIn a swift, circular line

    To the right,

    Because of the firecat.

    Or until they swerved

    In a swift, circular line

    To the left,

    Because of the firecat.

    The bucks clattered.

    The firecat went leaping,

    To the right, to the left,

    And

    Bristled in the way.

    Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

    And slept.

    The mythical invented firecat forces the old metrical clatter to “swerve” in swift, circular, short, irregular lines: he is the daimon of the new poetry, and he opens the volume. But the poems that follow don’t adhere to the firecat’s pattern. They will retrace old lines as they figure out how to integrate them into Harmonium’s distinct radicalism.

    The second poem in the book, “Invective Against Swans,” takes up those old lines, in pentameters, mostly iambic, and in irregularly rhyming couplets, to cock a snook at traditional prosody and at the traditional lyric symbol of the swan. The gesture feels almost adolescent in its irreverence, for one thing demoting swans to male geese, “ganders”: “The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks/ And far beyond the discords of the wind.” (This wind, which blows through the book and concludes it, recalls Shelley’s West Wind rather than Keats.) 

    The reader opening Harmonium in 1923 would have been confronted, then, with two jarringly different poetic modes right in the first two poems. And the volume, as it and an exuberant variety of stanza forms. In this riot of formal possibilities, I am interested in the extremes: a stark minimalism set against a lush maximalism. One way to observe this interplay is by tracking one of Stevens’s favorite words, “syllable.”

    A syllable is a phonetic, not a semantic, unit of language, organized around a vowel: semantic, that is, only by accident, if it coincides with a prefix or a suffix: “indigestion,” say, or “care-less,” or with a monosyllabic word, like “the” or “in.” A poet as aggressive as Stevens needs that “fecund minimum” (as Crispin the Comedian will have it) in order to refashion language from the ground up. A syllable is like a linguistic atomic particle. It also cues us to listen for sound even more than for sense in these new harmonies and discords.

    “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” comes early in the volume. Already the French title deranges English sense, and in its phonetic play it veers into a kind of nonsense in French as “Monocle” becomes “Mon Oncle” by the addition of one letter. This evasive and ambitious poem of twelve blank verse stanzas of eleven lines each punishes its own Keatsian eloquence (“This luscious and impeccable fruit”) as it mourns and savages an ideal of romantic love (lower case “r”). One can sense here, if one wishes to read biographically, something of Stevens’s disappointment in his marriage to Elsie, who may or may not have prompted the Eve addressed here: “When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet…” But it would diminish the poem cruelly to shrink it to personal anecdote: Stevens takes pains not to allow that. Yes, the lovers are seen as aged beyond romance: “Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof./ Two golden gourds distended on our vines,/ We hang like warty squashes…” But intrinsic to erotic loss is a rebellion against the language of romance, the “fops of fancy” as this self-proclaimed “yeoman” rudely puts it. The whole poem bursts with disappointment, and by mocking the old hymns — “Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds” — in their own “magnificent measure,” it discovers a new way to use that measure:

    I wish that I might be a thinking stone.

    The sea of spuming thought foists up again

    The radiant bubble that she was. And then

    A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

    Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

    Saltier well? Tears? Who is “she”? Mother of heaven? An estranged lover or spouse? An ideal of Romantic lyric? All of the above? The past tense of the verb “to be” bespeaks heartbreak: “that she was.” This “watery syllable” is as close to confession as Stevens will come. Not for the first time (recall Petrarch), disappointed eros gives rise to verse. In Stevens’s case, the failure of romance leads, paradoxically, to the rescue and metamorphosis of a Romantic poetics of luxuriant idiom and cadence, but always in tension with the snow man and the man on the dump.

    The hunt for syllables brings us to “The Comedian as the Letter C,” the longest poem in Harmonium and the latest composed. I confess: I don’t like “The Comedian.” I find its mock epic dimensions boring, its afflatus noisy, its fabulations coy. But I understand why Stevens had to write it. With Crispin, he looks backward and devises a story of his own coming-into-being as a poet, his search for a relation between language and the world; and he looks forward, laying out something like a map or promissory note for the poems to come: “The Man on the Dump” and “Connoisseur of Chaos” in Parts of a World, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” in Transport to Summer, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” in The Auroras of Autumn, to mention only a few.

    In “The Comedian,” Stevens brazenly adopts the old measure, blank verse, “…to drive away/ The shadow of his fellows from the skies,/ And, from their stale intelligence released,/ To make a new intelligence prevail.” These “fellows” to be driven away, I take it, are rival poets, of past and present. This choice of meter in 1923 throws down a gauntlet: how will Crispin, the poet-clown, “this nincompated pedagogue,” create “an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed” in this hand-me-down form? That agon takes shape in the collision, line by line, between the impulse toward maximalist verbosity and the counter-impulse toward minimalist reduction. The poem presents a theoretical commentary, later called a “pronunciamento,” on the counterpoint fundamental to Stevens’s whole oeuvre.

    We first meet Crispin on a ship sailing from his native Bordeaux (In Stevens’ mythology France is the world of. traditional poetic ideals) to the Yucatan, the barbarous new world. Six lines describe the poet-hero as an absurd aesthete: “The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,/ The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches,” and so forth: he is Stevens’s pathetic alter-ego who must be chastened, his Prufrock, his Mauberley. Faced with the sea, the poetling is “washed away by magnitude.” The poem asks, “What word split up in clickering syllables/ And storming under multitudinous tones/ Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?” The whole saga, we are told, from Yucatan to Havana and thence to Carolina, will reduce and transform the hero “…until nothing of himself/ Remained, except some starker, barer self/ In a starker, barer world…” In the midst of all this brouhaha, Stevens outlines the aesthetic ideal of the quest for the essential, not the decorative: an ideal that “The Comedian” can articulate but not yet fully embody.

    As we follow Crispin to his destination in Carolina, we watch a poetic Bildungsroman, a story of renunciations: “How many poems he denied himself,” “And what descants he sent to banishment.” Beneath the harlequinade, it is moments like this that feel urgent. Stevens here is writing close to the bone of his experience of self-creation. When Crispin arrives in Carolina at the end of Section III, the verse grows suddenly stern, and we can feel Stevens tuning up for what will become his lifelong theme, the Man with the Blue Guitar’s attempt to render “things as they are” in the language of the Imagination. “…It made him see how much/ Of what he saw he never saw at all./ He gripped more closely the essential prose…” 

    This blank verse “prose” is not where “The Comedian” ends, nor is it, by itself, Stevens’s ideal. The poem brings Crispin through various illusions to an earthbound reality, building a cabin, espousing a “prismy blonde,” and producing four daughters, a procreative effusion accompanied by an explosion of still more ornate language, archaisms, neologisms, and arcane syntax: his cabin is “…the haunt/ Of children nibbling at the sugared void,/ Infants, yet eminently old, then dome/ And halidom for the unbraided femes,/ Green crammers of the green fruits of the world…” (Stevens’s daughter, Holly, was born only the following year.) The word “syllable” both introduces and almost concludes this final section, marking the poem — as if it needed more marking — as an ars poetica, a thesis about the quest for a reinvented language capable of holding the vast world in its embrace. 

    “Portentous enunciation, syllable/ To blessed syllable affined,” Section VI begins. Along its way, the poem has rung the changes on words for language: “speech belched,” “gasconade,” “hubbub,” “vociferate,” “bray.” It winds up by defining itself as a “disguised pronunciamento,” a declaration heard, once again, as syllables — “In these portentous accents, syllables” — only to double back on itself, proposing that the whole “anecdote” might be “false.” But it asks, in an ironic, self-protective gesture, what that would matter anyway.

    A portent is a sign, indication, or omen. The syllables in “The Comedian” portend Stevens’s future, his endlessly inventive counterpoint of the linguistic minimum and maximum. Within Harmonium, however, let us look at two instances of a poetics of reduction to set against the noise of “The Comedian.” “O Florida, Venereal Soil” is marred by the racism and xenophobia of its second stanza, a large theme for another day. What concerns me now is the way this short poem in relatively short lines manages to pare itself down still further. The first stanza addresses the “venereal” state, playing on the double valence of “venereal” as pertaining to the goddess of love and to sexually transmitted disease. The opening phrase, “A few things for themselves,” repeated a few lines later, uses the barest language: no simile or metaphor, no fancy verbiage, insistence on reduction (“few”). Only in line seven do we understand this sentence as an imperative to “disclose” these “few things” to the lover: “A few things for themselves,/ Florida, venereal soil,/ Disclose to the lover.”

    Personified as a goddess, Florida has a double character. In the third stanza she appears “lasciviously as the wind” to torment the speaker, whereas in the final two stanzas she is imagined as “a scholar of darkness” and addressed in alliterative, liturgical terms, “Donna, donna, dark,” and commanded to disclose not “a few things” but “fewest things to the lover.” Only a page after “The Comedian as the Letter C” in Harmonium, “O Florida” contracts, and performs its own arithmetic of subtraction. It also sounds a chord, playing the muted “few things for themselves” against the sumptuous notes of “Donna, donna, dark,/ stooping in indigo gown.”

    “Anecdote of the Jar” is famous as a manifesto of human order imposed on nature. In the context of Harmonium as a whole composition, it stands between two poems of verbal fireworks: “Bantams in Pine-Woods” and “Palace of the Babies.” Its own spareness feels polemical. Its three tetrameter stanzas keep repeating phrases, as if penurious with vocabulary, as if it had no more words to spend and had to practice thrift: “upon a hill,” “surround that hill,” “the slovenly wilderness,” “The wilderness rose up to it,” “I placed a jar,” “The jar was round,” “The jar was gray and bare.” The internal rhymes also feel poverty-stricken: “round,” “surround,” “sprawled around,” “The jar was round.” The only end-rhyme (“air,” “everywhere,” “bare”) connects the jar’s power to its bareness; if the poem is a manifesto for human order, it also enforces an aesthetic of sobriety and reticence. The simple copulative verb “was” dominates. The most unusual word, “port,” is simple but complicated; derived from Old English, it means a gate, a city with a harbor, a carrier, and a tune. That line, with its slightly elevated syntax, lends the poem a mysterious stateliness: “and tall and of a port in air.”

    Along with “The Snow Man,” “Anecdote of the Jar” marks the minimalist extreme in Harmonium, to set against the hyperbole and plenitude of “The Comedian as the Letter C.” argument on a single sentence through five tercets. It finds its way to a more extreme version of Crispin’s “starker, barer self” in a Zen-like erasure: there is no first- or second-person pronoun in this taut poem, only the impersonal “one” who “must have a mind of winter” in the first line, and who may or may not be the “listener” in the last tercet, who hears the wind “blowing in the same bare place.” “The Snow Man” sets its weird “fullness” against its astringency: its landscape is “full of the same wind,” and the philosophically charged word “nothing” resounds three times in the last two lines to describe the listener, who “…nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The meter acts out this negative fullness: only the final line, burdened with extinctions, attains a full pentameter.

    In the book’s sonic middle range, Stevens has made rooms for all sorts of combinations, including hymns to poetry that unabashedly adopt the prosody inherited from the English Romantics: from Keats, yes, but not only from Keats. It is a feature of the wild originality of Harmonium that Stevens gets away with this, as he does in the concluding rhyming couplet of “To the One of Fictive Music,” where he meditates on the modernist “spurning” of Romantic imagination and invites the muse to restore it within the frame of a modernist volume: “Unreal, give back to us what once you gave,/ The imagination that we spurned and crave.”

    Harmonium ends with another syllable. “To the Roaring Wind” mediates between minimalist and maximalist forces, and between the Romantic trope of the wind as source of power, Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and modernist skepticism. 

    To the Roaring Wind

    What syllable are you seeking,

    Vocalissimus,

    In the distances of sleep?

    Speak it.

    It is a tiny poem, and at the same time immense. It is a question and a command. It is only four lines long, and it seeks not a word but a syllable. But “vocalissimus,” a single word taking up a whole line, is the superlative form of the Latin adjective “vocalis,” meaning “most sonorous,” “most voiced”: a maximalist grammatical form, and multi-syllabic.

    Wind-sound has been translated into alliterating S’s; traditional rhyme has been distorted in the chime of “seeking” and “Speak.” Romantic personality has been projected onto the wind — “What syllable are you seeking?” — while it is the poet, Stevens, who has been seeking and finding and arranging syllables throughout the book. In this poem, as in Harmonium as a whole, Stevens is magnificently having it both ways: writing poems both expansive and condensed, both of their own disruptive moment and vocalizing breath that has sources far more ancient that Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge. The Hebrew ruach and the ancient Greek pneuma in various contexts signified divine breath and prophetic inspiration. Stevens no longer believed in those gods, but he certainly experienced inspiration, and that wind blows through every page of Harmonium.

     

    Why Were We Beaten?”: Atrocity, Law, and Truth

    On Easter Day, April 6, 1903, a violent mob attacked the Jewish population of Kishinev, killing forty-nine people and wounding hundreds. During two days of bloody massacre, about a third of the city was destroyed, leaving hundreds of Jewish families destitute, their meager belongings smashed, broken, torn, or stolen. Hospitals were overwhelmed with injured men, women, and children. Fluff and feathers from torn pillows covered the streets of Kishinev as if snow had fallen in the middle of a sunny spring. It clung to puddles of blood and dirt, settling on the trees and the rubble scattered across the streets. The Kishinev pogrom would be followed by several others, some even surpassing it in brutality, but it would remain etched in the memory of generations as a turning point in Jewish history and the history of the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe.

    The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 again evoked the memory of Kishinev, supporting the historians’ claim about the pogrom’s lasting significance. The two events differ in their context and their scale: the carefully orchestrated terrorist operation carried out by the Gazan invaders equipped with advanced weaponry stands in stark contrast to the violence perpetrated by a mob of men and teenagers who brutally killed their neighbors and acquaintances using stones, clubs, metal pipes, and axes. Still, it is not unusual for a shocking event to trigger memories of past shocks and traumas despite all the differences. The common threads in this comparison are a deep understanding of the tragedy’s historical importance and an intensely felt need to uncover the truth about its causes. In the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7 and the conduct of the Israeli operation in Gaza, the avalanche of facts, coupled with a striking deficit in crucial details, created a sense of pervasive uncertainty. Everything seemed open to challenge. The most rudimentary and incontrovertible facts were thrown into doubt. There were even claims that the atrocity never took place. Particularly unsettling were the efforts to cast doubt on the suffering of civilians — Palestinians and Israelis — caught in the crossfire of the conflict, as though the trauma inflicted by war was not self-evident and required proof. 

    One does not have to be a trained historian to imagine that the crisis of credibility, the collapse of trust, that we experience today is not new, and that any tragedy creates room for contestation. Once upon a time it seemed that the catastrophes of the twentieth century had taught people to suspend their doubts in the face of the testimonies of victims and survivors, yet the ongoing wars in Ukraine, and in Israel and Gaza, show that this skill is easy to unlearn. The search for the solution to the political crisis in the Middle East often stumbles upon arguments about facts, throwing us back to the moment in 1903, when palpable anxiety about empirical truth pervaded the post-pogrom city of Kishinev. 

    Weeks after the pogrom, rain washed away the dirty fluff and feathers from the pavements. Shops remained closed, and people were paralyzed by fear of another attack, but the city was animated with a sudden influx of visitors. Amid the fear-stricken ruins, outsiders — journalists, writers, lawyers, and investigators — were busy collecting evidence and attempting to construct the stories of the event. Michael Davitt, an Irish journalist writing for American newspapers, spent several days in Kishinev interviewing government officials, visiting the sites of violence, and trying to obtain from “the living witnesses of the outrages an account of what they saw and experienced.” In the fall of 1903, Davitt’s dispatches from Odesa and Kishinev were collected in a volume called Within the Pale — an eye-opening account of the life of Jews in the tsarist Empire, explaining the sources and the outcomes of the Kishinev catastrophe. A short while later, in June 1903, the young Hebrew poet Hayim Nachman Bialik came on a mission from the Jewish Historical Commission in Odesa to collect evidence for a documentary book on the Kishinev pogrom. The testimonies of the pogrom’s survivors that he recorded remained unpublished until 1991. Instead Bialik wrote The City of Slaughter, a grand, wrathful, and influential poem. Around the same time as Bialik’s visit, Vladimir Korolenko, a Ukrainian writer, boarded a train from Poltava to Kishinev. Korolenko was fortunate to secure a room in the Hotel Paris, as many of Kishinev’s hotels were sold out, and tourists were seeking apartments to rent. By June, Kishinev coachmen had already learned the new morbid topography of the city, taking their guests to the sites of the tragedy. Korolenko followed the same paths as many others: observing the ruins of houses, visiting victims in hospitals, and conversing with Jews, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and Russians. “Fourth day in Kishinev, and I feel like I’m in a nightmare,” he lamented in his diary, feeling overwhelmed by despair and a sense of helplessness in understanding, aiding, or changing anything.

    What we know today about the Easter pogrom in Kishinev has been primarily shaped by literary texts and journalists’ accounts: Davitt’s book and articles, Bialik’s writings, Korolenko’s “House No. 13,” a short story about the tragedy that unfolded in one of the houses where seven Jewish families had lived before the pogrom. Contemporary historians have tried to dig deeper and explain the inner mechanisms of violence, reconstructing the events preceding the pogrom and documenting the public reaction to it. But what has often escaped our attention is the fact that although the massacre happened in front of everyone’s eyes, both its overarching story and its details were vehemently contested. The struggle to establish the master narrative of the massacre unfolded not only in books or newspapers that sold their readers sensational news, but also, most importantly, in lawyers’ offices and courtrooms, where hundreds of victims and witnesses testified about what they had seen, heard, and endured. 

    When the news of the massacre reached the public, the demand for justice was the most common reaction, and everyone started anxiously awaiting the results of the investigation and the trial. The trial of the pogrom’s participants, or rather, the series of twenty-two trials that took place in 1903 and 1904, was almost as troubling as the atrocity itself. It marked the first time that hundreds of defendants were indicted for participating in collective violence driven by racial and national hatred, thus setting a precedent for the legal proceedings against war crimes and crimes against humanity in our own day. It was also the first trial of this magnitude to be entirely based on survivors’ testimonies, which were meticulously scrutinized, often neglected, and overwhelmingly disbelieved. The raw and unedited testimonies of victims and witnesses, preserved in court documents and lawyers’ notes, in some instances paralleled Davitt and Korolenko’s accounts and exposed the horror of the days of slaughter. Yet the court systematically dismissed these testimonies, deeming them untruthful. As a result, the court, the government, and a significant part of Russian society agreed upon one version of the event. At the same time, another truth, described in Korolenko’s, Bialik’s, and Davitt’s writings and remembered by the survivors and the witnesses, existed in a parallel universe. 

    Reading the witnesses’ accounts, one may wonder how those heart-wrenching words could leave anyone unmoved or doubting. Why did the judges not believe the survivors? It might be tempting to attribute the imperial court’s attitude to the testimonies of the pogrom’s victims solely to the prevalent antisemitism within the Russian establishment. Yet antisemitism is not just its own endemic disease: it is also a symptom of other structural problems and malfunctions. The roots of doubt and disbelief could be far more intricate than mere nationalism, indicating a broader epistemic and moral crisis within society. Similarly, our own crisis of misunderstanding and distrust extends beyond mere national or political biases, sympathies, or aversions, reflecting deeper, more complex undercurrents. Our society has been stricken by a fear of gullibility, and of the embarrassment that it may cause, and in this way it becomes more and more gullible. The fear of this embarrassment has become a norm of everyday life. And when this psychological weakness overlaps with extraordinary events, the anxiety of uncertainty goes through the roof. Politicians weaponize the discourse of “fake news,” peddling doubts and exalting them; facts mingle cozily with fiction, and conspiracy theories proliferate. 

    One remedy to the pervasive doubt — to the culture of doubt and its political manipulation — is the memory of past crises and the history of the attempts to deal with them. And even though the historical analogy between the spring of 1903 and the fall of 2023 is imprecise, the story of the pogrom trial in Kishinev can be very instructive. It suggests that even when the criteria of right and wrong are clearly seen and uncontested, the markers of truth may still remain unclear and undefined, even among those who oppose evil. 

    The Kishinev pogrom trial of 1903 could set a world record for the number of defendants, witnesses, and plaintiffs involved. A total of three hundred and ninety-one individuals were indicted for murder, plunder, rape, and participation in collective violence rooted in “national discord.” Nearly two thousand witnesses and plaintiffs were expected to testify. The authorities opted to divide this colossal case into twenty-two smaller ones, with the number of defendants in each ranging from one to sixty-two. This decision was owed not merely to the logistical challenge of trying almost four hundred defendants simultaneously. By splitting the trial, the authorities effectively reduced the massacre of Jews to a series of violent incidents between “Christians” — as the defendants were referred to — and their Jewish neighbors. This trivialization of the Kishinev tragedy enabled the authorities to downplay the role of those who incited antisemitism and to hide the complicity of officials in criminal negligence. 

    Everyone in Kishinev was aware that the pogrom had been incited by a series of articles by the journalist Pavolakii Krushevan published in the blatantly antisemitic daily newspapers Znamia and Bessarabets. In the weeks leading up to the bloody Easter of 1903, Bessarabets propagated falsehoods about an alleged ritual murder of a Christian boy in the small town of Dubossary. When the investigation swiftly identified the boy’s murderers among his own relatives, Bessarabets was compelled to issue a retraction, yet it persisted in inciting retributory violence against Jews. At the same time antisemitic leaflets circulated urging Christians to “liberate” Russia from Jews. Within weeks or even days, Kishinev, a city where Jews, Russians, Moldavians, and Romani had coexisted peacefully, was polarized, with rumors of an imminent Easter pogrom becoming more and more believable. Thus, the massacre that erupted on the afternoon of April 6 did not appear as a sudden, unforeseen calamity. Another fact that made it look less like an unpredictable disaster was the authorities’ passivity — both the military command and the police observed the assault and the looting of Jewish neighborhoods with indifference and apathy until an order from above to dispatch the troops halted the violence.

    As soon as the bloodshed ceased, the police summoned the survivors and interrogated them, often in the presence of an armed gendarme. In many cases, their words were not fully recorded, especially when the witnesses spoke about the criminal passivity of the authorities. Alongside the official police investigation, however, a separate inquiry was underway. In May 1903, a group of liberal lawyers from St. Petersburg known as the “Young Advocates” arrived in Kishinev and settled into the city’s hotels. The “Young Advocates,” famous for supporting the oppressed, traveled around the country as a flying squad, aiding workers, peasants, and prisoners charged with participating in strikes, uprisings, and other forms of civil disobedience. The Kishinev trial marked a departure from their usual role. Here they represented the pogrom victims in civil suits, assisting them in seeking compensation for financial losses. 

    The “Young Advocates” established a temporary office and began interviewing victims and documenting damages — broken chiffoniers, stolen jewelry, the lost income of relatives who perished in the pogrom — and filing on their behalf thousands of suits against the civil administration. The unofficial investigation centered on the actions, or more accurately, the lack thereof, of the civil officials — the Bessarabian Governor von Raaben (who spent the critical days of the pogrom secluded in his mansion, failing to take any action to halt the violence), his deputies, the head of the police department, officers, gendarmes, and other officials. With none of these officials facing indictment, pursuing civil suits against the wealthy bureaucrats for financial reparations emerged as the sole means to hold the authorities accountable. 

    The competition between two investigative groups — the official police and the unofficial team led by the “Young Advocates” — tapping into the same sources but seeking evidence for different facts fostered an impression that the truth was buried under layers of falsehoods and misinterpretations. Journalists, philanthropists, and lawyers interviewed witnesses and survivors about what they had seen and heard from their neighbors. Accounts and rumors swirled together. When a few Russian newspapers published stories about the Kishinev atrocities, featuring shocking although sometimes inaccurate details, the government curtailed this uncontrolled publicity, allowing only a select few conservative outlets to report on the atrocity and its consequences. Another measure that the government took to maintain control was to hold the trials in secrecy, barring the public and journalists from attending. But this attempt to suppress information only heightened interest in the court case. A member of the advocate team meticulously recorded the proceedings and covertly passed these notes to the Western press. Inside the courtroom, with its doors firmly shut, all participants behaved as though the entire world was watching.

    Indicted in the first trial was a group of thirty-seven men accused of participating in “a violent public gathering and the attack of one part of the population against another” and charged with the attack on the Jewish residents of 33 Gostinnaia Street, which ended with the murder of the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Baranovich and his neighbors Benzion Galanter, Duvid Drachman, Ios Kantor, and Reiza Katsap. Even before the beginning of the trial, it became apparent that the Jewish victims and the survivors, as well as their murderers, were of little interest to the court. As the Russian-language emigré journal Osvobozhdenie summarized the position of the liberal public, it did not care whether “these naïve savages” who were the blind weapons in the hand of “educated” organizers” would be adequately punished. “The main interest of the trial is in revealing the role of the administration in the Kishinev massacre, the local administration as well as the central one.” 

    This was the position of the sixteen Young Advocates representing the victims: their main goal was not to defend the victims but to accuse those who were not yet indicted and to prove that the pogrom had been orchestrated according to a premeditated plan from behind the scenes. The role of the prosecution and the judges was to prove the innocence of the administration and to show that the massacre resulted from “national discord,” which was the subject of Article 269 of the Penal Code. This statute, introduced after the pogroms of the early 1880s, allowed the court to punish dozens of pogromists who joined the crowd, but it presupposed that the “discord” was mutual and tacitly blamed Jews for provoking the assault. The collective guilt of the crowd also dissipated the guilt of individual murderers, making the killings appear almost accidental. 

    The trial began with the testimonies of well-known figures: the former city mayor Karl Schmidt, the commander of the local regiment General Beckman, doctors from the local hospital who admitted and treated victims during the pogrom, police officers, orthodox priests, and journalists. The Young Advocates aggressively interrogated witnesses whom they held responsible for the disaster, trying to convince the court to re-investigate the case and indict antisemites who had instigated the violence and the officials who allowed it to happen. 

    It was not until November 17, the eighth day of the court proceedings, that survivors and witnesses of the violence at 33 Gostinnaia Street were finally called to testify. Ruvim Katsap, who had hidden in the attic while the pogromists invaded the house, recounted to the court the brutal murder of his sixty-year-old grandmother, Reizel Katsap. Following Ruvim’s testimony, Shimon Baranovich took the stand, sobbing and barely able to speak. A skilled house painter, renowned as “the best in Bessarabia,” Shimon had been a resident of Kishinev for twenty-two years. Among those who had attacked his house were Russians and Moldavians who had previously worked under him as apprentices. He testified that on April 7, the second day of the pogrom (I am translating from the records of the court proceedings in the Serguei Zarudnyi collection in the Russian State Historical Archive),

    the crowd … started breaking glass and forcing open the iron gates. … Soon the vandals made their way through the windows into the courtyard and the apartment. We all rushed to escape, some onto the roof, some into the attic, some into the outhouse. I was in the far corner…. Suddenly, a heart-wrenching cry reached me, “Daddy, Daddy, they’re killing me.” I rushed into the yard and begged them, promising to give them everything I had. I pleaded with Kolesnichenko to take everything from the house and leave me my son. He replied, “Shut up, you Jew, we’ll finish with you now, and we’ll take all your belongings without [asking] you.” I ran out into the street, [the gendarme] Solovkin was standing there; I fell at his feet, kissing his coat and boots, begging him to protect us. He remained calm, lit a cigarette, and said, “Everything is over in your yard; you have nothing to fear now.” “Here comes the patrol, for God’s sake, save us,” I asked him and cried in front of him. But the patrol passed by, and he did not call them. I noticed Officer Trofimov and began to plead with him. “What can I do for you?” he answered and walked away. Meanwhile, they [the pogromists] continued to destroy property in the apartments. I took my son to the water tap and tried to pour water on him. I heard only a groan from him.“For God’s sake, send a doctor,” I begged the officer again, but he walked around the yard, paying no attention to my words. 

    Baranovich’s court testimony, along with those of other survivors, not only provided the details of the killings but also exposed efforts by the police and the authorities to hide the truth about their criminal negligence. Survivors’ petitions vanished from the prosecutor’s office, and the presiding judge frequently censored and interrupted witness testimonies during their court appearances, dismissing their accounts as “irrelevant” to the case. The plaintiffs’ legal representatives protested and called for a re-investigation, citing new evidence of a conspiracy and the authorities’ complicity that had emerged during the trial. These demands were summarily dismissed by the court. When the Young Advocates’ efforts to redirect the focus from the collective guilt of the mob and the individual actions of the pogromists to the suspected orchestrators of the pogrom reached an impasse, they decided to withdraw from the trial and left the courtroom.

    The “quitting” maneuver employed by the group of Young Advocates had been used in previous trials as a public gesture to signal the illegality of the proceedings and to suggest that the court was not genuinely interested in uncovering the truth. By exposing the culpability of the antisemitic journalists and the authorities, the advocates felt they had fulfilled their role. Before exiting the courtroom, the lawyers declared that the true crime remained unpunished and that the wrong individuals had been placed on the defendant’s bench. Nikolay Karabchevsky, the star lawyer from St. Petersburg, nailed down the image of the pogrom that the lawyers had in mind, comparing Kishinev to the Roman coliseum. 

    On the basis of verified evidence [that emerged during] the court hearings, I claim that for several hours Kishinev instantly turned into one giant arena of a Roman circus, surrounded by troops and the festive applauding crowd, while in its depth a bloody spectacle, unheard of in our days, was taking place: from one side, the defenseless victims were pushed out, from another, the infuriated beasts were set on them. And when they were told: “Enough, end of the show,” it ended, as all shows usually end. I insist that even the external features of the event contain all the evidence of its internal organization. 

    Karabchevsky’s speech, which was published by Western newspapers, achieved rhetorical success. In reality, however, the lawyers lacked sufficient evidence to prove conclusively that the pogrom had been systematically organized or that there was a strategic plan directing the movements of the pogromist groups. There were rumors that a list of Jewish residences was compiled, and one witness claimed to have overheard that groups of pogromists were numbered like military units. The lawyers also tried to prove that it was implausible that an unorganized, leaderless mob could cause such extensive destruction. Yet despite their efforts, no definitive evidence was uncovered — neither the documents proving a conspiracy nor any indication of a pre-existing plot involving government authorities. The lawyers’ frustration with the court’s refusal to investigate the crimes committed by what they termed “educated people” — referring to officials, antisemitic politicians, and journalists — was justifiable. They viewed the pogromists as mere pawns, people without a will of their own, manipulated evildoers executing someone else’s order. 

    The decision to withdraw from the first of the twenty-two trials had an unintended consequence: both public and foreign press interest in the victims’ and defendants’ fates rapidly waned, as if a spotlight of attention had been abruptly switched off. This decline in interest was particularly notable as it occurred shortly after the court had begun to hear the accounts of the pogrom’s victims. Consequently, aside from the moving account of Baranovich regarding his son’s death — an account also captured in the interviews that Hayim Nachman Bialik conducted for the Jewish Historical Commission in Odesa, which provided the raw material for his great poem — and a handful of brief testimonies from Baranovich’s neighbors, the stories of many other survivors went unheard. The tragic irony of the pogrom trial lay in that, despite being heavily reliant on the testimonies of nearly six hundred witnesses, the court seemed disinclined to consider these accounts from the outset. 

    Let us pause for a second and consider whether the rebuke for failing to listen and appreciate the survivors’ testimonies is fair. Can we blame judges and advocates for not knowing how to listen? Even in the modern historiography of pogroms, as the historian Gur Alroey admits, “the victim has been marginalized,” and the attention usually centers on perpetrators and instigators. Indeed, the scholarly methodology for analyzing the testimonies of witnesses to mass atrocities emerged only in the aftermath of the Second World War, alongside the emergence of what is known as the jurisprudence of atrocities, but even in legal practice, the voices of witnesses and victims did not always play a key role. 

    The Nuremberg trial in 1945–1946 was based entirely on Nazi documents, and the Eichmann trial in 1961 was the first instance of adjudication that overwhelmingly relied on the testimonies of survivors. Historians also had to learn how to suspend doubt when dealing with testimonies — sources that may be imperfect in relating facts yet nevertheless be truthful. Jan Gross, writing in the early 2000s about wartime anti-Semitic atrocities in the Polish town of Jedwabne, argued for the change in the attitude to testimonies from “a priori critical to in principle affirmative,” and proposed “to accept as true Jewish testimonies about atrocities committed by the local population until they are proven false.” Gross’s message did not find unanimous approval in Poland, and the story of the killing of fifteen hundred Jews in 1941 by their Polish neighbors remains a subject of bitter contention.

    Still, even if the ethics of reading survivors’ testimonies is fairly recent, evaluating evidence, including eyewitness accounts, has been an essential element of judicial and everyday reasoning practiced by courts for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, in his attempt to define the principles of the critique of evidence, called on judges to suspend doubt and “hear everyone.” Bentham believed in people’s natural propensity to tell the truth and advocated for the presumption of truthfulness as a default setting. (He thought that lying is a laborious task that most humans tend to avoid.) One may dispute his optimistic view of human nature, but in the 1860s Russia introduced new courts with an improved organization and procedure that followed Bentham’s principles and allowed for an almost unrestricted freedom of evidence, including the use and interpretation of witnesses’ testimonies. Vladimir Spasovich, picking up Bentham’s thesis, added that each society, in each stage of its historical development, has its own principles for assessing proofs. The level of trust in testimonies fluctuates, Spasovich maintained; it is influenced by various factors, including the political climate, scientific advances, religious beliefs, and cultural trends. In the 1860s and 1870s, the era of liberal thaw, courts and the people whom they represented were open to listening and believing. In the 1890s and early 1900s, by contrast, Russian society was at its most skeptical and even cynical, at its lowest capacity for believing.

    There were multiple reasons for this incredulity. One of them was the persistent policy of the autocratic government to conceal the truth about crucial events and their causes — such as, for instance, a mass stampede in Moscow in 1896 that took the lives of around two thousand people. The regime of secrecy and censorship exacerbated popular anxiety, as did the proliferation of media and the industry of rumors and sensations. There were other factors as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian forensic psychologists and lawyers delved deeply into research on the psychology of memory and attention. Psychological experiments that tested people’s ability to remember and to reproduce facts led scientists to conclude that even honest and unbiased testimonies can be inaccurate and misleading. This was particularly true in extraordinary situations such as natural catastrophes or mass violence, in which individuals might struggle to fully comprehend and accurately recall the details of events, including the identities of perpetrators. This emerging understanding of the fallibility of memory played a significant role in shaping the judicial approach to witness testimonies during this era. Lying was exonerated and normalized, yet everyone appeared as a liar. “Doubts [in the trustworthiness of testimonies] grew into the merciless rejection of testimonies,” admitted Anatoly Koni, a famous judge who tried to restore trust in the human ability to remember and tell the truth. 

    The “scientization” of truth in legal proceedings resulted in a peculiar situation when the two notions of truth emerged parallel to each other: one based on facts, calculatable and verifiable, the other based on moral judgment. Russian philosophers loved pondering the specificity of the Russian language, which has two words to designate truth, “pravda” and “istina,” aligning themselves with the first or the second. Speculations about notions of truth could be entertaining, but when it came to deciding the fate of victims or the defendants, this splintering, this epistemological crisis, resulted in misjudgments. Leo Tolstoy attributed the persistence of doubt and uncertainty to the celebration of scientific knowledge: “Doctors, lawyers, theologians, all those who scientifically study fantastic matters that cannot be conceived, employ methods with which they can achieve only the superficial, mechanical semblance to authenticity … But the methods they use in principle cannot achieve the state of true knowledge.”

    Tolstoy, to be sure, was an almost mystical upholder of the moral truth and a believer in the human propensity to honesty, while remaining skeptical when it came to scientific “proofs” and “facts.” Yet the distrust in testimonies was not fueled merely by “scientific” skepticism. Testimonies were viewed through the lens of class, nationality, and religion. Although legal reform in the 1860s eliminated many institutionalized biases, in the 1880s and 1890s nationalists revived the most obnoxious myths about the propensity to lie among Tatars, Chuvash, Daghestanians, and, of course, Jews. Nationalists often used modern sociological and psychological theories to support centuries-old lies and biases, doubling the effect of the fin-de-siècle epistemological crisis. Thus, inadvertently, forensic psychologists, philosophers, and lawyers gave antisemites the language and the right to reject testimonies, normalizing prejudices as a form of doubt.

    Even before the beginning of the pogrom trial in Kishinev, nationalists started agitating against Jewish witnesses and victims. The nationalist newspaper Novoe Vremia published an article that insisted, with sarcasm, on a thorough interrogation of the “trustworthy” Jewish eyewitnesses, warning about the “unanimity of Jews” when they face Christians in court. The article manifested a tendency that would become even more apparent when Alexei Shmakov, a nationalist lawyer who represented the pogromists, evoked the Oath More Judaico, the medieval anti-Semitic institution that required a special oath of Jews to guarantee the credibility of their testimony about Christians in a Christian court, and demanded that the Jewish eyewitnesses take the oath in a synagogue. Judges rejected the demand as incompatible with law and the court’s ethos. But this rejection exposed only their own annoyance with the attempt of the nationalist press and antisemitic lawyers to instruct them how to interpret testimonies. Their own approach, sadly, was not significantly different.

    The judges and the administrators shrouded their antisemitism under the mask of objectivity and a healthy, rational skepticism. Prince Serguei Urusov, the new and progressive governor of Bessarabia who deemed himself a “philo-Semite,” did not conceal his disappointment that after the “interesting” beginning of the trial that featured the interrogation of “half-witnesses, half-defendants” by the Young Advocates, “the testimony of the Jews began:” 

    Witnesses who sat in their basement during the massacre had seen what was going on two squares ahead of them. Witnesses identified different persons among the accused as the perpetrators of the murders they saw…. In short, a Bacchanalian orgy of witnesses arose, confounding the unhappy judges and interesting the lawyers for the plaintiffs but little.

    Urusov, who was not sympathetic to the pogromists-defendants, blamed the authorities for their inactivity and even held the central government “morally responsible” for the massacre. But his lack of empathy and his overt distrust of the testimonies from Jewish survivors mirrored the prevailing attitude of even progressive administrators and the liberal public, who harbored doubts about the credibility of testimonies.

    Following the liberal lawyers’ collective withdrawal from the first trial, the court’s regard for testimonies diminished even further, while the voices of the survivors failed to reach an audience outside the courtroom. Some “young lawyers” returned to the courtroom for the subsequent trials, supporting their clients and recording testimonies. From the notes of Alexander Zarudnyi, one of the Young Advocates, we can gain insights into what transpired in the courtroom and can access the survivors’ accounts. Throughout the trials, which lasted until the end of 1904, Zarudnyi persistently pressured the court to reinvestigate cases, and sent appeals to the Senate, and urged the court to heed the words of the survivors. Zarudnyi was fighting what seemed to be a losing battle; his records, now kept in an archive, preserve the details of his legal ordeal.

    I ran away from home with my husband and the boys… We slipped into the alley next to the [brothers] Papanuks’ house… we were pressed against the fence. Papanuk started shouting, “Jews need to be killed!” We pleaded with them to let us go. Georgy Papanuk pulled me forward. And all of them started beating me, and I fell. I couldn’t see what was happening on the street. My eyes and my entire face were swollen from the beatings. I heard the voices of these two [pointing at the accused in the courtroom]. My husband stayed behind me, and I didn’t see who killed him. My son, who saw better than me, told me that Ivan Papanuk rushed out with a piece of iron in his hands and hit my husband. I recognize the accused. In the raging crowd, I didn’t see them, but when I regained consciousness, I heard their voices in the mob.”

    As Perla Kogan testified in court, she, her husband Avrum, and their sons, pursued by the mob, fled towards the railway station but were captured and brutally beaten. Avrum died on the spot. Although several witnesses identified the perpetrators, the court was reluctant to convict them. The judges’ hesitation stemmed from uncertainty over which blow to Avrum Kogan’s head was fatal — whether it was the one delivered by Anton Kuiban or by Georgy Papanuk. (The debate focused on whether Kogan remained standing after the blow.) 

    In her testimony, Perla asserted that the two neighbors, Georgy Papanuk and Konstantin Rotar, raped her after the beating.

    I lay on the ground from 8:00 PM until morning. Georgy Papanuk came to me twice around 12:00 and raped me twice. Then [Konstantin] Rotar approached and also raped me, then he left, cursing and pulling my shirt up. I recognized both of them by their voices, as I’ve known them for a long time. I couldn’t see their faces; I was all beaten up. When dawn broke, I covered myself with a shirt. By morning, a city guard and some Jew took me to the hospital.

    During the investigation, Perla mentioned the fact of the rape, but the officer in charge did not even record it. She reported it verbally to the prosecutor, and her lawyer, Zarudnyi, filed a written complaint on her behalf. Despite these efforts, the rape allegation was not included in the indictment.

    The court also doubted that Perla could recognize her attackers without seeing them, although forensic experts invited to the proceeding stated that a person who loses vision could still hear clearly and thus recognize people by their voices. Finally, Perla’s testimony was called into question when Eduard Woldenmeier, a resident of the same street where the tragedy unfolded, claimed to have seen a woman fall in the middle of the road, lying there until morning without anyone approaching her. Despite the apparent cynicism in Woldenmeier’s testimony — he watched Perla, severely beaten, lying on the ground for twelve hours and did nothing — the court favored his account over hers. Zarudnyi, representing Perla in court, pushed for the case to be reopened to investigate the assault and the rape that she endured, but his efforts were in vain. Ultimately the court acquitted the defendants accused of beating and raping Perla Kogan and murdering her husband.

    Perhaps most shocking was the court’s decision to acquit Yakov Bezdrigin and Nikita (Mitia) Kreuter, the rapists identified by several witnesses and victims, including the sixteen-year-old Sima Zaichik, who testified: 

    Gentiles, among whom I noticed Kreuter, cut through the attic roof with an axe…and through this hole they came down to the attic where we were hiding. Five of them grabbed me by my arms and legs, threw me down, and Bezdrigin started having intercourse with me against my will; I recognized him on April 14 when I came to the police department to identify things stolen from us. In addition to Bezdrigin, other people had intercourse with me, but I don’t know who because I fainted.

    Many residents of the house on Nikolskaia Street witnessed Sima’s ordeal. As Rivka Schiffer, another victim of the rapists, confirmed, about thirty people, most of them women, were hiding in the attic when the thugs broke in. Rivka recognized two of them — Nikita (Mitia) Kreuter, whom she had known for twelve years, and Yakov Bezdrigin. Rivka begged Mitia not to touch her, to no avail. Kreuter raped Rivka first, then Bezdrigin and others, eight or nine men in total, followed. She did not resist, fearing that they would kill her.

    Rukhlia Krupnik, a witness, saw how Kreuter ripped Rivka’s skirts, shut her mouth, bent her arms behind her back, and assaulted her. After Kreuter, someone else took his turn with her while Kreuter raped Sima. Sima was screaming, but they paid no attention. Bezdrigin stood on his knees next to Sima, waiting. After that, Kreuter came to Rukhlia with an axe; she gave him everything she had — money, a tin box with her golden watch and jewelry. Rivka’s husband, Shepsel Schiffer, also saw how Kreuter raped his wife, and how Bezdrigin assaulted Sima. The pogromists threatened him; he gave them his watch and ran away.

    The story of the two women raped in the attic of the house on Nikolskaia Street was known beyond the courtroom. Social norms of that time made women, and not their rapists, look disgraced, but Sima and Rivka, unlike many other victims who quietly carried the burden of pain and dishonor, chose to speak up. Michael Davitt met Sima, among other victims at the rabbi’s house: “One was a girl of sixteen, named Simme Zeytchik, very pretty, and childish-looking for her years.” She spoke to him. Bialik recorded Rivka’s long and detailed testimony. In court and in interviews, both women repeated their statements almost word for word. 

    They were not sure about the exact number of the men who assaulted them, but who could blame them for not counting? The court, however, harped on the fact that, according to Sima, Bezdrigin was first to assault her and Kreuter was second, while Rukhlia Krupnik claimed that Kreuter started and Bezdrigin was next. Sima and Rivka had gone through the forensic medical examination by male doctors eleven days after the assault. Sima’s legs were bruised, and the exam showed traces of coitus. Two experts — Kogan and Frenkel — asserted (this is from Zarudnyi’s courtroom notes) that these were the signs of rape; but an expert named Vasilevich sowed doubt by suggesting that the hymen was ruptured “with either penis or finger,” and the fourth expert, a man named Rava, doubted the very fact of the defilement. The results of Rivka’s examination were also inconclusive, and the court ruled that the inconsistencies in testimonies about the order in which the women were assaulted and the lack of unanimity among the experts not only undermined the accusation of Bezdrigin and Kreuter “but even raised doubt regarding the fact of rape itself.” 

    The list of crimes that the court refused to recognize because it did not consider the testimonies authentic is staggering. Judges acted as automatons, formally evaluating and calculating evidence, dismissing testimonies that came from victims or relatives or doubting that witnesses had been able to see things that they later reported seeing. Two pogromists, Yakim Sofronii and Ulyan Chebotarenko, knocked out Meir Weisman’s eye, and Weisman, who was already blind in one eye, lost his vision completely; but the court, the unconscionable cruelty of this crime notwithstanding, refused to consider Weisman’s petition because it was based only on his own statement. Judges acquitted the murderers of Kopel Kainarskii because the key witnesses to his murder were his widow and his children. Petr Kaverin, Ivan Pirozhok, and Stepan Foksh, who had killed Kelman Voliovich, were also exonerated because the testimonies against them came from Voliovich’s family members. Although seven witnesses observed the pogromists chasing and beating Srul Ulman, the crucial testimony came from his sons, and the court suggested that in their state of emotional distress they “could unintentionally make a mistake regarding the identity” of the assailants. Therefore, the court decided to clear the accused of murder charges. The case involving the killings on Muncheshtskaia Road, where Sura Fonarzhi, her husband Zis, and their neighbor Yankel Tunik were the victims, was particularly harrowing. Witnesses asserted that Sura’s body was found mutilated, with nails driven into her nostrils. However, the doctor who performed the autopsy later refuted this detail. This inconsistency in witness accounts regarding the mutilations provided the court with a pretext to dismiss their testimonies entirely, resulting in the acquittal of the accused on murder charges. 

    When survivors sought some solace by suing the pogromists for the destruction of their property, the judges questioned the plaintiffs’ ability to identify who plundered their homes because, during the attack, the plaintiffs were hiding from the attackers and, consequently, could not see anything. Even when the perpetrators were clearly identified, the court dismissed requests for compensation because the testimonies regarding the value of broken utensils, stolen goods, and clothing came from the plaintiffs’ neighbors, who were themselves victims of the attack. In the face of this injustice, Zarudnyi tried to appeal the court decision in the Senate, pointing out that “all these witnesses were themselves victims of the pogrom because, with few exceptions, all the Jews of Kishinev suffered from the pogrom. There were no other witnesses available to establish the value of the destroyed household property except for Jewish neighbors. The victims of the pogrom, who belonged to the poorest segment of the city’s population for the most part, were the ones who could testify to it.” This, like all other Zarudnyi’s appeals, was futile. Russian courts treated all Jews as if they constituted a single collective entity with uniform interests and consciousness. Simultaneously, it sought to individualize the guilt of each defendant, opting for acquittal when this guilt was not immediately apparent.

    The main cause of the judges’ attitude to the survivors’ testimonies requires no explanation. Antisemitism — deep, sometimes even unconscious, prejudice turned them against the survivors’ stories. According to many accounts, the presiding judge from Odesa, Vladimir Davydov, was a decent person, a loyal and conservative man, and very representative of the legal estate that was permeated by latent antisemitism. Other factors, however, also played a role. As I have pointed out, the court followed the formal rules of evidence, dismissing testimonies as legally unacceptable. It is quite possible that the judges understood that the survivors were telling the truth, but they prioritized the formal rules, dismissing contradictory testimonies altogether and rejecting the testimonies of close relatives. Doubt and skepticism, often with a scientific gloss, concealed and justified their biases and the lack of empathy. 

    The result was an absurd coexistence of the two truths. The city was abuzz with tales of atrocities, with burned houses and streets littered with fragments of shattered furniture serving as silent testaments to the catastrophe; everyone was aware of the truth regarding the rapes and the killings. Yet the judges constructed an alternate version of the truth that deviated from common knowledge. The judges’ prior doubt mirrored the prior willingness of the pogromists to accept lies and conspiracy theories, such as the story of ritual murder or of the Tsar’s alleged order to massacre the Jewish residents of Kishinev. The pogromists’ readiness to believe these rumors was not driven by the allure of falsehoods but rather by a desire to believe in their veracity, a credulity based on the platitudes of the world they inhabited, while the court’s doubt in the authenticity of testimonies also reflected a tacit convention.

    The liberal lawyers who withdrew from the trial because the court refused to investigate antisemitic conspiracy also inadvertently played a role in sealing the irrelevance of the victims’ testimonies and contributed to the murderers’ acquittal. The Jewish lawyer Samuel Kalmanovich, a member of the Young Advocate defense team, spoke on the victims’ behalf when he declared that they did not care about the prosecution of the pogromists: “We are not seeking the punishment of these poor souls… We, Jews, need the reasons… Tell us, why were we beaten?” But while this question certainly resonated with the words of the survivors, it seems that Kalmanovich and the victims were speaking about different things. Kalmanovich asked about the role of the authorities and the instigators, assuming the existence of a plot, while the victims wondered how and why people who had lived side-by-side with them for ages had turned into their enemies. The liberal lawyers’ position denying agency to the mob and to its individual participants somewhat foreshadowed Hannah Arendt’s stance about the role of individual perpetrators in the giant machine of Nazi violence. Like Arendt reporting in 1963 on the Eichmann trial, the young lawyers, undoubtedly sympathetic to the victims, failed in 1903 to hear their voices clearly. 

    The court, predictably, could not and did not want to address the question of the pogrom’s causes, all the more so because most defendants stayed silent throughout the trial, simply denying their guilt. The study of the origins of the violence requires deep research into the social, cultural, and economic history of Kishinev, and some of this work has been done recently by several prominent historians who showed that the pogrom was neither an organized and pre-planned assault, as the liberal lawyers tried to prove, nor the eruption of a national and economic conflict that had been building up for ages, as the prosecution suggested. What happened in Kishinev was a spontaneous ethnic riot provoked by antisemitic propaganda. In its causes, but not in its context or its scale, it was similar to the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, when, as Jan Gross asserts, “ordinary Poles slaughtered the Jews” without the Gestapo’s command and instruction, “of their own free will.” 

    While the memory of the massacre at Jedwabne lay dormant until Gross’s intervention, Kishinev’s story was neither unknown nor forgotten. But what remains to be explained is the seductiveness of the lies and the conspiracy theories, and the failure of both the court and the liberal lawyers, with the exception of a few, to hear the voices of the survivors. Was the society, including its liberal part, ready and willing to accept testimonies, and if not, what could have caused the crisis of disbelief? This question resonates, alas, with our own debates about alternative truths, elusive facts, prior ideological disqualifications, and trust that has become predicated on a testifier’s group or nationality or citizenship. 

    Striking a balance between credulity and skepticism regarding the narratives of victims is difficult. What matters is not their identity or their position — on the defendant’s bench, among the plaintiffs, or among the witnesses; even the categories of “victim” and “survivor” can be contested. A judge, a journalist, or a historian should approach testimonies with an assumption of truthfulness — but trust is not the same as blind belief, which turns quickly into distrust and injustice towards others. Truth has a history, and a society’s progress toward a better way of understanding and critically evaluating evidence is not straightforward. It is from the failures and the retreats in the history of truth that we can learn the most.

    No Art

    The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

    Elizabeth Bishop

    You know everything will come to an end:

    the sugar, the tea, the dried sage,

    the water.

    Just go to the market and restock.

    Even your shadow will abandon you

    when there is no light.

    So just keep things that require only you:

    the book of poems that only you can decipher,

    the blank map of a country

    whose cities and villages only you can recognize.

    I’ve personally lost three friends to war,

    a city to darkness, and a language to fear.

    This was not easy to survive,

    but survival proved necessary to master.

    But of all things,

    losing the only photo of my grandfather

    under the rubble of my house

    was a real disaster.

    Rescue Plane

    I wish I had a rescue plane

    to fly over Gaza

    to drop wheat flour and tea bags,

    tomatoes and cucumbers,

    to remove the rubble of the houses,

    to retrieve the corpses of my loved ones.

    I wish for a second rescue plane

    to drop flowers for children—

    the ones still alive—to plant

    on the graves of their parents and siblings

    in the streets or school yards.

    The wish behind the wish?

    I wish there were no planes at all.

    I wish there were no war.

    Right or Left!

    Under the rubble,

    her body has remained

    for days

    and days.

    When the war ends,

    we try to remove

    the rubble,

    stone

    after stone.

    We only find a bone

    from her body.

    It is a bone

    from her arm.

    Right or left,

    it does not matter

    as long as we cannot

    find the henna

    from the neighbors’ wedding

    on her skin,

    or the ink

    from a school pen

    on her little index finger.

    Who Has Seen the Wind?

    After Bob Kaufman

    The ceiling of my bedroom, my fridge

    and the stale bread in it,

    the notebook inside which I hid the love letters

    from my wife before we married,

    the foreign coins in my piggy bank ,

    my expired debit cards

    and my brother’s death certificate,

    the pieces of shrapnel on or near

    each of these

    Howl

    I’m howling, howling

    in Cairo.

    I jump off my chair. I hug

    the closest thing to me,

    the gray corner of my room,

    my head glued to it like

    a stamp so eager to travel.

    Books on the shelf,

    they listen to the whispers of my nose

    as it smells the old paint,

    as it searches for the fingers of the mason

    beneath the paint.

    My nose hears the mason’s radio

    playing Om Kolthoum

    and news about the Uprising nearby.

    My nose smells the burning tires and stones

    thrown by young hands.

    I open my eyes to the image of my mother

    on my phone

    handing me oranges she picked

    from a tree that’s now under the rubble,

    but that continues to howl

    in the wind. 

    Is a Public Philosophy Still Possible?

    Are we living in a “golden age” of public philosophy, as some claim? There sure is a lot of it, as magazines, blogs, podcasts, and Substack newsletters proliferate. Even the New York Times ran a philosophy column for over a decade in which philosophers shared their thoughts on issues “timely and timeless” with the hoi polloi. Is this deluge of wisdom a boon for democratic deliberation or a vanity project for academic philosophers who feel embarrassed to be counting angels on a pin’s head while Rome is burning? A cursory glance at the world provides little evidence that enlightenment is spreading. Yet philosophers do grapple with the most pressing human questions: How should we live? What defines a good society? Does this qualify them to shape public discourse and guide us through tumultuous times?

    Two strands of public philosophy are on offer today: the grassroots Socratic approach and the elitist, top-down Platonic. Both have limitations: the former is ineffective, the latter is paternalistic. But if we strike the right balance between the two approaches, we can anchor liberal societies in a robust philosophical foundation. Or so I hope!

     

    At its most ambitious, public philosophy “aspires to liberate the subject from its academic confines” and “offer non-philosophers a way of participating in the activity,” Agnes Callard recently wrote in The Point, a small magazine with a big mission: to create “a society where the examined life is not an abstract ideal but an everyday practice.” The concept of the “examined life” derives from Socrates, of course, who famously declared that “an unexamined life is not worth living” — a radical claim that never fails to baffle my students.

    Their idea of a fulfilling life is very different from Socrates’s. They want to study medicine, law, engineering, social work, education, and the like to realize their professional ambitions. They also want to find friends, fall in love, and go out and party. Socrates is not exactly telling them to throw their goals overboard. But he is telling them that they have no value whatsoever without relentless self-scrutiny. No wonder that Socrates admonishes his fellow-citizens with evangelical fervor. Their very salvation is at stake:

    I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger…. I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god. I was placed in this city by the god as on a horse, great and of noble birth, which was sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. I never cease to stir up each and every one of you, to persuade you and reproach you all day long.

    Note that Socrates is not offering intellectual stimulation. He seeks nothing less than conversion:

    I shall not cease…to point out to anyone of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall examine him…, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things.

    Socrates has immense confidence in the power of reason. Argument, he thinks, can remove false beliefs about what benefits us and then get us to reframe our lives around the truth. Nobody is so dumb to chase things of little value and neglect things of great value once they grasp what really is to their advantage.

    Liberal-egalitarians will find an ally in Socrates. For one thing, he is inclusive: the gadfly piques everyone. Sure, Socrates is in your face. But he doesn’t force you to change. Nor does he pour wisdom into your head. As an intellectual “midwife” he wants to help you give birth to your own ideas, making sure that they are founded in reason. This might still be too much for the complacent or the self-righteous. But it certainly fits nicely with John Stuart Mill’s brand of liberalism, for example, that champions critical thinking and vigorous debate. Karl Popper celebrated Socrates as the first advocate of the “open society.”

    The values that we embrace, Socrates argues, guide our choices. Scrutinizing them is crucial. If you really want to be pious, make sure you know what piety is. If you really want to be just, make sure you know what justice is. In short: if you really want to do well and thrive, make sure you know what that means. Who would not rally behind public philosophy if it could steer us to an examined life steeped in virtue and wisdom?

    The crises piling up around us add urgency to Socratic public philosophy. We need all the help we can get to make good decisions. I was finishing high school in Germany when the Cold War ended. With friends I drove to Berlin to watch thousands of East Germans climb over the Wall. We were mesmerized by what seemed like the triumph of freedom. In the decades that followed the world enjoyed more freedom than ever before. And yet, thirty-five years later, I am scratching my head. What are we doing with it?

    Liberals hail the freedom to live as we please. We can celebrate Christmas, Diwali, or Gay Pride; donate money to Greenpeace or the National Rifle Association; stay with one partner “till death do us part” or go out with a new one every week. Yet even in a perfect liberal society in which we have freedom, a fair share of resources, and equal opportunities to advance, we still need to learn how to craft worthwhile lives. What liberal societies fail to give us is the tools to deliberate within our freedoms and make good use of all that choice.

    The last few years have plunged us into ever-growing confusion: extreme weather, divisive ideologies, global health crises, populist upheaval, billionaires buzzing through space next to capsized migrant dinghies washing up on shores, intractable wars, technological revolutions, disinformation. These challenges don’t come out of nowhere. The world we live in is the world we create through our choices: the dreams we nurse, the careers we pursue, the politicians we elect, the stuff we buy, the vacations we plan, the charities we support, the social networks we join. In liberal societies, where free and equal citizens are the sovereign, we cannot point fingers at kings, popes, or despots when things go wrong.

    Consider the politicians we elect. Plato’s critique of democracy never failed to spark spirited protest in my classroom. A state where the demos, the people, rule, Plato argues, is like a “ship of fools.” To make it safely to the other shore, we need a seasoned captain at the helm, not passengers who have no clue about navigation. Pass the rudder to the demos and they will run the state into the ground. My students who grew up with the firm conviction that liberal democracy is the best political system were keen to recapture the captain’s wheel. Pushing back on Plato, they stressed the value of freedom, collective wisdom, and the need to hold rulers accountable.

    On a cold winter day in 2017, however, fervor gave way to gloom. More than one hundred students had signed up for my Intro to Political Philosophy. Not one was eager to speak up for democracy. At first I was surprised. Then I saw a raised hand. “Didn’t you watch the inauguration of the new American president last week?” the student asked. “Maybe democracies are ships of fools after all!” The other students nodded. By then even diehard optimists conceded that the moral arc of the universe at best looks like a zigzagging line. Suddenly the post–World War II political order trembled. One day we had been discussing transgender bathrooms. The next day a full-blown assault on the foundations of liberalism was underway: an American president who would go on to incite a mob to storm the Capitol in Washington; the United Kingdom breaking out of the European Union; nationalist, populist, and even fascist movements popping up everywhere. On September 11, Islamic terrorists flew airplanes into Western skyscrapers. These days leaders, duly elected by the people, strive to dismantle the system from within.

    Can public philosophy rescue liberal societies from turning into ships of fools? At stake is our most basic moral paradigm: the “morality of self-governance,” which replaced the “morality of obedience” from the seventeenth century onwards, as Jerome Schneewind argues in his classic study The Invention of Autonomy:

    All of us, on this view, have an equal ability to see for ourselves what morality calls for and are in principle equally able to move ourselves to act accordingly. […] The conception of morality as self-governance provides a conceptual framework for a social space in which we may each rightly claim to direct our own actions without interference from the state, the church, the neighbors, or those claiming to be better or wiser than we.

    Consider Kant’s “motto” of the Enlightenment: “Sapere aude!” “Dare to use your own reason!” It is addressed to those who out of “laziness and cowardice” follow “the guidance of others”: the guidance of a “book” or the guidance of a “priest.” Kant is optimistic: we can all become captains and competently steer our individual and communal lives. The sting of the gadfly is just what we need to help us overcome “laziness and cowardice” and embrace rational self-rule. If public philosophy can help us with that, it would be a blessing indeed.

    Socrates’s debates are anything but academic. Take, for example, his dialogue on the nature of piety with Euthyphro, the diviner-priest. The stakes could not be higher. Euthyphro insists that it is his pious duty to indict his own father for murder. But is his understanding of piety correct? Concurrently, the people of Athens have charged Socrates with impiety. His trial is looming. Will they wrongly put to death the very man striving to save them?

    Or consider inquisitors, missionaries, terrorists, and others who through the ages have done things in the name of piety that are questionable to say the least. In 1995 Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jew, assassinated Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, followed by a string of suicide attacks in Israeli cities ordered by Hamas. Together, in God’s name, they derailed the Oslo peace process.

    As is typical for Socratic debates, the one with Euthyphro ends in an impasse. Socrates knocks down every definition of piety that Euthyphro proposes. Does this mean that the exercise was futile? Not at all. Socrates has freed Euthyphro from the illusion of knowledge. Identifying and discarding false beliefs is a prerequisite for finding the truth. But will we hit on the right answer eventually? If we can count, measure, and weigh things, Socrates notes, disputes are quickly resolved. Concerning “the just and unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad,” however, disagreement persists. For Socrates the realm of values is messier than that of mathematics. We cannot know for sure what piety is.

    Still, some beliefs about piety are more plausible than others. Say, you propose a definition of piety that is not refuted in a Socratic debate. Granted, it may still be refuted the next time you enter the ring. Yet each failed refutation is a reason to believe the definition is sound. At the same time, even the most scrutinized definition hasn’t been proven beyond doubt. At the very end of his life Socrates is willing to reexamine — and, if need be, to revise — his long-held views on justice. Following his death sentence, his friends urge him to escape from prison. After probing the matter thoroughly, Socrates concludes that this would be wrong.

    The “examined life,” then, is not something you can learn like the periodic table, long division, or the passé composé. It is a lifelong practice, driven by the desire to get the values you live by right while conceding that you may be wrong. In this sense, public philosophy in the Socratic mode does not offer answers. It aims to get us hooked on an open-ended Socratic quest.

     

    Plato thought that Socrates’s gadfly mission — the attempt to change people’s minds and lives through argument — didn’t stand a chance. Yes, the parable of the cave is a moving tribute to Socrates’s effort to drag the cave dwellers up to the light. But it also highlights his spectacular failure: “And, as for anyone who tried to free [the cave dwellers] and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him? They certainly would.”

    Plato’s pessimism about Socrates’s project has two reasons; one we can dismiss, the other we should take seriously. Here is the former: Plato was an elitist who argued that most human beings are cave dwellers by nature. They are in the grip of lust, greed, and ambition. Even the best education cannot enlighten them. Only the select few have the desire and the talent for wisdom. On this view, trying to convert people from chasing after “wealth, reputation and honors” to caring for “the best possible state of the soul” is like trying to introduce the deaf to music. Most of us are unable to govern ourselves rationally because of our deficient nature, not because of cowardice and laziness. No amount of Socratic argument — or public philosophy, for that matter — can get the masses to embrace the examined life or turn a ship of fools into a vessel of the wise.

    Plato’s other worry, the one we should engage with, concerns not nature but nurture. Even “the best nature,” he contends, risks being “corrupted by its upbringing”: “It will grow to possess every virtue if it happens to receive appropriate instruction, but if it is sown, planted, and grown in an inappropriate environment, it will develop in quite the opposite way.” Consider Plato’s visit to the south of Italy. He stresses how “profoundly displeased” he was by “what they call the ‘happy life’” there: “a life filled with Italian and Syracusan banquets, with men gorging themselves twice a day and never sleeping alone at night, and following all the other customs that go with this way of life.”

    This decadent lifestyle, Plato contends, corrupts everyone: “For no man under heaven who has cultivated such practices from his youth could possibly grow up to be wise […] or become temperate, or indeed acquire any other part of virtue.” Note, finally, that Plato takes the corruption to be irreversible: “There isn’t now, hasn’t been in the past, nor ever will be in the future anyone with a character so unusual that he has been educated to virtue in spite of the contrary education he received from the mob.” Socratic argument, Plato insists, simply cannot pierce through to the partying Italians — even if they were by nature able to live an examined life geared towards virtue and wisdom.

    Plato, you will object, is exaggerating. There are people who radically change their life. In Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, Deborah Feldman tells how she left the Hasidic Satmar community in Brooklyn to become a bohemian writer in Berlin. My father hopped from one worldview to another. As a teenager he wanted to become a rabbi, after high school an engineer, in university a communist, and in his thirties a New Age mystic.

    But even if there are exceptions, Plato’s critique of Socrates’s project still holds. Recall that Socrates — and all champions of public philosophy — are not trying to reach this or that eccentric outlier. They want to effect large-scale change — to create “a society where the examined life is not an abstract ideal but an everyday practice.” That is where Plato’s skepticism is spot-on. Consider this ancient testimony of what an encounter with Socrates entailed:

    Whoever associates with [Socrates] in conversation must necessarily… keep on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived until now. And Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.

    Now picture Socrates pestering your family, friends, and colleagues about their values and convictions. Or picture him showing up at a medical convention, a law firm, a university seminar, a science lab, a museum, the opera — places where he will run into educated, open-minded people. Will they engage in longwinded Socratic discussions, then step out of their busy professional and family lives and rebuild them around new values? Or will they turn their back on Socrates, show him the door, and, if he refuses to leave, call the police? The great majority, I bet, will kick him out.

    Aristotle agrees with Plato. Trying to change people through argument is a waste of time at best. At worst they will do to you what Athenians did to Socrates:

    If arguments were sufficient by themselves to make people good, then they would have won many great rewards… But as things are they appear to have the power…to make susceptible to virtue [only] a character that is well bred and truly loves what is noble.

    Only people who have been brought up in the right way — who have internalized the right beliefs and values — benefit from theory. It explains to them why they feel and act as they already do, and it helps them to further refine their choices. People corrupted by their upbringing, on the other hand, are irredeemable:

    What argument could reform people like this? For displacing by argument what has been long entrenched in people’s characters is difficult if not impossible.

    Recall Chidi Anagonye, in the NBC sit-com The Good Place, comically failing to reform bad girl Eleanor Shellstrop through lectures on moral philosophy. Plato and Aristotle would not have been surprised.

    Yet we would not be living in a “golden age” of public philosophy unless there was a broad audience to consume it. Does that mean that we are, on average, more receptive to arguments than ancient Athenians? I don’t think so. As Callard stresses, public philosophy is often a form of highbrow entertainment. It makes “us feel smarter, deeper, better informed”; it puts “a spring in our intellectual step.” There is nothing wrong “with intellectually engaging fun,” she adds. But “there is something wrong with calling that philosophy.” Intellectual titillation is one thing. The examined life another.

    At the same time, there is no shortage of aesthetic and intellectual spaces for gadfly-style critique in liberal societies — from literature to arthouse cinema, from performance art to late-night comedy. But does it make a difference? We may feel unsettled for a moment, reflect on prejudices, or ponder social conventions. Yet once we close the book, finish discussing the film, leave the exhibit, or click on the next link, life goes on as before. Nothing changes. One might wonder if these spaces are not a fig leaf for the status quo. By conveying a false sense of openness to radical self-interrogation, they help to keep things as they are.

    Plato and Aristotle, at any rate, did not believe that arguments (or other bottom-up approaches) can effect change. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shares their skepticism about reason’s power. We are “emotional dogs with rational tails,” he argues. It is wrong to picture reason as an impartial judge who decides based on evidence and deliberation. Reason is as ancillary as a dog’s tail: a lawyer who defends our entrenched values. Haidt likes to cite Hume: “reason is the slave of the passions.” This is why political debates are tribal and polarized. Consider pro-life and pro-choice advocates: no matter how many arguments they hurl at each other, they will not budge an inch. We are stuck in what Haidt dubs “righteous minds.”

    In moral decisions, Haidt contends, “intuition” comes first, “reasoning” second. Both nature and nurture shape intuitions. Evolution selects for instincts that increase our own and our genes’ chances for survival — desires for food, drink, and sex, fear of predators, loyalty to one’s clan, protecting one’s offspring. Social norms, in turn, determine more concretely what we are drawn to and repulsed by.

    No wonder that Socrates’s attempt to make Athenians wise through argument backfired so badly. Many modern endeavors, too, are pipedreams on Haidt’s view: from Jürgen Habermas’s ideal society where genuinely free and equal citizens submit to the “unforced force of the better argument” to Elon Musk’s suggestion that unfettered freedom to spew out opinions on Twitter promotes democratic discussion.

    Plato and Aristotle are as keenly aware as Haidt of our powerful non-rational impulses —   Plato calls them the “multicolored beast” in us. But there is one crucial difference. They believe that “intuition” and “reason” can be aligned. Reason is not by default the master of the passions. But it also is not inevitably their slave.

    Plato was in his mid-twenties when Socrates swallowed the hemlock. Traumatized, he concluded that instead of trying to change the righteous minds of adults, we must mold the still flexible minds of children — not through rational persuasion, however, but through enforcing rational norms.

    Every parent knows what Plato means. If you want your children to eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, and do their homework, don’t lecture them on obesity, cavities, and the importance of study. They grasp the short-term pleasures of candy and video games, not the long-term advantages of a healthy lifestyle and a university degree. You must put in place incentives and deterrents to rewire their experience of pleasure and pain. Offset, for example, short-term pleasures and pains with greater pleasures and pains that they understand (a family movie if they have done all their duties; no playdate tomorrow if the homework is incomplete). My children are now avid readers. But when they first started stringing letters, words, and sentences together, it was not fun. To move them over the threshold from pain to pleasure, from no fun to fun, I didn’t give a sermon on the benefits of literacy. I nudged them with small rewards.

    This is how Plato describes the goal of “paideia” (education):

    Once the child has [developed] the right [tastes and] distastes, he will praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good. He will rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he is still young and unable to grasp the reason, but, having been educated in this way, he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its kinship with himself.

    Aristotle gives the thumbs up to Platonic paideia: people brought up in this way are precisely the people who benefit from moral instruction.

    So how do we move from a society that corrupts citizens to one that enables them to flourish? If reasoning cannot pierce through, Plato argues, we must go for a revolution. Of course he doesn’t call for storming the Bastille. In his view we cannot change social structures from below. Take women in Athens, for example. They are not inferior to men by nature, Plato contends, but owing to the crippled life they lead, excluded from education, culture, and politics. Persuading them to rebel, however, will not work because their desires have been distorted. They have naturalized their inferiority. Instead the transformation must come from above: philosophers take over the state and create a “clean slate” by tearing down social and cultural institutions and expelling all citizens over the age of ten who have already been corrupted by the old regime. Then they design new institutions — especially a top-notch education system — that direct children to virtue and wisdom.

    Molding minds is not the revolution’s only purpose. The rulers also put conditions in place that allow citizens to do what they like. You cannot pursue your love for learning unless there are schools, libraries, museums, and universities in town. Opera lovers need opera houses and cinema lovers need cinemas. To ski, you need slopes and to swim, pools. To reduce your ecological footprint you need recycling bins, good public transport, and safe bike lanes. This gives rise to a second objection to the Socratic approach: even if we could win people over through argument, we still need to put the conditions in place that allow them to realize the examined lives they choose.

    Public philosophy, as Plato and Aristotle conceive it, is rationality embodied in social structures set up by wise rulers. These structures first mold citizens in the right way and then ensure that they can live the lives they love. It is still an examined life — only that the examining is done by the philosophers in charge (as parents do the examining for their children).

    The most prominent contemporary champion of public philosophy in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense is Martha Nussbaum, especially when she first set out her ideas about how to promote human wellbeing in the late 1980s and 1990s. (Note that Nussbaum, in later revisions of her approach, made considerable efforts to integrate liberal rights and freedoms. Her 1997 book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, moreover, overlaps in some respects with my own proposal. However, the problems with the top-down approach, never got quite resolved in my view.) A key passage for Nussbaum is Aristotle’s claim in the Politics that “the best constitution” is that “according to which anyone whosoever is able to do best and to live a flourishing life.” Like Plato and Aristotle, Nussbaum is deeply concerned that we will miss out on such a life if we are corrupted through our upbringing. There are “entire communities,” she writes, “that teach, and deeply believe, false values that are inimical to true human flourishing: excessive love of money, excessive preoccupation with honour and reputation, an unbalanced attachment to the warlike life, a deficient concern with due procedure and human equality in the administration of justice.”

    Aristotle, Nussbaum points out, “stresses throughout his ethical and political writings that many people are badly educated and therefore want the wrong things.” This is why the goal of a good ruler should not be satisfying “people’s subjective preferences.” Like Plato, she highlights the crippling lives imposed on women: “Women in many parts of the world… have been so deeply and thoroughly taught to believe that they should not be educated, and in general should not function in various non-traditional ways, that they lack desire for these functionings.” Again, like Plato and Aristotle, she opts for the top-down approach. It is the job of philosopher-rulers to engineer good lives:

    The close link that Aristotle wishes to establish between philosophy and public policy (between perspicuous and comprehensive foundational argument and empirical designing) is rarely found in the contemporary world. The Aristotelian conception urges us not to forget that link.

    The “most urgent task of the philosopher, qua worker for the human good is, to think about such (to some modern eyes) unphilosophical topics as the number of children one should encourage, the nature of funding for public meals, the purity of water supply, the distance of the marketplace from the sea.” The philosopher’s “total task” has three components: to develop “in the young” the features of human nature that will enable them to flourish when they grow up; to “maintain those features in the adult”; and “to create and preserve the circumstances” under which these lives can be realized. Philosopher-rulers must assess how policies affect “the totality of a person’s way of living and acting.” They “cannot simply aim at designing a good and just health care scheme, or a good system of education, but must consider the total picture at all times.”

    Nussbaum wants the Aristotelian conception of the good life to provide “the philosophical underpinning…of basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations.” If Nussbaum had her way, Aristotle’s prescriptions would be followed around the globe! Note, however, that Nussbaum does not think that most human beings are cave dwellers by nature. The rule of philosophers is transient: once citizens have been brought up correctly, they can take charge of their lives — like grown-up children who are no longer defiant, but have matured and become “reasonable.” In this sense there is space for rational self-governance. But that much freedom even Plato was willing to grant:

    We don’t allow them to be free until we establish a constitution in them […] and by fostering their best part with our own equip them with a guardian and ruler similar to our own to take our place. Then, and only then, we set them free.

    Nussbaum’s goal is to somehow reconcile paternalism with egalitarianism. However, even in Nussbaum’s egalitarian version the Platonic approach removes the freedom to live as we please, which is the cornerstone of liberal societies. Is this something we should give up? Here are a few reasons why we shouldn’t: Kant ties human dignity to autonomy — our ability to determine our own goals. Mill urges us to custom-make life-plans suited to our personal talents and desires. He is, moreover, a fallibilist, like Socrates: even after extensive scrutiny our values are not beyond doubt, which is why we should not impose them on others. Finally, with all due respect to Aristotle, one size may not fit all. If there are multiple ways of thriving, the state shouldn’t promote one at the expense of others.

    Are we, then, stuck between a rock and hard place? Does public philosophy come too late to change “righteous minds” or crush freedom? Fortunately, being pestered by a Socratic gadfly or submitting to the authority of a philosopher-king are not the only ways to promote the examined life. Here are a few thoughts on how we might integrate it successfully into an open society in which citizens are free to live as they please.

    First, we must make philosophy classes mandatory in high school and college. The goal is not to teach students how to craft their lives, but to enable them to think through what that entails and then make their own choices. Serious thinking is not a natural attribute even in thinking beings. It needs to be learned. We would catch people in their late teens and early twenties as they move out of the parental home, facing big decisions that will define the shape of their personal and social lives: about education, work, love, relationships, family, politics, culture, and religion.

    The classes I have in mind would cover both content and method. Consider philosophical proposals for how to live: far from being monolithic, they form a vigorous debate. “Both Plato and the truth are dear to me,” Aristotle writes. “But if they clash, it’s my pious duty to choose the truth.” Then he goes on to demolish the very foundation of Plato’s philosophy. And philosophers clash not only with each other. They also turn conventional ideas of happiness and flourishing on their head. If we took a tour of ancient Athens, all philosophers we would meet there would try to lure us into their schools by advertising their philosophy as the gateway to eudaimonia, a happy and flourishing life.

    Sign me up! you will exclaim. Who does not want to be happy and flourish? But once the old bearded men in tunics start lecturing, you are in for a shock. Good looks, cool friends, Instagram-ready children, wealth, status, fame, an Ivy league degree, a stellar career? None of this matters. You can be completely miserable sipping champagne on a yacht and perfectly happy living in a slum, or so the Stoics argue. With the right attitude even the “bull of Phalaris” — a hollow bronze bull devised by the tyrant Phalaris to burn his victims alive — won’t upset you.

    Many philosophers engage in radical experiments in living (to use Mill’s phrase) that challenge social norms, from Socrates’s incessant questioning and Diogenes’s case for living in a barrel to Sartre’s notion that we are “condemned” to freedom. Their writings can take on the role of the Socratic gadfly: jolt us into re-examining our upbringing, our career ambitions, our status anxieties, our views on morality and politics, our ideas of friendship, love, and family, the things we fear or feel sad about, our role in society, our place in the world.

    But igniting a debate about the right way to live is not enough. Citizens also need to learn the skills of reasoned debate. That is why method is important: mastering techniques of argumentation — logical and semantic tools that allow us to clarify our views and give reasons for our claims, a contemporary version of what Aristotelians called the Organon, the “toolkit” of the philosopher. And alongside the techniques our students must be taught the virtues of discussion — valuing the truth more than winning an argument (that is, disciplining what Plato called thumos, or the “victory-loving” part of the soul) and trying one’s best to understand the viewpoint of the opponent. The debates we want are not based on the sophistical skill of making one’s own opinion prevail over others, but on the dialectical skill of engaging in a joint search for the truth.

    Such classes, focused on content and method, would do much more to realize “a society where the examined life is not an abstract ideal but an everyday practice” than all the magazines, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and op-ed pieces taken together, which now constitute the lion’s share of grassroots public philosophy.

    At the same time I take seriously Plato and Aristotle’s case for the crucial role that early education and social environments play. But if we have booted out the state from our lives in the name of freedom, who will put structures in places to help us flourish? In fact, we don’t need the state for such pedagogy. In liberal societies we have freedom of association: we can band together with like-minded citizens and build institutions that suit our distinctive idea of a good and flourishing life. Examples abound: Hasidic Jews have their synagogues and yeshivas; Muslims their mosques and madrassas; hipsters their trendy bars and galleries; and the bourgeoisie, of course, has the opera.

    Initially, existing institutions may not embody rationality in Plato and Aristotle’s sense. But this will begin to shift as citizens, empowered by mandatory philosophy classes, embrace an “examined life.” Gradually these citizens will reform the existing institutions and build new ones aligned with their considered values, ensuring that future generations will grow up in a philosophically informed environment which they can, in turn, refine and reform. Through this cycle, an open-ended feedback loop is established, connecting philosophical education to evolving institutions in a free and pluralistic society.

    Aristotle, in fact, envisaged something like that as the second-best option: “The best thing, then, is for there to be correct public concern with such things. But if they are neglected in the public sphere, it would seem appropriate for each person to help his own children and friends on the way to virtue.” For those who value freedom more than Plato and Aristotle did, this option becomes the more attractive one.

    However, doesn’t pluralism risk degenerating into balkanization? Isn’t there hope that citizens equipped with philosophical tools and virtues, will eventually converge on a single conception of the good life? If the history of philosophy is any indication, the answer here is “No”. When I was studying Arabic in Cairo (to be able to read philosophers like al-Farabi and Averroes in the original), I became friends with Egyptian students. They were pious Muslims and one Friday afternoon suggested I come with them to the mosque. After the sermon and prayer, they introduced me to their Imam. “A philosopher?” he asked, raising one eyebrow. “Isn’t philosophy an epic failure?” I watched his lips curl into an ironic smile. “There are as many answers as there are philosophers! Clearly reason alone gets us nowhere.” Then he held up the Koran. “Put your trust in God’s revealed word instead!”

    Yet instead of citing the debate among philosophers to prove reason’s inability to give definitive answers, we can also consider it an invitation to join an investigation unfolding through the ages. We learn to ponder rival, yet well-reasoned answers; we realize that the answers we settle on are open to contestation and revision; we learn to take joy in the search even if it remains inconclusive. Though full agreement may be out of reach, a shared ethos is not. This fallibilist ethos offers an attractive alternative: to skeptics who think that reason can do nothing; dogmatic rationalists who think reason can clinch everything; leap-of-faith champions who advocate fideism instead of reason; and New Age gurus who appeal to “esoteric” insights above reason.

    A public philosophy that calibrates the Socratic and Platonic approach in the way I suggest is our best shot to salvage “the morality of self-governance,” save us from coarse and nasty polarization, and prevent liberal democracies from turning into ships of fools.

    Or is it already too late?

    A Series of Small Apocalypses: On the Real Threats of AI

    In the doldrums of last summer, I found myself swept up in a fleeting social-media frenzy. I had thought this could not happen to me again. I had myself written an entire book describing the mechanisms that cause such explosions of irrationality, and counseling readers on how to claw their way out of the naïve and gullible frame of mind that takes claims found on Twitter/X at face value. I had also closed my Twitter account upon concluding “research” for the book. But suddenly I found myself back there, almost unconsciously, disguised behind a new alias account. 

    The particular frenzy that sucked me in had to do not with artificial intelligence, though there was plenty of that swirling around too, but with the controversial reports of a new substance engineered by South Korean materials scientists, dubbed LK-99. This lab-generated polycrystalline compound was reported to exhibit at least some of the properties of a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. At present, our superconductors have to be maintained at temperatures and pressures so extreme as to require vast effort, energy, and thus money, to maintain them. But if LK-99 was what some had begun to believe it was, well, this would have been the beginning of a truly enormous technological revolution, with vast, almost unthinkable implications for the global economy and the organization of society. Some compared it to the discovery of the transistor, which inaugurated our current era of telecommunication. Others found even that comparison inadequate. One fellow took to Twitter to declare: “We have discovered fire all over again.” 

    There was a fascinating scramble to replicate the sketchy results from South Korea, which seem to have been posted precipitously online after a dispute among the members of the lab. Many on social media observed that this was an exciting opportunity for the broader public to watch the scientific method in action. The scientific method, however, as it developed from Francis Bacon to the present day, does not include buzz, or upvoting, or virality, among its mechanisms for arriving at the truth. Yet in the LK-99 fever of the summer of 2023 one would have been hard-pressed to separate the wheat of the findings from the chaff of the buzz. 

    This became all too clear to me when Sinéad Griffin, a social-media-savvy physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ran a simulation proving at least that the Korean results were possible, and linked to her own results along with a GIF file showing Obama’s mic drop at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2016. Griffin’s confidence radiated far, and many found themselves unable to resist it. Even as my own skepticism grew, I remained spellbound. Each night, for a week or so, I skimmed the latest LK-99 results before turning out the lights, closing my eyes, and entertaining visions of a near future of levitating skateboards, quantum computers, ultralight space-elevators to take us to our moon villas, and so much more. 

    But as an effort to clinch the legacy of presidential administrations and scientific discoveries alike, mic drops seldom age well. (We also saw Obama making the same gesture around the same time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, upon declaring that Trump would never be president.) In both domains, people are always going to keep right on talking, and if they don’t pick up the mic from the floor this will only be because they have brought their own. In general, we consider this sort of continuity to be vital for the health of both honest science and good democracy. In recent years, however, both science and politics have been warped, sometimes beyond recognition, by the sort of frenzy that we are considering, and of which room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductors, whether they exist or not, whether they can ever exist or not, are perhaps the clearest crystallization yet. 

    Yes, never-ending contestation is what makes science and politics both work as they should. But this new element — of never-ending posturing by leaders and experts, and of instantaneous camp-choosing and takesmanship by followers and would-be experts — has made it infuriatingly hard to take any reliable measure of where we are really at in the present, and so also of where we are headed. 

    After my comedown from those few days of LK-99 euphoria, the phenomenon I had just witnessed began to remind me of two others in our recent past, both of which are still sending out ripples in our public debates, and both of which also, perhaps significantly, got delivered to us in the form of acronyms: NFTs on the one hand, and AI on the other. 

    Now, when I place these together, I do not mean at all to suggest that the science of artificial intelligence is a silly fad, or an abstraction of late capitalism, or something whose future prospects depend on anything similar to what some laconic crypto-bro is willing to pay for a pixel-art image of a Bored Ape. What I mean is that claims of AI’s revolutionary power, either to save our world or to destroy it, must be interpreted in the same way we interpret any other discursive artifact that comes down to us through the filter of the internet. As with effusions about the dawning utopia heralded by LK-99, so, too, warnings of the coming “AI apocalypse” can be assessed with accuracy only when we consider them within the broader context of twenty-first-century apocalypticism: the new habit of interpreting every development, bad or good, dystopian or utopian, as a sign of the end of the world as we know it. 

    It is hard not to hear the echoes in our present moment of a distant time, when European peasants saw great social transformation around them, along with great suffering, and simply could not conceive a future for humanity on the other side of these transformations. Under such conditions, apocalypse can become not just a prediction, but a fashion. When the rapper and Tamil activist Mathangi Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., went to visit Julian Assange in prison last year, the inmate asked her why she was dressed in shrouds the same dull grey-beige as the prison walls. Her response? “I told him we are still going through the apocalypse, and he asked, why the walls haven’t yet fallen, I said because everywhere is prison now.” A strange thing to say to a man in actual prison: a bit like assuring a beggar, for whom you have no coins, that money is only a social construction. 

    Now M.I.A. is a pop artist and she is allowed, perhaps encouraged, to say silly things. But the fact remains that, while her casual claim of “apocalypse now” is one that we may dispute, it is nonetheless one that we can all make intuitive sense of today in a way that we could not have done, say, in 1993. Objectively speaking, the 1990s were a huge mess, too. No healthy society could be expected to endure such things as the Oklahoma City bombing, or the Waco hecatomb, or Jerry Springer. But, at least in my memory, that era didn’t feel like a mess, and so we are left now to reckon with the brute social fact that something has shifted, something the young people might call a “vibe.” Like it or not, apocalyptic talk makes sense now in a way it previously did not. We feel it. 

    What has changed, exactly? For one thing, the weather. Climate change is surely happening. Yet a record temperature shown on a color map will look a lot hotter if the color scheme starts with orange for the lows and moves up all the way through dark maroon and black for the highs, than if the lowest temperatures are indicated in green and the highest in a calmer shade of red. I cannot prove this, but it seems to me that our culture has in recent years come to prefer the darker shades. Perhaps the chief editors instruct their graphic designers to go for these grim hues, on the conviction that the alarm needs to be sounded. (“I want you to panic,” Greta Thunberg said in 2019.) But the information would remain the same no matter the intensity of the colors. And that is a general lesson, I think, that we would do well to apply to any and all of the several current candidate horsemen of the purportedly imminent apocalypse. 

    I will steer clear, here, of any consideration of the threat of nuclear apocalypse. This seems different to me than climate change, or most pandemic scenarios, or indeed AI, as it would likely involve a singular all-or-nothing event, such that after it were to occur, there would be no M.I.A.s marching around claiming that it was still in the process of occurring, to the eye-rolls and consternation of many. I also find, in general, that this is a topic about which words fail me. To be compelled to live out our entire lives in the shadow of the ICBMs, the nuclear submarines lurking in the deep, is nothing less than unrelenting psychological terror, no different really from passing your entire life with a crazy man pointing a gun at your head. The threat of nuclear war alone is itself a grave and unfathomable crime. No matter what happens in the future, I often think, I, and you, and everyone else alive today, have been cheated of any hope of a moment of true peace in the unrelenting terror. If you think you are thriving under these conditions, it’s because you have succeeded in not thinking about them. 

    But climate change does not seem to me to be like that. It seems, rather, to portend at most an unending chain of mini-apocalypses — massive displacement of populations, drought, famine, fire; in short, nothing we haven’t seen before, and nothing our eminently resilient species cannot handle. This is little comfort, of course, to those who imagine, like the medieval peasant who could not see beyond the end of the Black Death, that the end of our current economic and social order is the same as the end of the world. These words of comfort are a pep-talk given at the entry to a narrow bottleneck, and many will find this unbecoming. But we need to hear it: climate change could very well change life as we know it, but it is not going to end life altogether. Nuclear proliferation really does make me panic, while climate change only raises my adrenaline somewhat, and inspires me to go on rooting for our almost unbelievably adaptable species, which has indeed been through some scrapes before — notably the Last Ice Age, which significantly cramped the motions and options open to Homo sapiens for around a hundred thousand years of our existence. 

    What about AI? It is curious to note that worries about its dangers have grown in fairly close synchronization with those about climate change, and indeed about nuclear proliferation. As with the climate, the earliest warnings went mostly unheard. Already in the early 1960s, Norbert Wiener articulated very clearly his fear that, once we have trained machines to do something so seemingly limited as to play checkers, there will be no telling whether it is on such narrow and anodyne tasks as this that the machines will continue to focus. Sooner or later, he warned, they will jump the fence, and start making decisions we should really be making ourselves — at least if we are attached to the survival of our species. 

    I have written previously, in these pages, about the role of “gamification” in the danger that Wiener identified. By the 1950s, computers were widely being used not only to play checkers, but also to run simulations of conflict-escalation scenarios in the stand-off between the superpowers. We human beings perceive a great difference between different kinds of games. The very concept of “game” is famously an extremely heterogenous umbrella term. It is “said in many ways,” to speak with Aristotle, and none of us expects to find any essential unity across its sundry examples: peek-a-boo, poker, Twister, arm-wrestling, checkers, “wargames,” and so on. A part of the difference among the different examples of games has to do with the gravity of the affair: tic-tac-toe is “fun,” while calculating risk in nuclear-showdown scenarios requires an attitude of utter seriousness. But an appreciation of this difference is something we cannot even in principle transfer from the human mind, or perhaps the human gut, to the machines. Machines are very good at some things, but they are not good, and never will be good, at having fun, or at panicking, and this fundamental difference is the true source of the tremendous existential risk we are taking when we outsource fundamental decision-making responsibilities to automated systems. 

    It was not until the present century that AI catastrophism began to seep into the broader culture. Its first points of entry were, unsurprisingly, through the fervent chatter of online subcultures, most notably the community of “East Bay rationalists,” clustered around the LessWrong website and led by the charismatic AI researcher and Harry Potter fan-fiction author Eliezer Yudkowsky. In 2010 a pseudonymous LessWrong commenter introduced a now-legendary thought experiment through the figure of a mythical creature that bore his own nom de plume. “Roko’s basilisk,” held by some to offer a contemporary spin on Pascal’s wager, invites us to consider the future scenario in which an extremely powerful AI, which otherwise has only benevolence for humanity, discovers a rational incentive to punish all those who had recognized the possibility of such an AI prior to its existence but had failed to do everything they could to make this possibility actual. Soon other members of this community of self-styled rationalists, who seek rigorously to apply Bayesian epistemology to their daily decision-making habits in order to maximize happiness, began reporting nightmares and mental breakdowns. Yudkowsky ended up having to ban any mention of the dreaded creature. 

    Plainly, these lads had worked themselves into a frenzy that had little connection to the real threats that loomed on the horizon at the dawn of the 2010s. But we may at least thank them for articulating in its most outlandish form a concern that today seems perfectly warranted to anyone paying attention, to anyone not totally duped by the sleek and stylized version of our technological reality sold to us in iPhone advertisements: that our new technologies are hardly operating in the interest of human well-being. 

    This more mundane version of the problem loses the science-fiction element that seemed essential to getting people excited: the coming-to-life of a new form of consciousness, capable of malign intention and petty revenge, just like Frankenstein’s monster, whose will to destroy his creator was ultimately a result of feeling spurned and unloved. In the mundane version, our technological creation has no “eureka” moment, it does not make any sudden qualitative leap from mere algorithmic switching to inward subjective experience. In this regard, it is kind of boring. But like the rare deadly animal whose fatal toxins are contained within a plain earth-colored body, its dullness is intrinsic to its danger. We keep waiting for a clear sign of a “eureka” moment in the development of artificial intelligence, as if by some tacit agreement that only when we finally see it will the real freak-out commence in earnest. But this hesitation in fact only helps to draw out the deeper problem. For whatever dangers AI really poses do not depend on the arrival of the moment of its conscious awakening, which is just science-fiction. The real danger is already very much part of our reality. 

    Here again we may turn to Norbert Wiener for clarity. Already in the first edition of his classic Cybernetics, published in 1948, the pioneering informatician insisted that the artificial feedback systems that he was attempting to describe were in no way some far-fetched vision of the future, but were in fact integrated into many Americans households in the form, for example, of the humble thermostat. Indeed, self-regulating furnaces were already a common instrument in the scientific revolution, and many early modern theorists noticed that these rather simple systems, in which a valve at the top opens up when the heat in the chamber passes a certain temperature, and then closes again when the heat has gone back down, have something in common with animals, who likewise “regulate” themselves by eating when they are hungry. 

    Cybernetics, though it never really matured as a science, was initially supposed to be the study of feedback in both living and artificial systems. For Wiener, modern technology does not mark a fundamental rupture with nature, but only a partial approximation of processes that we have always observed within nature. It is as if we keep waiting to be truly impressed by technology, even though the fundamental mechanisms that would be the basis of our impression already surround us. Heidegger would probably have something to say here, too, about the relationship between “ready-at-handness” and “everydayness,” between the tools that are so familiar in their functions that we are able to take them for granted and the mundane conventions that we easily fall back into when we take a break from the hard work of thinking. But let’s leave Heidegger out of it. 

    What I want to say about AI is but an echo of what Wiener said about cybernetics: we are already surrounded by the very devices or systems that we keep expecting to appear on the horizon. And these devices and systems, like thermostats, are utterly mundane. A very simple algorithm, for example, triggers a motion-sensor that blocks the subway turnstile when it detects one mid-sized solid body immediately following another. I try to push through with my luggage rolling just in front of me, but I am not fast enough, and after the suitcase is past the sensor the rotating bars freeze to a sudden stop, and slam me in the groin. Some sort of occurrence as this happens almost every time I leave the house. Our built environment seems fundamentally hostile. 

    We are familiar with this observation from those urban architecture and city-planning specialists who bemoan the now omnipresent “anti-homeless spikes” placed on concrete surfaces where someone with nowhere else to go might otherwise have somewhat comfortably lain down. There is nothing algorithmic about a spike, of course; its effects in the world are not determined by a decision tree, but by the bare physical motion of a body that might come into contact with it. Yet we may agree that the anti-homeless spike and the automated turnstile are doing fundamentally the same thing: they are both the result of efforts to outsource the enforcement of human rules to artificial systems that cannot themselves understand the rules. And in turn it is not hard to see the continuity between the turnstile, with its simple yes-or-no circuit switching, and an analogous online mechanism intended to prevent fraud — say, a two-step security measure that sends a one-time code to your phone, but that times out before you are able to find the phone and type the sequence of digits. These are mundane annoyances; they are well-camouflaged within our everyday landscapes, within the roster of things we can “reasonably” be expected to put up with, and look nothing like the brightly colored fire-breathing basilisk of legend. Yet again we must heed Wiener’s lesson, and not keep putting off the reckoning with our technological reality until some future time when its powers will make us gasp rather than simply groan. 

    Some of the new digital technologies that result from the outsourcing I have just described draw us more deeply and clearly into the reign of the non-human, perhaps the anti-human, which is of course the reign that is predicted by the singularitarians and other Silicon Valley visionaries and quacks who believe that we are on the verge of a great transition from principally biological evolution to principally technological evolution as the dominant force determining our planet’s fate. For example — and again this will sound perfectly mundane — when I am asked as part of a security protocol to click on, say, the six out of nine images that include some fragmentary image of a boat or a staircase, this is both to prove that I am not myself a bot trying to enter into the system for nefarious purposes, and to train the AI responsible for security to get better at identifying images of boats and staircases, in order, presumably, to better prepare for fending off smarter bots in the future. One can’t help but feel at such moments, as a human being, that one’s centrality to the whole operation is diminishing rapidly, and that very soon it will make more sense simply to leave the bots to work it out among themselves. 

    “What am I doing here?” I find myself muttering, whenever I am asked to click on boats. This question works simultaneously at both the practical and the existential registers. It is a supremely mundane task, and life, such as it is, goes on after it is over and I have gained entry to the desired website. Yet it is also, perhaps, an early rumbling of an emerging order, a prodrome of the next great phase of planetary history, whose arrival was foreseen by Wiener and even by the lads at LessWrong, in which the presence of conscious human beings at some of the terminals of our global digital network will have been rendered otiose. At least for a time the human beings will still be able to join up with the network, to sit and stare at a screen and click on boats, but strictly speaking it will no longer be necessary. The worst-case scenario, of a basilisk-like consciousness that will emerge from the network and become determined to eliminate human beings, will not have to come about in order for this new phase of history to be a profoundly unpleasant one. It already is unpleasant. So much so that I often feel I want no more of it.

    If I am expressing a weariness that was already familiar from the mid-twentieth-century philosophers of technology, among them Heidegger, who spoke of “alienation” from the mechanisms that are supposed to be making our lives better, rather than getting right to the point and addressing the unique risks and challenges posed by AI, this is intentional. For, again, it has come to seem to me that our recent worries about AI tend to combine two very different problems: the first one, the mundane alienation that I have described, which has already been flagged as a problem for well over a century, and the second one coming more from the domain of science-fiction and legend, which anticipates the imminent emergence of a new form of consciousness with incomprehensible and capricious desires. 

    This second part of the problem appears quite new, but in fact is also very old, indeed much older than the twentieth-century’s discovery of technological alienation. One may cite, for example, the anxiety surrounding the alchemist Roger Bacon’s purported invention of a “Brazen Head” in thirteenth-century Oxford, which, like some medieval Siri, was said to be able to answer any “yes” or “no” question posed to it. The medievals understood that such an invention, and indeed the products of alchemy in general, tapped into dark forces that a certain variety of wisdom warns us away from probing, and in this respect were to be placed on a continuum with black magic, necromancy, and other things we know we ought not be doing. Obviously we do not have any recourse to any explicit notion of deviltry when we are frightened by the more audacious boundary-pushing impulses of technological innovation today, and so we are left with a mostly inarticulate anxiety, and with latter-day neo-Gnostic fantasies such as the one proposed by the shadowy Roko, which we are unable to recognize for what they are.

    But could we really be on the verge of summoning a new sort of consciousness into being today, in contrast with the thirteenth century, in the large language models that have been trained up on trillions of data points fed to their artificial “neurons”? I am mostly agnostic about the prospects for machine consciousness, but this follows from the much more general fact that I am agnostic about the nature of consciousness in general. I have no idea what it is, honestly. I do agree with the Google engineer and AI expert Blaise Agüera y Arcas that “statistics do amount to understanding, in any falsifiable sense,” and that in principle a system that works on statistical principles could be made to achieve general artificial intelligence, that is, something that looks exactly like human understanding — at least, again, in any falsifiable sense, which is to say, at least from an external third-person point of view. But I am not convinced that the third-person point of view on our own consciousness could ever exhaustively account for what consciousness is, as it continues to seem to be plausible to me that there will always be a remainder, namely, the irreducible primitive feeling of what it is like to be a conscious being. 

    The sloppier defenders of the singularity hypothesis tend to run intelligence and consciousness together, apparently hoping that skeptics will not pause to insist on making a conceptual distinction between the two. More rigorous materialist philosophers, notably Patricia Churchland, argue explicitly that this remainder which I have just evoked is only a lingering phantom of our pre-scientific folk beliefs, soon to go the way of “phlogiston and witches,” to cite the common pairing beloved of philosophers of science. Agüera y Arcas, too, has made a strong case that consciousness just is a sort of high-level capacity for prediction, a very sophisticated form of autofill, that emerged over the course of primate evolution (perhaps also cetacean, canine, and a number of other distinct lineages) in view of the selective advantage of knowing what your mates, or your enemies, are thinking. In this respect, consciousness would be inherently a consciousness of other minds, and this is something that computer technologies, whose more prosaic commercial versions include tools like Google autofill, are getting very good at approximating. 

    I am aware that the kind of skepticism I am refusing to relinquish is itself ultimately unfalsifiable, and that in a strict sense it also extends to animal and even other human minds as well as to artificial systems with an air of intelligence about them. I cannot know that the machine is really thinking, but then again I cannot know that you are really thinking either. Yet it is necessary to hold onto this sort of skepticism, not just because it provides job security for philosophers, but also because science really does need supplementation by a reflection that cannot be subjected to its stringent and admittedly very productive method. What philosophy can tell you, for example, that science perhaps cannot, is that you are often unwittingly relying on metaphors when you think you are giving bare descriptions of fact. Overwhelmingly, in the cultural history of thinking about life and about the mind since the early post-war period, we have preferred to take recourse to information-processing models. Karl Popper famously proclaimed that “all life is problem-solving.” And Norbert Wiener himself, with the new science of cybernetics, sought to show that living systems and artificial information-processing sometimes are fundamentally the same in their reliance on feedback looping. Fair enough; such assimilations have proven, again, remarkably productive. 

    But what if some other capacity were to be centered as most characteristic of what it is to live or to think? What if, for example, the information-processing metaphor for understanding the mind were traded out for some other capacity that in other settings has been seen as most characteristic of a thinking being — attention, for example? The capacity to attend, one might argue, is something that (unlike understanding in Agüera y Arcas’s sense) cannot be treated statistically, or at least it is not obvious that it can be. And attention, unlike information-processing, also seems to have little to do with problem-solving. When you stare at a work of art for a long time, for the optimally powerful experience of it you would do best to come to it without any particular problems in mind, to empty yourself out, and to wait to see what the work has to offer you. 

    Go ahead. Do it. And then ask yourself again, while still high on the aesthetic sublime, whether life is really all problem-solving, and whether your own mind is really best understood as a central-processing unit. 

    My abiding awareness of the existence of a domain separate from information-processing, in which the human mind can continue to do its thing, will also help to explain in part what may come across as my extreme sanguinity in the face of yet another mini-apocalypse that AI is now often said to be bringing. I have in mind the danger that the latest AI chatbot tools are widely seen as representing for traditional humanistic education, particularly for the writing component of university courses in the humanities. 

    It is certain, of course, that things are going to have to change in response to our new information technologies. But that was already the case before the most recent frenzy of concern. Long before the most recent AI tools were available, student writing skills had already degenerated to a point where it made little sense to continue to ask them to compose well-researched and well-footnoted fifteen-to-twenty-page papers. For at least the past decade, what students have been turning in has relied heavily on internet-based prosthetics, not to mention autofill and spell-check and grammar-check tools that have largely absolved them of the need to master our shared written language. Well before the rise of GPT-4, there was already little awareness among the students, when asked to write something, that they were being asked to master a skill that is necessary for a well-rounded life. And perhaps they are right. The machines that can now simply write the papers for them, without all that time-consuming cutting-and-pasting, and grammar- and spell-checking, are really just sealing the deal, making it too obvious to deny any longer that we have moved into a very different epoch of the long history But this has happened before, and with enough distance the previous revolutions that seemed at first to destroy entire thought-worlds, entire “epistémès,” always eventually come to be seen by all as great improvements. Thus the tremendous research of Frances Yates in the 1960s showed just what a rich world of learning was lost when the medieval “art of memory,” a complex system of rote memorization of vast bodies of knowledge through the use of mnemonic devices, came to be displaced by books. Was this an improvement? Well, something was lost, surely, but something was certainly gained. What was previously stored in the human mind could now be stored on the shelf of the monastery library, in a volume that could be pulled down at any moment should one desire to do so. The internet revolution has simply been a further development of the Gutenberg revolution. I no longer need to go the library at all, if a sudden impulse awakens my curiosity about, say, Paleolithic cave art; I have at least a very good introduction to the topic, indeed more than I could ever read in my lifetime, right in my pocket. 

    This technological transfer, from a mental technê to an external storage device, relieves me and others of the need to cultivate any art such as was practiced by the medievals, and that is perhaps good for the “progress of knowledge” as a whole. It is bad, however, for self-cultivation. The students today have lost the rather more modest art of writing term-papers that was practiced as recently as twenty years ago, and at least for the moment are caught in an interregnum in which their elders are futilely telling them to keep doing things the old way while they, again with good reason, are increasingly having trouble understanding why they should do so. 

    But the more lucid among the elders might do well to seize this tremendous and rare opportunity, and to think hard about ways in which education in the twenty-first century could be brought to focus (again?) on self-cultivation, of the sort that once came with initiation into the art of memory, or that comes with learning a musical instrument or a martial art or stone-masonry, rather than on information. In other words, the AI revolution might afford us a perfect opportunity to stop treating human beings like information-processing systems, and to start treating them (again: again?) like human beings. 

    A delicious irony, that this precipitous rise of the machines might be what it finally takes to break us free of the machine metaphor of the human mind, and to open up the possibility for a vision of education based fundamentally on experience: something that we have no evidence that machines, for their part, are capable of having. We have no falsifiable evidence that human beings are capable of having it either, but humanistic education has always set out from the assumption that they do. In this era of STEM imperialism, when the methods and the requirements of the natural sciences increasingly dominate the humanities, and increasingly require of humanists that they justify their work in terms imposed on them by the STEM fields, we are indeed in a moment of severe crisis. But no crisis, short of total apocalypse, ever comes without a glimmer of hope. 

    There remains a question concerning the prospects, in our new technological landscape, of the more exalted forms of writing – of “real” writing, perhaps such as you are reading right now. Are we in the midst of a writing apocalypse? Here again, my answer is: a small one, perhaps. Much will change beyond recognition, but human beings will continue to express themselves.

    I have recently taken to telling my students, to whom I, stuck permanently in the ancien régime, continue to assign writing exercises, that they could likely, if they wish to be dishonest, get a better grade by farming out their work to GPT-4 than by doing it themselves. But I always add that this would amount to a shameful admission of defeat, and it is up to them to determine whether they wish to live with the shame. I also add that, for my part, as someone whose entire identity is wrapped up in writing, I remain completely certain that no machine can do what I do. There are just too many idiosyncrasies, too many quirks, too many untransferable kinks. 

    These might indeed amount, from an optimized AI’s point of view, to “imperfections”; what I call my “style” might really only be the collection of old scars gathered over the course of my spotty education, lingering traces of all those generic rules that I failed to grasp. So be it. My own writing, in the era of ubiquitous machine writing, may finally be able to come forth as what it really is: the record of a singular and unreproducible inner experience, which again is something that machines do not have. So here again, ironically, the rise of AI, the emergence of a world in which machines can in some sense do everything humans do but “better,” may afford us an opportunity to center, in our system of human values, that one thing that remains entirely off-limits to the machines, and to come to see writing not as a simple transfer of information, but as the witness and record of an inner life. 

    Of course, few of the most familiar outlets for human writing have understood our predicament and seized this opportunity. Most are going in an opposite direction. New media publications, from the lowbrow listicles of the unlamented Buzzfeed and the dumbed-down explanatory presentations of Axios to the highly formatted middlebrow TED-like “deep dives” of Aeon, are effectively constraining their writers to do their best to imitate AI, to strip away all their human idiosyncrasies and to transfer information to the reader with maximal clarity and minimal “noise.” (There are also a few venues, such as Substack, where human writers can go and cultivate their style, indulge their idiosyncrasies, and sometimes even make some money while doing so.) 

    I suspect this regime cannot last. The house style that is imposed in such ventures as I have described is a style that can just as well be imitated by AI, and to compel human authors to sound like AI is really just to acknowledge that we are currently in a transitional phase, like the CVS or Duane Reade that continues, for now, to employ a lone human being to watch over all the self-checkout counters. I often wonder how that drugstore employee feels about her future prospects, and I wonder the same thing, too, about copy-editors. But again, here, I see a glimmer of hope. For once this regime collapses definitively, we may (again?) be in a position to appreciate the art of writing for what it really is: an art, and not an imitation of an art. As such, it positively requires, at its source, a faculty of freedom. This is something that is unlikely ever to emerge from an algorithmic engine. 

    Music in the Prison of History

    On December 21, 1908, several hundred men and women gathered at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna, settled into their seats, and bore unexpected witness to one of the great revolutions in musical history. Heading the program that night was a new work for string quartet and soprano by a controversial young composer named Arnold Schoenberg, already known in Viennese music circles for his challenging style: tense, drawn-out Wagnerian harmonies, allowed only the briefest and rarest moments of respite. And indeed, as the first three movements of his piece unfolded — Schoenberg straight away twisting the four lines of the quartet, cat’s-cradle-like, into one splayed chord after another — the crowd could be heard growing increasingly restless. But none of this was, strictly speaking, out of the ordinary. Yet. 

    Then came the fourth, and final, movement. Suddenly, and seemingly without preparation, Schoenberg abandoned any sense of a home key, or resolution, at all — and unleashed on the unsuspecting audience eleven minutes of total, unforgiving dissonance. There had been near-precedents: flashes of atonality in Debussy, Scriabin, and Strauss. But Schoenberg’s radicalism was of a different order. Unlike Debussy, he did not employ dissonance as a streaky, painterly effect. Unlike Strauss, his atonality did not just bubble up momentarily from otherwise conventional harmonic tensions, as though somebody had simply turned up the heat too high and accidentally caused simmering chords to spill over, for a second, into outright dissonance. No, Schoenberg used atonality, really for the first time in history, directly: as an all-encompassing, self-contained — and consciously abrasive — musical language of its own. 

    The audience was, predictably, stunned. Schoenberg would later reminisce, perhaps a little romantically, that the crowd began to “riot.” The morning after the concert, one local paper ran the headline “Scandal in the Bösendorfer-Saal!” In another, the music critic called Schoenberg “tone-deaf.” The Neues Wiener Tagblatt published their review in their “Crime” section. Some close to Schoenberg speculated that the fourth movement was simply a crazed musical response to an ongoing crisis in the composer’s personal life. The previous summer, while writing the quartet, Schoenberg had discovered that his wife, Mathilde, was having an affair with their friend and neighbor, the painter Richard Gerstl. Richard and Mathilde eloped shortly after — but in October, 

    following an intervention from Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern, Mathilde agreed to return home. A few weeks later, Gerstl set fire to most of his paintings, stripped naked, and hanged himself in front of the mirror that he used for self-portraits. He was twenty-five years old. Schoenberg, contemplating his own suicide, drafted a will in which he wrote: “I deny facts. All of them, without exception. They have no value to me, for I elude them before they can pull me down. I deny the fact that my wife betrayed me. She did not betray me, for my imagination had already pictured everything that she has done.” In the end, he did not follow Gerstl’s example. The String Quartet No.2, which premiered forty-seven days after the painter’s death, was dedicated “to my wife.” 

    Others dismissed Schoenberg’s experiments as an adolescent attempt to trash the past, in keeping with the radical mood of the decade. But the composer, an austere and academic man, and living an otherwise bourgeois lifestyle, always insisted that his use of atonality was a rational decision. It was simply a matter of taking the inevitable next step in the evolution of Western music. The conventions of tonality, he would argue a few years later in his theoretical treatise Harmonielehre, had been worn out over the course of the nineteenth century — and melody and rhythm now needed to be decanted into a fresher idiom to ensure their survival. 

    Whatever the ultimate explanation, what emerged from that night was a narrative that has stuck ever since: that tonality had come to its irreversible end, and that, for serious composers, there was now “no going back.” Thanks in part to the painter Wassily Kandinsky — who, after hearing the quartet in 1911, made his own “break” with pictorial tradition, going fully abstract — and especially to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who saw in Schoenberg’s work the only truthful musical expression of the horrors of twentieth-century life, a connection was made, too, between atonality and the so-called “crisis of modernity.” The death of traditional harmony, the death of representational art, the death of syntax, the death of God: all the deaths, it was assumed, were intrinsically linked.

    It proved to be an intoxicating thesis. In the “high art” musical world, tonality became quickly associated with pastiche and compositional cowardice. And yet atonality, for all Schoenberg’s predictions that it would one day come to sound to us as natural as Mozart or Bach, failed to mature into a lasting idiom of its own. The result has been a profound sense of frustration: a musical culture stuck between a forbidden past and an increasingly irrelevant future. As the composer György Ligeti wrote in 1993: “[One] cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” And all of this has fed into the favored grand narrative of our times: that we are culturally stuck, still unable to get our spinning wheels back out of the modernist ditch. Consider the cultural historian Jacques Barzun’s book From Dawn to Decadence, which appeared in 2000, in which he partitions the last five centuries into two basic chunks: the years 1500 to 1900, during which the West blossomed, and the hundred or so years since, in which we have witnessed a “tailing off.” Our society has become restless, Barzun writes, “for it sees no clear lines of advance.” He continues: “The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through.”

    As a story, this narrative undoubtedly has a certain allure. If, as seems to me true, we have still not fully recovered our philosophical balance since the blows landed on us by Nietzsche all those years ago, then it would follow, naturally, that other areas of our culture — music among them — would exhibit surface signs of that same spiritual concussion. And indeed, the evidence seems to tally. Can it really be a coincidence that, in the space of a couple of decades at the beginning of the twentieth century, tonal music, representational art, narrative fiction — indeed our very faith in language, in beauty, in truth — all seemed to collapse at once? 

    A coincidence, no. But neither were these crises, as many people still seem to believe, inevitable and irreversible, as though penciled into the almighty calendar of the universe for a set date and time — a point after which humanity was obliged, by some mysterious force, to abandon its cultural past and start all over again. Put like that, such an idea obviously sounds absurd. But the notion that “history” makes specific demands of us — that, like a stern parent or a jealous god, it will “judge us” harshly if we ignore them — runs much deeper in our cultural subconscious than we perhaps realize. Anyone who wants to understand Schoenberg should first ponder why we, ourselves, still, right now, cannot fully shake the unnerving sense that he might have been right — that modernity really did spell the end of an artistic era, and that it would be wrong, a spiritual failing even, to “go back.”

    Rewind for a second, and replay the last few centuries on fast-forward. As a car runs on petrol, humans run on myth — on some kind of a story that gives their lives order and purpose. In the last few decades of the eighteenth century, conscious of the ongoing decline of traditional religion, humans began drilling into every other bit of their inherited conceptual landscape — science, philosophy, art — in search of some new dependable source of meaning. And they found a vast, and surprisingly potent, reservoir of spiritual fuel in, of all things, history. Give it its proper name: historicism. In the most basic telling, historicism is simply the belief that, like the laws of physics, there exist laws that dictate how history, too, will unfold. For nineteenth-century Europe, the task of discovering these historical laws, and then shaping our lives according to them — finding the inevitable stages that art is “meant” to pass through, for instance, and then doing one’s best to bring them about — proved a remarkably rich and rewarding project. Under the influence, in particular, of Hegel — who argued, brilliantly if a little oddly to our ears today, that every single aspect of history could be understood as part of the universe’s great teleological plan to become fully self-aware — historicist ideas spread rapidly into pretty much every aspect of intellectual culture. 

    True, the days of industrial-scale drilling for meaning — with Hegelian geysers spurting up all across Europe — are behind us. But historicism still bubbles up. Look at our language. We talk endlessly about “making history”; accuse each other of being on history’s “wrong” side (or boast that we are on its “right” one); argue that our beliefs are “ahead of ” — or “behind” — its curve. We view everything, natural or human, developmentally. The tyranny of history owes as much to Darwin as to Hegel (and then of course to Marx). History, and the particular histories which it contains, is confidently headed toward a goal, a telos. We repeat, almost ritually, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dictum that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

    None of this is quite the same thing as a belief in full-on determinism. What really sets historicism apart — what made it, and continues to make it, so alluring — was, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski once put it, that it turned history into something “real: not just something that once was, but a living being.” History became, that is, an anthropomorphic figure. It wants to unfold in certain ways, and we feel a profound obligation to make sure that it does so. We gain a monumental, even quasi-religious, sense of purpose — but a monumental burden, too. How often do we hear, for instance, the complaint that “even in 2023” some people still hold certain views — not because these beliefs contravene permanent moral laws, but because they happen to have popped up at the wrong time, like a magician’s assistant, struggling with a faulty trapdoor, emerging through the floor several moments too late? In 1936, Friedrich Meinecke called historicism “one of the greatest intellectual revolutions that has ever taken place in Western thought.” The contemporary historian Thomas Albert Howard calls it the defining ideology of our age — a “post-theological worldview coeval with modernity.” So entrenched is it in our way of thinking in fact, that we barely notice it. As Paul de Man once put it: “Whether we know it, or like it, or not, most of us are Hegelians…. Few thinkers have so many disciples who never read a word of their master’s writings.”

    Certainly Schoenberg was animated by a profound sense of historical duty as he put the finishing touches to his quartet in that summer of 1908. And he was, himself, just one link in an already much older chain. Casting his gaze back over the nineteenth century, he would have seen generations of musicians, themselves influenced by emerging historicist ideas, increasingly troubled by — as they saw it — the coming end of traditional harmony. He would have seen the growing popularity of the Hegelian notion that the teleological endpoint of all art is complete abstraction. He would have seen impassioned claims about some great irreversible rupture from the past — and the birth of a uniquely modern age towards which artists had a new spiritual responsibility. All he — Schoenberg — really needed to do was to write down the notes.

    In 1847, at the age of thirty-five, and at the height of his fame, Franz Liszt, the composer and virtuoso pianist, suddenly, abruptly, quit touring. For almost a decade before, the Hungarian master had been the nearest thing the nineteenth century had to a pop star. Women fainted at his concerts. They fought over his used handkerchiefs. Some brought phials into which to pour his old coffee dregs. One admirer even had a cigar stump that Liszt had discarded encased in a diamond-encrusted locket. It helped, of course, that Liszt had clenched-fist cheekbones, flowing hair, and a jaw that you could use to teach children about right-angles. It helped doubly that he was generally considered — as he still is, by many today — to be the greatest pianist ever to have lived.

    All the more strange, then, that Liszt should not only withdraw from performing, but settle, of all places, in Weimar — a small, sleepy town in central Germany, which George Eliot, on a trip there only a few years later, would describe as a “dull, lifeless village.” But Liszt had plans. Ostensibly there to take on a small (but handsomely paid) conducting role with the local orchestra, he was afforded enough time — finally — to think intently, and intensely, about a growing preoccupation of his: the future of music. That Liszt should be interested in the future was, of course, nothing unusual. The previous century had been marked not only by rapid social and technological change, but by a heightened sense, too, that such change was now predictable. Indeed, for many people, the apparent successes of democracy, capitalism, and the sciences — as well as emerging “social sciences” like economics — yielded confidence that the future was, really for the first time, something fully controllable. Now hurtling along at a thrilling speed, nineteenth-century Europeans began to reorientate themselves, switching from rear-facing to forward-facing seats. 

    Naturally, this led to an increased dynamism in the arts. But Liszt, as his lover Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein would later write, “hurled his lance much further into the future” than most. Already, behind the scenes, and rather in conflict with his reputation as a showy and shallow crowd-pleaser, Liszt had been working on some of the most harmonically experimental music ever produced. If you had broken into his study in, say, 1842, you would have probably found, on his desk, a pile of radical sketches for piano, each only a bar or two long, testing out wild, chromatic flourishes and cascading stacks of clashing chords. None of these early snippets was ever performed in public. But as steps in the evolution of Liszt’s compositional psyche — and in the development, therefore, of nineteenth-century music more widely — there is a good case to be made that they count among the most consequential bits of music ever written. The key to understanding why, though, is in the strange title that Liszt gave to each one: Prélude Omnitonique. 

    A decade earlier, in 1832, a twenty-one-year-old Liszt had attended a series of lectures given by the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis. Fétis had been working on an elaborate theory about the predetermined teleological evolution, and therefore the inevitable destiny, of music — based, at that point, on a relatively new idea: “tonality.” Even today, tonality is a slippery concept: Patrick McCreless, a professor of music theory at Yale, claimed recently not to have the first clue what the word really meant. To paint the matter in primary colors, tonality simply refers to the set of implicit harmonic rules, seemingly intuitive to us all, by which almost all music, in the West at least, has abided for the last five hundred years. Why do certain combinations of notes sound pleasant and others intolerable? Why do some chords sound awkward and restless, while others seem perfectly happy where they are? We might never fully know the answer, but — in just the same way we call that mysterious force by which physical objects are drawn to each other “gravity” — we can at least give the phenomenon a name: tonality. 

    All of this was already tacitly understood. But like his good friend Alexandre-Étienne Choron — who had first coined the term “tonality” in 1810 — Fétis wanted to step back and analyze the concept as a whole, from all sides. He had noticed — who hadn’t? — that the history of music was a story of ever-growing harmonic complexity, from the single-line simplicity of medieval plainchant to the constant key-hopping and deliberate dissonances of Beethoven. And, spotting a link with the voguish Hegelianism of his time, he posited that this was not, as many had previously assumed, because we were discovering ever-more intricate connections between the natural mathematical laws underpinning music, but because human consciousness itself was evolving, and demanding of music, as it were, ever-greater levels of harmonic excitement. Tonality, in other words, was not something coded into the laws of nature, but a kind of mental ability — which, like every other aspect of human thought, was developing teleologically over time. 

    Contemporary composers, ostensibly still writing in one particular home key, were now regularly borrowing notes and chords from others, yielding, at least for adventurous listeners, the exhilarating sense of being constantly upended. But Fétis predicted this process would soon reach its inevitable “endpoint”: music of the future, shaped by our increasingly “insatiable desire for modulation,” would flit so frequently between theoretically unrelated harmonies that the effect would be like being in all possible keys at once. Fétis — and here he split from traditional Hegelian optimism — found the idea profoundly troubling: this coming ordre omnitonique would, he argued, spell the ultimate end of all musical meaning. After all, when a painter mixes together all possible colors at once, she ends up with only a dull, lifeless black. 

    The young Liszt, though, was transfixed. He struck up a correspondence with Fétis, and began — not entirely to the theorist’s liking — attempting to put some of his harmonic predictions into practice. What, Liszt wanted to find out, would full omnitonality sound like? How would it work? Of the Prélude Omnitonique sketches that survive from those early trial runs, perhaps the most tantalizing consists of a quick waterfall of notes from the high end of the piano to the low, riffling, seemingly quite deliberately, through every single one of the twelve possible notes of the chromatic scale before repeating any a second time — an uncanny premonition of Schoenberg’s twelve-note tone-rows, employed seventy years later to obliterate all sense of tonal hierarchy. 

    It would be several decades before Liszt himself incorporated anything nearly as radical into his published compositions. But he arrived at Weimar with a deep desire to decode the secrets of music’s future. Over the next few decades, along with a small group of fellow musicians, among them Richard Wagner and Peter Cornelius, known collectively as the New German School, Liszt would transform Weimar into a hub of musical progressivism — or, in the words of the composer Humphrey Searle, “the Mecca of the avant-garde movement.” The informal catchphrase of the group was, fittingly, la musique de l’avenir, “the music of the future.”

    It helped hugely that Liszt had the support, and admiration, of perhaps the most influential musicologist of the time, Franz Brendel — the longstanding editor of the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Brendel was as Hegelian as Hegelians come, convinced that the history of music was a tale of ongoing, step-by-step, teleological emancipation. Renaissance music had freed itself from the church and become fully secular. Secular music had freed itself from words and become fully instrumental. Instrumental music was now loosening itself from its obligation to audiences, and becoming, in true Hegelian spirit, concerned only with its own internal laws — in short, those of tonality. Brendel outlined all of this in his monumental history of music published in 1852, which functioned as a kind of Hegelian heart, pumping historicism out into every last capillary of European musical culture. As the great music historian Richard Taruskin put it: “Ever since the appearance of Brendel’s History, historicism has been a force not only in the historiography of music but in its actual history as well…. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, in other words, the idea that one is morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history has been one of the most powerful motivating forces, and one of the most exigent criteria of value, in the history of music.” 

    Discussions about the fate of tonality in particular began poking up everywhere like flower shoots in spring. Brendel, to celebrate the fiftieth issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1859, ran a contest in which music theorists were asked to predict the future of harmony on the basis of currently discoverable laws. Liszt began penning a theoretical treatise, Sketches Humphrey for a Harmony of the Future, which has unfortunately been lost. Elsewhere, in a letter, admittedly a little tongue-in-cheek, he wrote about not only embracing omnitonality, but also going a step further and splitting the distance between all consecutive notes on the piano in two, thus creating a scale of twenty-four quarter-tones. (The avant-garde composer Ferruccio Busoni would later, in the twentieth century, do exactly this.) Liszt concluded with an ironic quip: “Behold the abyss of progress into which the abominable Musicians of the Future are hurling us!” 

    Perhaps because Liszt was still keeping his most radical compositional ideas under wraps, the focal point of the discussions turned to his friend Wagner, whose strained harmonies were seen as leading, as the French composer Louis Pagnerre put it, to “the almost complete annihilation of tonality.” The composer Karl Mayrberger summed things up in a rather more measured tone: 

    The harmonic language of the present day is on a footing essentially different from that of the past. Richard Wagner has pointed the musical world along the path that it must henceforth travel. The sixteenth century knew only the realm of the diatonic. In the eighteenth century, the diatonic and the chromatic existed side by side, equal in status…. But with Richard Wagner an altogether new era begins: major and minor intermingle, and the realm of the diatonic gives way to that of the chromatic and the enharmonic.

    Still, in the last five years of his life, Liszt would again move ahead of Wagner in the race for the musical future, publishing several works that harked back to his early omnitonal experiments. In quick succession came Nuages gris, in 1881, and La lugubre gondola, in 1882 — both dark, proto-impressionistic works, later celebrated by Debussy and Stravinsky alike, in which Liszt, rather than telling a story, paints something more like a static mood, with slow-motion splashes of notes up and down the piano. Then came the aptly titled Bagatelle sans tonalite, in 1885, a playful dance-like piece in which the pianist’s hands scuttle across the keys like drugged-up spiders. There are melodic fragments, but they sound more like childlike parodies of tunes — and none settles for long enough to establish any sense of a home key. 

    Liszt knew that these pieces were radical, and warned his younger piano students against performing them. But one day, he believed, they would be understood. He wrote to Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein: “The time will yet come when my works are appreciated. True, it will be late for me because then I shall no longer be with you.” In both senses, he was right. Liszt died in 1886, at the age of seventy-four. But as the composer Béla Bartók put it, several decades later, 

    Liszt’s works had a more fertilizing influence on the following generations than Wagner’s. Let no one be misled by the host of Wagner’s imitators. Wagner solved his whole problem, and every detail of it, so perfectly that only a servile imitation of him was possible for his successors.… Liszt, on the other hand, touched upon so many new possibilities in his works, without being able to exhaust them utterly that he provided an incomparably greater stimulus. 

     

    In 1867, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, an English printmaker and critic living in France, noticed something strange going on in Parisian art circles. Painters, he wrote, were “beginning to express contempt for all art which in any way depends on the interest of the subject.” Increasingly, they seemed concerned only with abstract shape and form:

    Painting, like journalism, should in their view offer nothing but its own merchandise. And the especial merchandise of painting they hold to be the visible melodies and harmonies — a kind of visible music — meaning as much and narrating as much as the music which is heard in the ears and nothing whatever more… when they paint a woman they do not take the slightest interest in her personally, she is merely, for them, a certain beautiful and fortunate arrangement of forms, an impersonal harmony and melody, melody in harmony, seen instead of being heard. It may seem impossible to many readers that men should ever arrive at such a state of mind as this and come to live in the innermost sanctuary of artistic abstraction, seeing the outer world merely as a vision of shapes; but there is no exaggeration in the preceding sentences, they are simply true, and true of men now living.

    Hamerton turned out to be extraordinarily prescient. Over the next few decades, artists would become increasingly obsessed with the purely formal or aesthetic aspects of painting — flattening their images as though with a steak press, carving the world into two-dimensional shapes with hard outlines, and eventually eliminating any sense of a depicted subject at all. And they would indeed look to music as their model. Titles like “Nocturnes” and “Symphonies” became commonplace. Cézanne talked about color “modulating.” Matisse explained that “colors are forces, as in music.” Henri Rovel claimed, simply, that “the laws of harmony in painting and in music are the same.” And it wasn’t just painters. Poets, too, seemed less and less interested in subject matter, and more and more preoccupied with the abstract sounds of speech. Verlaine urged “de la musique avant toute chose,” “music above all else.” One critic, lamenting the state of late nineteenth-century poetry, remarked: “It is music and picture, and nothing more.” 

    Where was this strange mass movement coming from? Cue a bang, a puff of smoke, and Hegel emerging from a time machine with a self-satisfied expression on his face. All of this, he would say, surveying the world a half-century or so after his death, was exactly as predicted. 

    Well, sort of. Hegel had always contended that art was a manifestation of the universe’s ongoing journey towards complete self-awareness. For painting, that meant moving away from illusionistically, as if through a window, “representing” external subjects in space — a vase of flowers, a muddy battlefield, a ballroom dance — and instead reflecting on, and drawing greater attention to, itself: the flatness of the canvas, the texture of the paint, the repetition of certain shapes, the unconventional selection of colors. Poetry, too, would become increasingly about poetry, and music increasingly about music. Indeed, Hegel believed, pure and non-programmatic music already represented a kind of ideal: “Music has the maximum possibility of freeing itself from any actual text as well as from the expression of any specific subject-matter, with a view to finding satisfaction solely in a self-enclosed series of the conjunctions, changes, oppositions, and modulations falling within the purely musical sphere of sounds.”

    No wonder the other arts would look to music as a model of formal purity. Eventually, in Hegel’s account, the arts would go one collective step further, inviting reflection not just on the unique qualities of each medium, but on the philosophical nature of art itself. The abstract, that is, would give way to the conceptual, and merge with theory once and for all. It was a chillingly prophetic narrative, at least in the hands of a twentieth-century critic such as Clement Greenberg, who adapted it, retrospectively, to explain the journey from representation, via “flatness” and abstraction, to fully conceptual art. In truth, Hegel himself never spelled out in concrete terms what artworks of the future would look like, and it is hard to know whether Degas, Delaunay, and Duchamp are what he had in mind. His more rudimentary claim — that art would become increasingly interested in its own formal properties — can be just as well explained by the emergence of photography, which forced painters to reflect about what advantages the canvas offered over the darkroom.

    It certainly helped Hegel’s reputation that his ideas were adopted by several generations of art theorists — such that, by the end of the nineteenth century, a genuine feedback loop had formed: artists went increasingly “abstract,” largely for non-theoretical reasons; theorists then interpreted this abstraction in Hegelian terms; and artists duly adopted the new rationale, with the bonus sense of historical significance it gave them. In 1873, for example, the highly influential aesthete and art critic (and Hegelian) Walter Pater observed that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” The German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, a few decades later, would popularize the idea of the “urge to abstraction.” Artists lapped it up. But the idea that music represents a model of aesthetic purity was, in fact, nothing new. Michelangelo, for instance, had written, in a critique of Flemish painters:

    They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes… And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful selection or boldness, and, finally, without substance or vigor… for good painting is nothing but a copy of the perfections of God and a recollection of his painting; it is a music and a melody which only intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty.

    All Hegel really did was add a twist of teleology — the mildly more exciting plot line of a journey from realism towards abstraction — thus giving an age-old idea a second lease on life. It is a measure of his influence that Liszt, Wagner, and Brendel’s great nemesis, the Austrian critic and philosopher of art Eduard Hanslick, spent years attacking the New German School’s progressive Hegelianism on equally Hegelian, but slightly more conservative, grounds. Hanslick was a purist. Music, he believed, ought to be entirely non-representational, concerned only with the aural architecture of the notes themselves. He despised Wagner’s attempts to combine music with other art forms — to create the fabled, all-encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork” — and Liszt’s use of extended program notes. 

    The gap between Hanslick and the New German School only appeared great because they were staring at each other from opposite points on the same Hegelian spiral. After all, it was the progressive Brendel who had already waxed in quasi-mythological terms about the emancipation of “pure” music from words and religion — he just happened to recognize in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk the prospect of another synthesis, the creation of a new art form that might itself be further purified down the line. The conservative Hanslick, meanwhile, held that pure, non-programmatic music was already the perfect aesthetic endpoint. Ironically, it was Hanslick’s pivotal book, On the Musically Beautiful, in 1854, that ended up becoming a kind of Bible for formalism in the arts. The abstract painter František Kupka cited it fifty years later as one of his great influences. 

    But what if there were a way for pure music itself to become even more “abstract” than it already was? What if tonality, say, were the musical equivalent of a “subject” — an external point of reference, a catalog of well-known storylines that had been passed down from generation to generation, ultimately distracting listeners from the pure sounds, gestures, and rhythms that really constituted music? Certainly Debussy seemed to be arguing this when he wrote: 

    I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms. The rest is a lot of humbug invented by frigid imbeciles riding on the backs of the Masters — who, for the most part, wrote almost nothing but period music.

    Schoenberg echoed this a couple of decades later, in a letter to Kandinsky: “One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” And of course, as the twentieth century wore on, the notion developed that composers should even abandon sound itself — music, in the hands of John Cage, dissolved into pure spirit.

    “Of great painting or great music there can no longer be, for Western people, any question.” So wrote the German polymath Oswald Spengler, in his magnum opus The Decline of the West, in 1918. Spengler was not a cheery fellow and neither was his thought. His father, a dissatisfied civil servant, had discouraged the young Spengler from pursuing his literary interests as a child, leading to a lifelong sense of his being misunderstood. He would suffer, in adulthood, from severe insomnia and debilitating migraines — extreme enough to give him regular bouts of memory loss. He was a recluse, and never married. And yet his profound pessimism about the fate of Western art was not — at least not entirely — projected gloominess. 

    Spengler’s great thesis was that all cultures were, in his word, “organisms” — and that the religion, art, philosophy, and science of each one had more in common “physiognomically” than, say, the paintings or poetry of two unrelated societies or ages. Indeed, Spengler contended that no such thing as “painting,” “music,” or even “maths,” really existed — certainly not as a single “entity” that you could compare across different eras or places. The criteria for producing and judging “art” (or anything else) were restricted to each particular cultural epoch:

    One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their “eternal truths” were true and necessary are extinguished.

    Spengler believed that our own culture was in rapid decline and could no longer produce anything of artistic merit. But this was not because, by some permanent and universal set of aesthetic standards, we were not up to it anymore, but because the very standards themselves, as part of the dying organism, no longer had the authority to “dictate” whether art was good or bad. If someone were to create a work of art that, in a previous era, would have been considered aesthetically great, Spengler argued it would now be meaningless. “What is practiced as art today — be it music after Wagner or painting after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel — is impotence and falsehood,” he wrote. 

    One of Spengler’s biggest — and looking back, most surprising — followers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, echoed this in a personal note, in 1948:

    If it is true, as I believe, that Mahler’s music is worthless, then the question is what I think he should have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and burnt them?

    Wittgenstein denounced Mahler for trying to speak, stylistically, to a bygone era. And yet the alternative, he conceded, was little better: contemporary music that attempted to reflect authentically the present moment was condemned only to articulate the “absurd” and “stupid” axioms of its time. A familiar refrain emerges: artists must be true to their times, but modernity, as an epoch markedly different from everything that came before, seems to offer us no meaningful way of doing so.

    If Spengler’s ideas were to do one of those spit-in-a-tube genealogy tests, the results would show a big flush of ancestry coming from Germany of the late eighteenth century. Hegel, as we know, saw artworks as momentary snapshots of the evolving spirit of the universe, and thus believed that artists were answerable not to timeless truths but to the specific demands of each age (or the Zeitgeist). But like many of his peers, Hegel also worried that the unique conditions of his own time — namely, rapid disenchantment — were making art increasingly impotent. It “is certainly the case,” he wrote, “that art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone.” His intellectual sparring partner, Friedrich Schlegel, lamented in 1800 that “modern poetry’s inferiority to classical poetry can be summed up in the words: we have no mythology….” The same year, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling wrote mournfully about a lost golden age of art “before the occurrence of a breach that now seems beyond repair.”

    There was one crucial difference, though. What stopped Hegel and his contemporaries from lapsing into full-on Spenglerian nihilism was the sense, still widespread at that time, of fundamental teleological optimism — the implicit belief that these crises (even the “death of God,” which Hegel had announced in 1802, almost a century before Nietzsche) were sent our way for some greater purpose. Hegel was especially taken with the Biblical image of The Fall — “the eternal Mythus of Man; in fact, the very transition by which he becomes man” — which he believed to be a kind of historical stencil, appearing again and again, each time carrying us one stage closer to full self-awareness. This basic template — crisis followed by a return at some “higher point” on the upward helix of historical progress — became so common in late-eighteenth-century literature that it gained a nickname: the “Romantic Spiral.” 

    But over the course of the nineteenth century, such teleological optimism steadily disappeared. Thanks in part to Schopenhauer’s melancholy philosophy, and especially to the rise of Darwinism and subsequent fears of “degeneration,” the Romantic Spiral was knotted into a closed loop, and any excess string that might have led to a happier ending was snipped off. History, as Spengler later put it, was no longer seen as a story of linear progress — a “tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another” — but as a series of self-contained epochs, each following the same fixed lifecycle: birth, growth, decline, and death. 

    Hope having evaporated, there remained in the dregs, though, two key elements of “cultural modernity.” First, the sense that we now found ourselves irreversibly on the other side of a terrifying historical threshold. “The complete negation in the state, church, art, and life, that occurred at the end of the last century,” the historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote midway through the century, “has unleashed… such an enormous measure of objective consciousness that a restoration of the old level of immaturity is quite unthinkable.” And second, the residual conviction among artists that this “modern” epoch presented them with an entirely new set of spiritual demands. (In Rimbaud’s words, “il faut être absolument moderne.”) 

    Schoenberg, like Spengler and Wittgenstein, inherited this psychological burden, and felt it deeply. Unlike them, however, he despised defeatism. In 1923, he wrote an article castigating Spengler for his pessimism and lack of ambition. What Spengler failed to see, he argued, was that a truly brilliant figure, a real genius, might yet still rescue the West — like a superhero flinging his arm over the cliff edge at the last-minute to grab the falling heroine — and single-handedly return it, once more, to artistic greatness. 

    When intellectual revolutions happen, it is rarely because everyone has sat down, considered a manifesto line by line, agreed that it improves upon the currently accepted account of reality, and then employed it consciously in their day-to-day lives. On the contrary, ideas — big ones, at least — are like islands of chalk in a river, little bits crumbling off all the time, swept along in the cloudy water, until, at various kinks down the way, piles of sediment build up anew. For nineteenth-century historicism, a great bend in the stream appeared around 1910, and the ideas of the previous hundred or so years began slopping up, wave after wave, on the bank. Schoenberg scooped up the broken-off notion of a predetermined destiny for tonality; of art’s yearning to abandon all representation; of a new, terrifying — but also, for the truly heroic, liberating — historical epoch; and created his own strange amalgam of them all. 

    In his subsequent attempts to ghostwrite modernity’s memoirs, Schoenberg had collaborators, each retelling the same myth with slightly different inflections. His friend and artistic soulmate Kandinsky emphasized, for his part, Hegelian ideas about abstraction, music, and purity:

    And so at different points along the road are the different arts, saying what they are best able to say and in the language which is peculiarly their own. Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the differences between them, there has never been a time when the arts approached each other more nearly than they do today, in this later stage of spiritual development. 

    In each manifestation is the seed of a striving towards the abstract, the non-material. Consciously or unconsciously they are obeying Socrates’ command — Know Thyself….

    And the natural result of this striving is that the various arts are drawing together. They are finding in music the best teacher. With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomenon but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound…. Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his art is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid, which will some day reach to heaven.

    Schoenberg’s student, Anton Webern, brought out the more rebellious side of the project. “We broke its neck!” he said of tonality. The miserable philosopher Theodor Adorno, an earnest student of both Hegel and Spengler, focused on the consequences of “psychological differentiation” between epochs. Modern consciousness, he wrote, “now debars the means of tonality, which is to say, the whole of traditional music. Not only are these sounds obsolete and unfashionable. They are false. They no longer fulfill their function.” Generations of composers added a line, like visitors scribbling in a guestbook at a hotel. The modernist Pierre Boulez proclaimed: “The tonal system has gone through a kind of historical evolution, and you cannot go back. That’s impossible.” The less modernist Alfred Schnittke lamented: “Earlier music was a beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back; and in that sense it has a tragic feeling for me.” Those who deviated — like Constant Lambert, who in 1934 declared Sibelius the defining composer of his age — had their entries torn out Contributing a kind of ideological backing track the whole time was what Ernst Gombrich once called “Hegelianism without metaphysics” — the entrenched belief, among cultural historians, that great art is always a kind of encrypted signal of its time. This entered the game as early as 1843, when the Hegelian critic Carl Schnasse wrote: “The genius of mankind expresses itself more completely and more characteristically in art than in religion…. Thus the art of every period is both the most complete and the most reliable expression of the… spirit in question.” Echoes of this idea have sounded every decade since. To give just one more example, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin declared, in 1888: “To explain a style cannot mean anything but to fit its expressive character into the general history of the period, to prove that its forms do not say anything in their language that is not also said by the other organs of the age.” The result, today, is that we filter out any artists or movements that fail to fit the story that we wish to tell about the “modern” spirit: namely, that it is austere, self-critical, skeptical about beauty, and hostile to tradition. 

    But the modernist line was, ultimately, a lie. Tonality never “died.” Nor have we been “stuck” since. If you were to whizz Liszt to the present, he would be stunned by the range of music written since his death — just think of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Britten, Messiaen, Reich, Ligeti; the whole jazz tradition from King Oliver to Ornette Coleman (and beyond); the Beatles and the Beach Boys; funk, disco, hip-hop, metal, electronica, and, for those who go looking, a million and one other strange stylistic hybrids. The last hundred or so years have been perhaps the most innovative in musical history. 

    Fétis was not wrong, of course, that something in the intrinsic grammatical rules of tonality allows us to predict what happens when you crank up the harmonic complexity knob. But we knew that. In 1785, in the opening bars of his so-called “Dissonance Quartet,” Mozart had experimented, in the words of one contemporary critic, with deliberately over-seasoning his harmonies, yielding a musical dish that could easily have been prepared by Schumann or Mendelssohn fifty years later. The tortured Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613) toyed with chromatic harmonies that today sound like a retrospective echo of Wagner. The skittish Fugue No. 12 by Anton Reicha (1770–1836), a Czech composer and a friend of Beethoven, could easily be mistaken for one of Conlon Nancarrow’s pointillistic pieces for player piano a century and a half later. Assuming you use a similar complexity setting, tonality seems to produce surprisingly consistent results across time. None of this means that it is somehow predetermined to “end up” in one or other particular place. Nor does it suggest that one could ever fully “exhaust” it: tonality appears to be almost as boundless and malleable as the great primitive syntactic superstructure that underlies our natural languages.

    The funny thing, looking back, is that the first few decades of the twentieth century were ostensibly a time of great cultural despair. Belief in Hegel’s actual “optimistic” philosophy had long waned, replaced by various iterations of post-Kantian skepticism and a widespread sense that nothing could anymore be trusted. Indeed, Adrian Leverkühn, the austere composer in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, was based on an imagined hybrid of Schoenberg and Nietzsche — his purported motive for abandoning tonality being a kind of tit-for-tat rejection of beauty as payback for the loss of faith in truth. And yet neither Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Adorno, nor any of the others, were nihilists in the true sense of the word. They believed profoundly, to the point of near-insanity, that what they were doing mattered. Therein lies the tremendous appeal of historicism — the promise, that, somehow, thanks to the benevolent protecting hand of history, the great wave of philosophical acid sloshing over every last belief of ours nonetheless leaves the things that matter unscathed. Indeed, standing there stoically, and watching everything else disintegrate around us, they matter even more. 

    It is this that we still cannot quite let go of. But we must. Art should not be boxed in by imaginary historical thresholds, like a slapstick artist slamming into an invisible wall. Stasis in one area of culture need not spell stagnation elsewhere. Nor, indeed, should we distract ourselves from the genuine philosophical predicaments we face as a culture with vapid pleasantries about being “on the right side” of history. To somewhat out-Schoenberg Schoenberg, historicism, the willingness to give history the last word, was a cop-out — a crutch in a moment of crisis. “Comfort, with all its implications,” he wrote in the Harmonielehre, “intrudes even into the world of ideas and makes us far more content than we should ever be.” Indeed. What would art, philosophy, literature look like if we abandoned historicism — if we abandoned the concept of cultural modernity itself? We should permit ourselves to find out. After all, history may judge historicism very badly. 

    Ilse Aichinger’s Bad Words

    “It’s a sad poem,” Bettina said as we walked down the glistening wet ribbon of a Vienna street one rainy evening. “I don’t read it every day.” Bettina, a Viennese psychoanalyst, was describing the daily walk from her home in Leopoldstadt, in the Second District, to her office in the inner city, the First District. The journey takes her across a bridge over the Danube canal which bears a poem by Ilse Aichinger inscribed in cast iron along the span. The poem reads, in part:

    The world is made of stuff

    that wants watching, no eyes left

    to see the white fields,no ears to hear birds whirring

    in the branches.Grandma, where are the lips you need

    to taste the grasses,

    and who will sniff the sky till it’s done?

    When the German language billowed with Nazi contaminations, said George Steiner, it got “the habit of hell into its syntax.” Those who repaired that syntax and got it whirring again, those who after the Shoah expressed estrangement from the German language in German, were by and large “non-German Germans”: Paul Celan in Paris, Nelly Sachs in Stockholm, Elias Canetti and Erich Fried in London, and Ilse Aichinger in Vienna. 

    Unlike German writers who found in the German language an inalienable form of belonging, each of these writers grappled with a language that had become foreign, hostile, a sign of non-belonging. Each of these adversaries of postwar forgetting wrestled with a language, as Celan put it, that “gave back no words for that which happened.” Of these figures, Ilse Aichinger, with whom the story of postwar Austrian literature begins, has been until recently the most overlooked and undertranslated. Since her death in 2016, a spate of new English translations affords us an opportunity to correct this literary injustice, to take some soundings from the still-potent body of work that Aichinger bequeathed us.

    Ilse and Helga Aichinger, identical twin sisters, were born in Vienna in 1921. Their mother, a Jewish pediatrician and one of the first women to study medicine in Vienna, and her father, a Catholic schoolteacher, were “opposites in race and character,” Ilse said. They divorced when the twins were six years old. “A threefold suffering dominates my life,” Ilse recalled. “The antagonism between my parents, the antagonism within me, the antagonism to my surroundings.” Only “the powers of childhood held the world together.” Ilse and Helga were raised in Vienna by their grandmother, “the dearest person in the world to me.” One spring day in 1933, a twenty-two-year-old Bavarian medical student spending the semester in Vienna appeared at their door and politely introduced himself as someone with a professional interest in twins. “My name is Josef Mengele,” he said. They shooed him away and never saw him again.

    Long before the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, Vienna had suffered from virulent and politically successful anti-Semitism. But the Anschluss unleashed a pent-up brutality that amazed even the Germans. The German playwright Carl Zuckmayer described Vienna during the following days as a once-cultured city transmuted “into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch,” as if “Hades had opened its gates and vomited forth the basest, most despicable, most horrible demons.” The racial restrictions that had gradually taken root in Germany over the previous five years demonized Austrian Jews almost overnight. The National Socialist regime classified Aichinger as a so-called Mischling, a “half-breed” or “mixed-race.” In August 1938, SS officer Adolf Eichmann set up his Central Office of Jewish Emigration in an “Aryanized” palace not far from where Ilse lived with her grandmother. 

    Ilse’s sister Helga escaped on July 4, 1939, with the last Kindertransport to leave Vienna’s Westbahnhof. She fled via Holland to London. Ilse’s father had urged her to leave, too: “I don’t understand it, it’s much nicer out there in England. A young person belongs outside.” The superficial materiality of his remark, Ilse noted in her diary, showed “a great lack of understanding.” Ilse chose instead to stay in Vienna to protect her mother, who remained safe from deportation so long as she had a “half-Aryan” child to support. As a Jew, the mother was ostracized, and forced to support herself as a factory worker. With this reversal of roles, the daughter protecting mother, Ilse and her mother — by then stripped of her job as a school doctor — lived in constant fear, billeted with a hostile landlady in a small room on Marc-Aurel-Strasse, adjacent to the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo in the former Hotel Metropole. As Paul Hofmann, later head of the New York Times bureau in Vienna, recorded, the Hotel Metropole “became the synonym for terror and torture.” It was where former chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and Baron Louis Nathaniel Rothschild were held. 

    In March 1945, when the four-story building sustained heavy damage from an aerial bombing raid, a passerby cautioned Ilse: “Don’t look happy or you’ll be arrested, too.” (A scene in The Third Man, shot in Vienna in 1948, uses the building’s ruins as a stark backdrop. Helga makes a cameo appearance in the film. After the war, a plaque at the site described it as an “inferno for those who believed in Austria… It crashed to pieces like the Thousand-Year Reich.”) The twins meanwhile corresponded through Red Cross messages limited to no more than twenty-five words. In these clipped messages sent across the Channel — intended, as Ilse wrote to Helga in November 1945, “to rip the veil between us” — Aichinger whetted her terse prose style. The editor of their correspondence suggests that it served as Ilse’s “engine of literary writing.” 

    Once released from their inhibitions, the Aichingers’ neighbors proved so untroubled by the roundups of Jews that before long the Gestapo conducted raids with impunity in broad daylight. In May 1942, Ilse watched as her seventy-four-year-old grandmother, together with her aunt Erna and uncle Felix (awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War) and about a thousand other Jews were forced before jeering onlookers onto a truck which disappeared over a bridge across the gray-green Danube canal. “Those who watched as my grandmother and my mother’s younger siblings were driven on an open cattle car across the Swedish Bridge toward torture and death looked on, to be sure, with a certain glee,” Aichinger recalled. “And someone called out: ‘Look, there’s Ilse.’ But she didn’t turn around.” This is the bridge that today is sanctified by Aichinger’s lyrics, the one that burdens Bettina’s daily walk. The Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek said that ever since that day on the Swedish Bridge Aichinger had her gaze riveted on this most excruciating sight of her childhood. The horror that took place on that bridge is never really past,” Jelinek said. “Only who sees it anymore? Ilse.” In an interview fifty years later, Aichinger said that her greatest wish would be to see her grandmother again.

    Only after the war did Aichinger learn that her relatives had been transported east on “iron rails running straight on into infinity,” as she wrote, and had met their deaths at an extermination camp near Minsk — they were three of over sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews murdered during the Nazi occupation. In her last diary entry before a white flag was hoisted over St. Stephen’s Cathedral, signaling the end of the war for Vienna, Aichinger confessed to a fatigue so extreme that she wished to die. Ilse and her mother survived, at least physically. “You don’t survive everything you survive,” Aichinger wrote. The state grudgingly offered her mother a paltry ten thousand shillings for the loss of her apartment, her medical practice, and her murdered relatives — a “disgraceful” restitution, Ilse said. 

    Storytelling can be another form of restitution, of restoring what has been lost or looted. In 2021, the Belarusian writer and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose work, none of it fiction, is a monumental project of recapturing the lived experience of suffering in the Soviet Union, expressed her admiration of the ways in which Aichinger tore through the banal idea of peaceful dwelling-in-the-world in which so many bystanders had swaddled themselves. 

    The Moscow Declaration of 1943 had defined Austrians as the Germans’ first victims and thus free of obligation to make reparations for Nazi crimes. The preamble to Austria’s declaration of independence, signed in April 1945, interpreted the years between 1938 and 1945 as a violent, externally imposed interruption in the country’s history, foisted on the “defenseless state leadership” and on “the helpless people of Austria.” If Austria had ceased to exist in 1938, if it was an occupied nation rather than an aggressor, it could not be held itself responsible for crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich. This was pure self-exculpation, the brazen foundational lie — the Lebenslüge — upon which modern Austria rebuilt itself and which Aichinger sought to shatter for the sake of “the attempt to translate our hope into a future.” 

    In 1946, at the age of twenty-five, she suggested how to accomplish this great sobering in a trailblazing two-page political manifesto called “A Call for Mistrust.” Aichinger implored her young contemporaries to question the self-exculpating complacencies of their “wounded world,” to prefer self-doubt to self-pity, to direct mistrust “toward ourselves, in order to be more trustworthy!”

    This is how the tremendous thoughtlessness of these last years called us to think; this is how the inhumanity from which we suffered like tormented animals summoned us to seek and to condense everything human; this is how we learned, first of all, to be human before we became poets…. For what we say today was unsayable yesterday!

    André Gide once remarked that if skepticism is the beginning of wisdom, it is often the end of art. But Aichinger’s art begins with an address to skepticism—with a distrust of language, of collective self-righteousness, and, above all, of oneself. She wrote her first and only novel, Die grössere Hoffnung or The Greater Hope, in fragments during the war. On September 1, 1945, Aichinger published a chapter of The Greater Hope under the title “The Fourth Gate” in the daily newspaper Wiener Kurier. The entire novel appeared in 1948, and it came out in a deft English translation by Geoff Wilkes in 2016. She intended it, as she told her sister, “to show that miracles happen even amidst the darkness.” It is an astonishing book, a book like no other. 

    Aichinger centers the novel on the wartime experiences of Ellen, the sensitive adolescent daughter of a Jewish mother and a Nazi policeman who disowns his daughter and asks her to forget him. This is one of the first literary texts, if not the very first, which mentions the term “concentration camp.” But Aichinger avoids the term “Nazis” — the father and his subordinates are described as “lost souls” — and leaves the city unnamed, as though the unembellished story could have unfolded anywhere. We first meet Ellen lying across a map on the floor of the consul’s office, “tossing uneasily back and forth between Europe and America.” Having failed to obtain a visa to rejoin her mother, who has fled to America, Ellen endears herself with a group of Jewish children who find themselves trapped. “The last Kindertransport had left long ago. The borders were closed.” When the children are no longer allowed to go to school, an old teacher is surprised that they want to forget German. “I won’t help you do that,” he says. “But I’ll help you learn it anew, the way a foreigner learns a foreign language.” 

    As the anti-Jewish edicts tighten and Hitler youth skulk outside their doors, Ellen and her friends ask what is left. 

    You keep only what you give away. So give them what they take from you, for that will make them ever poorer. Give them your toys, your coats, your caps, and your lives. Give away everything in order to keep it.… Laugh when they tear the clothes from your bodies and your caps from your heads…. Laugh at the satiated people, laugh at the placid people who have lost hunger and uneasiness, the most precious gifts which are vouchsafed to human beings.

    But the children do not laugh, certainly not at the prospect of receiving deportation orders. “Who’ll help us onto the truck, if it’s too high?” one asks. “We’re guilty of being alive,” another says. They wonder where they can find refuge. “Not the south and not the north, not the east and not the west, not the past and not the future.” 

    Before long, only the children’s imaginations offer the semblance of a safe harbor. In one game, the children wait on a riverbank hoping that a baby will fall into the water so that they can save him, as the infant Moses was rescued from the Nile. “We’ll dry it off and take it to the mayor. And the mayor will say: Good, very good! You’re allowed to sit on all the benches again.” In another, the oldest boy, Leon, with “four grandparents of the wrong kind,” plays the role of an angel. Angels permeate Aichinger’s writing, and they bear messages neither of hope nor consolation but of vigilance toward intrusions into fixed reality. One of the children comments on the unseen adult audience: “Don’t you hear how they’re already laughing, how they’ll laugh when we’re being led across the bridges?” 

    At first, playing together is a confirmation of belonging. But before long the children lose track of what is rehearsal and what is performance, of which game they are playing and which game — with all-too-real malevolent rules — is being played with them. “Already the two plays were beginning to flow into each other, weaving themselves inextricably in a new play.” Yet the performances allow the children to give words to the unspeakable. Aichinger elevates playing to the status of a mitzvah: “To play. It was the only possibility remaining to them, composure before the incomprehensible, grace before the secret. The most unutterable commandment: Thou shalt play in my presence!” (In the same year that Aichinger published The Greater Hope, Paul Celan published his “Death Fugue,” a poem which invokes the word “played,” spielt, seven times.)

    Ellen’s uniformed father, “who had asked Ellen to forget him,” instructs the children that Jews are no longer allowed to play in the city park. In a chapter called “The Holy Land,” they decide to play instead in the Jewish section of the cemetery. Aichinger describes the tram rattling rapidly past the graveyard gates, as if it had a bad conscience. The children dart among the gravestones of their ancestors until at last the dead and the living seem to play with one another. “Our dead people aren’t dead,” they shout. “They’re playing hide-and-seek with us.”

    Aichinger’s book was one of three important novels about children in Vienna during the Nazi dictatorship. It joined Jacob Glatstein’s Emil and Karl, published in Yiddish in 1940, a book written for children in order to explain to them the historical convulsions that they were witnessing (Emil is a Jewish boy and Karl a Christian boy); and Children of Vienna, published in 1946, by Robert Neumann, whose books had been banned and burned in Germany, and who left Vienna in 1934. But The Greater Hope, a story filigreed by exclusion, itself became excluded from public perception; it sold poorly and got few reviews. The Vienna-born writer Erich Fried was one of the few to recognize its merit. Within a year of its appearance, he called the novel “one of the most profound and — despite all the horror — one of the most beautiful and joyful books of our time.” It would be a dozen years until it was reissued, in paperback in 1960. (The German writer Peter Härtling called it “a book that waits patiently for us.”) It embarrassed a readership inclined to regard those who dredged up their country’s complicity in Nazi crimes as “befoulers of the nest” (Nestbeschmutzer). It denied such readers the comforts of exoneration. For the rest of her life, its author — who understood her own survival as a surprise — refused to play the role of absolver in Austria’s theater of guilty memory. 

    In 1952, four years after the appearance of The Greater Hope, Aichinger read her “Mirror Story,” in which time runs in reverse, to a transfixed gathering of writers that included Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Hans Werner Richter described the experience: “She was able to put everyone under her spell… and it was not only the quality of her texts, it was her voice that fascinated everybody. Of course, the declared realist writers of our group tried to resist… yet they could not escape her charisma.” This was Group 47, a loosely knit, mostly male vanguard of young writers who wished to make a clean sweep in the aftermath of the “zero hour” (Stunde Null, in German), as they called the final Nazi defeat. If the increasingly occult Martin Heidegger understood language as the “house of Being,” these rehabilitators understood that the house had collapsed. Though the group’s early efforts were often seen not so much as “tabula rasa literature” as defeatist “rubble literature” (Trümmerliteratur), books by its members — including Ilse Aichinger, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass — would overshadow the ruins of the German-language literary landscape from 1947 to 1967. 

    Many of her colleagues in this circle perceived Kafka’s influence in Aichinger’s spare style and parables of powerlessness. One member of Group 47 went so far as to call her “Miss Kafka.” Another, the literary critic Walter Jens, praised her “Kafkaesque technique.” “The great K., the holy K.,” Aichinger said in exasperation, “that’s what I heard.” Yet on accepting the Kafka Prize, Aichinger insisted that other than a single passage from his letters (later incorporated into his early story “Conversation with the Supplicant”) — a childhood memory of overhearing a perfectly mundane conversation between his mother on the balcony and a neighbor below, she had read almost nothing of Kafka’s writing and had avoided conversations about him. She could not bear his precision. 

    Even as she cast a skeptical eye on promises of radical renewal, Aichinger grew particularly close to two members of Group 47: the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, cherished by the Aichinger family as a “third twin,” and the poet Günther Eich, whom she married. When Bachmann met Aichinger in war-wrecked Vienna, their experiences could hardly have been more different. Bachmann, whose father had joined the Nazi party in 1943 and served as an officer in the Wehrmacht, had spent the war years in almost idyllic safety in Klagenfurt. But in its dissonance and tenderness, the close friendship between the two writers could almost stand as a metaphor for Austria’s postwar entanglements. (The Bachmann-Aichinger correspondence, more than a hundred letters spanning the years from 1949 until their estrangement in 1962, came out in Germany in 2021. In her last letter, Bachmann confesses to her friend and mentor that she “said far too little… thanked you too little.” The letter was never sent.) 

    In the decade after the publication of The Greater Hope, a realistic novel with touches of surrealism, Aichinger’s language grew more condensed and more self-scrutinizing, as it turned toward the cracks through which the past splinters into the present. This becomes evident also in works such as The Bound Man and Other Stories (1951); “Buttons” (1953), a radio play in which workers in a button factory turn into the products they make; and “Squares and Streets” (1954), a series of vignettes on Vienna places (including Judengasse, or “Jews’ Alley,” and Seegasse, the Jewish cemetery in the city’s Ninth District dating to the sixteenth century), on the theme, as she put it, that “the places that we saw now look at us.” So, too, in At No Time (1957), a collection of Aichinger’s surreal dialogues. A mundane conversation between a maid and a policeman, for example, ends with the prophet Elijah whirling through the cobalt sky above in a crimson chariot. 

    Throughout, as she told an interviewer, Aichinger slanted her writing toward an “identification with the weak, the disabled, the injured.” The truly strange people, says her novel’s narrator, “are those who feel most at home.” Aichinger held this to be true both geographically and linguistically. The truest and most individual language, Aichinger said, “has to counter the existing language, the established language.” As it tilted away from the literal, her own language turned within a tight radius, almost with a will of its own. “My language and I, we don’t talk to each other,” she writes, “we have nothing to say to each other.”

    After her husband’s death in 1972, Aichinger devoted herself to Bad Words, which appeared four years later, a collection of short stories clotted with memory, dense texts that ask us to overcome our desire to decipher everything. The English translators of Bad Words, the poets Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey, resist the impulse to “fill in the gaps.” Instead they preserve the lexical choices that tighten Aichinger’s writing, above all the wariness of verbal virtuosity and pretty words. (Aichinger is to the German language what her fellow Viennese Adolf Loos, author of the essay “Ornament and Crime,” is to architecture.) She prefers “bad words,” words that “never occur in lullabies.” Many writers feel commanded to reach for the right words, les mots justes. If, as Aichinger said, “the best is always an imperative,” she refused such imperatives. “Life is not a special word, and neither is death,” she writes. “Both are indefensible; they disguise instead of define.” 

    If Aichinger belongs to the avatars of bad words rather than to the seekers of the sublime, it is because to write is, for her, to define, to say what a thing is. “Already as a child I hated the word fantasy. I didn’t want fantasy, I wanted precise realness, as precise as possible.” That desire — especially when the precise is less beautiful and less enthralling than the imprecise — informs her sole poetry collection, Squandered Advice, which appeared in 1978 and was published two years ago in English translation. Its translator, Steph Morris, delivers the rhythmic density of Aichinger’s poems, the way she juxtaposes words to give them the unsettled loneliness that she said they need “in order for them to produce meaning.” Some, like the following, can be read as attempts to rescue possibilities of remembrance. 

    Moby Dick,

    Rabbi Fingerhut 

    has drowned,

    has died,

    gone. 

    He had yellow eyes 

    and a large mouth,

    dark regalia packed onto him. 

    Moby Dick, Rabbi Fingerhut. 

    Tell Ahab too, 

    and the others, 

    the helmsmen 

    and the harpooners,

    and tell them soon. 

    Pass it on, 

    Don’t forget.

    In 1988, Aichinger returned to Vienna after four years in Frankfurt, and resumed her strolls across the bridges over the Danube canal. Because she had cut against the Austrian grain, she was a solitary figure. Only late in life did she see the corona of her recognition brighten. In 1991, to mark her seventieth birthday, S. Fischer Verlag published an eight-volume edition of Aichinger’s collected works, edited by her companion, the literary critic Richard Reichensperger. Her books, translated into eighteen languages, won many prestigious awards, including the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1995. Several years earlier she had declined the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Aging, she said, “means learning to play better.”

    She had never sought easy applause, much less fame. “Ever since I was a kid,” she told an interviewer, “I’ve wanted to disappear. That was my first passionate wish.” In Film and Fate, which appeared in 2000, she stages the story of her early life in the form of an autobiography of a moviegoer who felt that cinema’s flickering ephemerality matched her own self-effacement. During the war, she writes, the cinema had served as a “place of disorder,” a welcome refuge from the Nazi order. In her last years, Aichinger would disappear after a day of writing into the dark of the Bellaria movie theater, which screened vintage films, including Laurel and Hardy comedies. (She kept a life-size cardboard cutout of Stan Laurel in her bedroom.) She often attended the Burg Cinema’s Sunday screenings of The Third Man. Aichinger died in 2016, a few days after her ninety-fifth birthday, in her native Vienna, a city that she called “murderous but familiar.” 

    The Habsburg emperors bore many titles, among them King of Jerusalem and Duke of Auschwitz. Ilse Aichinger’s language of hope and suffering, Reichensperger said, moved between those two poles, Jerusalem and Auschwitz.

    Like Aichinger, the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, her younger contemporary, who was born in Czernowitz and lived most of his life in Jerusalem, and wrote in Hebrew, understood children as carriers of continuity. He, too, told stories of hope and suffering through a child’s eyes. His stories, set in the outer precincts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, likewise allowed a child’s incomprehension to bring the Shoah’s incomprehensibility into focus. In The Age of Wonders, Appelfeld describes a ghoulish group of Jew-haters on a train in the late 1930s as they taunt the main character’s father, a man of letters and of culture. “Am I not an Austrian like you are?” he cries out. “Didn’t I go to school here? Graduate from an Austrian gymnasium, an Austrian university? Weren’t all my books published here?” And yet, says the son, “Father’s determination to remain in Austria was even stronger than before. To leave at a time like this, with evil spirits raging, meant admitting that reason had lost out, that literature was to no avail.” 

    Aichinger called voicelessness “the tuning fork of the wise.” But if the Shoah strained the limits of language, after Auschwitz certain silences also sounded different than before. The silence of the survivor, she insisted, is unlike the hushed reticence of the perpetrator, a respectful silence unlike an indifferent silence. On accepting the Nelly Sachs Prize, she commended “the engaged silence without which language and conversation are impossible.” Although the accents vary, everything Aichinger wrote over sixty years records her efforts to reclaim both an engaged silence and an afflicted language. In defiance of the evil spirits, she kept her composure before the incomprehensible, in the greater hope that her writing would be of some avail.